Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  “Ah-ha!” Herr Smith came bustling out of the rehearsal-room and caught January’s arm. “It is in good time! I feared Herr Sefton would have to play for the rehearsal alone. . . .”

  Madame Rossi and Madame Montero emerged from the prop-room, arms filled with brown peasant skirts and tags of lace.

  “. . . simply too plain,” La Montero was saying. “It’s ridiculous that I should be required to look like a farm-girl. . . .”

  “But, Madame, Alice is a farm-girl. . . .”

  “Fire, he says.” Tiberio perched grumblingly on one of the net-draped bollards that had so lately decorated the shore of Portici village and was soon to do duty as medieval Sicily. “More fire. One ovation and now he must have fire everywhere. . . .”

  “They have a witness who claims he saw Davis at the City Hotel just before the murder,” said January softly as he took his place beside Hannibal in the rehearsal-room. Several little rats were warming up at the barre with exercises January recognized as Marguerite’s. Miss Flaherty had cornered Caldwell and was trying to convince him to enlarge the mad, ghostly dancing abbess’s role to include a song, and possibly a romantic interlude with the hero as well.

  “Sure, and Mr. Trulove thinks I’m good enough—”

  “The fact that Davis is an honest and clean-living person doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have assassinated Belaggio.” Hannibal coughed, and tightened the pegs on his violin. “Quite the contrary, in fact. One may smile, and smile, and still be a villain. . . . Not that I’d wish a stay in the Cabildo on even the dishonest and filthy-hearted. But at the moment it’s a fairly moot point.” He tightened another peg, drew the bow experimentally across the strings, and then played a fragment of “The Lost Sheep,” like a stray butterfly in the dingy room. “I’ve located the Gower boys.”

  EIGHTEEN

  “I wouldn’t let you anywheres near him.” Kentucky Williams looked January up and down with hard blue lashless eyes in a face like five pounds of veal. “ ’Ceptin’ he needs a doctor bad, and ol’ Doc Furness been drunk a week.”

  At this hour—rehearsals hadn’t ended until nearly five—her front room, and indeed most of the surrounding Swamp, was fairly quiet. Men drifted in from the levee or the canal, joshed with friends, lit up long-nines, and cracked jokes with the few women who worked the place. When the damp river breeze bellied the sheet of osnaburg that did duty as a door, January could see the physician in question, snoring soddenly on a bench in the corner. From here he could smell the man, too, which given the general atmosphere of woodsmoke and sewage that typified the Swamp argued for a fair degree of pungency closer up.

  “What’s wrong with him? Gower, I mean, not Furness.”

  “Cut up.” Kate the Gouger, sitting tailor-fashion on Williams’s unsheeted bed beside Hannibal, paused in the act of braiding her rufous hair. A half-barrel near-by did duty as a nightstand, bearing two candles and a battalion of half-finished liquor-bottles. January wondered that mere proximity to the spilled dregs didn’t ignite the place. “Took a cut in that alley rumpus, and it’s all swole up an’ fever. Furness bled him four-five times—puked him real good, too—but he just gets worse. Reckon if they put him in the Calaboose, he’d die.”

  Him and Davis, thought January.

  Williams was pulling on a man’s buckskin jacket over her grease-spotted calico. “You bring your bag?”

  January nodded. He’d paid the son of the Fatted Calf’s proprietor to fetch it, but the boy had been turned away by Madame Bontemps, who’d insisted that January’s note to her had been forged by King Louis’s spies. He wasn’t sure whether she meant Louis the Sixteenth or the Eighteenth—it could have been the Eleventh, for all he knew. In the end, January had walked back to his lodgings, fetched the bag, then rendezvoused with Hannibal at Williams’s. It was after six, and he’d given up all hope of supper with Rose. He only hoped Rose would still speak to him, at whatever hour he finally managed to present himself at the Théâtre d’Orleans.

  Williams whistled through her teeth, and a couple of men pushed through the curtain, Kaintucks, filibusters, or keelboatmen, bearded and filthy like most of their breed. As they blindfolded January, he heard Kate say, “I went and heard that operee last night, that you give me tickets to? I never heard anything so pretty in all my life. It ain’t right, somebody tryin’ to do them nice folks a harm. . . .”

