Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  The shadow reared back off him; Lou’s head turned. Mademoiselle Jocelyn had run in close to the two men and whacked Lou over the back with a cane-stalk, and January seized advantage of the fighter’s distracted attention to roll and twist with all the strength in his body. Taken unawares, Lou pitched off his balance and fell like a tree.

  “Lou, stop it!” screamed the girl again as January rolled to his feet. The fighter bounded up with terrifying lightness, but Mademoiselle Jocelyn stepped in front of him, huge dark eyes blazing in that too-pointy white face. For one instant January thought—looking at Lou’s face, at those small eyes like the cunning, hate-hot eyes of a wild pig—that Lou was going to swat his master’s daughter aside like a barking bitch-puppy to get at him.

  “He’s dead, Lou,” said January, and Lou stopped.

  And January thought, That made a di ference.

  And loathed Vincent Marsan anew for what that knowledge told him.

  Lou wiped the blood from his lip. In that soft, mumbly voice he said, “Your daddy don’t want nobody near that barn.”

  “Go back to the house,” said Jocelyn. She was shaking like a sapling in a gale. Lou would have hit her, thought January, almost disbelieving the enormity of it. Not that a black man would strike a white girl—that an adult so huge would strike a child.

  And almost by instinct, he knew Marsan wouldn’t have punished Lou in any way that mattered.

  “He lookin’ around the barn,” reiterated Lou stubbornly. “Your daddy say—”

  “My father is dead.” Jocelyn’s cold, small voice was like broken china. She still held the cane-stalk in both hands, not much less in diameter than her bruised, skinny arm. “Go back to the house.”

  The small, dark eyes turned to January. Studying him. Regarding him with absolute chilling impersonality. A job to be done. A task unfinished.

  January stood where he was, breathing hard, hands hurting, thigh hurting, belly hurting, face hurting, blood hot on his own flesh and every muscle trembling as Lou turned and walked away back toward the house, wiping the blood off his chin with his white muslin sleeve.

  Only when Lou was out of earshot did January say, “Thank you, Mamzelle.” He wiped at the blood running down the side of his face. His head felt bloated with air, his knuckles as if someone had brought a flat-iron down on them.

  “Are you M’sieu Janvier?” Closer, Jocelyn’s pale face had a sharp prettiness to it, though her eyes—brown like her mother’s in her mother’s fine-boned face—were smudged underneath, as if she did not sleep well. Under the torn flounce of her schoolgirl dress her black-stockinged ankles were like sticks. They would get her mourning clothes in town, January found himself thinking, when they went to claim her father’s body.

  “You want to be careful what you say to Lou, M’sieu.” She held out her handkerchief to him. January waved it aside, knowing how badly blood would stain white linen and not wanting to make work for the laundress. He pulled his own blue bandanna from his pocket to stanch the cut on his cheek. “He’s a bad man.”

  “Thank you,” said January. Many white girls—white adults, too—would have said, a bad nigger: meaning he was useless for the purpose God intended, which was to serve the whites. A bad man meant something different, bad by anyone’s standards. “I noticed that.” He flexed his right hand.

  Good thing it wasn’t Mozart tonight, he thought. Amid the hair-tearing hysterics of Auber’s score, any deficiencies in his speed and deftness of touch should be adequately covered by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

  The girl met his eye for one instant, and for one instant January saw in it a bright, sardonic glint, the same humor that had almost been killed in her mother, tempered by a cynical awareness of too many things. Then she glanced aside.

  “The American animal back at the house asked to find you,” she went on, falling into step beside him as he headed—cautiously—across the open ground toward the yard. She pronounced American animal exactly the way his mother did, as one word, as if the noun could not take another adjective or do without that particular one. “He says that they’ve found the young lady that was lost.”

  FIFTEEN

  “My dress is all ruined.” Drusilla d’Isola wiped the tears that streaked the mud and dust on her face, and gazed up pleadingly from the brocaded satin study couch where Sam Pickney had carried her. “I don’t know who they were, or what they wanted, but they tied me up. They put a blindfold on me, spoke to me of I don’t know what!” Tears welled again, and she clung to Cavallo’s hands with bruised fingers scored by dirty cuts.

