Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  March 5, 1825. Je ferson Parish planter questioned in connection with the death of a woman. . . .

  March 10, 1825. The mother of the murdered woman created a scene in court. . . .

  March 12, 1825. To the editor: A woman of color knows the truth about . . .

  For no reason he could think of, January saw Dominique at the breakfast table, Dominique twelve years old with her soft, thick hair combed down over her back, silky as a white girl’s. His mother, he recalled, had always been proud as Lucifer that Dominique’s hair wasn’t nappy, and never braided it or tied it in strings. She’d dress it with sugar-water so that its reddish highlights gleamed in the sun. Dominique in the flat corsets of girlhood, eating lost bread and listening to her mother’s crisp opinions on the case as she read the newspaper.

  Dominique sweet-faced and young, with nothing more to worry her than piano lessons and learning to dance gracefully, so that one day she might become plaçée . . .

  “Well, I can see how Marguerite might have stumbled onto some piece of information about all this.” Hannibal dropped two chunks of sugar and a dollop of opium into his coffee. “But it still doesn’t get us any closer to who’s been trying to kill Belaggio. It can’t have been Cavallo. He was locked up with you in the cellar at Cornouiller that day.”

  March 15. The court today ruled that the woman Sidonie Lalage, and the cab-driver found dead just outside her house, were slain by person or persons unknown. . . .

  “I said,” repeated Hannibal, causing January to glance up with a start, “that it can’t have been Cavallo who tried to kill Belaggio because he was with you. And I’ve been checking through everything Concha did, those first two days in town, and I’ll swear it wasn’t she who hired the Gower boys.”

  “No,” said January, and he folded the newspaper to put in his pocket. He felt curiously calm, and in spite of clothing still damp, and the hot sting of the bullet-graze on his face. In spite of exhaustion and the knowledge that tomorrow night he’d have to deal with Big Lou and, presumably, Mr. Tillich himself when the buyers came after the opera’s performance. In spite of all that, he felt at peace.

  As if he held one end of a clue of thread in his hand, the other end stretching away into darkness.

  “No, it wasn’t, I don’t think,” he told Hannibal softly. “Because from the first it wasn’t Belaggio who was the target. It was Marsan all along.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  When January and Hannibal limped across the Place d’Armes and into the watchroom of the Cabildo in the small hours of Thursday morning, it was to find Abishag Shaw seated at his desk. In the dirty flare of the oil-lamps, his narrow face had more than ever the appearance of a gargoyle’s, bruised and scratched—chipped, one almost might think. A dirty bandage wrapped his left hand and forearm, wet, like his hair, from a hasty dousing in the courtyard trough. He looked up from the report he was scribbling as the door opened, and got hastily to his feet.

  “Maestri.” A few long strides brought him to them, and he steered Hannibal to one of the benches by the door. “You all right?”

  “I could play Erecles rarely,” responded the fiddler in a conversational tone, “or a part to tear a cat in, to make all split. A passing indisposition merely, coupled with a far more intimate acquaintance than I ever imagined I could want with the flora and fauna of the bayous. Yourself?”

  “Calvert.” Shaw gestured to one of the lamplighters. “Might you go over t’ the market, see if you can get some coffee for my friend here? Brandy, too, if’n you got it.” He held out a couple of silver reales. The man reached for them, then shied back as a rolling mob of City Guards and drunken combatants burst through the door, mudslathered, bloody, and arguing at the top of their voices in several different tongues. Late as it was, every gambling-den, public house, and brothel in town was doing vigorous business; along the torchlit levee, steamboats off-loaded cargoes and market-women hawked their wares, and the Place d’Armes was as lively as if it were two in the afternoon rather than two in the morning.

  When Calvert departed, Shaw went to fetch his grimy coat from his desk, to wrap around Hannibal’s shoulders. “Good to see you back. I just got in myself, after checkin’ your landlady’s, Maestro. I had to backtrail some, ’fore I lost our friends in the swamp—thought as long as I was pullin’ foot anyways I might as well split the pursuit. I cut your trail later but lost it again when it got dark. Seemin’ly somebody tattled to Captain Chamoflet that we was headed out to Marsan’s after all. You learn anythin’?”

