Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  Don’t let her die. Virgin Mother of God, don’t let her die.

  There’s not much you can do about a deep concussion, Dr. LeBel had told him—the head surgeon at the Hôtel Dieu in Paris. Just nurse them, and get them to drink if you can once the danger of vomiting’s past. He’d lifted back the eyelids of the man he and January were examining then, a laborer whose thin breath reeked of decayed teeth and cheap wine, to show the mismatched dilation of the pupils, their fixed, unseeing gaze. It’s surprising how long they’ll last, unconscious, if they can be made to sup a little gruel or water.

  One priest—probably Father Eugenius, January guessed—was already hearing confessions at the Cathedral of St. Louis. Three or four women in the gaudy, faded calicoes of the market waited on the benches near the wooden cubicle, hands folded in prayer. Only a few candles burned in all that shadowy space—at the far front of the church, votive lights before the Virgin’s altar picked out the beauty of a curved eyebrow, the intricate life-maps of wrinkled and arthritic hands. Where was that quiet beauty, January wondered, in music? Why did opera celebrate only the loves of the young and noisy?

  He confessed himself, and sat on the benches at the rear of the church that were reserved for people of color, until a sleepy altarboy came out and touched flame to the candles at the high altar, and Father Eugenius emerged in a robe of white and gold to say Mass. Only a handful of market-women were present, and a dozen slaves at the rear of the gloomy side aisles. The places of the whites in the center aisle were empty.

  A veiled and fashionably-dressed woman knelt near him, her elaborately-wrapped silk tignon proclaiming her in all probability a plaçée. She did not take Communion, but when January rose to leave, comforted as always by the words of the blessings and the prayers, she remained, rosary glinting faintly in her gloved hands.

  Praying for expiation, he wondered, of a sin that the white man’s law would not permit her to rectify? Pleading for the well-being of others in her family, who might rely on her protector’s largesse to give them a security they might not otherwise have? Most of the plaçées, if they attended Mass at all, came to the eleven o’clock Mass—the fashion-show, it was called. A parade of silk frocks and new bonnets for the whites, of jewelry and stylish variations in color and wrap and feathers for the tignons of the free colored women.

  Not that many came. Mostly the ladies of the Rue des Ramparts would exhibit their finery at the Salle d’Orleans tonight.

  The image of that penitent, whoever she was, stayed in January’s mind as he crossed the Place d’Armes, like the air of a song that repeats over and over. He bought a bowl of jambalaya and a cup of coffee in the market, and sat watching the sea-gulls quarrel over shrimp dropped from the baskets on the levee, trying to wake up.

  In the blue gloom of the market hall the last torches were extinguished. Light smote the waters of the river and tipped the leafless branches of the sycamores around the square with gold. Protestants and Americans said in hushed, disapproving tones that the population of New Orleans kept the Sabbath the way Bostonians kept the Fourth of July, and as if to prove this, slaves stopped to laugh and chat on their way to the market for their Masters, fishermen and stevedores sang in the morning chill as they worked, their breath puffing white. A melismatic holler was passed from crew to crew along the ranks of the steamboats unloading at the wharves, the words lost in the rise and fall of the voices: “Wayaaaaay, yooooo. . . .” January could follow the sound down the levee like the cloud-shadows that ran over the dark seas of standing cane.

  At ten o’clock Consuela Montero would present herself for her session, and January knew from experience that it was easier and less exhausting to stay up than to get up. He could sleep in the afternoon—before or after returning to Olympe’s house to check on Marguerite—so as to be clear-headed for that night’s quadroon ball.

  You can sleep during Lent. Last winter, having gotten on the wrong side of a powerful Creole matron, January had lost nearly all his students and had been hired to play very few balls; Mardi Gras was the harvest of his year, far less grueling than the sugar-grinding seasons of his childhood. You didn’t sleep in either case, but at least at Mardi Gras you went to interesting parties.

  You got her, Philippe duCoudreau had said in the lightless confusion of the Bichet kitchen last night. The candles had been out, the fire covered—jostling shoulders, crowding heads, features obscured in shadow. January passed his hand across his unshaven face, wondering how duCoudreau had been so sure. There was only one person at the party last night anywhere near January’s size, and that was his brother-in-law, Paul Corbier, who would scoop up the gross brown four-inch palmetto-bugs on a piece of newspaper and pitch them gently outside rather than crushing them like every other person in town did.

