Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  “And to Trulove’s reception,” said January. “He must have heard about the attack on Marguerite the following morning, and realized he was in danger.”

  “And still he stayed in New Orleans.” Hooves clattered furiously in the street. It was the hour of night when rich young men tended to leave parties afire with the impulse to race their phaetons like chariots through the streets. Rose’s strong hands tightened over his own, and she shook his arms gently, as if to make sure he heard her, to make sure he believed. “He could have left. But he wanted his revenge. His honor.”

  “If I had written that music,” said January, “and had it stolen, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have done the same.”

  “And you would have met the same fate,” said Rose. “He chose it, Benjamin. He knew these people, remember. Not who they were in New Orleans, but the kind of people they were, and what they would do. I suspect that’s why he left Belaggio. Because he didn’t want to have anything further to do with them.”

  She put her hands on his shoulders and tiptoed to brush his lips with hers. “You didn’t cause his death. And you may not have been able to save him.”

  “But I can avenge him.”

  “You seen what happened,” said Olympe, coming quietly into the room with a half-dozen fresh candles, “when he tried to avenge himself, brother. It’s a dangerous thing to go playin’ around with, vengeance. A long chalk more dangerous than them chemicals and gunpowder you get so twitchy about Rose playin’ with. You be here tomorrow to sit with her, Ben?”

  “In the afternoon, yes.” He pinched out the burned-down bedside candles one by one. “There’s no regular rehearsal, though M’sieu Bucher’s asked me to spend a few hours taking La d’Isola through Euridice’s part. Belaggio’s had her reading the part, and practicing with him, since she came back from La Cornouiller.”

  “God knows what that silly Italian was thinking,” said Rose to Olympe. “Orfeo is what they used to call a court opera: masques, pageants, dancing, but not much in the way of a real plot. It’s just people standing around, singing. . . .”

  “Oh, I’ll wait in line all night for a ticket to that,” commented Olympe, taking the faintly sheep-smelling tallow stumps from her brother’s hand.

  “Don’t listen to her, Olympe, she’s a complete barbarian,” said January. “Orfeo ed Euridice is one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever composed. But it’s an old-style piece, and it was certainly not composed with Americans in mind. And with our friend Smith in charge of the divertissements, God help us, all the Hell-fire Tiberio can conjure won’t change the fact that—”

  He’d heard, while Paul laughed, the clatter of hooves far down the street. And he’d thought, Dumb damn Kaintucks running races. . . .

  All this he remembered later.

  As the words “all the Hell-fire Tiberio can conjure” came out of his mouth, as if in fact naming Hell-fire was a conjuration, there was flame, and smoke, and shattering glass, spraying into the parlor from the broken windows. Fire skated across the beeswaxed parlor floor, burst from the woven rugs. Paul shouted, plunged into the dining-room for another rug; January grabbed Rose aside, struck at her skirts, which were beginning to catch. Smoke, footfalls, Olympe’s voice shouting for water—people running, and more flame spilling from the lamp as Paul knocked it over in his haste. . . .

  Someone pressed towels into his hand; January dunked them in a water-bucket (who’d brought that in? In the smoke he couldn’t see) and slapped at the flames, eyes burning. Someone stumbled into him, nearly knocking him over; a door opened and wind swept through the parlor, fanning the flame. January cursed and realized it must be Zizi-Marie or Gabriel, getting their tiny brother out of the house. Shouting in the darkness.

  Then, from somewhere, a child’s scream.

  Marguerite’s room. January turned to the door through the front bedroom to the back, and a shape loomed at him in the dark. Collided with him, struggling in the smoke, coughing—he thrust past, and into the rear bedroom, where a single candle still burned blurred with smoke, and Chouchou, Olympe’s five-year-old daughter, crouched in a corner, staring with huge eyes at the door. She screamed again as January came in, and hid her eyes, but January—who would ordinarily have beaten half to death any man who frightened her—plunged instead straight to the bed.

  The bed where Marguerite lay, a pillow covering her face.

