A Free Man of Color

by Barbara Hambly

  “He is innocent. I swear to you he had nothing to do with the murder. I—” She took a deep breath. “I strangled Angelique. Please, please, I beg you …”

  “You didn’t,” said January quietly, “and I know you didn’t, Madame. That outfit of yours was leaking black cock feathers all over the building and you were never near that parlor. And you had nothing on you that could have been used for a garrote. Did you stay to see him?”

  “No! He had nothing to do with it, I swear to you.”

  “Were you with him?”

  She hesitated, searching in her mind for what the best answer would be, then cried “No!” a few instants late. “I saw him—that is, I saw him across the lobby.… I saw him the whole time. But we weren’t … we didn’t …”

  She was floundering, and January turned away. The woman sprang to her feet, caught his arm, her face blazing like gold in the soft flicker of the lamp. “Please! Please don’t go to the police! Please don’t mention his name! Come …” She hesitated, stammering, scouting, staring up into his face, trying to read his eyes. “Come to Les Saules tomorrow. I’ll talk about anything you want me to then. But not tonight.”

  “So you can get a note to him?” asked January.

  Her eyes flinched, then returned to his. “No, of course not. It’s just that—”

  She got no further. Hannibal Sefton, threadbare coat and long hair damp with the rain, singing a von Weber aria and more than slightly drunk, sprang lightly through the French door from the banquette outside directly behind Madeleine’s back, caught her around the waist, and gave her a resounding kiss on the neck.

  Madeleine screamed, pure terror in her voice. She wrenched herself free with a violence that knocked away the chair by which she stood and ripped her assailant’s face with the clawed fingers of both hands. Hannibal recoiled with a gasp of shock, almost falling back through the doorway. January caught at the terrified woman but she tore herself from him and staggered a step or two into the middle of the room, sobbing and shaking. The next instant Dominique came flying through the dining room door and caught her in her arms.

  “It’s all right! It’s all right! Darling, it’s all right, he’s a friend of mine—a very impudent friend.”

  Hannibal stood, violin case forgotten on the floor beside him, clinging to the doorjamb with one hand while the other felt his bleeding face. His eyes were those of a dog who has come up expecting a pat and received instead a forceful kick in the teeth. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Madame, I’m so sorry, I didn’t—” He looked pleadingly from Dominique to January, aghast and helpless. “I thought it was Minou. I swear I thought it was Minou.”

  “Oh, and that’s how you treat me, is it?” retorted Minou, furious at the result rather than the deed, but furious nonetheless. Held tight in her arms, Madeleine was still racked with long waves of shaking, head bowed over, as if she were about to be sick. If she was faking, thought January, he had never seen it so well done.

  And somehow, he did not think her horror at a man’s touch was a fake.

  “It’s all right.” He put a hand on Hannibal’s shoulder. “I’ll explain outside. Minou, would you go out to Les Saules with Madame Trepagier? I don’t think she should be alone.”

  “Oh, of course! I’ve already told Thérèse to tell Henri—if that slug ever puts in an appearance—that I’ve been called away by an emergency, and to give him tisane and flan and everything he might need. Now you get out of here, you bad man.” But she touched Hannibal’s forearm to reassure him, as January herded him out the long doors and onto the banquette once more.

  Glancing back, January saw his sister help Madame Trepagier into a chair, still trembling violently; heard Madame Trepagier whisper “Thank you.… Thank you.”

  “Augustus Mayerling, hm?” said Hannibal, when January had finished his narration. Even along a relative backstreet like Rue Burgundy, oil lamps still burned on their curved brackets from the stucco walls of the houses, their light gleaming in the gutters and the wet pavements beyond. Beneath the outthrust galleries of the town houses and shops and the abat-vents of the line of cottages, they were almost completely protected from the increasing rain.

  In every house, past the iron-lace balconies and behind spidery lattices of wooden louvers, warm light shone, working a kind of magic in the night. Somewhere someone was playing a banjo—strictly against the rules of Lent—elsewhere voices sounded from the two sides of a corner grog-shop, shutters opened all the length of the room onto the street, where free blacks and river-trash played cards, cursed, laughed.

