Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  He froze, eyes bulging. January, floating effortlessly on the opening bars of the Sylph Cotillion, followed his gaze to the vestibule doors. The man who stood framed in the triple archway was costumed in close-fitting black trousers and jacket accentuated by crimson bucket-topped boots, a crimson hat with a white plume, a crimson baldric on which hung a very businesslike sword. A long velvet rope attached to the back of the trousers did duty as a tail; the black velvet mask that covered the beardless face bore whiskers of silver wire; and around it, long silver hair swept in a gleaming mane. Without another word, Belaggio yanked his mask back into place and bolted for the passageway, the renowned feline trickster striding in his wake.

  “Did he catch him?” asked January nearly two hours later when next Hannibal made his appearance. It was now past two. The St. Margaret’s Ball had broken up, and several of the musicians drifted across to play a few more songs and chat with friends as the tail-end of the Blue Ribbon proceedings grew more relaxed.

  In the street the rattle of carriages could still be heard, women’s voices calling farewells and invitations to future dinners and danceables. The male population of the room, thinned by the necessity of last dances with wives and fiancées, burgeoned again: Just going to have a drink with old Granville before coming on home, my dear. Won’t be a half-hour, I assure you.

  All around the Salle d’Orleans couples stood quietly talking in the shadows of curtains and pillars. Masks were lifted, kisses stolen.

  “Puss in Boots?” Hannibal grinned. “I take it that was the famous Incantobelli?” He made his violin embroider a little ornament on the dreamy waltz January and the others were playing, a counterpoint comment plucked from Don Giovanni—he could quote phrases of music the way he quoted fragments from his omnivorous reading. “I’ve never seen a statue move that fast. He nearly ran down Marsan in the doorway.”

  Marsan had returned to the Salle d’Orleans an hour previously, much the worse for drink. He stood now in the corner with his mistress, a ripe-figured woman with the almost-straight bronze-dark hair so prized by whites. His head was bent down over hers, forcing her to drink a cup of punch. She kept shaking her head, trying to push him away, and January saw possessiveness transform that Adonis face as rage had transformed it last night. Saw the blue eyes grow paler with malice, the carven lips wrinkle like a beast’s. Marsan seized her roughly by the back of the neck and pushed the cut-glass rim to her lips. The liquid spilled down her chin, splashed the soft, heavy breasts, and wet the gold-stitched ruby velvet of her gown.

  “There’s another one.” Dominique strolled back to them as January surrendered his piano to Ramesses Ramilles, who broke into a far livelier jig than had been permissible at the St. Margaret’s Ball. Minou had lost a few more roses from her coiffure, and under the edge of her mask her mouth had an ashy paleness. She’d flirted most of the evening, with no man more than another, but, January had observed, she’d spent the bulk of her time between dances talking with her female friends.

  The woman she nodded toward now moved lightly from group to group but never spoke to anyone. She kept to the rear of the room, and always managed to be just turning away when any man approached.

  “They sneak dominoes in with them because they’re easier to bundle up in a dress-box than a completely different costume,” Dominique went on, sketching with her gesture the billowing cloak of black velvet that hid the slender figure, the ruffled hood that covered the hair. “Not that a man would ever recognize what a woman had on, of course. And even if two of them happened to have the same idea and ran into one another here, they’d cut their own throats before they’d admit it.”

  “They might sneak dominoes into the cloak-room,” remarked Hannibal. “But they’d be smarter to smuggle in a change of shoes as well. Because those particular pink-and-yellow slippers belong to the American Theater’s costume for Roxalana, the Sultan’s Bride, and I last saw them earlier this evening, at the St. Margaret’s Ball, being worn by Drusilla d’Isola.”

  “But I love him.” La d’Isola pressed her lips with one pink-gloved hand, and tears filled her eyes. “God help me.”

  January thought of Belaggio in his bronze armor, coming and going between the two balls. Of the woman in crimson shaking her head at the champagne punch, and how the spilled liquid splattered on her heavy breasts as Marsan forced her to drink. Of the ugly glitter in those cerulean eyes. “God help you indeed,” he murmured.

