Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  There were few candles in the yard, fewer still inside. Dark forms swayed and whirled. Feet slapped creaking floorboards. Loose happy voices: “Get them knees up, Philo!” “Whoa, look at her!” “Get after her, Isaak, you gonna take that from her?”

  “This’s Madame Scie, my friend from Paris,” January introduced Marguerite to those gathered around the kitchen door. Hands extended, welcoming. “Is Mademoiselle Vitrac hereabouts?”

  “Well, ain’t that just like a man?” sniffed Cora Chouteau, Rose’s best friend, looking like a half-grown skinny kitten. “Brings one lady and starts lookin’ around for another before his shadow even catches up with him on the ground.”

  “I’d get rid of that one, honey, if I was you.”

  “One accustoms oneself,” sighed Marguerite in her grandest de Vermandois accents, and flipped open her fan.

  “ ’Scuse me, I think I hear trumpets blowing a retreat,” murmured January, and he crossed toward the house, whither Hannibal had already gone to join Cochon and old Uncle Bichet in playing for the dancers inside.

  Musicians and cab-drivers at this hour, mostly, after the white folks had danced themselves exhausted and gone home to bed. The party would have started out larger, all the carpenters and milliners and furniture-makers of color, the libre craftsmen and artists, the workers in iron and marble and silk who made up this neighborhood at the back of the French town. Men and women whose work transfigured this low pastel city and embellished the lives of the rich. There would have been children earlier, too, racing around underfoot, sticky-handed with candy and shrieking with laughter, dancing dances of their own invention, now long carried home and put to bed. Old M’am Bichet’s bed would have been heaped with babies. It was the die-hards who were left, the ones who loved to dance more than they loved food or sleep.

  From the doorway January tried to pick out Rose from the press of people inside. He saw his full sister, Olympe, two years his junior, face sheened with sweat— the little room was like an oven—and all her cool iron toughness dissolved, dancing the pilé chactas with her husband, a grin on her face like Judgment Morning. Though Paul Corbier had to wake early to get to his work, January knew he’d dance the world’s end to a standstill if he could do so with Olympe. Other friends were there, too, Isaak Jumon, the marble-carver, and little Vachel Corcet, the attorney, and Crowdie Passebon, who sold perfumes, dancing with the beautiful Mamzelle Marie, queen of the voodoos, her tignon off and her astonishing hair loosened down over her shoulders and her wise, wicked eyes bright. Paul and Olympe had been masking—half the people in the small double parlor had—and still wore bits of costumes. Olympe had gold-striped veils wound around her crimson dress and Paul wore old-fashioned doublet and hose.

  In the corner near the street door Cochon Gardinier and Hannibal leaned back-to-back against each other, knees bent, eyes half shut, fiddle-bows flying so that the music spiraled and soared like mating dragons—Jacques and Uncle and every other musician from a dozen balls and parties had assembled here and whirled along behind them, the glory of the music fast and heartstopping and wild. January shut his eyes and let the sound fill him, and for a time he understood again why after Ayasha’s death— when the whole world stood open to his empty heart— the only place he could come to was here.

  Music. The flesh that robed his soul’s chilled bones.

  Family. Helaine Passebon’s dirty rice on a couple of sheets of newspaper and the sound of laughter in the shadows.

  New Orleans on a Carnival night, at the back of town.

  “Get on over here, Ben!” called Uncle Bichet, and everyone waved. Someone held up a guitar. January shook his head, got booed and shoved, sighed resignedly, and edged through the press along the walls. He put his foot on a chair and swung into the chactas mid-bar, fingers leaping and fretting and hammering at the strings, chasing the fiddles, dancing rings around the tune. Cochon winked one twinkling piggy eye at him and Hannibal grinned like a sweat-drenched Celtic elf, and everyone swooped into one more crazy chorus before the dance crashed to a conclusion amid laughter and panting and gourd cups of tafia punch.

  “And what’s this I hear about you coming here with another woman?” Rose appeared at his side in a himation of bedsheets and a cardboard spear and Gorgon-decorated shield. Her nut-brown hair was plaited in those dozen soft little braids that adorned the maiden statues of ancient Greece.