  “My dear child!” Madame Marsan knelt to tuck a thick woolen shawl around her shoulders, voice soothing as if to her own daughter. “How could anyone have . . . ?” She looked around her, at Shaw, January, and the others gathered in Marsan’s study. “Jules, please have Dinah fetch this young lady down some dry clothing. She’s of a size with Mademoiselle DuClos, I think.”

  “This dress cost twenty-five dollars!” sobbed the girl, touching the tattered and mudstained organdy, “and now it is all torn, and my shoes, too, and they took my pearls and my locket! I have never been treated so, never!”

  Mademoiselle DuClos—Jocelyn’s governess—hastened back to the attic stairs. Jocelyn went after her, but returned only moments later with a nearly-empty bottle of lavender-water and a handkerchief. Cavallo took this with a murmured “Grazie,” to massage d’Isola’s welted wrists. “Are you hurt?” he asked—meaning, January guessed by his tone, Were you raped?—but d’Isola had her face buried in her hands and only shook her head, and repeated that her dress was ruined and her shoes, too.

  “Those smugglers are a disgrace!” Isabella Marsan took the basin of warm water that Jules brought in and gently began to wash d’Isola’s bare, scratched, and bleeding feet. “The entire country knows about them—including Sheriff Arbitage and M’sieu Pickney—yet no one will do a thing!”

  Mr. Knight, who could not have been ignorant as to the source of his employer’s wealth, cleared his throat and said, “Very true.”

  “Only look at my hands!” wailed Drusilla. “What is the matter with everyone in this country?”

  Cavallo took her hands again between his own, and Bruno, who’d been sitting on a corner of Marsan’s cypress-wood desk, came to press his big peasant palms against the girl’s shoulders in silent reassurance. Madame Marsan, wearing now the mourning black that every adult woman owned in that land of large families and tropical diseases, rose and went out to the gallery for one of the glasses of lemonade that had been left on the tray there.

  “Was they the same men as you saw lock your friends under the house?” asked Shaw after January had translated.

  D’Isola blew her nose on one of Madame Marsan’s handkerchiefs and raised red eyes to the policeman. “I do not know, Signor. They would have to be, wouldn’t they? I couldn’t make the horse go, and I got Cavallo’s horse and tried to get on it, but I fell off, and then these men came out of the woods and grabbed me, and they talked and I didn’t know what they were saying! They had beards and slouch hats and they spit tobacco and stank—beg pardon, Signor. . . .” Because Shaw had just at that moment leaned out the window and spit onto the gallery. “But I’d never seen them before and I don’t know who they were or what they wanted.”

  She wiped her eyes. Cavallo relaxed a little, evidently taking all this to mean that if her attackers wanted sex, even she couldn’t have failed to deduce it. But whether they were Americans speaking English, or Chamoflet’s slave-stealers speaking swamp-rat argot beyond La d’Isola’s limited capabilities in French, was still undetermined.

  “They put me in a boat,” she went on. “But there was a razor, left down between the seats among their coats and bags. Signora, grazie. . . .” She took the lemonade Madame Marsan offered and drank it gratefully. “I pretended to faint while they were rowing, and cut myself free, look.” She held up her hands. “And now I have ruined my hands, and torn my best yellow dress. . . . They struck a floati
ng log, and were cursing—it was nearly night—and I rolled overboard, and swam and swam, and lost my shoes in the water, and I could hear them shouting behind me, and saying I don’t know what. . . .”

  “Was they white men,” asked Shaw, “or black?”

  “Oh, white,” replied d’Isola the moment January had translated. “With beards, and their hair all curly. Swarthy men, like Spanish.”

  Which could mean, thought January, white or black—or any of the myriad divisions and combinations in between. It certainly described any number of the inhabitants of the Barataria, third-generation Acadians out of Canada or the mixture of French, Mexican, Spanish, and Levantines that had made up Lafitte’s crews and their children. As Madame Marsan and Jules helped La d’Isola to her feet, January backed to let them pass. On the shelves beside him he noted among the plantation ledgers a couple of books about sugar and cotton—a very few of these—and over a dozen volumes of racing-stud records. There were, surprisingly, novels, too: The Sorrows of Young Werther, in German, by Goethe. Die Elixiere des Teufels, by Hoffmann. Musäus’s Volksmärchen der Deutschen. Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft. As everyone filed from the office, he glanced at the desk, and saw the green-bound libretto of Othello lying open. So Marsan evidently did read. It was the best thing he’d learned of the man so far.

