Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  January shut his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall, and hoped that in the event of mayhem, John Davis would have a good alibi for his own whereabouts. “O Sable-vested Night, eldest of things,” he said. “I can hardly wait.”

  “She’s locked in her dressing-room.” Julie, the dresser’s assistant whose exclusive assignment to La d’Isola had caused such heart-burning among the rest of the female cast, twisted her hands in distress and cast a frantic eye at the box-clock. “The door’s bolted from the inside, but I heard her moan.”

  “Mille diavoli!” Cavallo strode toward the gallery steps, tearing off hat and greatcoat. “Drusilla! Drusilla . . . !”

  “What is it?” January sprang up the last three steps from the prop-vault in time to see the tenor’s hasty ascent. “What’s happened?”

  “Drusilla is ill.” Emerging from his own office, Belaggio looked ill himself, far more shaken than even the sudden indisposition of his beloved might warrant. “She was perfectly well, gay and happy, when we parted this afternoon. . . .”

  “Has she had anything to eat?” In his days as surgeon, half of January’s patients had turned out to be ill from spoiled food. Though not, it was true, at this time of year.

  “We lunched with Signor Trulove, but like a true artista, she ate no more than a light omelette, a little fruit. . . .”

  “I took the Signorina up a bowl of soup just after she came in,” provided Madame Rossi. She looked harried and put out—as well she might, thought January, eyeing the half-dozen milkmaid’s gowns piled in her arms. “She told me earlier to have one ready. . . .”

  “Why did she lock herself in?” From the gallery above, January could hear Cavallo rattling the door of the big corner dressing-room, calling La d’Isola’s name.

  Belaggio shook his head and looked around him helplessly. Everyone was milling about incompletely costumed in the midst of the Contessa’s gilt-trimmed bedroom furniture and segments of Mount Vesuvius. Sable-vested Night was well and truly on its way, and patrons were lined up already outside all three of the theater’s doors. “Perhaps,” offered Hannibal, coming up the steps in January’s wake, “she wished to take a nap and feared some ill-intentioned person might slip into her dressing-room and put a piece of glass in her shoe, or a roach in her wig.”

  “Who would do such a thing?” cried Madame Montero. She was wearing, January noticed, the Countess’s pink-and-gold gown from Act Two, considerably too tight in the bodice, as it was made to fit d’Isola’s slimmer form.

  “Signor.” January pulled his notebook from his jacket pocket and began to scribble on a blank page. “Might one of the stage-hands be sent to this number in the Rue Douane? It’s a gold-colored cottage. My sister Olympe is a midwife; she understands local fevers.” There seemed no point in saying that Olympe was a voodoo who knew all about poisons; Tiberio snatched the note from Belaggio’s hand as he beckoned one of the two stage-hands who had been hired that afternoon.

  “Unless you wish to set the stage yourself you send Julie.”

  “Julie!” Oona Flaherty, who had been following the criss-cross of French and Italian with difficulty, grasped at least the name and yanked the paper from the little man’s fingers. “And the lot of us standin’ about in our corsets with our faces hangin’ out bare as eggs?” It was not specifically her face that was hanging out bare as eggs, mused January, though she was, indeed, in her corset. . . .

  “I’ll go.” Bruno Ponte, still in street trousers and a shirt, took the note, scooped up his rough tweed jacket, and departed.

  “Lorenzo”—January heard Montero’s voice behind him as he climbed the gallery steps—“if, God forbid, Drusilla is unable to sing, I could do the part. You know I am able to do it. . . .”

  And you just happen to have been through it recently. . . .

  Cavallo still stood by the dressing-room door. “Is there another key?” asked January, and the young tenor shook his head.

  The smell of vomit crept nauseatingly from the room. Three smaller dressing-chambers opened straight off the gallery, the rest being cramped cubicles partitioned from the long rooms devoted to the female and male cast members at large. The corner room, January knew, in addition to its palatial appointments, possessed a stout door to ensure quiet, and, it appeared, a lock to safeguard both privacy and security for whatever the most favored cast member might have in the way of necklaces or stick-pins.

