Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  “Which is why Belaggio was so insistent on Orfeo, of course,” muttered January, torn between anger at Shaw for laughing when fifty men and women were about to be sold to the cane plantations, and a desire to laugh himself at the rogue impresario’s cleverness. He gestured with one of the posters that had begun to be seen pasted to every fence and building-front in town: Giant Spectacle Never Before Seen. “I should have guessed.” The garishly printed bill depicted an army of monsters, more like apes or dogs than humans, with fanged mouths and glaring eyes. January’s lips hardened with anger and he settled back into the ladder-backed chair Shaw had dragged over from near the sergeant’s desk into his own corner of the Cabildo watchroom.

  “Well, that is the truth,” agreed Shaw with a grin. “What’d Caldwell say?”

  “To sum up,” said January grimly, “oh, er, and uh. Of course he guesses what’s going on. Now, at least. I don’t think he knew ahead of time. And I don’t think he knows quite what to do or say, since Belaggio’s insisting that these are legitimate members of the opera troupe. . . .”

  “Like them poor stage-hands Pedro an’ Louis, an’ that girl Nina.”

  January was surprised Shaw remembered their names. He himself had forgotten.

  “An’ every one of those poor souls is gonna just somehow fade out of sight by the time Belaggio gets to his next engagement in New York. Was this somethin’ he set up with Marsan, you think?”

  “Has to be,” said January. “It may even be the reason the Austrians killed Marsan—or tried to kill Belaggio. To warn him off this. Because, of course, if the Navy caught him, he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut. . . .”

  You’re asking too much of me, Marsan had cried to some member of the Opera Society at the Salle d’Orleans. And, It’s all arranged. No wonder the other members of the Opera Society were so frantic to stop the duel.

  And with the whole Opera Society involved, no wonder the Austrians couldn’t do much about it now.

  “I’m guessing the money will change hands Thursday night after the performance,” said January. “The members of the Opera Society—and whoever else they’ve told about this scheme—will need to look their ‘merchandise’ over—” His voice stuck bitterly on the word.

  “And Belaggio and La d’Isola are booked on the Dolley Madison to New York Friday morning.” Shaw folded his long arms and chewed for a moment. His gray eyes— dark-circled now from lack of sleep—cut to the watchroom doors as Guardsmen dragged in a drunk deckhand from one of the steamboats, cursing in a vile mix of Spanish and Greek; noted no immediate danger and moved to the doors that led out into the courtyard, where the wet crack of whips on flesh announced that the usual business of “correction” was in process, sparing urban slave-holders from doing their own violence at the going rate of a dollar a stroke.

  Monday morning. Business as usual. The custom of the country.

  In the cells someone was ranting, cursing in the voice of a drunkard or a madman, audible even down here. In one of the women’s cells a prisoner screamed on and on, a piercing note like a steam whistle. January thought of John Davis, running his faro-bank and hanging on as best he could until his trial. Of Marguerite, sinking deeper into her cold sleep that for four nights now had had no waking. Of Incantobelli, silver hair spread out damp on the boards of the morgue table, and skull glaring through where the crawfish of the canal had eaten away his face.

  “How’s your singin’ voice, Maestro?”

  January glanced back at the Kaintuck, reading in that lantern-jawed gargoyle countenance precisely what was in his mind.

  “Feel up to treadin’ the boards your ownself?”

  “I’d have to be slipped in at the last minute.” January was already calculating possibilities of how this could be done. “Everyone in the Opera Society knows me, of course. But I’ve seen the masks backstage, and it’s a dark scene. And they have to have everyone on the stage for the performance, because you know the Navy—and probably the British as well—are going to be watching to make sure those people really are part of an ‘operatic chorus.’ But the buyers are going to want to conclude their bargains and get their property the hell out of town the moment the final curtain rings down. And whoever’s behind all this,” he said quietly, “I’ll see them then.”

  “I just might sorta mooch on into one of them third-tier boxes this afternoon when you start rehearsin’ with that chorus.” Shaw spit cheerfully in the direction of the sandbox, adding to the random spatterings of tobacco-juice that befouled the floor all around the box. “Where the gals sit, you know, with the grilles over ’em so’s nobody can see who comes callin’ on who. Just to have a look at how many friends the members of the Society happen to bring along.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  As Shaw suspected, quite a number of the Opera Society were blessed with friends who were suddenly and inexplicably seized with such a fervor for Gluck’s music that they made it a point to attend the first rehearsal with the new chorus. Sitting at the piano, January watched their shadows stir in the dark boxes, listened to the murmur of voices, and felt hot rage rise in him.

