Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  “Your friends really Eye-talians?” He regarded them curiously. Covered with filth and soot, they could have been anything from bedouins to Chickasaws.

  “That they are,” said January. “As is the young lady I spoke of to Mr. Pickney—”

  “Cacchio!” Cavallo, who had drawn the basket to him, sat back with a pone of ash-bread in one hand, a handful of ground-nuts in the other, and a look of disgust on his handsome face. “This is what they give their slaves to live on in this country? Unrisen bread and—what? Pig-food?”

  “Ground-nuts.” January hunkered beside him, showed him how to break the thin husk and shake out the kernels of meat. “Pea-nuts —Arachis hypogaea, and yes, they are used as fodder for pigs, which means they’re perfectly edible for human beings. They don’t take much looking after, and you can live on them for weeks if you have to—one bush will yield pounds of the things.” He popped two into his mouth and Cavallo bit cautiously on one. Rufe laughed at his expression.

  “All right,” he said, throwing up his hands. “You got me convinced. I never met a nigger yet, no matter how bright, that didn’t know what a goober was. They’s Italians all right.

  “Which is a good thing,” he added, “considerin’ some of the folk that come to see Mr. Marsan when the moon’s dark like tonight, an’ the tide’s in.”

  January’s glance cut sharply to him, hearing in his voice the stealthy echo of rowlocks in the bayou that led back to the heart of the Barataria country, and the mutter of bargains struck in darkness for human cargo run in from Africa or Cuba in defiance of the law. Shaw had spoken truly when he’d said that as long as the sale of slaves was legal, and the ownership of one man by another was countenanced in any form in the United States, there would be men who’d buy human cattle cheap and bring them in, to charge what the hungry market would bear.

  Belaggio had made this delightful discovery: the men, and woman, he’d purchased for three hundred dollars apiece in Havana were salable in New Orleans for four or five times that much. How great a percentage of Belaggio’s profit had Marsan charged, January wondered, to act as go-between?

  “You mean Captain Chamoflet?” he asked, and Rufe shook his head.

  “Ask me no questions an’ I tells you no lies. An’ believe me, friend, in this part of the country, that’s the best advice you’ll ever hear.”

  “You might tell Mr. Pickney,” said January carefully, “and anyone else who might need to know it, that in case Madame Marsan isn’t at Roseaux, my family in town— and Mr. Belaggio that’s the head of the opera company these two gentlemen are in—know we were in this part of the country today and will be looking for us. Or in case Madame Marsan turns out not to speak Italian after all.” He stood up as he spoke, his gaze meeting that of the slave, and he saw in those bright, intelligent eyes the understanding of what wasn’t asked:

  Am I safe?

  Is your master to be trusted, with every man in the parish in on smuggling slaves or blood-related to folks who kidnap those they find roving free?

  Are YOU to be trusted? Or do you get a percentage for easing captives’ fears with promises that everything will be all right?

  Ask me no questions. . . .

  Rufe’s smile broadened a little, rueful and bemused. “Well, I don’t know about M’am Marsan herself,” he said, ducking his head. “But Dinah that’s housemaid over to Roseaux is the daughter of the cook at Mr. Clopard’s place down the bayou, an’ she says they got a white governess to teach Miss Jocelyn Italian, a little bit anyway, like ladies are supposed to know. So you should be all right.”

  January spent the remainder of the night trying to plot an escape without knowing how many smugglers he’d have to fight in total blackness, how well they’d be armed, and where exactly Pickney’s shabby farm lay in relation to Bayou des Familles. It was a futile exercise and he knew it, but it kept his mind off the lice in the blankets and Cavallo’s indignant harangue about leaving La d’Isola to her own devices—Does he think we’d have stumbled across her by plunging into the woods at random instead of following the bayou back to the river?—and about what they would or could do to return to New Orleans in time for La Muette de Portici the following night.

  “This whole affair might well be that whore Montero’s doing!” stormed the tenor at one point, yanking on the chain that snaked up over the rafter so that it jerked on January’s ankles. “I would not put it past her! It makes more sense than the Austrians locking us up and then doing nothing to us. It is no difficult thing for her to hire men to wait here for us, to slip a paper under Belaggio’s door for poor Drusilla to find. Montero would do anything to return to center stage—and to that Austrian lickspittle’s bed!”