  “I looked. It would have been in Caldwell’s office.” His dark curls rumpled, his face drawn with concern, Cavallo had a boyish air, like a worried student. “But the door is bolted from within. Could it be broken?”

  “No!” Caldwell wailed, struggling up a stair jammed with cast, chorus, and curious musicians. “Don’t break it!”

  “She can’t be left there.” January fished in his music-satchel for his stethoscope, which he generally carried, along with a scalpel and narrow-nosed forceps, just in case. He put the end of the boxwood tube to the panels and listened as well as he could—everyone who’d pushed up onto the gallery seemed to have advice to give or anecdotes to relate concerning personal experiences of a similar nature. Above the level of the backstage gasolier, the dim air was suffocating.

  “No, of course not.” Caldwell slithered and wriggled to January’s side. “But breaking the door won’t be necessary. When the theater was built we’d already gotten William Pelby—nobody remembers him now, but ten years ago he was one of the greatest tragedians in America—”

  “I remember Pelby,” declared the bass Cepovan, his face already embellished with old Antonio the gardener’s whiskers and wrinkles. “I never thought him above average.”

  “Heymann was better,” added Chiavari’s husband, Trevi.

  “Not as Rolla in Pizarro!” protested Mademoiselle Rutigliano, the company’s mezzo—whose name was actually Lucy Schlegdt, from Basle. “In Philadelphia two years ago—”

  “Pelby was to perform Macbeth at the theater’s opening,” Caldwell went on, ignoring the argument about the two men’s relative merits, which quickly spread down the stairs. “The dressing-room was built with him in mind. He was—er—something of a ladies’ man. One of his stipulations was a private entrance. A private stairway.”

  “Leading from where?” January mentally tried to orient the rooms of the theater’s rear. “The stable yard of the Promenade Hotel?”

  “Oh, the hotel wasn’t built until ’twenty-nine,” said Caldwell. “There was just a vacant lot on St. Charles Avenue. You could still get in that way if we can find the key. It should be on a nail with the others in my office.”

  Of course it wasn’t.

  “Hannibal . . .”

  In addition to his talents on the violin, Hannibal Sefton was a reasonably gifted forger. He had, January gathered, studied antique orthography at Balliol College, Oxford, and put the knowledge to use producing various unauthorized documents, most frequently freedom papers for the runaway slaves who drifted into New Orleans by the hundreds every year. One of these individuals had repaid the favor by instructing him in the techniques of lock-picking, a skill January gathered he was passing along to the ever-inquiring Rose.

  It was a tight squeeze between the moss-grown, filthy bricks of the stable-yard wall and the grubby and peeling planks of the theater. The stable yard drained into the slit between the two walls, and it was quite clear that whatever garbage and offal the hotel servants didn’t particularly want to haul down the alley to Camp Street found a final resting-place there as well. Cavallo and Caldwell followed January and Hannibal in, oil-lamps upraised to illuminate Hannibal’s assault on the private door’s lock with a bent bullet probe and long-snouted forceps from January’s bag, and a buttonhook borrowed from Madame Montero.

  “The Lord looseth men out of prison,” coaxed Hannibal, angling his head to avoid his own shadow. “Why so recalcitrant, my love? ‘Had we but world enough and time, / This coyness, Lady, were no crime. . . .’ ”

  “If Drusilla comes to harm,” growled C
avallo, “I’ll personally thrash that Mexican bitch. . . .”

  “Now, we don’t know that she had anything to do with this!” pleaded Caldwell, unnerved at the prospect of both Countesses being put out of commission an hour before curtain-time.

  “Got it,” said Hannibal.

  The four men clambered up the narrow steps that wormed between two dressing-rooms and a closet, lamplight splashing around them on a stuffy universe of mouse-droppings and cobweb. The narrow door at the top was painted incongruously bright yellow and green, to match the decor of the room into which it opened.

  The smell of vomit hit January even in the stairway, infinitely stronger as he thrust on the door. The inflowing lamp-gleam showed him the screen that hid the chamberpot knocked down, a chair lying on its side, and a crumpled form curled up on the floor between the chamberpot and the daybed. No candles burned. She’d been lying there since before dusk.

