Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  That Rose Vitrac existed in Louisiana, scholarly and bespectacled, thumbing through Lyell’s Principles of Geology with her ink-smudged fingers and then looking up with that fugitive sunshaft smile?

  “I know,” answered Dominique in a beaten voice. “Only I’ve just recently discovered I’m with child. And I don’t know what to do.”

  NINE

  Rehearsal Monday was marked by the same eddies of activity that had characterized the Salle d’Orleans the previous night. During the dance rehearsal—long before any of the principals put in an appearance—James Caldwell prowled the backstage, severely discomposing the new ballet master and causing the latter to trip over the silk-leaved rose-bushes of Count Almaviva’s garden. Throughout endless repetitions of the fandango in Act Three and the Act Four ballet, January heard the staccato chatter from behind the flats: had Signor Belaggio been heard from yet? Had Monsieur Marsan sent a note? “What are we going to do?” wailed Mr. Trulove’s voice as Herr Smith attempted for a fifth time to instruct Oona Flaherty in the execution of a simple pirouette that did not hopelessly entangle her in her own supporting wires. “Can we get someone else to manage these performances?”

  Toe-dancing—usually with the assistance of wires— had been the rage at the Odéon and the Paris Opera for years, but it was new here. Only Tiberio—and January, thanks to Marguerite—had the slightest idea how the system of pulleys and counterweights operated, but Trulove was adamant. Oona Flaherty would be the “Queen of the Milkmaids,” and she would dance on her toes.

  “Cafone,” muttered the little prop-master as he and January adjusted the sandbags for La Flaherty’s not-inconsiderable weight, and she bounced delightedly, testingly, up and down on her wool-stuffed toes. “Pezzu di carne cu l’occhi. It isn’t enough to have these candles and trellises and summerhouses to keep track of? Now I have to make this butana fly. And by the beautiful Mother and verily, now must he go sell those who were to help me, ptui!”

  Tiberio spit with Levantine eloquence. On-stage, Herr Smith fluttered his hands and cried, “No, and no, Fräulein—I mean, Mademoiselle—Miss—do not lift the skirts! I don’t care if no one can see your toes, you will not transform the classical beauty of the dance into a peep-show for every lust-ridden savage from the riverbanks!”

  Eyeing the wires, January guessed that even with the borderlights concealed in the proscenium arch burning at full, the light wouldn’t be strong enough to show up the support.

  “Irish, he says, I will hire you Irish. Malòcchio on his Irish! Cornutu e cornutu abbiveratu, with more horns to him than a basket of babaluci. . . .”

  Whatever, reflected January, losing the thread of the little man’s Sicilian, babaluci are—

  “Hideputa!” shrieked Consuela Montero’s rich voice from backstage. “What do you mean, he has sold Nina? Who will dress my wig? What are the rest of us to do for dressers tomorrow night, eh? Are we chambermaids? Peasants?”

  January sighed, gathered his music into his satchel again, and made his way from the stage into the wings. Most of the principals were having their lunch in the green room: Signora Chiavari gravely discussing the length of Susanna’s skirts with Madame Rossi, while Cavallo and Ponte shared the hard Italian sausage and wine in the rose-shadowed lattices of the dissected summerhouse. Caldwell had cornered Belaggio near the steps up to the gallery, gesturing persuasively around him at the growing clusters of singers and ancillaries, to which entreaty the impresario only shook his head. At the same time, Mr. Knight’s clerk was trying to explain something to Mr. Rowe—Caldwell’s manager for the American Theater—and the Austrian bass Cepovan sat at the Contessa’s white-and-gold writing-desk explaining to Cochon Gardinier and the Valada brothers that during his Act Three solo they were to take their cues from him, not from Belaggio on the conductor’s stand.

  January took bread and cheese from his satchel, and the bottle of lemonade he’d left stashed in the prop-room, and settled himself on the lower slopes of Vesuvius to eat. Cochon joined him, and Jacques, and Ramesses Ramilles. “M’am Scie all right?” asked Bichet in an undervoice, and January shook his head.

  “Still unconscious,” he replied. “I was there this morning, before the dance rehearsal. She hasn’t stirred. Mr. Caldwell gave me a bank-draft to pay Olympe for her care.” It grieved him that Marguerite would be stricken like this in a foreign country, where she knew no one and was without family or friends. According to Olympe, none of the company had come to the cottage on Rue Douane to ask after her. He supposed this was as well. When he had examined her again early this morning, he had seen how livid the marks of huge fingers stood out against the waxy skin of her throat.

