Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  She knows she’s fit only for chorus work.

  Separated from an audience by the footlights, masked in paint and surrounded by other singers, enmeshed in a spectacle of action and beauty, a mediocre singer can get by. Cognoscenti might compare her coloratura to others they’d heard, but in the main, the weak or dull thread is safe in the brilliant tapestry’s web.

  A vain woman wouldn’t have noticed her own flaws, or feared exposure as no more than the impresario’s mistress, the woman foisted on the company and the audience.

  Tears filled d’Isola’s dark eyes, but she took a deep breath, ready to go down trying.

  January was never sure afterward why he reacted as he did. Asked beforehand what a girl deserved who had used her body to edge her way ahead of better singers, he would unhesitatingly have said, Let her stand up and try to sing without anything to distract her audience. Let her try to sing in a small room, in an intimate setting, face-to-face. That should teach her.

  Maybe it was because only a few hours earlier he’d seen the pain in Dominique’s eyes, and how she’d held up her head and smiled.

  Maybe because of the woman in the blue dress, at the New Exchange, and the way Belaggio had held on to Drusilla’s arm and said, I insist.

  Maybe it was just that she was young.

  He said in Italian, “Perhaps the Signorina would care to sing ‘Si profondo mi amore’ from your own Othello, Signor?” And he named Desdemona’s sad little canzone from Act Four, heart-tugging in itself, tragic in its sweet simplicity before Othello’s terrifying entrance . . .

  . . . and, he knew, just within the girl’s range and capabilities.

  For one instant her eyes met his, filled with gratitude and almost unbelieving relief that she would be spared. She swallowed hard, drew another breath, steadying herself. “Yes,” she said, “yes, thank you, that is . . . that would be perfect.”

  “Othello is a new opera, Signor,” added January encouragingly to Belaggio, who showed signs of holding out for “Casta diva.” “And truly, the finest that I have heard.”

  “Well, well . . .” Belaggio puffed up like a mating pigeon. “It is a fine piece, is it not? One of my best. What about it, Popola?” He brought d’Isola’s hand to his lips. January saw that her fingers were trembling.

  Somewhere in the candle-lit golden shadows, a shrill Irish voice demanded, “If she’s going to sing, why can’t I dance?”

  And silence fell on the room as La d’Isola took her place before the bower, silence seduced, a moment later, by the sweet, languid whisper of Hannibal’s fiddle.

  It is the music that makes up the feeling, January had said to Shaw. The words themselves are nothing. Indeed, he doubted whether five people in the great soft-glowing cavern of the ballroom even knew Italian. But the gentle wistfulness of the air spoke, the slow-building pulse of intensity and sadness; that terrible alternation of yearning and despair that a woman knows, who both loves and fears her man.

  So deep my love, that even in his anger

  My heart leaps out; his stubbornness and frowns,

  These I embrace, the day and night together . . .

  When Cavallo spoke of her depth of feeling, of her ability to deliver, not a perfect song, but an emotional performance, January had been tempted to attribute the praise to the friendship between the two. Now he saw that the tenor had spoken the truth.

  La d’Isola, though her training had clearly been adequate, might not have been more than a mediocre singer, but as an actress she was unsurpassed.

  Or else, thought January—and he glanced sidelong at her lover’s florid countenance, the pride-filled, possessive dark eyes—she sang from her heart.

  My mother had a maid called Barbara.

  She loved a man, and him she loved was mad;

  And he forsook her, leaving her to sing

  This song of Willow; singing it she died. . . .

  Hannibal’s violin feathered gently in as the girl’s voice soared into a cadenza, freed for the moment of words at all, singing only feeling, like a dove flying into storm. Love that accepts the rage of the beloved as just; the heart too tender to defend itself or the life of its owner. Anne Trulove, who did understand—who like Hannibal had been raised on Shakespeare—glanced aside and down, acknowledging her malice defeated and chastised. Major plunged into minor like the night that stalks in the wings of a hurricane, notes unfurling like luminous pennons against a lowering sky.

  Sing willow, willow, sing willow,

  Sing willow, willow, sing for me. . . .