  Except, thought January, for the fact that Montero wouldn’t have put the blood in the desk-drawer if she was making arrangements with old Queen Régine to have La d’Isola puking her guts out two hours before the performance.

  In his mind he saw again Olympe’s strong black hands sorting through the withered little bunches of pennyroyal and St. John’s wort, tobacco and mouse-bones, and heard her voice, deep and smoky like their mother’s: Had she enemies of her own? Just ’cause you keep soap in the kitchen doesn’t make it food.

  And there was something, he thought suddenly, that didn’t fit. That wasn’t right. His mind grasped at the mists of half-perceived connections. . . . Something about the poisoning . . .

  Something Cavallo had said? Pickney? Someone . . .

  “But what of Signora Scie, and Belaggio?” Bruno asked in his quiet voice. “And they waited for you, too, you say, Signor Janvier, in the dark.”

  He propped himself up on one elbow in the blanket he had spread for himself and his friend: a difference from Americans, January reflected, who would each have appropriated one of the ragged coverings and left the black member of the party to make do with shivering in the hay. “It was to be expected that Drusilla would call on you for help, for you know the countryside. It was only chance that she encountered us on her way out of town. They might have seen us and thought, Che culo! Now we must kill three men rather than one, and thought better of it.”

  “Why would they think that?” demanded Cavallo. “We are alone. They are Austrians. Dead men tell no tales.”

  The chorus-boy shrugged, and with a peasant’s matter-of-fact practicality scooped hay over to cover the two of them like an extra blanket, something January had already done for himself. “If Belaggio is one of them, perhaps he didn’t want to have to find someone to sing Masaniello at the last minute.”

  “Well, if Madame Marsan has gone into town already for the opera,” said January in a dry voice, “that’s what he’s going to have to do.”

  This led to heated speculation about how well Orlando Partinico—Cavallo’s cover for the role—would sing, and just where and how Madame Montero would have found bravos willing to lie in wait for her rival. Just as if, thought January wearily, they did not all stand in danger of losing their liberty and perhaps their lives the following morning. But oddly enough the argument— and its subsequent tangent about the necessity for Italian unification and the formation and composition of a legislature along American lines—proved a distraction from his own fears. On those few occasions on which he did fall asleep, January dreamed he was a supernumerary on-stage in an interminable opera consisting entirely of récitatif.

  It was nearly noon before the creak of carriage-springs and the slurp of hooves in the muddy yard announced the arrival of Madame Marsan. January and, perforce, Cavallo—the chain over the rafter was barely long enough for both men to stand side by side—went to the outer wall of their stall and peered through the gaping cracks to the misty sunlight of the yard, where a coachman was just climbing down from the box of a plain, scratched, and much-mended green landaulet.

  Having seen the smart black phaeton Marsan drove in town, with its matched white team and sparkling brass, January felt a sort of shock of distaste. Not only the carriage was old. The horses, a black and
a roan, were both decrepit and thin, and the roan’s knees were scarred. Not an animal a dandified seeker after perfection like Marsan would have tolerated in his stables. Certainly the dress worn by the woman Pickney helped down was as unfashionable as the carriage, and as frequently repaired, reminding January of the slightly outdated frocks she and her daughter had worn to the opera. As he watched her with the cracker, he could see fear of men in her rigid stance and the unconscious distance she kept from him, in the way she held her gloved hands folded tight before her breast. Like Rose, when first he’d met her. Wary as a fox scenting a trap.

  She glanced in the direction of the barn when Pickney gestured and hesitated, as if she feared Pickney had sent for her only to lure her into that building and ravish her.

  She signed to the footman standing on the carriage’s rear, an enormous man whose shaven head and massive shoulders were vaguely familiar to January. When he got down, the carriage rocking with his weight, and followed her and Pickney across to the barn, January recognized the rolling stride, the springy animal crouch.

  It was the fighter Big Lou.

  “. . . says they’s Italians,” Pickney was explaining as they approached. “But I seen octoroons lighter’n them, an’ it’s best to be sure. I am sorry if I kept you from startin’ for town. . . .”