  Whatever else Incantobelli might have done, the hands that went with those neat, narrow boot-prints in Trulove’s garden-maze, with that trim figure in Puss in Boots garb, would not have made those.

  “You were in the kitchen when the lights went out, weren’t you, Jacques?” he asked. “Was there anybody at your place that evening who could have been mistaken for me in the dark?”

  “Ben, the side of the house could have been mistaken for you in the dark,” retorted the flautist. “But I don’t know who else. There’s damn few niggers your size in this town, and that’s a fact.”

  “And who says it was a nigger?” argued Cochon reasonably. He settled his three hundred-plus pounds on the rim of the volcano’s lowest caldera, a deep bowl in which wet clay would be packed to avoid, if possible, setting the entire theater alight. A few feet away, Caldwell and Knight intercepted Mademoiselle d’Isola: Knight gripped the young girl’s hand desperately. “You cannot allow our season to end before it begins, Signorina! Not after all the work we have done to bring proper opera to this city!” He sounded on the verge of tears. January couldn’t imagine that the girl’s intercession between the two men would do anything but fan the flames.

  “Once people started blowin’ out those candles,” Cochon went on, “the King of England could have walked into that kitchen and grabbed Madame’s hand. Didn’t Hannibal say one of the men you pulled off Michie Belaggio in the alley was darn near your size?”

  “Maybe,” January agreed doubtfully. But a little later he sought out old Tiberio again, where the Sicilian sat glumly, connecting what appeared to be miles of hosepipe with young Ponte’s good-natured aid, and asked him, “Did you know Incantobelli? Was he mad enough to—to attack, or have attacked, the other members of the company as well as Belaggio? To destroy the opera season as well as the man who wronged him?”

  Tiberio cocked his head a little sideways. Something about the way he stood reminded January of the buzzards near the stock-pens, angry black eyes glinting among the heavy folds of skin. “You don’t know Sicilians, do you, Signor?” he said. “Sicilians and Neapolitans. Even the Milanese, and the stuck-up Florentines, even the block-headed Romans, they don’t know us. We’re a poor people, Signor. We scratch in the dirt to raise a little food for ourselves and our children, and we see the nobles, i padroni, who sell us the very water we need to survive, take it away from us. We pray and do penance and we see the parrinu— priests, you understand—get fat on the tithe we pay.”

  Ponte set down a coil of thick leather tubing and said, “This is true, Signor.”

  “So the thing that is truly important,” the prop-master went on in dialect so thick that January had to bend all his attention to understanding, “the thing that makes a man a man and not a beast—this thing men call Honor—that we hold to, for it is all we have. And the man who takes that away, or tries to take it away—that man will suffer. And he must be made to suffer so that all that see, understand.”

  January was quiet for a time, thinking about that. Behind him he heard Belaggio say, “What is between Signor Marsan and myself is a thing of honor, but for the other, I could not agree with you more, Signor Caldwell. . . .” And a little farther off, Cepovan shouted at someone, “Young Italy! Don’t talk to me of Young Italy! Traitors, and cut-throats, Carbonari! Looking only to stir up dis
content and bring back the horror and bloodshed of Napoleon’s time!” And Hannibal’s light, hoarse voice added, “Video meliora, proboque, as the poet says—not that there’s a superabundance of meliora about Perdidio Street. . . .”

  “So you think Incantobelli would value his honor above an innocent woman’s life?”

  “What woman is truly innocent, Signor?” asked Tiberio. “Or what man? Sometimes honor demands more.”

  Cavallo appeared in the door of the little hallway that led back to the prop-room, looking around the backstage as usual for his friend. Ponte set aside his hoses and rose to go. “Myself,” he said, “I would not have thought it in Incantobelli to do such. But neither would I have thought it in Signor Davis, who has as much reason as any to wish that Milanese cornutu ill.”

  “Incantobelli was castrated as a young boy so that his voice would remain beautiful forever,” said Tiberio as the chorus-boy walked away. “There are men who accept the knife as a gift, and men in whom the theft of their manhood burns like a secret canker throughout their lives, so that they think of nothing but evil and revenge. And it is not always possible to know which man is which.”