  “She says she came in and saw a man there,” said Olympe quietly. The fire in the parlor was out. January, Rose, Paul, and Gabriel gathered again in the smoke-stinking dining-room as Olympe emerged with her daughter in her arms. The French door from the front bedroom to the street had been standing open. Through the open door between the rear bedroom and the rear parlor, dim candle-light showed January Marguerite’s still face. He kept looking at her breast, where the white sheet lay over it, watching each slow, shallow breath she took with sick dread in his heart.

  Nothing he’d tried—not water, nor light slaps on her hand, nor burnt feathers, nor the ammonia stink of hartshorn—had waked her.

  She was breathing. That was all.

  Olympe rocked Chouchou in her arms, leaned her head down to listen to the girl’s whispered communication. Now and then she nodded. “That’s right. That’s my brave child.” She looked up again. “He had the pillow over M’am Scie’s face, holding it down. A Devil, Chouchou said, in a big black cloak and a mask, with a kerchief over his head.”

  “Maybe the one who looked like a tough,” said January. “Maybe Mr. Winkers—the one who ran out of the alley— has more than one bullyboy. Either he or another rode the horse and threw the torch.” For they’d found the torch that had been thrown, butt-first like a flaming javelin, through the French door of the parlor. In spite of the heavy curtain drawn over the broken panes, a draft came through, chilling the room and making the curtain itself quiver and flop with sickening life.

  Beside Marguerite’s bed lay the shattered remains of the teapot. Little streaks of blood skimmed the puddles of cold tea. Part of the handle had lain on the sheets near the ballet mistress’s hand, the broken edge wet and red, and blood had spotted the bedclothes, the floor, and the night-dress Marguerite wore.

  She had fought.

  “Was it chance, do you think”—Rose twisted back her soft walnut-colored curls where they’d fallen over her shoulders in the confusion of beating and dousing—“that all this happened the night after Signor Belaggio fled town?”

  It was close to dawn. Neighbors had come crowding over to help put out the flames (which had been out within minutes in any case) and offer other unspecified assistance. In not many hours, January was aware, he was due at the theater again. Coffee and breakfast seemed to make more sense than sleep.

  “I don’t think anything is chance, these days.”

  He sent his nephew, as soon as it was light, to Madame Bontemps’s for clean clothes, for his music-satchel, and his own shaving-things. “What a spook!” said the boy, coming back when January was shaving with Paul’s borrowed razor in the cabinet behind the dining-room. The cabinet opened onto the yard as well; smoke from the kitchen where Olympe was making breakfast scented the air, coffee-smells, syrup, and grits. In the front parlor Paul was already neatly cutting out the two or three floor-boards that had been badly burned, preparatory to planing and fitting new.

  “I told her I had to get your things because you hadn’t been able to come home last night, and she just looked at me and said, But why didn’t he get them last night when he was here? Like she didn’t even hear me.”

  Or like someone came to the garçonnière late last night, thought January. And waited for me to come home.

  Shaw came, but could find little, and the accounts given by the neighbors were not much help. They confirmed what January had guessed, that there were at least two men, one of whom had ridden down Rue Douane at full gallop and thrown a torch through the window to bring everyone into the front parlor, but beyond that there was little to learn. In Carnival time, masked m
en careering down the streets at full gallop were not uncommon. At that late hour, most of the neighbors—free colored artisans, for the most part—had been asleep in bed.

  Shaw examined the broken teapot, the blood, the fading bruises on Marguerite’s throat. The blackened prints of fingers had diffused into a general greenish-yellow mass of discoloration. January still didn’t know if he’d done well or ill to conceal them—he knew only that he’d done what he had to, to keep his friends and himself from the grip of the white man’s law.

  He went to Mass—the Fashion Show rather than his usual early Mass—and lit a candle for Marguerite before the statue of the Virgin, as he had every day that week, and another for Incantobelli. But even that brought him no comfort. A week ago he had come here to lie in wait for the singer, and now the man was dead.

  Blessed Mary ever-Virgin, he prayed, help me to find these men. Put the clue of thread into my hand, and give me the strength to follow it wherever it leads.