  “It is quite all right,” Madame Marsan replied in her uncertain English. Her bonnet was old, too, of a wide-brimmed, flat style January hadn’t seen in years. It threw a kind of pale shade on her thin face, like a veil that did not obscure the anxiety in her dark eyes. “But you understand I must not stay. My husband expects me. . . .” She didn’t turn her head, but January saw in her stance her awareness of Big Lou looming a pace behind her.

  “We drives fast, we makes it by four, m’am.” There was a kind of careless sullenness in the big man’s curiously soft, high voice. “But best we drives fast. You know how Michie Vincent don’t like to be kept waitin’.”

  The woman stiffened, though her slight, noncommittal half-smile didn’t alter. “Still,” she said, “one cannot refuse to help men in trouble.”

  “Sounds like they got theirselves in their own trouble, m’am.” His words came out as a kind of crumbly mumble, as if no one had ever spoken much to him as a child, or expected words from him in return. “What I wants to know is, what’d a couple of Italians an’ a nigger be doin’ wanderin’ around the old Dougherty place that time of night anyways?”

  The open door flung a wan glare into the barn. Madame Marsan hastened forward, wobbling on her iron pattens in the muck. She was, January realized, actually a very pretty woman, dark and slim like an expensive greyhound. But long years of desperate invisibility had told on her, bleached her of anything that might trigger her gorgeous husband’s volatile wrath.

  Cavallo and January, each guiding his end of the chain with a hand, came together along the path of the beam to the stall’s end as Bruno got to his feet and bowed.

  “Bellissima madama.” Cavallo bent over her hand. “Do you speak Italian? How can I convince you that I am who I say I am—Silvio Cavallo of Milan. . . .”

  “Good heavens!” Madame Marsan’s free hand flew to her lips. “Oh, my dear sir . . . You’re the music master! From the opera Tuesday, the silly music master with the curled wig!”

  Cavallo bowed again, still more deeply, kissing the gloved hand again. “Bellissima madama, my thanks. My eternal thanks.”

  She turned to Bruno and asked in careful Italian, “And you are also one of the singers?”

  “I am, bella madonna.” The young Sicilian likewise saluted her hand. “Bruno Ponte, of the chorus, now and forever at your service and in your debt. And this man is Signor Janvier, of the orchestra, who was good enough to come after us and Signorina d’Isola when we needed guidance and help.”

  “But I am not Italian,” said January gravely in French. For one instant the woman’s dark eyes sparkled appreciatively—then wiped themselves clean of humor almost by reflex, as if even in his absence her husband would disapprove if she laughed. January wondered if Big Lou carried tales.

  “Monsieur Pickney, these men are—are indeed who they say they are.” She turned back to the captain of the patrol with a stiff diffidence, bracing herself slightly, as if she expected anger, a curse or a blow.

  And when Pickney immediately replied, “That’s good to know, m’am, an’ I thank you for troublin’ yourself to come here,” January saw how the woman’s shoulders relaxed. She had learned never to disagree with, or disappoint, a man.

  “Best we be goin’, m’am,” mumbled Big Lou as Pickney knelt to unlock the shackle from January’s ankles. “I makes it noon now, an’ you know how Michie Vincent gits. . . .”

  “Yes,” she said quickly, “yes, of course. I hope Mademoiselle Jocelyn has finished the packing and is ready—”

  “Anybody to home?”

  Big Lou spun, ready as an animal to respond to a threat as a gawky form ambled into the square of the open door’s light. At the fighter’s reaction, Abishag Shaw stepped back, neatly and unobtrusively, into safer distance: for one instant January was aware of each gauging the other. Then each relaxed just slightly, and Shaw came into the shadows of the barn. “Well, here’s where you got to, Maestro!” He pulled his hat off at the sight of Madame Marsan, but went on. “You never heard such a catawumptious conniption, with Belaggio an’ yore pal Sefton an’ it seemed like beat-all ever’body comin’ into the Cabildo durin’ the evenin’ sayin’ as how the four of you been murdered. . . .”