  “Drusilla!” Cavallo fell to his knees at her side, almost dropping his lamp. All we’d need, thought January, catching it up—he had a lifelong performer’s dread of theater fires. At the brassy brightness on her eyelids the soprano moaned, then gagged and reached for the overflowing chamberpot again.

  Cavallo held the young woman steady as she retched, unable to come up with more than a little saliva. “Get water.” January set the lamp on the marble-topped dressing-table. Hannibal shoved back the door-bolt and sprinted straight into the entire cast of Le Nozze di Figaro.

  “Oh, the unfortunate creature!” Consuela Montero clasped her hands before her brutally-corseted bosom. “I am sure she cannot go on! How fortunate that I—”

  “Get that woman out of here!” Cavallo surged to his feet like an indignant Apollo. “Get her out or I shall strip that dress from her worthless back and—”

  Montero backed a step, colliding with Olympe and nearly taking the both of them over the gallery rail.

  “She been poisoned, all right.” Olympia Snakebones sniffed at the remains of the soup. “Indian tobacco, smells like, and not much of it, thank God.” She took the water-pitcher from Hannibal and poured some into the spirit-kettle to heat. While she added herbs to the kettle, January took the rest of the water, added clean charcoal to it, and worked at getting it down d’Isola’s throat.

  “Get out of here now,” Belaggio was saying to the rest of the cast, who showed signs of crowding into the dressing-room to further add to the confusion. “Good God, it’s already past six! Consuela . . .”

  “I can go on,” d’Isola whispered. She raised her head, pushed back the sweat-black strings of hair from around her face. Her rouge stood out against skin gone ashen with shock and she groped for Cavallo’s hand.

  “My dearest . . .” pleaded Belaggio.

  “Don’t be silly,” said January.

  “I can go on,” she insisted. “Signora . . .” She looked up at Olympe, panting with the effort not to be sick again. “There must be something that you can give me, that I can sing.”

  “Cara, you must see it is impossible. . . .”

  “If that Montero whore goes on in place of Drusilla,” said Cavallo quietly, “you’ll have to look for another Basilio as well.”

  “And another leader for the chorus,” added Ponte.

  “Bastardos!” hissed Belaggio. “Froscios!”

  The two men regarded him stonily, and d’Isola struggled to sit up in January’s arms.

  “It’s all right.” Her brown eyes were heavy with exhaustion, but she cleared her throat, forced her voice to calm sweetness. “Thank you, my dear friends. I’ll be able to go on.” She turned to Olympe, asked in her broken French, “Will I not so?”

  The voodooienne’s dark eyes held hers for a long time; then Olympe smiled. “Oh, I think so.” And in the coarse patois of the cane-fields, the mostly-African French of slaves, she added, “You do got the bristles, girl. You keep your belly tied up and you be fine.”

  TEN

  From his place in the orchestra—what seemed like only minutes later—January searched the audience for Incantobelli’s silvery mane. The pit was lively, the rougher spirits of the American sector shoving and jostling goodnaturedly, ready to be pleased by anything. In the boxes— divided only by partitions and not the separate curtained rooms they were in Europe—he picked out the Widow Redfern, resplendent in black velvet and diamonds and as usual in the center of her little court of hopeful bachelors. In the next box Fitzhugh Trulove danced anxious attendance on his wife, dispatching footmen right and left to fetch lemonade, negus, and coffee from the concessionaire for her and for their shy, curly-haired daughter. Dressed en jeune fille, her hair still down and her skirts schoolgirl-short, the girl looked all of fifteen, an age when Creole girls were all out and frequently wed: gossip said she would be sent to a finishing-school in England soon. In the meantime the sons of the great French Creole families hovered around the back of the box, proffering nosegays and sweets under Trulove’s paternal glare. Vincent Marsan, another box over, also had his daughter with him, this girl a few years younger and very much a schoolgirl. She and her mother both wore white, quite clearly to complement Marsan’s nip-waisted black coat, his three waistcoats of black, white, black again, with their diamond buttons. The narrow-skirted, skimpy-sleeved dresses were clearly old and the white suited neither of them; January saw, on the girl’s bare arm, a dark bruise just above the elbow.