  “I hate to think it was him,” January finished after a time, “because I like the boy. But of everyone in the Orléans ballroom that night, it sounds to me like Mayerling had the best reason for wanting Angelique dead. And Madame Trepagier knows it. And much as I like him, and much as I don’t blame him for doing it, it’s him or me … and I want to look around his rooms for that necklace.”

  “And if you don’t find it, then what?” asked Hannibal. His voice was a faint, raw rasp, and he coughed as they crossed the planks at the corner of Rue Conti. “It could have been anyone in the ballroom, you know.”

  “Then why protect him? Why beg me not to so much as speak his name to the police? Why risk her own neck, if all that would happen to him was a night or two in jail until he was cleared? Other women have lovers. It isn’t spoken of, but everyone in town knows who they are. It isn’t as if she were deceiving a husband, and the plantation is hers to dispose of as she will, no matter what her family says. She doesn’t have to say they were together in the ballroom. She can say they met elsewhere, if she’s going to lie about it. But she doesn’t. Why would she deny his involvement in anything so completely, if what he did doesn’t bear scrutiny?”

  “It’s not what he did,” said Hannibal quietly. “It’s what he is.”

  January looked at him blankly. For a moment he thought, With that complexion he can’t POSSIBLY be an octoroon trying to pass.

  Hannibal hesitated a moment, then said, “Augustus Mayerling is a woman.”

  “What?” It stopped January dead on the banquette.

  “Augustus Mayerling is a woman. I don’t know what his—her—real name is.” Hannibal started walking again, with that kind of loose-jointed scarecrow grace, his dark eyes turned inward on the recollection.

  “But it isn’t that unusual, you know. There was that woman who served for years as a man in the Russian cavalry recently. Women fought at Trafalgar and Waterloo disguised as men. I’ve talked to men who knew them. I found out about Augustus—well, I guessed—almost by accident. About two years ago he picked me up outside a saloon in Gallatin Street where I’d been playing for dimes. Of course they robbed me the minute I was out the door, and he took me back to his place, since I was almost unconscious. I was feverish all night, and he cared for me, and I—it was probably the fever—I could tell the difference. I kissed his hand—her hand—we just looked at each other for a minute. I knew.”

  Of all people, thought January, Hannibal would know.

  The fiddler shrugged. “Later we talked about it. I think he was glad to have someone else who knew. I’ve covered for him now and then, though he seems to have worked out long ago all the little dodges, all the ways of getting around questions, things like keeping shaving tackle in his rooms and staying out of certain situations. But, that wouldn’t be possible, for even a day or two, in jail. God knows he’s far from the first person to manage it. You’re the only one I’ve told. Don’t …”

  “No. Of course not.” January walked along, feeling a little stunned.

  Fighting is either for joy, or for death.…

  He could still see the Prussian’s cold yellow eyes as he said that, bright as they spoke about the passion of his art. And he’d seen Mayerling fight, in the long upper room that was his salle des armes on Exchange Alley: whalebone and steel and terrifyingly fast. He’d heard about the men he had killed.

  Suddenly he remembered Madeleine Trepag
ier as a child, attacking the Beethoven sonatas like a sculptor carving great chunks of marble in quest of the statues hidden within, drunk with the greedy strength of one lusting to unite with the heart of an art.

  Hers was music, like his own. Her lover’s was steel.

  But the passion was the same. Of course they would find it in each other.

  “I understand,” he said softly. “In a way it could be no one else.”

  “No,” said Hannibal. His dark eyes clouded. “Too many women who have been … injured like that … don’t find anyone.”

  But that was not what January had meant.

  They walked in silence, January remembering the occasional couple in Paris—usually prostitutes who came from five or ten or twenty men a day back to the arms of their lady friends. But there had been one pair of middle-aged and smilingly contented daughters of returned aristo émigrés who ran a hat shop in the Bois de Boulogne and made fortunes off their bits of flowers and lace.

  But none of that, he thought, meant that Augustus Mayerling hadn’t been the one to wind that scarf around Angelique’s neck.

  “I still want to have a look around his rooms,” said January after a time. “In any case he’ll want to hear what happened tonight.”