  During this scene, the libretto instructed, Othello would be visible on the gallery, just outside Desdemona’s door. Weeping as he listened, and turning away, repentant of his jealousy. And at that moment, around the flowering vine of the willow song, would twine Iago’s theme, as Cochon and Uncle threaded it in now, vivid as blood dripped on bridal-silk, as the echo of a cry uttered hundreds of years ago.

  Lie with her, on her, what you will. . . . Hot as monkeys, salt as wolves in pride. . . . And like night returning, Othello would turn back to that lighted room. To vengeance, and his own doom.

  Now, now, very now, January’s mind whispered the words of the first act, which Belaggio had taken intact into Iago’s opening aria. That old black ram is tupping your white ewe.

  He had heard and read endless speculation on Iago’s motive in bringing about his commander’s downfall: rage at being passed over to make room for the place-serving Cassio; envy of the greater man’s abilities. The mention in passing that “he hath sometime between my sheets performed my office” was clearly a throwaway, an excuse, brought up only once at the end almost as an afterthought—certainly Iago’s wife, Emilia, never gave the slightest indication of interest in Othello throughout the play. And to January, the motive was clear, starting in that first scene.

  Iago could not endure it, that the Moor dared love a white-skinned woman, and was loved by her in return.

  And it mattered to him not a whit that it was a woman in whom Iago had no interest himself.

  Sing willow, willow, sing willow,

  Sing willow, willow, sing for me.

  Which of those men, wondered January as the final grace-notes of d’Isola’s simple fioritura climbed into the silence, agreed with Iago? It was all very well for them to have mistresses of color—as Henri Viellard, mammoth and solemn in his gray coat and flowered waistcoat, had Dominique—girls whom they would bull for years without ever considering them good enough to marry.

  But a black man bedding a white woman? Marrying her? Loving her so desperately that the thought of her betrayal drove him literally mad?

  Unthinkable.

  And criminal enough, in the mind of at least one man almost certainly in the room, to justify a little lesson in the alley beside the theater.

  Anne Trulove was the first to applaud, the first to step forward and take La d’Isola’s hands. John Davis was immediately behind, his face filled with admiration and, as he turned to Belaggio, with unwilling envy. A lover of opera, Davis recognized greatness, even in a man he disliked—January saw him hold out his hand, saw his lips move in words.

  Belaggio drew haughtily back, eyelids drooping, and said something that made Davis drop his hand. Then the crowd intervened, and Anne Trulove caught January’s eye, and gave a commanding nod.

  Obedient, he riffled the introduction to “L’Alexandrine” on the piano’s keys. Fiddles and cello, flute and clarionette bounded after him like fauns. Men and women paired again—French with French, American with American, like some absurdly politicized Noah’s Ark. Jeté and emboitté, glissade and pas-de-basque. The froufrou of taffeta silk and the amber slither of candlelight—kid-gloved fingers to kid-gloved palms. The rhythmed creak of slippers on beeswaxed oak. Belaggio was still handing out copies of his libretto to potential subscribers and didn’t even notice as La d’Isola slipped, trembling, away to the curtained alcove of a window, gathering around her shoulders her white-and-gold lace shawl, as if suddenly exhausted
and cold.

  And no wonder, thought January.

  Perhaps she had learned a lesson, after all.

  Despite what he’d said to Marguerite about the music at the free colored balls being better, January thoroughly enjoyed playing wherever he was hired to play. Music was his fortress, the shining world to which he’d retreated during a painful childhood; the brilliant spine around which he’d rebuilt his life during the dark months after Ayasha’s death. Listening and playing—especially a grand piano like Trulove’s—was the greatest joy he could ask for. Watching, too. A hundred minor dramas skirmished along the fringe of the dance, like a dance in itself, or an interlocking set of dances.

  Trulove, Anne Trulove, and Oona Flaherty formed a minor cotillion as the planter attempted to cross the crowded ballroom to the Irish girl’s side, and his wife intercepted him with spun-steel graciousness, a sort of verso Odyssey in miniature. Pale little Mr. Knight performed a one-man haie as he encountered and spoke with every planter in the room who owned forty arpents or more—he evidently had scant use for lesser fry. A sort of ring dance developed around the Widow Redfern, bachelors of every age paying court to her available affluence, and like the illustration of a tract, Marguerite Scie stood alone. She wasn’t young, and she wasn’t marriageable, and unlike La d’Isola and Oona Flaherty, she had come without the patronage of a man. Only John Davis paused to chat with the ballet mistress in the midst of his own grand-right-and-left with the influential Creoles of the City Council. January saw her draw herself up in a burlesque of Belaggio’s snub; he saw Davis laugh.