  Dress rehearsal proceeded uneventfully enough. The only interruption came from James Caldwell’s suggestion that since the American audience was unfamiliar with both Mozart and the Italian language, the talents of the lovely Miss d’Isola and the equally lovely Mrs. Chiavari might be better showcased were certain more popular— and more familiar—American songs inserted at key points into Le Nozze di Figaro.

  “What?” said Cavallo, shocked.

  “You’re joking,” said Hannibal.

  January knew better than to state any opinion of his own to a white man in the State of Louisiana, but he did ask himself whether he’d assisted the wrong parties in the alley last Thursday night.

  And the lovely Mademoiselle d’Isola turned wide eyes to Cavallo and whispered, “Qual’? Di cos’ sta parlan’?”

  “I’ve marked in the libretto where these should go,” Caldwell continued. “Here—you see?—in Act Two, we have the Countess singing ‘Soft as the Falling Dews of Night’ when we first see her, and then ‘Blest Were the Hours.’ Both very pretty songs, I’m sure you’ll agree.”

  “Are you crazy?” demanded Hannibal, lowering his music to stare at the theater owner. “You want to put ‘Soft as the Falling Dews of Night’ into Mozart?”

  “Well, that’s precisely our point,” explained Trulove, his pink oval face beaming with satisfaction at his own cleverness. “It’s a little too much Mozart, if you take my meaning. . . .”

  “I agree,” chimed in Belaggio, “I agree completely.”

  January found himself wondering what Anne Trulove would have to say on the subject, if anything. Or did she content herself with operating the plantation, the sawmills, the brick-yard, and the cotton-press, and leave her husband to pursue his hobbies as he pleased?

  “Now, we have the dance number in Act Three, which I think would go just as well with the John Quincy Adams Grand March and Quick-Step—”

  Herr Smith opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

  “—and then Susanna in Act Four can sing ‘Look Out Upon the Stars, My Love,’ when she’s in the garden at the beginning, and follow it up with ‘Cherry-Cheeked Patty.’ ”

  Hannibal repeated soundlessly, Cherry-Cheeked Patty? while Belaggio nodded and approved, “Yes, of course— just the songs for my beautiful d’Isola, are they not?”

  “I will have to learn them in English?” Drusilla looked as discomposed as if the lyrics had been in Mandarin.

  “A few run-throughs merely,” declared the impresario. “I’m sure the musicians won’t mind staying a bit later after rehearsal.”

  “You’ll see,” said the theater owner encouragingly. “It’ll bring the American audiences back shouting for more.”

  “And add immeasurably to our reputation as musicians,” muttered Hannibal under his breath as Caldwell, Trulove, and Belaggio—hugely pleased with themselves— turned away. He reached beneath his chair and brought out his hat, a shaggy, flat-brimmed chimneypot that hadn’t been fashionable since Napoleon’s day, and turned it over like a beggar’s bowl. “Anyone want to start a fund,” he inquired, “to purchase bullets for M’sieu Marsan?”

  January sighed, and dropped a couple of silver half-reales into the hat. Cavallo threw in a franc; stout Herr Pleck left his double-bass and made a contribution, remarking in German to the ballet master, “I cannot approve of violence, you understand, Herr Faber, but under the circumstances . . .”

  “It is Smith,” corrected the ballet master stiffly, “in this country—and has been since Messires Talleyrand and Metternich between them chose to give most of my country to the Prussians to thank them very much for Waterloo.”

  “Naturally this facetiousness must be displeasing to any man of pretension to taste,” remarked Mr. Knight. Disapproval radiated visibly from his prim, pale face. A silver English shilling clinked into the hat. “And yet . . . ‘Cherry-Cheeked Patty.’ ” He shuddered, and went to follow Belaggio and the others to the stage.

  Whether through the tearful pleadings of La d’Isola, or the more monetary objurgations of Mr. Knight, the following morning’s Louisiana Gazette carried the following letter from Vincent Marsan:

  In the words of the great gentleman Lord Chesterfield, Si fueris Romae, Romano vivito more—When in Rome, live in the Roman way— January winced at the misquote—the true gentleman does not place the same expectations upon men of foreign extraction as upon those with whose ways he is familiar. In view of the representations made to me by those more familiar with the Italian customs and sensibilities, I have come to accept as bona fide the assurances that no insult was intended in the words spoken by Signor Lorenzo Belaggio to me at an entertainment given by Monsieur Fitzhugh Trulove on the 24th inst.—fortunately, before fatal shots could be fired in anger. May this incident be an example and a warning. . . .