  Heavy hands took January’s arms, pushed him out into the drizzly chill of the early-falling night.

  He didn’t think they led him far. The smell of the Swamp lessened around him, the stink of tobacco and woodsmoke and untended privies gave way to the thick green odor of standing water. He felt the wet slash of weeds on his trouser-legs, the soggy give of the uneven ground, and nearly broke his shin on what had to be a cypress-knee. Then the tufts of grass underfoot gave way to the slither of bare mud and the stink of civilization again, and he heard the knock of wood on wood, the faint plash of water.

  Near the canal, then.

  Hannibal coughed. One of his escorts spit.

  “Here we are.”

  Leather hinges creaked. The muggy atmosphere of a shut-up room and the overpowering stink of sickness: rotting flesh, latrine bucket, blood, and the foul sweat of illness soaked into bedding unwashed. A tallow candle and greasy sausage. Rats. January heard water splat from a wrung-out rag, and a man said softly in coarse English, “You gonna be all right, Buck. Don’t you give up on me now.”

  “Pull that curtain over the window,” instructed Williams. “You want the whole town to see us?” And then, “Here’s the doctor we talked about.”

  The blindfold was removed. “They’s nigger doctors?” asked a big blond bearded man in surprise, straightening up from where he knelt by the dirty pallet on the floor.

  January opened his mouth to snap that if he was so damn nice in his taste, he could go to the Cabildo and ask for a physician there, then met the man’s eyes. And saw he was young, probably under twenty, the blond beard like the loose, soft stringy fuzz of a puppy’s coat. Saw that there was no malice in his words or his eyes, only genuine brute ignorance. Saw that he’d been crying.

  The young man’s gaze went to Kate as the Gouger unblindfolded Hannibal, then to Kentucky. He looked back at January and swallowed hard. “You ain’t—you ain’t gonna bleed him again, are you? I don’t know if he can take it.”

  “Don’t worry, sir,” said January. “Nigger doctors don’t bleed ’em like white ones do.” He glanced at Williams, said in the deliberately sloppy English copied from Shaw, “Might you get your boys to boil me some water, m’am? Clean the wound up a little so’s I can see what we got?”

  He could already tell what they had: raging infection by the smell of it, the fever-ravaged body weakened steadily by bleeding, purging, and probably dosing with calomel as well while the slash wound on the right biceps probably hadn’t even been washed. He took half a dozen candles from his bag and drew the packing-box close to support them.

  Buck Gower was delirious, but so debilitated by fever that Williams and one of her boys could hold him easily as January first irrigated the wound, then with deft speed carved out the decaying tissue. Behind him, he heard the murmur of Kate’s voice, explaining things to the sick man’s brother. He heard the word “operee” and later, “. . . want to know who hired you. . . .”

  “They ain’t gonna tell the Guards?” asked Bart anxiously. “I said, no Guards. . . .”

  “ ’Course Ben ain’t gonna tell the Guards. What’s he gonna tell ’em? Sassafras is bringin’ his boat down tonight an’ you’ll be out of town an’ gone come mornin’.”

  Once the arm was clean, January inspected it minutely, holding the candles close. Though horribly swollen and oozing, the surrounding flesh and the arm below it showed no sign of the dark lividity of mortification, and the sweetish, nauseating whiff of gangrene was absent from the wound itself. When January had trained at the Hôtel Dieu, there had been two or three surgeons there who had insisted on fanatical cleanline
ss of their persons, their tools, and the wounds on which they worked, and though these men had been roundly scorned by most of their colleagues, January had observed that they seemed to lose fewer patients. And keeping everything clean, he reflected as he packed and bound the yawning mess with fresh lint, was such a simple thing to do, and no sillier than putting slices of onion under the patient’s bed to chase away the vapors of contagion. . . .

  If it was silly. Some people in the plague hospitals during last summer’s outbreak of yellow fever had recovered after such onion-slices had been placed. January personally didn’t think the onions did anything but vary the diet of the local rats—dozens more patients had perished than had survived—but then, he didn’t think bleeding helped, either.

  Another reason, he thought, that he probably would never be able to make his living as a surgeon, even should he somehow and miraculously become as white as a Swede.