  “Vincent Marsan tells me you have a couple niggers to sell?”

  The soft-muttered words lifted the hair on January’s nape, though he’d heard them in one form or another at every ball and entertainment given by white men that he’d ever played. As Shaw had complained yesterday, half the slaves sold in New Orleans never got near such public venues as the New Exchange.

  “Ah, that I do, Signor Burton.” That was the voice that made January turn his head. Made his stomach curl sourly, and the music clink harsh in his ears. “That indeed I do.”

  Punch-cup in hand, Jed Burton looked up into the face of Lorenzo Belaggio.

  “Prime hands?”

  The impresario kissed his fingertips, smiling proudly about the men he was selling as if he hadn’t written a song about loving that minutes ago had opened January’s heart like a scalpel. “They have cut the sugar-cane in Cuba, they have worked in stables, they are young, they are healthy—”

  “How young?” Burton spit tobacco into the brass can discreetly tucked behind a potted fern. “And how healthy? Creole niggers?”

  “Of a certainty,” agreed Belaggio, though January had seen the tribal scars—country marks, they were called—on the faces of both the stage-hands the impresario had brought from Cuba. “Louis is perhaps nineteen, and Pedro, twenty-two. Both were born in Cuba, and are acclimated against the diseases of this hemisphere. They speak English. . . .”

  Another lie. But January guessed, with even a hundred-dollar knock-off in the average price of a cane-hand, that Burton wouldn’t care.

  He turned his face away, as if the notes before him were a map that would lead him on to a better world.

  At the age of ten he’d beaten up three of the quadroon boys from the St. Louis Academy for Young Gentlemen of Color, classmates he’d surprised in the act of drowning a puppy in the gutter. As the darkest boy in the school, January had little patience with those boys anyway—the ones who’d call him bozal and country and cane-patch—and he’d taken a split lip and a swollen eye in defense of the poor little cur, who had promptly slashed his wrist nearly to the bone and run away while its erstwhile tormentors howled with laughter at January’s pain and chagrin. His mother had whipped him, too, for getting his clothes torn.

  The dog had been run over in the street by a carriage the following day.

  As he’d said to Shaw, he understood that the makers of sublime art were not necessarily sublime themselves. And it was not necessary that they be, he told himself. Only that the art—the passion and the glory of Othello’s unwise love—be permitted to reach out to those whose loves were routinely denigrated, whose passions daily mocked.

  Nevertheless he tasted bile in his mouth as his fingers skipped through the Pantalon.

  “If only the man wasn’t such a damn huckster, he’d be easier to take,” sighed Davis, coming to the musicians’ bower between dances a few minutes later, to sneak Hannibal some brandy. “You wouldn’t have a friend or two in the Swamp, would you, who’d know where I could lay hands on fireworks?”

  “I don’t know about ready-made fireworks,” said January, overhearing. “But if you can procure gunpowder and chemicals, Mademoiselle Vitrac—you remember Mademoiselle Vitrac, M’sieu. . . .”

  “The teacher, yes.” Davis nodded. “And a chemist, too, if I remember rightly. Where could I send her a note, to ask . . . ?”

  “Puta!” Belaggio’s bellow of rage cut across the music’s opening bars. “Puttana! Cattiva fica!”

  “Consarn, as the Americans say.” Hannibal untucked his violin from beneath his chin. “Backed the wrong horse.”

  Across the room, Belaggio ripped aside the curtain that half concealed the window embrasure, thrust apart Vincent Marsan and Drusilla d’Isola with such violence that the girl smote the wall. The water-ice she’d been holding spun from her hand, glass splintering. Marsan lunged forward, beautiful face transformed by a snarl of demonic rage—the men nearest him leapt to seize his arms. He twisted free of them with a movement more animal than human, stood facing the Italian, the two huge men towering over the girl like maddened bulls. For a moment there was deadly silence; then Belaggio struck Marsan across the face.

  “Keep your filthy hands from that woman, you bastard stronzolo!”