  January rolled his eyes. “Seems like people in this town mind everybody’s business but their own.” His face ran with sweat in the hot dark and he handed off the guitar to Jacques.

  “You should thank the stars they do.” Rose retreated with him to one of the front parlor’s darker corners as the music struck up again. “The woman who works in the kitchen of the Fatted Calf remembers Silvio Cavallo and Bruno Ponte very well. They were in and out, she says, all the evening, in turns—first one sitting quietly and drinking coffee, then the other. She was most affected by the story of my putative mistress’s distress. Would that it were another woman, she said. Another woman, you just go get some steel dust and honey from the juju doctor and that’s that—something I’ll evidently have to try. . . .”

  “Madame Scie has no more interest in me these days than she has in Belaggio.”

  “So you say.” Rose regarded him severely over the tops of her spectacles, which far from detracting from her personation of Owl-Eyed Athène in fact in a curious fashion increased it. “In any case, just before three, Ponte—whose turn it was evidently to keep watch—appeared in the doorway, gestured peremptorily to Cavallo, at which Cavallo rose and hastened from the room.”

  “This woman didn’t happen to note what they were wearing, did she?”

  “Cavallo wore the blue long-tailed coat that you described him wearing at rehearsal, with the velvet collar. I asked about it when I described him.”

  “In other words,” said January, “he changed it at the theater, when he saw everyone there.”

  “If he and Ponte were watching the place, waiting for everyone to leave so they could search Belaggio’s office,” said Rose reasonably, “he’d have wanted to rid himself of anything that shouted ‘I’ve been here since the end of rehearsal.’ ”

  “Maybe,” agreed January. “But equally, Cavallo could have been—”

  From outside the shutters, a voice called, “The Guards!”

  The music stopped with a jerk and a squeal. A dozen dancers seized the nearest candles and snuffed them to oblivion, quite clearly forgetting that they needed at least some light to beat a retreat out the back; January cursed, and grabbed Rose by the hand. Bodies blundered in the dark. He heard Olympe call “Out! This way. Give me your hand . . .” and someone squeaked and laughed.

  One hand on Rose’s wrist and the other against the wall, he groped through the darkness. The dimmest possible glow marked the rear door behind a heaving wall of shoulders. Astonishingly, the exodus was made in close to complete silence—curious, thought January, considering how few of the revelers had actually ever themselves been slaves.

  They’ve only been treated like them, he thought as he and Rose swiftly crossed the darkness of the yard and ducked into the deeper night beneath the trees beyond. You didn’t have to belong to someone if you more or less belonged to everyone; if everyone together had a reason to keep you down. People like Rose, and Crowdie Passebon, and Cochon Gardinier, second- and sometimes third-generation libres, still had the slaves’ instinct for swift, stealthy retreat. Their self-preserving watchfulness had been ingrained from a lifetime of working around the restrictions of the whites: you can’t smoke cigars in public (the yard and house had reeked with them); you have to cover your head. Don’t be uppity. Never look a white man in the eye.

  Whatever you do, whatever you do, don’t fall foul of a white man at law. Because you will not, you cannot, win.

  Silence fell on the yard. Those among the pitch-black shadows under the trees watched and listened, attention strained toward the yard. From here in the fleeting starlig
ht, it looked like even the trestle tables and the food were gone—Somebody had presence of mind. A dry rustle of palmettos off to his right; a twig cracked underfoot to his left; a woman giggled. The other women in the kitchen must have hustled Marguerite into the woods with them: That sound you hear, he could almost hear her saying, is Grandmère de Vermandois rolling over in her grave. . . .

  After fifteen minutes or so, when no torches came into sight around the corner of the house, January saw a dark figure—probably Jacques’s mother—leave the shelter of the woods and cross back to the kitchen. A light went up there—somebody must have simply clamped the firebell over the blaze on the hearth at the first alarm—and a moment later Old M’am Bichet emerged with a candle in her hand and went around to the front of the house.