  He was to reflect, later, that he really needed to be more careful about what he prayed for.

  Thou hast delivered us, O Lord, from them that afflict us, said the priest as January slipped quietly out through the great Cathedral doors, and made his way upriver to the American Theater to deal with Euridice’s journey to the Underworld and back.

  La Cenerentola being written for a mezzo, and it being unthinkable that Drusilla d’Isola would play an Evil Sister, the prima donna was able to concentrate on learning Euridice’s role. She had more opportunity for this than even she had counted on, it transpired, because on Wednesday, the day of the first general rehearsal for Norma, she overslept, waking at last with a splitting headache that January at least recognized as one of the symptoms of being dosed with opium. He had little worry that the Emperor Francis’s minions were to blame for this, however. One of the bottles of laudanum that Hannibal habitually carried in his pockets was missing, and most of the cast had seen Madame Montero, who had been surreptitiously taking sessions with Hannibal in the role, talking with the soprano when she came backstage to congratulate little Signorina Rutigliano, after watching the opera from Mr. Caldwell’s private box.

  The upshot of it all was that Madame Montero took the rehearsal. Even compared to the florid, if interchangeable, Princesses of previous operas, Norma is a gruellingly demanding role. What was merely a difference of ornamentation between one soprano and another in the case of La Muette and Robert became a painfully evident gulf. James Caldwell, a little to everyone’s surprise, put his foot down at Thursday’s rehearsal and politely requested that Madame Montero continue to sing Norma to Rutigliano’s Adalgisa.

  “And I’m not sure,” the theater owner confessed, taking January aside into Belaggio’s office between the dance rehearsal and the beginning of dress rehearsal, “whether I shouldn’t replace Miss d’Isola in the Gluck piece as well.”

  As the player whose work formed the base-line of the small orchestra—and one of the two most musically knowledgeable men in the ensemble—January was often treated as spokesman by both Caldwell and Davis. Caldwell, who genuinely loved opera, had come to rely more and more on January’s technical advice, particularly after Belaggio’s unexpected departure. “Would you very much mind—and I know you’re certainly stretched thin as it is—taking an extra, private rehearsal Sunday with Madame Montero for the part of Euridice? I know how fond Signor Belaggio is of Miss d’Isola, but . . .”

  Caldwell hesitated, stroking his trim, dark mustache. Outside the office, Tiberio could be heard calling upon Heaven to witness that he could do nothing with the final act if Norma and her boneheaded lover refused to show a little courage about the flames of the pyre. What was a little fire, after all?

  “In spite of the—the quite dramatic pyrotechnics in Act Two, and the beauty of the music, Orfeo is a very . . . a very—”

  “Static?” suggested January.

  Caldwell nodded eagerly, relieved to be so tactfully seconded. “A very static work. Oh, I realize that much of its appeal lies in the stage direction. And Signor Belaggio was most insistent that it be performed.” Despite his best efforts, an edge crept into his voice. “And of course Mr. Trulove backed him in that. . . .”

  Had Mr. Caldwell not been a white American gentleman talking to a black musician, January felt he would have expressed himself more fully on the subject of the special dance that Trulove was paying Herr Smith to evolve for Oona Flaherty—utilizing the tune of the Martin Van Buren Quick-Step—to be grafted on to the Dance of the Blessed Spirits.

  “But looking over the libretto itself, I must admit that there doesn’t seem to be much activity. Except for the dancing, of course. I fear poor Madame Scie’s talents are greatly missed. How is Madame Scie?”

  “The same.” After days of stillness, she had drifted back to a sort of clouded consciousness late the previous night, enough to drink a little broth, which had given January hope. But that morning she could not be wakened, and he had gone to the theater with chill fear riding his shoulder like a vulture.

  There has to be some way of finding the man who did this, he thought, desperation returning to his heart. He’d gone to see Davis that morning in the Cabildo, and the entrepreneur had had to be helped to the door of his cell to speak to him. “Just a little tired,” Davis had said. “I’ve had worse accommodations, believe me, and running a faro-bank here has done wonders for my popularity. . . .” He’d lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Particularly since I know when to start losing.” He had ordered LeMoyne to draw a draft on his bank for money to give Olympe, for Marguerite’s care, he’d said, and for a contribution to Incantobelli’s tomb in the New Cemetery on Claiborne Street. “We can’t let an artist go off without a show,” he’d said.