  January said, “Oh, yes,” and recounted everything he had heard from Jules and Judy, and what Hannibal had found in Marsan’s study. He finished with “It has to have been Lou who followed us after Trulove’s reception and attacked Marguerite—” No wonder duCoudreau thought it was me, he reflected, remembering the prints of those enormous hands. “I still don’t know why. But of course he was in town that day, for the fights. As for Mr. Tillich . . .”

  “You rat-faced little fyst, who you callin’ whore?” bellowed one of the women in the mob before the sergeant’s desk, and fetched the man next to her a wallop that sent him reeling. Shaw stepped out of the way, still chewing mildly. The man tripped, rolled in a messy white bundle—he was clothed as Pierrot, his billowy suit spattered with blood from his streaming nose—and sprang into the fray again, colliding with Madame Montero as she thrust open the watchroom’s doors.

  “Corazón!” Dodging the battle, the soprano strode to Hannibal, a dragonfly glitter of garnet, jet, miles of mantilla, and armloads of sable and plumes. “I have looked all over the town for you. . . .”

  Hannibal smiled and extended a hand. “Not all over, I hope, querida mia.”

  “All over indeed! That disgraceful puta who runs the place where you live—”

  His eyes widened with alarm. “You went to visit Kentucky Williams?”

  “I did indeed, and she told me that you”—she whirled, an accusing finger stabbing up at January—“that you had coaxed him away this morning, to who knows what ends, rambling over the countryside like Don Quixote—”

  “They had need of a gentleman, Dulcinea,” argued Hannibal.

  “And you were the best they could do? You have missed the rehearsal, not that there was much to miss, and the Chorus of Hell—bah! As bad as those imbecilas of the ballet, and Belaggio letting every friend of the Opera Society come backstage to look at his diablos as if they had never seen a Negro before. . . .”

  Under cover of her account of Belaggio’s blatant huckstering, Shaw murmured, “I don’t rightly see how Tillich could have bought Big Lou. He’s just a clerk, an’ lives in lodgin’s. Big Lou’s livin’ in lodgin’s on his own, down near the turnin’ basin, with a tin-badge pass. If’n we arrest him much ’fore the show tomorrow night, Belaggio’s customers won’t come backstage to close their deal, much less his Austrian contact to try to get his cut of the loot. But I can sure have a man watch him tomorrow. . . .”

  “Whose clerk?” asked January.

  Shaw smiled slowly, gray eyes twinkling. “Erasmus Knight’s,” he said. “Now, if’n you please, M’am Montero— it so happens I have a little favor to ask of you. . . .”

  Chevalier, January had called to him. He could see himself saying it, distracted between the demands of his work and his concern for John Davis. He’d been switching back and forth between English, French, and Italian all evening, and Chevalier, he recalled, had been the name he’d heard Knight called by on those few occasions he’d seen him in Paris.

  It meant the same thing, of course, which made it all the easier to stumble. Not that Chevalier had been his real name in those days, either—at a guess it was actually Ritter. But in Paris, January recalled, he’d been a sort of boulevardier, who made it his business to attend salons and follow the opera and the races and whatever new fashion in cravats or politics came along.

  To be in all those places where the politics and plans of the Restoration would be discussed.

  Was it so easy
? he wondered bitterly, looking down into Marguerite’s still face, her cold fingers like the stems of knotted cane.

  To Vincent Marsan it would have been nothing when Knight slipped aside and whispered to him, That man knows me from Paris. Have Big Lou get rid of him.

  Who would search for the casual killer of a black man on a deserted road? In the confusion of Carnival he’d have been lucky if the Guards even investigated. A white woman’s body found beside his (“She’ll be the one who told him—” He could just imagine Knight saying it, like ordering a dozen eggs for a supper next week) might guarantee that no investigation would be made.

  Like Othello, something that was unpleasant to think about or view.

  For other reasons, it had certainly kept his own friends and family quiet.

  Morning light lay cold and silvery on Marguerite’s sunken face. From the yard, small, sharp metallic taps as Zizi-Marie hammered a line of tacks into the frame of some rich man’s chair. I should feel triumph, January thought, turning the thin hand over in his own huge fingers; gently touching the yellowing bruises on her throat. I know who did this to you, and why. And we’ll get him. He won’t get away.