  Rage at the chicanery of it. At the blithe sidestepping of the laws aimed at ending, at the very least, the kidnapping of slaves from Africa. Rage at the laws themselves, that gave lip-service to sentiments—“Of course we know slavery is evil”—that it had no intention of following through to their logical conclusion.

  And rage that they’d use Gluck’s music to do it. My house is a house of prayer, and you have made it a den of robbers, said Jesus of Nazareth.

  Said it to men who—like the two gentlemen sharing Mrs. Redfern’s box, and the three who accompanied Mr. Trulove and sat chatting and pointing—were only trying to make a little profit.

  From where he sat among the quarter-strength orchestra January could hear them muttering as Belaggio escorted his new “chorus” out onto the stage. As Devils, the Negroes would dance stripped to the waist, the better for the men in the boxes to appraise muscle and skin-tone. And it quickly became clear that they weren’t required to do much in the way of dancing, either. Most of the dancing, and the singing of that wild cacophonous chorus that opens Act Two, would be done by Bruno Ponte and his small male troupe, clothed like the prospective slaves in loincloths, tights, and savage-looking paint, crimson instead of black. The slaves themselves had only to sway threateningly, and break into howls, waving red-and-black weapons of light wood and papier-mâché as Orfeo approached the flame and iron and ominous smoke of the gate.

  Apollo’s sacred lyre in hand, Cavallo stared around him with cold rage in his eyes. The only castrato in New Orleans having been laid to rest last week with one of the largest and most festive funerals January had ever attended, Belaggio had elected to use the 1774 French version of the opera, with Orfeo’s crystalline sweetness rewritten for a tenor voice. Cavallo’s glance swept the men around him, turned to the spectators in the boxes: “Fellow second from the end, in the yellow,” a voice audibly said, “how much is he?”

  The tenor’s lips tightened. Whatever thoughts of vengeance for his brother had led him to the Carbonari, he had learned enough there—and in America—to genuinely love justice. For a moment January thought he was going to walk over to Belaggio, smash the lyre over his head, and storm off the stage. Then a little of the tension went from him, as if he told himself—as January had— that whether or not he walked out, the half-naked men and women around him would be sold nonetheless.

  “And again,” urged Belaggio in rough Spanish, shoving aside the nonplussed and dumbfounded Herr Smith. “One, two three, howl!”

  Backstage, Tiberio lit an experimental flare. A great gout of brightness splashed across the men nearest the gate, showing up their faces: tribal scars, somber eyes, the tight fantastic braids of their hair. And in the back, tall above all the others, the slick-shaved pate of an enormous man, the heavy brow marked with scars gained in the boxing-ring rather than the shaman’s hut.

  It was Big Lou.

&nb
sp; And on his left biceps, as he lifted his arms to howl, January saw a small jagged cut, as if the flesh had been ripped with the broken handle of a china teapot.

  January, Shaw, and Hannibal crossed the river early next morning by the steam ferry to Point Algiers. Lying in the back of a small wagon covered with tarpaulins, January heard Shaw’s light, scratchy voice as he chatted with the deck-hand, and Hannibal’s churchyard cough. “. . . sweetest woman you ever did see, but what does the stupid son of a bitch do but start makin’ love to her hairdresser—her hairdresser, for the love o’ Christ! And ev’ry Thursday afternoon they’d take the ferry an’ I’d see her—the hairdresser, I mean—Alice Grantaire, her name was, an’ no great beauty—all slicked up in lace an’ jewels, an’ him settin’ up in that phaeton. . . . It was a nice phaeton if you like them high-perch types, blue paint an’ red wheels, with a smart little bay gelding with one white sock. Now, I heard tell you ought never buy a horse with one white sock ’cause the odd foot makes ’em stumble, but my uncle Finn, he had a white-sock mare—Prettyfoot, her name was, and she had a mouth on her like a iron shovel. . . .”