  Good thing I can play the piano.

  “You gonna give him medicine?” Bart Gower edged his way back to January’s side, and snuffled, wincing as he did so. His left cheek was discolored and swollen where January’s fist had connected with it in the alley beside the theater, and that side of his mustache was slick and glistening with a permanent leakage of watery mucus from the break. “Katie tells me you said you’d help him if’n I told you about bein’ hired to kill this operee dago. That you wouldn’t help Buck if’n I didn’t.”

  January glanced back at Kate. With her snarly hair and her uncorseted frock, she looked dirty and sinister, tamping smoking-tobacco into the bowl of a clay pipe with her thumb, her tongue thrust out a little between her teeth in concentration. She’d probably lain with both of Kentucky’s bearded henchmen—possibly with the Gower boys as well—with as little thought as she’d have given to drinking coffee with them in the market-place: what’s another man, more or less? And if any of those four men were to decide to cut her throat as an accompaniment to coupling, they would almost certainly never be caught or punished.

  This is the fruit of whoring, they would say with Iago. A woman who lets a man have her is admitting that he is permitted to do with her what he pleases.

  January’s jaw tightened, and he looked back at the young man kneeling beside him. “The lady mis-heard me, sir,” he said. He settled back on his heels. “If you’d tell me who hired you, I’d appreciate it, because it might save the lives of myself and my friends. But I don’t hold back from helping a man because he can’t pay, or can’t help me in return.”

  Bart Gower looked around indecisively, then picked up a bottle from the several on the packing-box and held it out to him. January accepted it, and took a drink—fiery and vile. Handing it back, he said, “I better not take more of that. The man who hired you may be waiting for me the minute I start back for home alone, and I’ll need my wits.”

  Bart took a brief swig, winced, snuffled again, and stood to hand the bottle along to Kentucky. “Buck gonna be all right?” he asked again, his eyes pleading. “That other doctor—Lordy, it give me the creeps to see him, with his knife all waverin’ around in his hand. We got a feller gonna take us out of here tomorrow, get us back to Ohio. We thought we was some punkins, but we was sure wrong.” He wiped his mustache gingerly, as if his whole face still hurt on that side, and held his other hand down to help January to his feet. “We just wanted the money to get home on, see.”

  January nodded. “It’s a bad town, sir,” he said, “to those who come to it for the first time.” He went to the bucket, where what was left of the boiled water still steamed gently in the candle-spotted gloom. Bart followed him, and watched with puppy-like curiosity as he washed his hands again, as if he’d never seen a man perform this same act so many times in the same night— maybe the same year.

  “You said a mouthful,” the boy agreed. “Buck gonna be all right?”

  “I don’t know.” January dried his fingers as well as he could on the bandanna from his pocket. “It would be best if you could let him rest a few more days before you try to travel. . . .”

  “We can’t.” Bart shook his head vigorously. “Not if some other fella got hisself killed by that theater. We didn’t do that, I swear it to God, but I been here nursin’ Buck here by myself, an’ who’s gonna believe me? We been waitin’ to get Buck better all this time, an’ all he got was worse.”

  “Then take this.” January held out the little packet of powdered willow-bark that was Olympe’s favored febrifuge, and wrote on it, with the stub of pencil, F, for fever. “Boil it in water, like tea—about this much”—he sketched a few tablespoonfuls in his palm—“at a time. It will bring his fever down some. And wash the wound with this, boiled up in water”—he wrote W, for wash, on a packet of comfrey root—“and change the bandage every day for as clean a one as you can get.”

  The boy nodded earnestly, marking the instructions down in his mind. In a gang of men, thought January, he’d probably have beaten January up on the street if that was the entertainment going that night. Now he was alone, and confused, in pain himself and scared for his brother, and wanted only to go home. Where his mother and sisters probably loved him.

  January wondered why he continued to strive to understand humankind. How much simpler to hate and be done.

  “Thank you.” The boy snuffled, and shoved one packet into each of his trouser pockets. He took another drink from his bottle. “Well, I can’t tell you the name of who hired us, ’cause I don’t know it, but it was a lady, not a man. A woman, anyway . . .”

  He hesitated, trying to sort out remembered distinctions of dress and speech in his mind, and January, startled, said, “A woman?”