  “The four of us?” January sat to pull on his boots again, making a play of searching for something among the tousled blankets to cover surreptitiously scooping his knife into his pocket. “Mademoiselle d’Isola didn’t return?”

  “She ain’t with you?” The rain-colored eyes narrowed and cut sidelong to Pickney’s face. “Young Italian gal about twenty, wearin’ a yeller dress an’ white sash? My name’s Shaw, by the way, Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans City Guards. . . .”

  “Sam Pickney.” The white men shook hands. “Mr. January here told us there was a young lady missin’. . . .”

  “M’am,” interposed Big Lou again, and there was a meaningful edge to his words. “Best we be goin’, or Michie Vincent gonna be mad.”

  “Yes,” said Madame Marsan hastily. “Certainly. Monsieur Pickney, if you’ll excuse me, I must return and get my daughter so that we . . .”

  “M’am Marsan?” Shaw put his hat against his chest, looked down at the drab figure before him. “M’am Belle Marsan?”

  “This here M’am Marsan.” Big Lou interposed himself between the woman and Shaw, watchful contempt in eyes like small black beads. Like his French, his English was slurred and crumpled, and there was neither fear nor diffidence in his voice. He was sure of his ground and apparently feared no white man’s retaliation. “Michie Vincent told me bring her on safe into town.”

  Told you to keep Americans from her, too, thought January, observing the tilt of the scarred bullet head, the compacting of the breast and belly muscles beneath the neat muslin shirt, the blue fustian coat. Instinctively readying himself to lash out.

  Shaw met the big man’s eyes. “They’s time,” he said in English. After a long moment Big Lou dropped his gaze—far longer than any white man would have expected a black one to hold his eyes—and Shaw shifted his glance back to the woman. In execrable French he went on. “At Roseaux they told me as how you was comin’ here,” and a beat of silence followed the words, like the small deadly breath of wind that precedes the driving storm-rains. “Best you have a seat, m’am.”

  She pulled her hand from Shaw’s—and Pickney’s— attempts to guide her to the nearest seat, which was in fact the top of a firkin outside the barn door. January could see in Pickney’s eyes, and Rufe’s, what he himself knew: Best you have a seat, m’am always translated to I have bad news for you. The worst of bad news. She stiffened like a child bracing for a whipping. “Tell me.”

  Shaw folded his big ha
nds before him, respecting her choice of time and place. “Vincent Marsan was found dead early this mornin’,” he said. “In the alley beside the American Theater.”

  FOURTEEN

  January recognized the plantation of Les Roseaux immediately as one he’d visited on the same scouting mission in 1814 that had taken him to Cornouiller. On seeing the place from the back of Sam Pickney’s light wagon, however, he felt the same jolt of distaste he’d experienced at the sight of the carriage itself. Marsan’s finicking wardrobe, his mistress, and his lavish town equipage had all given January the unconscious expectation that at Les Roseaux he would see reflected the same prosperity.

  Instead, he saw fields nearly as overgrown and neglected as those at La Cornouiller, run-down slave-cabins, a house in need of paint and patching. In all things, not just in women, Marsan was a man who would not share. He’d rather match his sapphire cuff-buttons than pay for a new dress for his wife. Even the sawmill, ostensibly the source of the plantation’s profits, had a dilapidated air. Only a few dozen cypress trunks lay outside it, and the piles of lumber stacked behind it were small.

  “Far’s we can tell,” said Shaw quietly in French as much to include Cavallo as to exclude Rufe on the driver’s seat, “Marsan died sometime between midnight—which is when the last wagon came through that alley to the Promenade Hotel—and six, when the first couple horses went out.” He glanced ahead of them at the landaulet, but satisfied himself that there was no chance that Madame Marsan could possibly overhear. She sat like a wooden thing in the middle of its seat, tearlessly telling over her rosary with fingers that shook.

  Nevertheless he edged his bony chestnut horse closer to the wagon—Big Lou had expressed the same sentiments about free colored riding in Michie Vincent’s carriage that the cabmen of New Orleans did—and kept his voice low. “Nobody heard nuthin’, nor saw nuthin’ from the street, an’ maskers goin’ back an’ forth along Camp Street most of the night. He was carved up bad. Face, chest, belly . . .”