  Marsan’s colorless wife stepped a pace toward them, but fell back at the sight of her husband’s face.

  “Stay with your Negress concubines, for I do not take such an insult from any man!” Seizing d’Isola’s arm, Belaggio shook her until her head lolled on her creamy bare shoulders, her face ashen with shock.

  “Devil’s whore! You will not dishonor me. . . .”

  “You dishonor yourself, sir!” The Widow Redfern strode from her ring of suitors in a jangle of diamonds and crêpe. The men—who had applauded so wildly when the girl sang of how a true woman trustingly accepts abuse from her man—muttered and shifted and avoided each other’s eyes. January had seen the same uneasiness, less outrage than a disapproval of the inappropriateness of it all, when a white man punished a slave in the presence of other whites.

  Mr. Knight, who was one of those who’d held back Marsan’s first killing rush, added in Italian, “Signor, we cannot have you speaking to a lady thus. . . .”

  “Lady?” Belaggio let out a crack of laughter. “This lightskirt, with her wicked eyes?” He shoved d’Isola before him through the French door onto the broad terrace. Framed by the flambeaux on the balustrade, the girl seemed to hover for a moment like Eurydice on the threshold of Hell.

  “Honestly!” Galvanized by visions of a season-wrecking scandal, James Caldwell moved to thrust himself between Belaggio and the infuriated Marsan, and Davis interposed his body in the embrasure of the window itself.

  “Mademoiselle d’Isola surely never—”

  “Keep back from me!” Belaggio retreated a pace from Davis and lifted his hand in a gesture hugely reminiscent of an overweight Don Giovanni confronted with the stone commander in his parlor doorway. “Assassin! I told you before this evening I have nothing to say to your blandishments. Will you call your hired bravos from the darkness now?”

  Davis was so shocked, he stepped aside, open-mouthed, and Belaggio shoved past him and out into the pagan torch-glare of the terrace. “Bitch!” the impresario cried. “Puta! I’ll teach you to flee from me . . . !”

  In point of fact, d’Isola had lingered for perhaps two minutes on the terrace before she fled, cl
utching her shawl distractedly about her, like Desdemona, awaiting her lover’s pleasure. As the tallest man in the room, January had watched her during Marsan’s altercation with Belaggio. Even when she’d finally descended into the dark protection of the garden’s hedge-maze she had paused, a glimmering white form in the blackness, turning back to watch . . .

  . . . or to give Belaggio a chance to overtake her for a lovers’ quarrel and reconciliation among the ornamental hedges of orange and box.

  “Where are you, faithless hussy? Do not flee from me, for I shall find you . . . !”

  Of that, January had not the smallest doubt.

  Then two things happened at once. At the same moment that he felt a tug at his coat—Uncle Bichet nodding toward Anne Trulove’s tight-lipped gesture to resume the music—January saw a lithe figure glide through one of the other French windows onto the terrace, a silver-haired man with the odd, almost boneless stature that characterized a eunuch.

  Incantobelli. January dropped back onto the piano-bench, swung into the Lancers. . . .

  And, as he struck up the first gay chord, saw John Davis, after a moment’s hesitation, disappear after Belaggio into the dark.

  If it hadn’t been for Mrs. Trulove stationing herself where she could keep an eye on both the orchestra and her husband, January might have tried to slip away after his friend and warn him not to put himself out of sight of witnesses, at least until the potentially murderous Incantobelli had been accounted for. But whatever might be going on in the garden, he had been hired to do a job, and would not be thanked for straying from that task.

  Thus he had only a general idea of the subsequent chain of events in the room around him: couples trying to find their partners, their sets, their dance-cards, and their left feet; Vincent Marsan striding toward the French doors and being stopped by his factor, a spectacle rather like that of an Italian greyhound trying to down a charging stag. Marsan’s wife joined her voice to little Mr. Knight’s, and the planter lashed at her with words that sent her in white-faced silence back to the wall, where she’d stood for most of the evening, as alone as Marguerite. “I’d better go after them,” boomed Trulove as if the thought had only just occurred to him, and strode, not into the garden, but through the big double doors that led into the rest of the house. “Oh, faith!” cried Miss Flaherty, seconds later, to no one in particular. “I seem to have left me fan in the lobby. . . .”