  Bart nodded. “She come right into the Blackleg, where Buck was dealin’ cards—we made a kind of deal with ol’ Shotwell that owns the place for a cut of Buck’s winnin’s. Tryin’ to make back some of what we lost so we could go home again, see. An’ she says, ‘You Bart Gower? I hear you’re lookin’ for a way to make some money.’ ”

  “This woman knew your names?”

  “Well . . .” He made a little embarrassed shrug. “Just about ever’body round the Swamp knew by that time we was lookin’. We did a little stealin’, see, on the levee. But the Levee Boys let Buck and me know it was their territory, an’ took most of it off us.”

  “I see.” January reflected that between the City Guards and the various gangs that regularly worked robberies on the levees and such hellholes as Girod and Gallatin streets, it probably wasn’t easy to make money in New Orleans even as a freelance thief. Bart and Buck were lucky to make it home with no worse than a broken cheekbone and a useless arm. Many simply ended up in the river or the morgue. “What day was this? The day you made the hit?”

  “Day before.” Bart wiped his nose again.

  Wednesday, then. “What did she look like? Was she white or black?”

  “Oh, white. They don’t let no black girls into the gamblin’-room at the Blackleg. She had on this veil over her hat”—his fingers sketched something that looked like Spanish moss over his face—“but I could see through it she was white.” He fished around in what was probably a rather limited vocabulary for something to illustrate his memory of the encounter. “I think her hair was brown.”

  “Brown eyes?” asked January, since the dark scrim of a veil would have obscured whether her complexion was pink or olive, and in any case he doubted the boy would make the distinction. Bart nodded. “Or blue?” Bart thought about it and nodded again. “Was she tall? Short?”

  “I dunno. All girls is kinda short, ain’t they?”

  To Bart they would be, of course. Bart was only an inch or so shorter than January’s six-feet-three.

  “Young or old?”

  “Young, I guess. I mean, she weren’t bent over like a old lady or nuthin’, an’ she talked like she had all her teeth. She talked to us over in a corner of the gamblin’room, away from the lights, so it was kinda hard to see. Mr. Shotwell, he don’t spend too much on lamp-oil. But she had this kind of accent,
like folks around here do.”

  “But she spoke English?”

  “Well, yeah.” He looked surprised that January would have to ask.

  “And she offered you money to—what? Beat up a man in the theater alley?”

  “Kill him,” replied Bart somberly. “She said, I want him corpsed. I want him cold sti f for the dirty bastard he is. That’s what she said. An’ she give Buck a hundred dollars an’ said there’d be a hundred more when she seen the body. Said to wait in the alley by the American Theater an’ he’d be along about midnight. Which he wasn’t—it was close on to three in the mornin’, an’ we’d waited there for hours, with other people comin’ in and out an’ all.”

  “In?”

  “There was this fella got down from a cab an’ went in, right after we got there. He had on a mask, an’ a big hat, an’ a pistol, too—we seen it by the light over the door we’s s’posed to watch.”

  “Was he tall?” January asked. “Short?”

  “Yeah. Shorter’n us, anyway.” Bart’s forehead squinched with concentration, trying to summon back a recollection of a shadow glimpsed in shadow. “I only saw him good from the back, when he went up the steps into the door.”

  Belaggio’s Austrian contact. And of course any white man could walk around New Orleans on a Carnival night masked and cloaked and bristling with weaponry. No wonder Shaw didn’t look like he’d slept since Twelfth Night.

  “You called him an opera dago a few minutes ago,” said January. “Is that what she called him?”

  “No. That’s just what Kate said just now. This woman—lady—said as how he’d be big, big as us. A big white man. Take him, she said, an’ snu f him. Cut him up bad. An’ her voice got mean when she said it, like he done somethin’ to her. An’ later Buck said to me, Let that be a lesson not to rile up a woman in THIS town, little brother. An’ we laughed.”

  He looked down at his brother, sunk into sleep now, his breathing light and slow. Under matted, lousy hair his face was haggard and thin. Bart reached down and touched the unswollen hand. Snot dripped off his mustache, and he wiped it again, as January suspected he’d be wiping it for the remainder of his life. “God, I hope he’s gonna be well.”