  Why would Philippe have accused him? The worst January knew of the man was that duCoudreau was the most hapless musician in New Orleans, and relations had never been anything but cordial between them. January felt a deep uneasiness, and anger at that uneasiness: anger that he would have to so deeply fear the possibility of anyone mentioning the truth to the police.

  Struck by a carriage? He grimaced at the childishness of the lie. And what would the police say if they happened to see the huge bruises around Marguerite’s throat?

  You were her lover, you who love another now. Why would a white woman have gone with you to Bichet’s except to demand something of you?

  Of course your friends will all lie for you.

  The people at the back of the Faubourg Tremé weren’t so very different from the Milanese and the Sicilians who said sbirri with that look in their eyes. It does something to you, to know in your bones that justice is something other people get.

  Someone had tried to strangle her. Someone had seized her by the shoulder and slammed her against the low-hanging tree-limb when she fought free.

  What would Philippe say if someone started asking questions of those who’d seen Madame Scie leave Trulove’s ball with himself and Hannibal last night?

  Consuela Montero appeared on Madame Bontemps’s doorstep on the stroke of the hour, a copy of the score to Le Nozze di Figaro in hand. “Mil reniegos that I declined to go to the house of Señor Trulove last night!”

  News, reflected January, travels fast.

  She folded back the mantilla that sheltered her round, determined face from the winter sun and incidentally from the chance notice of passers-by. “Not that there were not some in the Opera Society who begged me to meet them there, but to go listen to Americanos tell one another about cotton and slaves, qué fastidio! How would I know the girl would be so stupid as to displease her patron so in public?” She opened her little purse of gold mesh and laid a stack of five Mexican silver dollars on the corner of January’s square six-octave piano. “Just so! One can only hope that foolish as d’Isola is, she will contrive to bring him to his senses herself.”

  Briskly, she set the score on the music-rack, and removed her black-and-gold velvet pelerine. “It is as well to be ready if she does. Buen’ dias, Señora.” She nodded and offered two lace-mitted fingers to Madame Bontemps, apparently not in the least discomposed by that woman’s silent appearance at her elbow.

  “Madame.” January selected one of the silver dollars and pressed it into his landlady’s palm. “This is Madame Montero, who is paying me for a private singing lesson this morning. You remember I sent you a note of this, yesterday afternoon?”

  “I don’t forget things.” Madame Bontemps continued to hold Madame Montero’s extended fingers in her damp grip. “Even seeing the Devil last night doesn’t make me forget. I saw the Devil last night,” she added, released her hold, and settled herself into one of the nearly thread-bare—but spotlessly neat—green grosgrain chairs that decorated the front parlor. “It’s ten o’clock.” She folded her hands in her lap. “At ten o’clock I sit in the parlor.”

  January glanced at the soprano, who was studying herself in the pier glass between the windows and making sure that
the lacquered curls on her forehead remained perfectly symmetrical. If Montero heard the landlady’s intention, it didn’t bother her. And there would be odder distractions than that, he reflected, at the theater Tuesday night.

  To do her justice, Consuela Montero was a far better Countess than La d’Isola. She had, as she’d said, sung the role only the previous year, and needed only to be taken through it. January, who had a very passable baritone, sang the parts of both Figaro and the Count for her, accompanied occasionally by his landlady, who had a habit of chiming in with fragments of “Fleuve du Tage” and “Les bluets sont bleus.” “You are good,” Montero told January after their Act Four garden duet. “Better than Señor Staranzano, who just stands there, waiting for the world to swoon at his feet. You would make a good Almaviva—always supposing Almaviva was a Moor. It is you they should put in Othello, and not that Austrian buffoon in black paint.”

  That really WOULD have them burning down the theater, thought January, too amused at the notion of the reaction to such casting to feel much anger at the fact that in America it simply could not be. Probably not in Paris either, he thought, and be damned to your Liberté, Fraternité, and Égalité. “Maybe you could tell me,” he said, shuffling through the score to locate the point at which the Countess reveals her true identity to her baffled husband. “Was there someone in the Opera Society who tried to get Belaggio to change Othello for some other opera? Tried to get him not to put it on?”