  Only, of course, Knight almost certainly would.

  Knight would prove his Austrian citizenship; call on the Austrian consul in Havana. Leave his burly, fair-haired, bullyboy of a clerk Tillich to be hanged for treason, and Big Lou, for attacking a white woman, perceived in some circles as the greater crime.

  Punish the bullet and smash the gun, but let the man who pulled the trigger go free.

  January closed his eyes. Don’t open that door, he told himself. It’s enough to know Knight will be punished by his superiors for fouling up, for being caught.

  Warm hands slipped over his shoulder. Like a blind man, he could have identified Rose by touch and scent in the dark: ink and soap and the subtle velvet woman-smell of her body and clothes. She rested her hip against his shoulder and he put his free hand around her skirts, turned his face to rest it against them.

  How do men live, he wondered, who do not have a woman to hold?

  “She woke up late yesterday afternoon,” said Rose. “I checked her eyes, and the pupils looked the same size. She knew me—knew where she was. Olympe tells me you know who did it. Who was behind it all.”

  “That I do,” said January, and it was almost the truth. “Marsan’s factor, Knight. He’s passing money and information between the Austrian government and the counter-revolutionists in New Grenada and Bolivia; using his diplomatic influence to smuggle slaves in from Africa to pay his operatives here. He’s kept his name out of it by using Marsan and Tillich as his cat’s-paws. No wonder he panicked when I called him by his French alias the other night.”

  In the yard he heard Gabriel singing as he carried water into the kitchen, light and free and casual. Zizi-Marie called out some remark, and was answered by Olympe’s rare, joyous laugh.

  How easy to destroy beauty, January thought. To simply say, Get rid of that person because they might spoil my plans or interfere with the Rights of Man. Why was happiness always so fragile?

  “If he works through Tillich—you mean that stuffed-looking young man who escorted Mademoiselle Flaherty to all those parties?”

  “The very same. And who went with Knight to the Hotel Toulouse to search for Incantobelli, and who probably did the horse-riding and torch-throwing the night Big Lou broke in here.”

  “If he works through Tillich, how are you going to get Knight?”

  January sat up, his hand slipping from around Rose’s hips to hold on to her fingers, strong and slim and blotched all over with ink and chemicals and dried crusts of glue from Mr. Davis’s fireworks. Looking up into her face, with its delicate bones and dusting of freckles and wise, ironic gray-green eyes behind her spectacles, he remembered the desperate warmth of her lips under his, the strength of her arms as they tightened around him.

  The memory was in his eyes, because he saw it reflected in hers—and in her slow, secret smile.

  And he smiled, too. “Mr. Tillich,” he answered, “is going to be taken very sick this afternoon.”

  “Oh, the poor man,” replied Rose, not in the least discomposed. “Was there enough left of whatever Queen Régine’s sold to Madame Montero?”

  “Oh, yes. Consuela said she didn’t dare put much into La d’Isola’s soup because she still wasn’t sure how strong it was—and given how sick Drusilla got on just that pinch, I think I can assure you that Mr. Tillich is going to be in no shape to go pick up money from Belaggio after tonight’s performance. He’s due to encounter Kate the Gouger near his rooms in about . . .” He took his watch from his pocket. “About four hours.”

  “Ah.” Rose nodded wisely. “So I expect his lunch isn’t the only thing he’s going to lose.”

  No, thought January. Probably, in the long run, he would lose his life.

  But sooner or later, everyone does that.

  “But if Belaggio was working for Knight,” said Rose doubtfully, “why would Knight have had him attacked? Since it was Knight who got him and Marsan together— who killed Marsan? And why?”

  Why indeed?

  January sighed, and turned back to the bed, to stroke Marguerite’s graying hair. She was not, he thought, Knight’s only victim. Kill that man, that woman, to shut them up. Hang that one—or anyone we can find ready to hand—just so that people won’t ask about who Belaggio might have been meeting at the theater after hours.