  Every table around the coffee-stands in the market was crowded with imitation Ivanhoes and masked counterfeits of Raleigh and Essex. Turkish beauties, classical goddesses, hennaed princesses laughed too loudly at their jests and leaned too close to their shoulders. Respectable women had taken to their beds long ago. Cressets stitched the bare branches of the sycamores around the Place d’Armes with gold and made every word a puff of luminous fire. From the steamboats on the levee—and the levee was a rampart of them, like floating barns—rolled the tinny jangle of a dozen conflicting tunes. A man with a bottle in either hand and a ragged Boston accent staggered along trying to sing to all of them.

  “Do you hope he’ll make you his mistress?” asked January. Drusilla’s dress was pink and yellow—he found himself reflecting irrelevantly that in such colors Marsan would never let her near his somber crimson splendor. “You saw him with his plaçée tonight. Do you think he’ll put her aside?”

  “Vincent’s said he loves me.” She looked pleadingly from January’s face to Hannibal’s, begging them to make all things well.

  “Darling,” said Dominique, “I understand how it is to love. But he’s not going to abandon Liane for you.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Dominique’s mouth tightened. A breeze from the river caught the sails of the tiny windmill that crowned her wig, making them turn; rustled in the miniature grove of Lilliputian trees. “Believe me, chère, I know that. M’sieu Marsan isn’t a man to let anything—certainly not a woman—go, once it has been his. He’s not a good man, Mademoiselle. Not good for you, or for anyone.”

  The dark eyes lifted to hers, sulky and frightened with a fear unacknowledged—furious, too. “You’re only jealous,” Drusilla said in her stumbling French. “Jealous because Vincent’s so handsome, so wealthy—jealous that he loves me. You want him for yourself, don’t you?”

  Dominique slapped her fan down onto the table. “Marsan? I’d sooner bed the crazy old man who sells gumbo on the corner! Darling, Vincent Marsan—”

  “I will not hear this!” The girl turned her face away. Dominique reached out as if to grasp her wrist, to shake her, pulling her hand back only at the last moment, remembering that this dusky girl, in her fancy-dress and her gaily-striped mask pushed up to her tumbled dark hair, was white, and not to be casually touched. “I do not have to listen! Yes, it was wrong of me to seek Vincent in that place! But the heart is stronger than the head! From the moment I saw him, I knew we were one heart, one soul! You do not understand, you who sell your love!”

  Flouncing to her feet, d’Isola plunged away between the brick pillars, and a moment later her bright dress flashed in the jumble of torchlight and darkness in the square. January started to rise but then sank down again in his chair, and glanced sidelong at Dominique: his sister’s mouth was open in shocked indignation, but if there was anger in her great brown eyes at d’Isola’s remark about you who sell your love, at least there were not tears.

  “Well,” remarked Hannibal, edging his way back to the table with four cups of coffee in his hands and a plate of beignets balanced on one forearm like a waiter, “I can see it wouldn’t take more than a few pennyweights of heart to be stronger than whatever she’s got in her head. God is thy law, thou mine: to know no more / Is woman’s happiest knowledge and her praise. More beignets for us.”

  “I’d better go after her,” sighed January. He picked up the satchel she’d left behind her, in which she’d stowed her cloak at the Théâtre—nearly new, lined with green silk and expensive. Belaggio’s gift, be
yond a doubt. “She doesn’t know much French and no English at all, and this isn’t the time of night for a young woman to be roving about the streets alone. I’m not sure she even knows the way back to her hotel.”

  “If she’s so purblind foolish as to fall in love with Vincent Marsan,” retorted Dominique acidly, “it’s quite obvious she shouldn’t be abroad without a keeper in the first place. Not that it wouldn’t serve her right . . .”

  But by the time January had crossed the jostling darkness of the Place d’Armes, he glimpsed that daffodil headdress again in the light of the torches on the Cabildo arcade, bobbing as d’Isola negotiated in her laborious French with a cab-driver. January watched from the shadows until she got into the fiacre, then made his way back across to the market, satchel still in hand, with little detours to avoid a shouting-and-shoving match of drunk keelboatmen and what sounded like a furious argument among seven or eight equally inebriated French Creoles over the putative parentage of France’s Citizen King.