  The elegantly-plucked black brows pinched. “Not put it on?” Montero’s voice had the note of a queen who has been informed that her carriage isn’t ready due to the drunkenness of the grooms. “De qué, not put it on? It is a very good opera. Beautiful. And we have no other premiere, unless you will have La Muette as such. But La Muette is years old, and is everywhere done. One must have the premiere.”

  “There are those in this city,” said January, “who would not thank a man to put on-stage the love of a black man for a white woman. You do not know how it is here,” he added, seeing in her face the same incredulity he had seen yesterday in Belaggio’s. “I assure you, there are men who would do what they could to prevent it, as being ‘indecent.’ And I know Signor Belaggio is proud of it, as well he should be. But the pride could put him in danger.”

  Montero’s red lips curled. “If what you say is true, Señor, I think you’ll find that Señor Belaggio is the last man who would place his life before his pride. And á la verdad, I don’t know what cause he has to be proud. It isn’t as if he wrote Othello.”

  “What?” Even as the word came out of his mouth, January knew she spoke the truth. A man doesn’t have to be good to write great music. But there must be something about him that is great.

  And that, he understood, was what bothered him about Belaggio.

  He was petty. A petty man can write excellent music, he knew. But not the aria La d’Isola had sung last night.

  “De verdad.” The soprano shrugged her fleshy shoulders. “Did you not know? Incantobelli wrote it. Why else do you think he made the threats he did, of murder and ruin? Why do you think Belaggio had that brother of his denounce Incantobelli to the Austrians so that he can never return to Milan? And even so,” she added, settling the finale score before January on the piano-rack, “Belaggio still dared not remain in Europe, knowing Incantobelli could be as close to him as Naples or Rome. No, he must come to Havana.”

  Her onyx eyes flashed with a sudden ugly glint. “And like a fool, I signed his contract, not even making sure that it specified that I would be prima. I did not know then,” she added darkly, “that he had fallen in love with this hussy, and promised her a season. Come.” She tapped the music smartly with the backs of her polished nails. “Let us now return to this other pig of a lover Almaviva, and run him to confusion.”

  “I saw the Devil last night,” put in Madame Bontemps from her chair opposite the windows.

  “Did you?” Madame Montero tweaked a curl back into place. “No doubt he was looking for a fiacre—why are they never about when you need them? So. The finale. This time I will try a little fioritura, just to show these people what true singing is.”

  For the next two hours they concentrated on the Count Almaviva’s efforts to exercise le droit du seigneur on his barber’s bride, Susanna’s efforts to elude him, the Countess’s struggle to win back her husband’s love, and the page Cherubino’s double dilemma of achieving puberty and evading conscription. Only when January was handing the soprano into a hack at the end of the rehearsal was he able to return to the subject of Incantobelli. It was just after noon by then, and he had been hard put to keep his mind on the music, wondering whether he would find Marguerite conscious or even alive when he returned to Olympe’s. If anything had happened, they’d have sent for me, he told himself.

  But his heart felt sick.

  It came back to his mind that in the dark of the alley, his fist had connected with a chin not very much lower than his own; he remembered the bulk and weight of his attacker, throwing him against the wall. As he led Madame Montero through the French door to the Rue des Ursulines, he asked, “You say Incantobelli made threats against Belaggio for stealing his opera and passing it off as his own? Threats of murder?”

  “Of a certainty.” She tilted her head to look up at him through the dusky cloud of her mantilla. Draped over a comb nearly a foot high, it rose above the mountain of love-knots, bows, gems, and ringlets on her head. “I myself heard him.”

  “So it might very well have been Incantobelli who hired the men who attacked Belaggio.” Many castrati, January knew, grew to be enormously tall—which did not seem to be the case with Incantobelli, so far as he’d been able to glimpse him last night—but it was no eunuch whose beard had scraped his knuckles in the dark.