  If it hadn’t been John Davis, who was without an alibi, it would have been someone else. Exactly as the desperate Incantobelli had shoved January into a stranger’s arms, not caring if he got thrashed or jailed or hanged. But at least Incantobelli had the excuse that he was in fear for his life.

  Like Marguerite, he, too, was due his avenging.

  He didn’t ask Olympe for the information he needed. He wasn’t sure she’d tell him. Breakfast, and coffee; a bath in the cabinet behind the parlor and a shave; a little more quiet talk with Rose. The mists were yielding to sunlight sharp as a small knife when he left Olympe’s house and made his way to the poorer neighborhood at the back of the old French town.

  Only a few of the livery stables along Rue des Ramparts had been there in 1825. As more houses were built, and land became more dear, men who rented out horses and stable-space for a living tended to move across into the Faubourg Tremé. But a handful remained, and by good luck, one of these was the one next door to the cottage of Marie-Pucelle Morriset.

  “Yes, he worked out of here,” said Romain Faon, in charge of Combeferre’s Livery. There was a small house on the front of the property, which extended behind the house almost through to Rue Burgundy. In the big yard, grooms were washing down a cherry-red curricle. The smells of soap mingled with those of horse-piss, clean straw, wet brick. “Rented from Michie Combeferre for ten dollars a month, cab and horses both, plus half his fares. Nice little bay named Elisá, I recall, good paces but short in the legs, and a big, tall piebald named Wellington. Treated them well, he did. He’d come in and groom them, Sunday mornings, while his sister cleaned up the cab. She’d braid ribbons in their manes, blue for the mare, red for the gelding. Shameful what happened,” he said, and shook his head. “Shameful.”

  “You know where he lived?” asked January. “If he had other family besides the girl?”

  “He had no family but the sister,” said Faon. “They lived on Rue de l’Hôpital. Land was owned by the Ursulines then, but they leased to a Madame Fourgette, who let rooms. God knows if she’s still there.”

  She was. The house was an old one, rambling and seedy, the smells here of privies long untended, of rooms long unaired. There was a constant coming and going of day-laborers in smocks, clerks in checkered trousers and tight-fitting coats with elbows discreetly patched; young women more brightly dressed than daytime called for, even daytime during Carnival. A smell of greasy soup, of poverty and desperation.

  “Oh, I wept for the poor creature.” Madame Fourgette
clasped big hard hands clotted with rings before her heavy breasts, but her eyes, set like polished coals in a thick face framed by an enormous lace-trimmed tignon, had the dry look of eyes that have shed no tears since babyhood. “His sister, too, of course, but poor Aucassin! And him so young! He was only twenty, you know, when that brute cut him to pieces, only for talking to the girl. . . .”

  “Did he know her?” asked January. “Were they friends, I mean?”

  The woman appeared to be thinking, tongue probing at the inside of her shut lips, but those hard, dry eyes met his and January, with the appearance of absent-minded-ness, jingled the coins in his coat-pocket and took out a Spanish dollar, turning it over in his gloved hand and looking at it as if he’d never seen King Ferdinand’s face before in his life. The walls of the parlor in which they sat hadn’t been painted, probably, since the house was built; through the French doors light fell from Rue de l’Hôpital and showed up the scratched and dulled cypress boards of the floor. He wondered what white gentleman protector had given the house to Madame Fourgette, and set her up with enough money to get her start. And found himself looking forward to what his mother would say of the woman when he spoke of this meeting next Sunday at dinner.

  “Well, she only lived over a few streets,” said Madame. “Her cottage was just a house or two from the livery where he kept his horses, and I know he’d speak to her sometimes, coming and going from work. Little Marie—the sister, you know—said once he was walking home late at night after turning in the cab, and heard her weeping, and spoke to her through her window. But you could tell it was only kindness. He’d never come to anything,” she added with a touch of condescension, of scorn, in her tobacco-roughened voice.

  She dug a tobacco-pouch from the pocket of her over-embroidered and none-too-clean silk dress, and with it stuffed a small ivory pipe. Her clothing, her tignon, the chairs in the big double parlor, all reeked of old smoke, and the ceiling was yellow-brown with it around the dead lights of a dust-covered chandelier.