  When he reached the torchlit market arcade again, Hannibal was kissing Dominique’s wrist and quoting Petrarch to her—a marvelous antidote, thought January, to whatever reflections she might have entertained about Henri Viellard’s absence from the ballroom. “No wonder you were obliged to leave Ireland, if you carry on with ladies like this.” She tapped the fiddler’s cheek with her folded fan. “The cloud you left under must have covered the earth and the sky.”

  “No greater than the darkness that will devour me should you turn your eyes away. Oιoν τo γλυϰύμαγoν εγεύϱεται αϰϱὀ επ υσδὀ. . . . Find her?”

  “She got a cab.” January removed the saucer Hannibal had set over his coffee-cup, to keep it warm. River mist blurred the torches—the sounds of festival seemed to grow distant as well, retreating like voices in a dream. “Minou, you say Marsan never lets go of anything, particularly women. Might he have been the one who hired those bullies to beat up Belaggio? Is Marsan the jealous type?”

  “Jealous?” Dominique stared at him as if he’d idly put himself forward as a prospective husband for Andrew Jackson’s sister. “P’tit, don’t you know? Vincent Marsan killed a plaçée of his just for speaking with another man.”

  “Killed her?”

  “Slashed her to death with his sword-cane.”

  “A free woman?” January stared at her, stunned. He had, in two years, reaccustomed himself to the yawning chasm between the rights of the whites and the ever-diminishing legal position of the free colored; still, this was more than he’d expected or feared. “Do they know this?” He remembered the hardness of those blue eyes, the way Marsan had lunged for Belaggio at Trulove’s; saw that powerful pale-blue figure retreating down Rue St. Louis in casual chat with Trulove. Saw him dancing with Anne Trulove, with Henrietta Granville, while their husbands looked on.

  When Knight had said, You faced ruin, January thought the man spoke of money.

  “Was it proven?”

  “Yes! There was a terrific scandal over it. They found his gloves on the scene, and his cane, or anyway rose-colored gloves that were like the pair he’d bought the week before and a cane with a big rose-colored stone in its head, though of course Marsan said they weren’t his. Even ten years ago, near-bankrupt as he was then with only that wretched little plantation, he always had things that matched. He has them made specially, to his orders, by Dumetz in the Rue Chartres—who charged Iphigénie’s friend Yves Valcour five dollars to make a coat, out of ivy-green superfine, but it was so beautiful, I went to him to have a jacket made—out of that clay-colored silk-satin, you remember? He made a big show in court of trying to get the gloves on his hands—M’sieu Marsan, I mean— and swearing they were too small. . . .”

  “If I were on trial for murder, I’d make sure I couldn’t get the gloves on, either.” Hannibal bit into a beignet in a snowfall of powdered sugar.

  “It came to trial?”

  “Of course, p’tit,” said Dominique patiently. She leaned forward, the diamond clusters at her ears swinging like chandeliers. “Her family made sure of that. But of course the jury were all white men. Even the ones who weren’t related to Marsan or his wife—and just about half the Creoles in town are—do business with him, or his family, or his wife’s family. Hiring men to kill Signor Belaggio because he was jealous over Mademoiselle d’Isola would be nothing to him.”

  “And he could get away with it,” said January slowly, “because Belaggio is a foreigner.” There was a sour taste in his mouth. “The Austrians don’t even have a consul in town to look after the affairs of their subjects here. No one would inquire.”

  He thought again about Marsan’s striking beauty that so dazzled La d’Isola; of how cold that marble-fine countenance was, until rage or jealousy transformed it. D’Isola’s sweet, desperate voice came back to his mind, and the doomed Desdemona’s words, Sing willow, willow, sing willow. . . . His stubbornness and frowns, these I embrace. . . .

  But I love him. As if that would somehow change what Marsan was.

  Rising, he picked up his music-satchel, and that which Belaggio had given La d’Isola. “I’ll walk you home,” he told Dominique.