  They were the only travelers that early. There was no way to tell whether they’d been observed or followed, in the first stirrings of the day’s traffic. For one moment, last night, January had raised his eyes from Gluck’s score to see Big Lou looking down at him from the stage.

  “With any luck they’ll expect us to try and see M’am Marsan at her brother’s first, ’fore going out to Les Roseaux.” When the noises of the Algiers waterfront died behind them, January pushed back the oiled canvas sheets, and Shaw reached down for the long rifle that had been concealed beside him. “That’s always supposin’ M’am Marsan wasn’t her husband’s partner in the first place.”

  “A cherub’s face,” quoted Hannibal, “a reptile all the rest.” He looked a little better since he’d been squiring Madame Montero, though whether this was from pleasure at the friendship of a fellow artist, or because she was feeding him better, was hard to say.

  “I think if she were in on it, she’d have taken enough of the profits to get herself a better dress.” January brushed flecks of straw from the wagon-bed out of his hair, and swung around the side of the seat to take the reins. “Her vouching for Cavallo, Ponte, and myself— rather than claiming we were runaway slaves—could have been nothing more than the knowledge that she couldn’t get away with it. Aside from the fact that everyone in town saw Cavallo on-stage that night, if her husband was working with Belaggio, Cavallo was too integral a part of the opera to lose just then. But as to whether she’s innocent of her husband’s death . . .”

  “If she ain’t, she come across the river that mornin’ in some other way than the ferry.” Rifle held ready in the crook of his arm, Shaw scanned the wet, low-lying clearings—prairies, the Acadians called them—on either side of the road. “I asked Mr. Break-Jaw back there already about that.”

  “Anyone who could have been her?” January kept his voice low in the hush. The stillness, and the winter fog, thick with the scents of woodsmoke and burnt sugar, seemed to cling around them as the wagon drew away from the river. While they followed the shell road between fields of stubble cane he felt safe enough, but the woods were the domain of M’sieu Chamoflet and his men.

  It was ridiculous to suppose they didn’t know everyone who passed that way.

  “Not unless she can turn her color like one of them chameleon-things,” replied Shaw. “They was enough folks goin’ over in the afternoon that the ferryman can’t say for sure. He says he knows M’am Marsan by sight, though I bet he’d miss her on foot in a cheap dress an’ bonnet. But she’d have to come back early in the mornin’, an’ there wasn’t a white man or woman returnin’ before noon.”

  January halted the wagon just short of the last thicket before Les Roseaux came into view, for Shaw to step down. Hannibal’s personation of a feckless dilettante on the trail of German novels didn’t admit the presence of a Kaintuck bodyguard, and in any case, Big Lou—the only person on the plantation itself they had to worry about— was in town. The Big House had a shut-up air in the silvery forenoon, though there was activity around the stables and pig-yards. January could hear, as he drove up, the grinding whir of machinery from the sawmill. As he drew rein before the front steps, the door of Madame Marsan’s bedroom opened—like all Creole houses, the women’s side of the house was the one upstream from town—and the girl Jocelyn emerged, clothed now in mourning, followed by the respectable Mademoiselle DuClos.

  Jocelyn Marsan’s black dress looked newer than the frock she’d worn last month, but still had the air of a hand-me-down, ill-fitting and pale at the seams. January guessed it came from her Dreuze cousins in town. She descended the steps with the calm self-possession she’d earlier shown, and listened to Hannibal’s apologies for the intrusion into what he knew was a house of sorrow. But he had heard that M’sieu Marsan had left a number of novels in the German tongue—Hannibal’s German accent was a miracle of discretion, considering he was speaking in French.

  “M’sieu Knight is taking care of the sale of all my father’s things,” replied Jocelyn. “But he’s busy in town, and nothing has been done so far, if you’d like to come in and have a look.” She ascended, Hannibal effusive with thanks on her heels. “There aren’t many. I don’t think Father even read German. . . .”

  January took the wagon around to the back.

  Jules recognized him anyway, and Judy, the pleasant-faced cook. And though January guessed they, and all the other slaves on the place, were facing the possibility of sale, and separation from the home they had known, from their friends and families, he thought the two looked more relaxed than they had when last he’d seen them.