  “If this was one of your nephew’s practical jokes,” breathed Rose, “I hope his mother makes a gris-gris that turns him into a toad.” January tried to recall whether it had been a man’s voice that had given the alarm, or a boy’s, and couldn’t. It was the sort of thing his nephew Gabriel—or a half-dozen of the boy’s cronies—would have considered hilarious, now that he thought of it.

  Or himself, he thought, at the age of twelve.

  A minute later their hostess came back around the corner of the house, shielding the candle in fingers edged in pink light. Uncle Bichet and Jacques and Jacques’s wife, Jane, left the black wall of the swamp at three separate points and converged on her. Jacques lifted one arm, signaling all was clear. “I’m going to wear those boys out,” promised January grimly. It was probably past four, and if he was going to give “a opera lesson” of unspecified duration to Madame Montero, and play at a Blue Ribbon Ball for Davis at the Salle d’Orleans tomorrow night, he’d have to attend early Mass—a thought that made him groan inwardly.

  Why couldn’t he be a heathen like Hannibal, and laugh God to scorn?

  Others, it appeared, were also mindful of the nearness of dawn. As January and Rose returned to the yard, parties formed up for the walk home, Olympe already regarding her eldest son with deep suspicion. Penelope and Jane wrapped up dishes of food in sheets of clean newspaper for those to take home who would. “You take some dirty rice, Ben?” inquired Alys Roque, one of Olympe’s friends. “I hear M’am Bontemps don’t board.”

  “Would you really want to eat anything she’d cooked?” retorted Cora Chouteau, and got a general laugh.

  “Hannibal, where’d you go?—Take some of this, please. I swear I could put you in a candle-mold and have room for the wick. . . .”

  “I didn’t yell ‘Guards,’ ” protested Gabriel’s voice over the general hushed babble of departure. “I swear I didn’t. . . .”

  “Marguerite?” January scanned the faces limned by the threads of candle-light, but saw no twist of graying blond hair starred with flowers. “Have you seen my friend Madame Scie?”

  “I was talking with her.” Mohammed LePas frowned. “Then some idiot whose name I won’t mention knocked over the candle in the kitchen. . . .”

  “I told you it was an accident,” retorted Philippe duCoudreau. “You try movin’ around in there with ten other people and somebody yells the Guards is comin’ . . .”

  “I thought you came in and grabbed her, Ben,” said Cora.

  “He did,” confirmed duCoudreau, nodding. “I saw him.”

  January shook his head. “I was inside with Rose.”

  Silence. And those looks that go back and forth between people, when nobody wants to be the first to say Uh-oh . . .

  They found every candle still long enough to sustain flame and spread out in the swamp. At this time of year, January found himself thinking, it was too cold for alligators—too dry for them to come up this far from the nearest water, which was Bayou Gentilly. . . . Besides, if someone were seized by a ’gator, he couldn’t imagine it would have been silent.

  Someone. As he edged through the harsh three-foot shields of the palmetto, the twining tangles of hackberry between the cypresses, January reflected uncomfortably on the way his mind phrased that thought.

  Not Marguerite . . .

  Just someone. Spindly light glimmered greenish through dagger-shaped leaves, edged creepers snaking around the oak-trunks and the pointed goblin heads of the cypress-knees thrusting through last year’s dead leaves. Bobbing glints in the darkness, like unseasonable fireflies, and an occasional hushed voice: “M’am Scie . . . m’am, can you hear . . . ?”

  Gabriel’s voice. “Here she is.”

  Damn it, thought January, hearing in his nephew’s tone what the boy had found. Damn it, no . . .

  She lay at the foot of an oak-tree. A little blood smudged a low-bending bough where her head had struck. But the wound was on the back of her skull, and the shoulder of her golden dress was torn. There was no possible way she could have simply run on the limb in the dark. The white flowers, fallen from her hair, strewed the dead leaves around her head. When January and the others bent over her and held the candles close, they could see the darkening bruises on her throat.

  Huge hands. January had never met another man who had hands like that.

  He didn’t need to turn his head to see people look at one another. Didn’t need to hear their silence. It was as if he felt the draw of everyone’s breath.