  He wondered briefly if Madame would be willing to part with the Hoffmann, and discarded the thought of asking her. A pity. It was one thing to be civilized enough not to intrude on grief, but it was the only copy of Die Elixiere des Teufels he’d seen in America, and one couldn’t ever count on what books would show up in the job-lots sent from Paris and New York.

  Only as they were helping Mademoiselle d’Isola into the landaulet—attired now in Mademoiselle DuClos’s starched gray muslin—did January say to her softly, “Do you realize who this woman is, and to what house you have been brought, Signorina? That is Madame Marsan. . . .” He nodded to the black-draped form on the back gallery, giving final instructions to Jules, Jocelyn, Dinah, and Mademoiselle DuClos, and readied himself to clap his hand over d’Isola’s mouth, white woman or no white woman, if she should scream.

  “And she wears mourning because Vincent Marsan was killed last night.”

  The heart is stronger than the head. . . .

  La d’Isola’s eyes flared, huge within the delicate bones of her face. But she glanced toward the widow who had been kind to her, and pressed her own hands to her mouth. “O Dio mio.” Then she inhaled hard and let it out, and averted her face, pressing her forehead into Cavallo’s filthy shoulder to conceal her tears. “His wife. O my beautiful one, my adored.”

  Cavallo clasped her close. On her other side, Bruno rubbed her shoulders as one would comfort a child. Jules descended the gallery steps with a small portmanteau and strapped it on the dickey, and Shaw came loafing around the corner of the house and stepped into the saddle of his horse. January mounted his own borrowed animal, and heard Cavallo explain to Madame Marsan as Mr. Knight helped her into the carriage, “The Mademoiselle is tired, so tired, from all she have go through.”

  Knight cast at Cavallo a glance of infinite gratitude that he’d been spared a very complicated scene, and Isabella Marsan stroked La d’Isola’s trembling back and murmured, “Of course. Of course, poor child.”

  Buttoning his all-encompassing buff surtout to his chin, Mr. Knight climbed into his own smart gig, bestowed his briefcase of papers beneath its seat. As he removed the yellow kid gloves he had worn in the house and with fussy care put on driving-gloves of York tan, January was reminded that the man was French, whatever he was passing for now. What thoughts did he have, if any, about the whole sordid business of working with Vincent Marsan?

  Or had he, too, succumbed to that miasma Hannibal had described, and now thought of nothing beyond the plantation’s profits?

  The shabby house, the overgrown yard, vanished behind the little caravan as they rounded the curve of the bayou. What will they do now, January wondered: this crushed-looking woman, that too-thin girl-child. He couldn’t imagine Madame Marsan taking up her husband’s connections with Captain Chamoflet’s men. He supposed the enterprising Baratarian would find another planter along the bayou to act as go-between instead.

  Or would Knight coerce Marsan’s widow to maintain the commerce? Had the factor been taking a cut? Looking at the prim, secretive face, he couldn’t tell. One way or the other, without that clandestine trade—with no crop, few slaves, and little viable machinery—a woman had few choices, her daughter fewer still. No dowry meant few prospects of marriage. Most convents wouldn’t even take a girl without guarantee of support. They wouldn’t starve— January had overheard her mention to Shaw something about her Dreuze relatives, and he knew the Dreuzes were rich. But Madame and her daughter would dwindle to poor relations, companions to richer cousins or governesses to children, consuming the bread of charity and required to pretend they enjoyed it.

  That, too, thought January, was the custom of this country.

  The carriage swung out onto the shell road along the bayou, and January looked back to catch a glimpse of the baracoon, barely visible behind its sheltering line of tupelos. In the shadows of the trees, Big Lou stood, massive arms folded, watching the carriage away. For one second, January met those cold, steel-black eyes.

  It was a silent ride back to Point Algiers.

  “I will go on,” d’Isola said as simply as a child. “Of course I will go on.”