  January glanced up from the smudged pages and blinked in the pale morning sunlight that fell through the French windows and into the rear bedroom of Olympe’s cottage on Rue Douane. “I’m at a loss to decide how one man may call another a stronzolo without intending insult.”

  “Possibly he meant an aromatic and socially useful stronzolo.” Hannibal, who had brought him the paper at Olympe’s after not finding him chez Bontemps, sat on the smaller of the little room’s two beds, which in ordinary circumstances was shared by Olympe’s daughter, Chouchou—aged five—and her two-year-old brother, Ti-Paul. A low fire burned in the room’s small hearth, welcome after the morning’s chill, and he held out his hands to it like one who never expected to be warm again. “Care to hear Belaggio’s apology?”

  “What does it amount to?”

  “That everyone in the ballroom mis-heard him, presumably including his second. At no time did he ever intend etc. etc.” Hannibal stood and took the paper from January’s hand. In the yard beyond the French doors, fourteen-year-old Zizi-Marie helped her father stretch and fit stiff black horsehair over the framework of a curve-legged chair, amid neat piles of the dark, wiry moss that made such excellent upholstery. Taller already than most boys of twelve, young Gabriel emerged from the kitchen, the ladle in his hand giving off steam like a banner in the cold, and asked something of Chouchou, who was stirring alum into a big clay jar of rainwater to purify it for drinking; little Ti-Paul gravely lined up fragments of kindling in order of size on the bricks by the kitchen door. Looking worriedly down at the chalk-white face of the woman on the bed, Hannibal said, “She hasn’t wakened, has she?”

  “Olympe tells me she came around enough last night to be taken to the privy.” January sighed, and gently touched Marguerite Scie’s hand. “She tried to get her to drink a little water, but she doesn’t think she actually swallowed any. She hasn’t stirred since.” The ballet mistress’s hands were cold. Her breath was barely sufficient to lift the clean starched linen that covered her breast. The eyelids, beginning to
wrinkle like an old woman’s, did not move.

  January wondered if she dreamed, and of what. “No word from the Gouger about the Gower boys?”

  “Not yet.” Hannibal sounded worn to thread-paper, but January knew he was playing at one of the taverns that afternoon, for reales and dimes—the girls at Kentucky Williams’s as often as not would get him drunk and go through his pockets for whatever he’d earned the night before. “Can I get you anything?”

  Out in the Rue Douane a woman’s voice sang, “Berry pies, cherry pies, mince and quince and peary pies!” and farther off was answered by the wailing, dreary singsong of the charcoal man. On the house opposite, posters had gone up, enormous letters proclaiming THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO above stylized figures in powdered wigs and skirted coats, gesturing alarm, adoration, delight. AN OPERA BY MR. W. A. MOZART. There were at least six posters in a line, covering over the earlier poster, which had advertised:

  LA MUETTE DE PORTICI

  Musical Spectacle and Excitement

  PRODUCTION BY JOHN DAVIS, FRENCH OPERA HOUSE

  “Nothing,” said January. He looked down again at Marguerite’s sunken face, wondering what the police would say about the marks on her throat, were she to die.

  “I’ll be here all day, if you hear. If you’d care to return for supper, I’m sure Olympe would put another plate on the table before the performance.”

  “Thank you.” Hannibal shrugged a worn plaid shawl around his shoulders and put on his hat. The bullet-fund for Marsan had actually been spent on beer for the musicians after the rehearsal; Trulove assured everyone that following the performance, a collation would await the cast backstage, courtesy of the St. Mary Opera Society. “I must say I’m astonished that we’ve made it as far as the premiere performance of the season, and confess to a certain degree of curiosity about what will happen tonight.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Of course.” Hannibal paused in the doorway to the front bedroom—no good Creole entered or left a house through the parlor—and regarded January with raised brows. “You don’t think Incantobelli’s going to let his enemy get away with an uneventful show, do you? I’m only hoping that the assault takes the form of a direct attack on Belaggio—say, a garrote in one of the corridors outside the boxes—instead of a bullet fired from the gallery, which could hit anyone in the orchestra. Or maybe something simpler, like burning down the theater.”