  He cannot pass himself off as a gentleman, Jean Bouille had said of the American Granger, little realizing that the spidery-thin sword master who had taught him was doing exactly that.

  Only the mask he wore was his cropped fair hair, thought January, and the scars on his face. But a mask it was, as surely as the elaborate thing of jewels and fur that had hidden Angelique’s face on the night of her death. The man’s coat and trousers were a costume as surely as that stolen white silk dress had been, more subtle because they used the minds of those who saw as a disguise.

  I wear trousers, therefore you see a man.

  Your skin is black, therefore I see a slave. Except, of course, that Augustus was one of the few people in this country who saw a musician, and a man. Beside him, Hannibal said again, “Will she forgive me? Will Minou make her understand? I thought it was Minou. She was wearing Minou’s dress—I thought it was Minou. I’m so sorry.”

  January started to say, “It’s all right, she was just scared—” and then stopped, and it seemed to him that the blood in his veins turned colder than the rain.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he whispered.

  Hannibal halted too, looking up at him, baffled. “What—”

  “She was wearing Madeleine’s jewels,” said January softly.

  “Who was? Minou …”

  “She was wearing Madeleine’s jewels, and whoever killed her thought she was Madeleine.” January still stood in the middle of the banquette, staring into space, shaken to his bones but knowing, as surely as he knew his name, that he was right.

  “They killed the wrong woman.”

  “Who did? Why would anyone …?”

  “The plantation,” said January. He made a move back toward Rue Burgundy, then halted, knowing the carriage had moved away from the banquette moments after he and Hannibal had left the house. “Les Saules. It butts up against the Gentilly place—wasn’t one of the proposed streetcar routes Granger and Bouille were fighting over out past Bayou Gentilly? If the route goes out there the land will be worth a fortune. If she sells it all to that McGinty fellow for debts …”

  “McGinty?” said Hannibal, startled. “McGinty was one of Granger’s seconds. The pirate with the red Vandyke, holding the horses.”

  The two men stared at each other for a moment, pieces falling into place: McGinty’s coppery whiskers clashing with the purple satin of his pirate mask, the faubourgs of New Orleans spreading in an Americanized welter of wooden gingerbread and money, Livia’s dry voice reading aloud William Granger’s slanderous accusations of Jean Bouille in the newspaper, the efforts to discredit Madeleine before Aunt Picard could marry her off.

  “Come on!” January turned and strode down Rue Bienville, Hannibal hurrying, gasping, in his wake.

  “How did they know she’d be at the ball?”

  “Sally. The girl who ran off. The one who had a ‘high-toned’ boyfriend—a white boyfriend. You or Fat Mary ever find out anything of where she went?”

  The fiddler shook his head. “Not a word of her.”

  “Ten to one the man she ran off with was McGinty or someone connected with him. He’d been around the plantation on business.”

  “And tonight …”

  “It’s got to be someone connected with the Trepagier family. Someone who stands to inherit—and my guess is it’s Arnaud’s brother. Claud, the one who’s been in Texas.” He strode along the banquette, heedless of the rain. “Anyone connected with the family would know she’d be at her Aunt Picard’s tonight. Anyone could have arranged an ambush.”

  “Then if the attack this evening wasn’t chance …”

  “They’ll have followed her out of town to try again.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Hannibal’s breathing had hoarsened to a dragging gasp by the time they reached the gallery outside Mayerling’s rooms. The rain was heavy now, streaming down from a tar-black sky and glittering in the lamps hung under the galleries. In the amber glow of the candles that the Prussian brought to the open door, January could see no difference, no clue to confirm what he now knew. The epicene ivory beakiness was the same. His only thought was, Even without the scars, that’s one homely woman.

  “Madame Trepagier is in trouble,” said January, as the Prussian stepped out onto the gallery, clothed in vest and shirtsleeves, the short-cropped blond bristle of hair still damp from its earlier wetting in the rain. “Where do you keep your chaise?”

  “Rue Douane. Where is she?” He reached back through the door and fetched his coat from its peg. “And how do you—?”

  “Bring your guns.”