  A clamor of voices drew Caldwell to the door— Blessed Spirits having a violent disagreement about who danced in front of whom, with Herr Smith’s voice pecking ineffectually at the general din like a gull-chick flapping against a storm. “My dear young ladies,” said Caldwell. “Remember that variety is the key to a pleasing performance. . . .”

  January crossed the little office to the bookshelf, pulled down the ledger—as he’d already done three times previously, whenever he could steal an unobserved moment—and scanned back another page. It told him nothing. There didn’t seem to be appreciable skimming, and there was no record of where Belaggio had gotten the money to pay Bucher to take his place.

  Certainly there was no budget for “additional cast” in Orfeo.

  A footfall beside the open door made him shove the book back among the other ledgers—which he’d also had a look at—and the dozens of bound copies of libretti, stacks of sheet music, and half a dozen German and Italian novels that shared the shelf. He turned quickly, but it was only Cavallo, already moving away from the door, looking embarrassed, like Lover No. 1 encountering Lover No. 2 in the soubrette’s bedroom door in a rather low-class farce.

  Exasperated, January took one last quick look at the shelf as he turned away, but there was nothing else of interest, nothing he hadn’t looked at before. A small stack remained of OTHELLO, Tragedia Lyrica in two acts by Lorenzo Belaggio, bound in the familiar green with stampings of inexpensive Dutch gilt. Opening the top one, January found no papers, no notes, within.

  There’s a clue in all this somewhere, thought January, replacing the libretto on the shelf. What is that one piece of information that struck me like a sour note?

  That told me . . . what?

  Marsan dead. Incantobelli murdered. Marguerite attacked. Davis in the Cabildo, facing the fiasco of a trial that could go in any direction . . .

  Bayou des Familles. I got a glimpse of it at Bayou des Familles. . . .

  He fished in his memories of that run-down plantation, of the long brick jail-house hidden by the trees, the servants clustering around the kitchen. Was it the family of that girl? Jules had asked.

  Evidently not.

  And Sidonie’s successor certainly wasn’t the woman who had told Buck Gower, Cut
him up bad. She was too dark of skin to be mistaken for a white woman, even behind a veil.

  And why would the Austrians, who’d shown themselves willing to kill to protect their secrecy, have brought down an investigation on their heads by the nearly-public murder of a man so prominent and so closely connected with their messenger? Particularly when waylaying him on his next trip to Les Roseaux would have resulted only in shaken heads and mutterings that something had to be done about Captain Chamoflet?

  It didn’t make sense.

  Norma was presented the following night, and despite a rather hasty preparation was dazzlingly received. Barbarian soldiers marched, scantily-clothed priestesses cavorted, Druid knives flashed, a mother’s Medea-like passion was diverted by the innocence of her children, to the accompaniment of Bellini’s soaring “Casta diva” and the somewhat more prosaic interpolation of “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms . . .” Even one of the innocent children visibly scratching herself during their “slumbers”—and the fact that someone appeared to have bribed M’sieu Bucher to speed up the music during every one of Madame Montero’s arias, so that she had to gasp and stumble hastily through them like patter-songs, eyes blazing with fury—did not mar the general effect.

  Mr. Caldwell began to look much cheered.

  Two days later, halfway through January’s surreptitious morning rehearsal of Euridice’s part with Madame Montero, Lorenzo Belaggio returned from Havana.

  With him he had his additional cast for Orfeo ed Euridice: a massive chorus of forty-five men and five women.

  All of them, coincidentally, African.

  “It ain’t a bad plan,” said Abishag Shaw once he’d quit laughing at the sheer audacity of it. “Not a bad plan a-tall. If’n our Navy boys—or the Royal Navy—stops ’em, why, they’s just the chorus of Devils. . . .”