  “Mi brava!” Belaggio surged forward, enfolded the young woman in his meaty arms, and planted kisses on her cheeks and throat. “Mi bellissima! Mi cara! Mi prima!”

  “Get me out of here,” muttered Madame Montero to Hannibal. “I think I may be sick.”

  D’Isola looked fairly ill herself.

  “It would have been more than I could endure, mi fiora, if you could not take the stage tonight!” By the gaslight glare, Belaggio’s cheeks had a blotchy look, as if the man were still pale with the shock of the morning’s news. When Liam tangled a swatch of fish-net on the side of Masaniello’s humble cottage and brought the whole thing down with a crash, the impresario leapt like a startled deer.

  Moreover, he seemed to have shared January’s apprehension that someone might have tinkered with Vesuvius. “Already done it, Signor,” said Tiberio when January suggested—as he did immediately upon arriving backstage—that Marsan may have recognized someone who had no business about the theater last night. “Signor Belaggio had me check every hosepipe, every chemical— nay, had me examine the very gas-jets, and in his office and the dressing-rooms and the proscenium as well. A man who keeps his eye not only on the scorpion and the serpent, but on the millipede, too.”

  “But it is Marsan himself,” protested Cavallo, coming to January’s side as the Sicilian vanished like a gnome into the mountain’s hollow core, “who had no business about the theater at that hour of the night. What would he have been doing here? Had Drusilla been in town, perhaps I would understand, but . . .”

  “He may have thought she was in town.” January sank down onto the rustic bench that would shortly grace the Portici village square. Hannibal reappeared through the jumble of flats, a couple of lumpy parcels balanced in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other.

  “The folks at the Promenade Hotel kitchen said they’re coming to see Vesuvius erupt and don’t want the spectacle destroyed by poor piano-playing. The coffee they threw in as lagniappe.” The fiddler laid one of the parcels on January’s swollen knuckles—it was ice, done up in a rather grubby green bandanna. “They’re taking their places even now in the left-hand gallery, en bloc and set on seeing the volcano.”

  The ice was agonizing, but January spread his hands wide and laid it over his knuckles. “They may have agreed on a rendezvous days ago,” he went on to Cavallo. “It may be why Belaggio was at the theater to begin with. If he got wind of it . . .”

  “But it seems he did not.” The young man had washed the soot and grime from his face and put on the bu
ckskin breeches, boots, and shirt of the doomed and heroic fisherman. His damp hair he’d slicked back from his face, preparatory to donning the wig for the role, and it put the fine bones into prominence, the wide, clear brow and deep-set eyes. “On the gallery at Les Roseaux, Signor Knight”—he called him Notte, and January didn’t feel up to explaining that Notte and Cavaliere sounded alike in English—“said to your policeman that he’d encountered Belaggio at about eleven, at the barroom of the City Hotel. The man had just come from the theater and was inquiring again whether Drusilla had returned. They were together some time, Knight said, before Belaggio went up to his room.”

  And the last carriage went up the alley to the Promenade at midnight, thought January. Eleven would have been just after the conclusion of The Forty Thieves, when cast and crew still milled about and the sweepers were clearing up. “Knight didn’t happen to mention whether Belaggio had his libretti with him, did he?”

  “He said at the end of their conversation Belaggio ‘picked up his books’ and went to his room. If . . .”

  Belaggio appeared at the top of the gallery stairs with arms outspread and cried in triumph to the backstage at large, “She will sing! She will sing!”

  “But can she sing?” asked Caldwell from the floor below, caught up in the drama of the moment.

  “Of course she cannot sing.” Madame Montero flounced over to Hannibal’s side. January observed that she wore Princess Elvira’s flower-bedecked wedding-dress from Act One, which fit her no better than had the Countess’s. “She never could sing. And she has taken all the dressers, the worthless puta, and there is no one to unlace me. . . .”

  As the Mexican soprano strode off in the direction of her dressing-room, she passed Bruno Ponte, bearing bowls of cheap jambalaya in either hand. “She’s the one,” he remarked quietly, “I would be asking after, where she was last night. This is not bad,” he added, handing January one of the bowls. “Better than the brodaglia that Rufe gave us this morning, anyway. Silvio, you’d best come if you’re going to get your make-up on and lie down before you go on. If you want your voice in its best heart . . .”