  Mayerling stopped, his eyes going to January’s, then past him to Hannibal, leaning on the upright of the gallery stair and holding his ribs to still his coughing.

  “What’s happened? Come in.” He strode away into the apartment, where another branch of candles burned on a table before an open book. The place was small and almost bare, but in one corner of the room stood a double escapement seven-octave Broadwood piano, and music was heaped on its lid and the table at its side.

  The Prussian flipped open an armoire, pulled a drawer, drew forth the boxed set of Manton pistols with which Granger and Bouille had missed each other, and a bag of shot. From the wall beside the armoire he took down a Kentucky long rifle and an English shotgun.

  During this activity January explained, “Someone attacked Madame Trepagier after she left here.” Mayerling turned his head sharply, but January went on, “She was assaulted in Orléans Alley by the cathedral. I stopped them, sent her off home, but now I think they’ll try again. Her brother-in-law’s behind it, he’s got to be.”

  “Claud?” Mayerling handed January the shotgun—thereby, January reflected wryly, breaking Louisiana state law—slung the powder box under his arm, and shrugged his coat on top of it, to keep it out of the rain. The last time he had had a gun in his hands, thought January, had been at the Battle of Chalmette. “I’d heard he was back in town, staying with the Trepagier cousins.”

  “When?” asked January, startled.

  “I don’t know.” Their feet clattered on the wood of the stairways, down one gallery, two. “Mardi Gras itself, I think, or the day before. At least that’s when he sent a message to Madeleine asking to see her.”

  “Did she?”

  “No.” His voice was dry and very cold. “I think she knew he was going to propose to her.”

  “Try to murder her, more like. She’s lucky she didn’t go. You know what he looks like?”

  “No. Which is as well,” he added softly, “from what she has told me of the man. But why would he have men attack her? Why would he—”

  “To inherit Les Saules,” said January as they reached the street.

  The sword master checked his stri
de for a moment to regard him in surprise. “The plantation? But without slaves it’s worthless. The land’s run-down, there are too few slaves to work what they have, they need to replant every one of the fields …”

  “The land will be worth a hundred dollars an acre if they put the streetcar line out from Gentilly, instead of from LaFayette like Granger’s company proposed.”

  “Granger.” Mayerling’s light, husky voice was soft. “The duel was over Bouille’s decision, of course. Since it went against Granger the line will of course be from Gentilly. And Granger’s friend McGinty would have known that. He’s been pressing Madeleine to sell to him for months now.”

  “And at a guess,” said Hannibal, reaching out one hand to prop himself just slightly on the iron post of the gallery, “Claud Trepagier is the fellow in the green Turk costume who was talking to McGinty in the Salle d’Orléans a few minutes before Angelique came in.”

  “Äffenschwänz,” said Mayerling coldly. “The horse is at the livery just down the way. It will take me minutes …”

  “Pick me up on Rue Douane below Rampart. Hannibal, you sound like you’d better stay here.”

  The fiddler coughed, and shook his head violently. “You’ll need a loader.”

  There was no time to argue, so January simply handed the shotgun to Hannibal and took off up Bienville at a lope. A few minutes brought him to Olympe’s cottage, where a boy of eleven or so opened the French door into the front bedroom, instead of to the parlor where he had been before.

  “Mama, she with a lady, sir,” said the boy politely, in slurry Creole French. “You come in, though, it pourin’ out.” He stepped aside. Through an open door into the other bedroom January could see three more children, like little stair steps, sitting cross-legged on a big bed with a large, broad-shouldered, very kindly-looking mulatto man who was reading to them from a book.

  The man got up at once and came in, holding out his hand. “You must be Ben. I’m Paul Corbier.”

  Once upon a time January could have pictured Olympe marrying no one less impressive than the Devil himself. Looking at his brother-in-law’s face he understood at least some of his sister’s mellower mood. “I need to speak to Olympe, now, quickly. I think our sister’s in trouble … Dominique. I need somebody to find Lieutenant Shaw of the police—or any of the police—and send them out to the Gentilly Road, out to the Trepagier plantation at Les Saules, quickly. There’s an ambush been laid, murder going to be done.”