  “You don’t think the poor girl took the poison on purpose, do you?” Dominique appeared in the curtained demi-porte behind the orchestra in a whisper of yolk-gold silk and creamy lace. “I met Olympe on the way out—she says the girl will be quite all right. Darling, what happened? You know Liane—Marsan’s plaçée—tried to kill herself last year—not the one he murdered, but the one he has now. She begged us all not to let him know.”

  January saw again the big girl’s gentle face as she fought to turn her lips from the punch Marsan forced on her. The heart is stronger than the head. . . .

  His stubbornness and frowns, these I embrace. . . .

  Golden hair shimmering in the house-lights, Vincent Marsan turned abruptly to speak to his wife, and her unthinking flinch said more than any words January had ever heard.

  “I don’t think so,” he told Dominique. “I don’t think it was even intended to kill her. There was very little poison in that soup, just enough to make her thoroughly sick. Which leads me to think—”

  He broke off, seeing his sister’s eyes flick to another box, then dart away.

  Henri Viellard entered, like a mammoth plum in his damson coat and pale-green waistcoat, with Chloë St. Chinian small and delicate in ivory satin on his arm.

  “Darling, I must be off.” Dominique tapped January on the shoulder with her fan and gave him her most sparkling of smiles. “I have to see to the champagne up in my box—I’m right up there.” She pointed to the third tier of boxes above and behind them. About half of them were latticed discreetly, that the plaçées might receive their protectors between acts while everyone in the theater kept up the pretense of not knowing. Gaslight danced behind those gilded grilles as wall-jets were kindled. Shadows passed back and forth. Soft soprano laughter floated down like a dropped blossom into the noisier roar of the pit.

  “I’ve ordered dragées,” she added conspiratorially. “Henri can’t resist them. If he can wrench himself away from his mother.” She did not speak Mademoiselle St. Chinian’s name. In the Viellard box, Madame Viellard was holding forth on some subject to her four daughters—who looked absurdly like one another and more absurdly like their only brother—the half-dozen ostrich-plumes in her ash-hued hair quivering like lilac-tinted palm-trees in a hurricane. “Shall I send you down some? Play well!”

  And Dominique swirled away to join the ranks of the demimonde in their stuffily hot upper boxes, their world of laughter and bonbons and lamplight and feather fans. A number of the girls would be with their protectors— protectors who would, during the course of the show, circulate between the boxes of their mistresses and
those of their wives in much the same fashion they skulked back and forth along the passageway between the Théâtre and the Salle. A moment later, if he listened hard, January heard his sister’s gay voice calling out greetings, laughing over the quality of the champagne available, and wailing in exaggerated apprehension over an American production of anything. . . .

  I’m with child, Dominique had said. And I don’t know what to do.

  Chloë St. Chinian flipped open her fan—the elaborate mother-of-pearl engagement-fan presented by young Creole gentlemen to the damsels who would be their brides—and spoke to Henri, who moved his chair a little closer to hers and gave an order to the liveried valet who had followed them into the box. The valet departed, probably in quest of the coffee and sweets being sold in the lobby. Mademoiselle St. Chinian put her tiny white-gloved hand on Henri’s wrist and blinked out over the parterre with her huge pale-blue eyes.

  I’m with child. And I don’t know what to do.

  Nor would she, thought January, arranging the candles on the piano’s music-rack, until it was far too late to do anything except birth the child of a man who had put her aside. For a young lady of color in quest of a new protector, a dangerous encumbrance.

  For a young woman of color without a protector, a heartbreaking expense.

  Every box of the three tiers was full. Candles gleamed behind those moving shadows as servants brought up chairs for people to visit during the performance. In Milan and other Italian cities, they played cards and chatted, stopping to listen only to favorite arias. Parisian audiences, January had found, were more attentive, but any performance in Paris was bound to be interrupted by the hissing, or booing, or cheering of a claque, regardless of the quality of the singing. He’d even known fashionable preachers to hire claques to murmur approvingly and nod their heads during their sermons.