  “Never.” Montero shook her head decidedly. “He may have taken a warm bath in his youth, Incantobelli. . . .” She switched casually to Italian with the old phrase that described the operation by which boys were castrated. “But he is a Neapolitan, when all is said. Hire louts to administer a beating for such a thing? Pah! It is not like the seduction of a man’s wife, who after all is but a wife. It is the rape of his daughter, his child. One does not delegate chastisement for such a deed. Ah! Behold the fine caballero—I trust you will not speak of seeing me here?” She extended a round little hand for Hannibal to kiss as the fiddler came up the banquette. “That back-alley drabtail d’Isola carries tales enough to Lorenzo as it is. All we need is that she should say I am plotting against her, that it is my doing if greenstuff is thrown at her after she sings Tuesday night.”

  “If she sings.” Hannibal removed his shabby high-crowned beaver and saluted the hand as if it were a holy relic. “If there’s a performance at all. I took the liberty of calling on Mr. Caldwell to tell him he needs to find a new ballet mistress and the man’s in near hysterics, sending messages to Belaggio at his hotel and Marsan at his town house—though neither of them, apparently, can be reached. I thought Caldwell would give birth. He’s procured the services of Herr Smith, by the way. . . .”

  “Smith?” January groaned. Madame Montero, whose hand remained in Hannibal’s, raised an eyebrow. “Smith—who was certainly called something else in Dresden, before he left for I think political reasons—is probably one of the finest instructors and arrangers of opera ballet that the reign of Louis the Fourteenth ever produced. Unfortunately, Louis the Fourteenth has been dead for about a hundred and twenty years and we do things a little differently these days.”

  “If you want a strict regulation of passepieds in every opera prologue, musettes in the first act, and tambourins in the second, with every dancer doing his or her specialty turn no matter how it fits into the story,” explained Hannibal, “Smith’s your man. Though he’ll fight like a maddened butterfly to get more allegorical costumes for the rats.”

  Montero paused in the door of the fiacre. “Allegorical—as what? The spirits of Love and Duty in Figaro? Of Hearth and Home?”

  “If he
can manage,” said January, “he’ll do it.”

  “Smith was at liberty.” Hannibal shrugged. “What more need I say? Difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti se puero. . . . I overheard Knight complaining that Davis raised the pay of his own dance-master rather than let Caldwell hire him away—about half the Opera Society was at Caldwell’s, running around like the fourth act of a bad opéra bouffe trying to figure out a way to stop the duel over cakes and tea, not that they offered me so much as a bite. Kentucky Williams tells me Kate the Gouger may know something about Belaggio’s friends in the alley, by the way,” he added as they shut the fiacre door and the jarvey whipped up his horse. “Kate runs a bath-house on Tchoupitoulas Street near the cattle-market. Occasionally one can even get a bath there. The lovely Mistress Williams remembers there was a pair of brothers renting a room from her, spending money she’s pretty sure they shouldn’t have had.”

  “Were they indeed?” The thought of dealing with any friend of Kentucky Williams—a cigar-smoking harpy who ran a combination grog-shop and bordello on Perdidio Street in the part of town referred to by one and all as the Swamp—made January wince. The prospect was not sweetened by contemplation of the swinish rabble of filibusters, gun-runners, mercenaries, and river-rats native to Tchoupitoulas Street, which skirted the levee upriver like a dirty rampart of cotton-presses and baracoons. Under ordinary circumstances January would cheerfully have consigned Belaggio to Hell and his stolen opera with him, no matter how beautiful its music, rather than venture into territory so perilous.

  But the circumstances were not ordinary. So after a brief and frustrating visit to Olympe’s house, long enough to ascertain that Marguerite had neither wakened nor stirred in the night, January and Hannibal made their way across Canal Street in the sharp, heatless brightness of noon, and as far as they could along Magazine, which was at least in daylight hours marginally more genteel. Here among the white-painted board houses, the brick shops and liveries of the American section of town, an approximation of Sabbath quiet could be detected: a number of stores were closed and slaves weren’t lined up on the wooden sidewalks outside the salesrooms as they were on other days of the week. But winter was the time when business got done in New Orleans. It was the end of the roulaison—the sugar-grinding season—and the beginning of the cotton harvest. Factors, planters, brokers, steamboat companies, all made their money in the months between November and March; and on their coattails, the owners of refineries and cotton-presses, livery stables, salesrooms, bordellos, saloons. To lose one day in seven was more than ridiculous. It was impossible, irresponsible, absurd.