  Gently he felt her wrist. There was no pulse under the thin white skin, but he thought he detected a fragile beat in the vein of her neck. When he plucked the skeletal nosegay from Hannibal’s buttonhole and held it before her lips, he saw the paper-fine petals stir. “Somebody, get a plank.” He wondered why there was no expression in his voice. “An old door, or a tabletop. Anything to lay her out straight to carry her back to the house.”

  “Her neck broke?” Olympe knelt at his side, shrugged off her shawl. Hannibal brought up Marguerite’s gray cloak, all snagged with dead leaves and twigs, found among the oak’s twisted roots.

  I should be feeling something, January told himself, not remembering how many nights had passed between Ayasha’s death and the first onslaught of that hammering pain. “I don’t know. She has a concussion, how bad I don’t know.” He saw Philippe duCoudreau, and one or two others, draw back a little when he turned, and said again, “I was with Rose.”

  “He was,” agreed Rose, and duCoudreau nodded, with eyes that said, And you’re the woman who hopes to wed him.

  Isaak Jumon and Crowdie Passebon came back then from the house with one of the planks from the buffet. Holding Marguerite’s head steady, January and Mamzelle Marie eased the ballet mistress onto the makeshift litter, covered her with cloaks and shawls.

  “What do we say about this?” asked Mohammed. People looked at each other again, then at Jacques and his family.

  Whatever you say, thought January, it sure as hell can’t be the truth.

  No one spoke for a time, as the implications of January’s former relations with Madame Scie—known to a number of the other opera musicians present and almost certainly common knowledge by now among everyone at the party—and his present relations with Rose, sank into everyone’s consciousness.

  “We say a carriage struck her,” said Mamzelle Marie at last. The voodooienne knelt on the other side of Madame Scie, listened to her chest, and gently touched her face and throat. “You know how crazy people drive, late, along the Bayou Road. You and Hannibal were walking her home, Ben, and a carriage struck her, going fast without lights. You carried her here.” She straightened up to her knees, regarded the fiddler with those dark, wise serpent eyes. “That sit with you, Hannibal?”

  January felt Philippe duCoudreau looking at him, heard the silence louder than a thousand whispers.

  The voodoo queen’s gaze passed from face to face of those standing in the raw dark of the swamp. “That sit with all here,” she asked, “until we can find the real truth?”

  Uncle Bichet cleared his throat. Like everyone else there, the old man feared and respected Marie Laveau, but he had been, once, a prince of his tribe. He had been raised to love justice. “An
d what happens,” he asked, “when we find that truth?”

  “Depends,” replied the voodooienne, “on what it is.”

  With Jumon and Mohammed and half a dozen others keeping watch all around for the City Guards, they carried Marguerite through the streets of the old French town to Olympe’s house on Rue Douane. There they put her to bed in the rear bedroom, white and still as a corpse.

  When January finally slept, much later in the day, he dreamed that he stood on a worn marble terrace in Cyprus, and through archways curtained in gauze heard Marguerite sing Willow, willow, sing willow for me in Drusilla d’Isola’s sweet, despairing voice.

  SEVEN

  By the time January left Olympe’s house, after ascertaining that Marguerite’s neck was not broken, the dense, misty blackness of the night had begun to thin to gray. In kitchens and slave-quarters all over town, men and women crept shivering from straw-tick pallets in un-lighted rooms to kindle up the fires they’d prepared last night. To heat water so that Masters—or husbands— could wash their faces, or oil to fry rice, flour, and egg for callas. Along the levees, at the foot of Market Street, and St. Joseph, and Madison and St. Philippe, pirogues and canoes and fishing-boats put in, unloading aubergines and apples by the yellow cresset-glare, beans and winter lettuces and crates and barrels of black oysters and silvery pungent fish. A glory of baking bread and coffee blessed the air.

  Crossing through the pre-dawn bustle of the Place d’Armes, casting despairingly this way and that in his mind for something else he might do, some other treatment he might add to those futile efforts already made, January felt again the iron cold of other dawns, the damp, mossy stink of the morning streets of Paris. Marguerite beside him, sinews and heart loosened with the sleepy content that the young feel when they’ve made music three-quarters of the night and love for the rest of it, in quest of coffee among the grimed echoing torchlit stone vaults of Les Halles.