  “I saw Big Lou in town the other day,” he said once he’d traded greetings in the kitchen yard and produced, casually, his tale of being a driver at Desdunes’s livery.

  “Lord, yes,” said Jules as Judy laid a half-loaf of new-baked bread on his willow tray and hurried through the kitchen to where an empty oil-jar was buried neck-deep in the ground behind, a cold-safe for butter and milk. “He was a mean one, Lou—he’d have pounded you up bad, for snoopin’ around that jail. M’am Marsan sold him first thing, to pay for Michie Vincent’s funeral and keep things going here for a time.”

  “For a fighter?”

  Jules nodded. “At least that’s what Michie Knight said. Tillich, he said the feller’s name was. Said he saw Big Lou at one of those fights Michie Vincent used to take him to. Thank you, Mamzelle,” he added as Judy set a round of fresh-molded butter on a glass plate, and added it, and half a dozen scones, to the tray. He leaned over to give her a peck on the cheek. “What can you cook up that’s a little special for lunch? I’m sure Mamzelle Jocelyn’s going to ask the white gentleman to have some, ’fore Michie Ben here drives him back to town.”

  “Why was Big Lou so all-fired anxious that I shouldn’t get near that jail?” asked January as he helped Judy bring in apples from the store-room. “I know he said Michie Vincent had given him orders people was to be kept away from it, but you know there’s a difference between ‘kept away’ and ‘beat to hash.’ ”

  “It would have been more than beat to hash if you’d been one of the men who worked here,” said the cook glumly. Her big hands rolled, floured, folded dough for a lunch tart as unthinkingly as January would have vamped along with a familiar tune. “Big Lou killed a man once— Lionel, his name was, not more than seventeen, nosy as a kitten and just about as harmless. Knocked him down and kicked him, and he pissed blood for two days and died weepin’. . . . Cruel to see.” Her brow puckered with remembered distress. “And Michie Vincent didn’t do a thing to Lou. Not a whippin’, not a scoldin’ . . . We’d stayed away from the jail before then, but we really stayed away after. Even . . .” She dropped her voice, swallowed hard, with shame and remembered fear. “Even when we heard their voices there, callin’ out. The ones they’d sometimes bring up the bayou, and lock up, for Michie Vince
nt to sell. But it didn’t matter whether there was anyone in that jail or not. When Lou killed Lionel, there wasn’t even anyone in that jail for him to see.”

  “Why keep it secret, then?”

  She glanced toward the house, and lowered her voice still more, as if Marsan, or Lou, were still there to hear. “I think they used to leave the money there,” she said. “Them and the slave-smugglers. All the cells, the keys to the padlocks, was kept in Michie Vincent’s office in his desk, but the cells themselves was left open, except, of course, when . . . when Michie Chamoflet and his boys had been by.” From its dish set in a greater dish of water—though there were few ants about this time of year— she took the sugar-loaf, brown with molasses, and nipped pieces off, dropping them from the box end of the nippers into a much-stained marble mortar.

  “But that one cell on the end, in the corner—that cell was always kept locked up, even when there was nobody there. Michie Vincent would go out to it and let himself in, and you bet the children from the quarters would watch him around corners and from the trees. My own boy David hid in the trees on a dare, and I like to have wore him out, because Michie Vincent, he was an evil man. He wouldn’t have stopped at hurtin’ a boy, even a child eight or nine years old like David was then. He would even beat his own—” She hesitated, then shook her head and went on. “Anyways, I told him never, ever go near that jail.”

  Kneeling beside the hearth, she prodded the fire, settled the iron griddle into place. “But David told me—and I don’t even want to think how he came to know—that at night sometimes another man would come down the bayou in a pirogue, or sometimes on a horse down the bayou road. He’d open the lock on that one cell door and let himself in, then let himself out again. He—my David, that is—took me once to the little landin’ that the slave-smugglers use, just where the trees hide the jail from the bayou, and showed me the scrape-marks of a boat, and a man’s boot-prints. I hauled him away from there fast. I didn’t want to know.” January handed her the dish of butter—she cut a hunk and it sizzled on the griddle’s slick face. “I didn’t want him to know. Bring me over those apples, would you, Michie Ben? That’s mighty sweet of you to cut them for me. When I whip up this tart, I’ll save over enough to make a little one for you. . . .”