  “Will you be all right?” he asked as the three of them made their way up Rue Du Maine away from the torchlight and music of the square. The fog was thinner away from the river, but the light that suffused the mist failed quickly. The clouded glare of the iron lanterns on their chains above the intersections failed to do more than guide pedestrians from one street to the next. January kept glancing at the dark mouths of the passways between the houses, listening behind him for the wet step of other boots on the banquette.

  He had a knife, Madame Bontemps had said.

  And he knew where January lived.

  If he existed at all.

  The dark air breathed of dampness, of chimney-smoke and sewage. Dominique’s pattens scraped metallically on the brick underfoot, and her enormous white wig made a bobbing splotch, like an overfed ghost in the dark.

  “I think so.” She drew a deep breath and pulled her bronze silk cloak closer about her shoulders. “Yes, of course I’ll be all right, p’tit. Even if the worst happens and Henri—decides to sever our friendship, I know he’ll be generous.” The brittle note was back in her voice. The artificial airiness of a woman pretending not to care. Pretending not to hurt.

  “The question is,” put in Hannibal, his breath laboring as he walked, “how generous will Mama Viellard and Mademoiselle Chloë allow him to be? This is a girl who had her own nurse and half-sister sold at auction when her father died.”

  “I think we can trust Mama,” said January grimly, “to make sure your rights, at least, are protected.”

  “Oh, yes,” replied Minou in a tiny voice. “Yes.”

  “She may have her faults,” mused Hannibal, “but give your mother a dollar to fight for and there will be blood in the gutters.” He stopped, leaning against the wall, and tucked his violin case beneath his arm to press one hand to his side. “Shall I continue on with you to your doorstep, amicus meus? Not that I’ll be a great deal of help to you against such hearties as La Gougière described to us this afternoon, but if one of them’s asking for water transport out of town next week, it’s a sporting bet the other one’s wounded. Since Davis paid us, I can get a cab home.”

  “Thank you,” January said. “I’d appreciate that.” If the presence of Madame Bontemps—unnerving but certainly not threatening—had been enough to put last night’s “devil” to flight, it was a good chance the attacker was more worried about an alarm being spread than about the physical might of a second opponent. “Hannibal’s right,” he added in a low voice as he climbed the two brick steps that led up to Dominique’s bedroom door. A lamp burned within. Through the gauze curtains January could see his sister’s maid, Thérèse, dozing in a chair beside the tall half-tester bed, waiting up to unlace her, make her some cocoa, brush out her hair. “I certainly wouldn’t want to try to get around Mother on a contract. Whatever ha
ppens with Viellard, I don’t think you need be afraid of poverty—or of having to return to living under Mother’s roof.”

  Dominique mimed a great, exaggerated shudder. “P’tit, you know I love our maman very much, but when you were living there, my heart absolutely bled for you. I’ll be all right. It’s just that . . .”

  She hesitated, twisting a curl of her wig, and glanced past January to where Hannibal waited out of earshot.

  “For what it’s worth,” January told her, “I’m pretty sure Henri loves you.”

  “I know he does, poor lamb,” whispered Minou. “But you know, Madame Viellard controls all the family money. It’s how she forced him to offer for that dreadful girl in the first place. And poor Henri has never done anything in his life except read Rousseau and press flowers and do the accounts when they grind the sugar. He can’t go against them. Not his mother and a wife both. And I’m afraid.” A tear crept down her lashes, and she touched it away, mindful of her rouge even on the threshold of her own bedroom.

  January thought again of his landlady, eking out a living by taking in boarders, spending hours a day on her hands and knees scrubbing floors, scrubbing steps. Keeping up the only thing that remained to her from her days of plaçage. True, she hadn’t had Minou’s quick wit or Minou’s ferocious mother. Still . . .

  He put his big hands gently on his sister’s arms, the silk crinkling with a sigh like dry leaves. “I know you don’t think this now,” he told her, “but there are other men.” As the words came out of his mouth, he remembered his wife sitting in the window of their little room in Paris, combing out the black bewitching midnight of her hair. Smiling at him under her long, straight lashes, like a desert sprite masquerading in her proper Parisian dress.

  Would he have understood, in the horrible days following her death, that there were other women in the world?