Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  “He might be light as you please—his mother was old Charles Hougoumont’s plaçée and near as fair as a Spaniard herself—but he was nowhere near that poor Mademoiselle Lalage’s class. He could barely sign his name, and so simple-hearted, you’d take him for a booby. Well, it goes to show, doesn’t it?” She walked to the fire, and with a spill from the box by the hearth kindled the pipe, puffing the smoke from the other side of her mouth as she stood beside the marble-painted wooden mantel. “No man in his right mind would go up to a white man’s plaçée that way, would he? Not at that time of the night. I don’t care if they heard her screaming, let alone just crying—and they do cry a good deal. Don’t know when they’re well off, I daresay.”

  The street door opened and two girls came in, hand-in-hand like sisters or friends. But when they stepped clear of the bright incoming light, January saw their faces were like Madame Fourgette’s, tired and hard. They might have been thirteen and fourteen years old, but the dresses they wore were styled like women’s dresses—cut low despite the earliness of the hour, over small breasts just beginning to bud—and their tignons gaudy with feathers and bows. One of them looked across at her and opened her painted lips to speak, and Madame Fourgette said quickly, “Excuse me a moment, sir,” and went to them, holding out her hand.

  One of them put some money in it. Madame counted it with a practiced glance and with her free hand lashed out and boxed the girl’s ear: “Where’s the rest of it?”

  “Wasn’t no rest of it.” The girl rubbed her ear sullenly, and her friend added, “That’s all there was.”

  “Carnival season and every man in town walking around with his pants out in front of him and that’s all there was? Little liars!” She shoved the money in her bosom, caught each girl by those thin bare shoulders, and whipped them around, pushed them to the door again. “Don’t you come back till you can bring me five dollars apiece, you understand? Five dollars! Lazy little bitches,” she added, crossing back to January, her dark eyes ugly with annoyance. “And drunk, and at this time of the day, too.” She picked up her pipe again. “They don’t care whose money it is.”

  “No,” said January, watching those two flower-bright forms pass the other window, make their way back down Rue de l’Hôpital in the direction of the levee and the taverns of Gallatin Street. “No, I daresay they don’t.” He looked back at Madame Fourgette. “Is that what happened?” he asked. “Aucassin—”

  “Couvent,” she said. “Aucassin Couvent.”

  “Aucassin Couvent heard Sidonie weeping and went around the back to speak to her, to comfort her?”

  She shrugged. “It’s what he done before, according to that sister of his. I daresay she made it up. She was an ungrateful little creature, stuck-up and pert-mouthed. A thief, too. After he died, I let her stay on here, at my own expense—for they’d no family, their mother being dead, and Old Man Hougoumont, too, by that time—for a month, an entire month! Then she just disappeared, and made not the slightest attempt to pay me back for rent or food or even the clothes on her back. Nothing!”

  Aware of the delicate mechanics of owing and paying by which bawds and pimps controlled their girls, of constant debt and earnings that were never quite enough— five dollars, you understand?— January guessed what it was that the young cab-driver Aucassin Couvent’s twelve-year-old sister had fled. Dominique, at least, he found himself thinking, had the choice of seeking another protector. She had the training, the accomplishments, the social grace to be plaçée—placed—as a white man’s mistress.

  Some didn’t.

  “Do you know what happened to her?” he asked. “Where she went?”

  “To hell, I hope.” Madame Fourgette viciously knocked the ashes out of her pipe. “Let her sing her little songs for the Devil, and hope he pays her for them.”

  January paused in the act of rising. “She sang?”

  January was late getting to the theater that evening. When he returned to his room at Madame Bontemps’s, he found a note from Dominique, and going to her house in the Rue Du Maine, found Thérèse just lacing her into a gown of green and amber, and fastening Henri’s pearls around her neck. “He’s meeting me at the opera.” Dominique angled her head a little to the mirror to touch her lips with rouge. “He says he will not let anything, or anyone, come between us.” She fixed small golden pearls into the lobes of her ears, and he saw her hand tremble.

  “You believe him?”

  Her eyes met his in the mirror, then shifted to her maid. “Thérèse, could you get me a little more coffee? And a cup for my brother? Thank you.” She smiled after the woman as she left. When she turned to meet her brother’s eyes direct, her face had altered, calm but very still.

  “My last period started the twentieth of November,” she said. “How long do I have?” She touched her lips with her tongue, pursed them as though fearing for the delicate color there. “Before I have to make up my mind, I mean.”

  In his mind January saw Henri handing that chill, diamond-perfect girl a cup of negus. Saw Madame Bontemps rubbing her own floors with beeswax. Saw Madame Fourgette in her shiny-elbowed violet plush, knocking ashes into the dirty fireplace of the house some man had given her. “Until Mardi Gras,” he replied, and her jaw tightened.

  “That’s next week,” she whispered. “So soon?”

  “After that it gets more dangerous with every day that passes,” he said. “When will they be married?”

  “August.”

  She was no longer looking at him. Her gaze fixed on the buttons of his waistcoat, holding silence about her like a too-thin shawl against Arctic wind. January put his hands on her shoulders, drew her to him, and kissed her forehead. Held her, trying to give what he’d sought from Rose that morning—the comfort of knowing someone was there.

  Everything that he or anyone else might have said— Henri loves you or Everything will be all right—faded before the fact that there was no way to know. One could only take one’s best guess and walk forward in the dark.

  “Enjoy the opera,” he said, stepping back from her. “The music’s beautiful, but very little happens.”

  Which turned out to be one of the most inaccurate statements he’d ever made.

  “But where is she?” Belaggio was demanding when January came up the steps from the prop-room. “I’ve looked in her dressing-room, in the green room . . .”

  Not again, thought January. And then, Not tonight . . .

  “It was not half an hour ago that I fixed her hair.” Madame Rossi still held the curling-tongs, and a handful of hairpins, from preparing the Chorus of Heroes and Heroines; Madame Chiavari, a dressing-gown of violet silk wrapped over the somewhat abbreviated pink costume of Love, trailed her distractedly.

  “I’ve checked in all the dressing-rooms,” added Cavallo worriedly. Over flesh-colored tights Orfeo’s black tunic looked a little gaudy for mourning—gold laurel-leaves twined its border and sleeves—and in the chill of backstage he wore a decidedly un-Greek blue coat. “Could she have been taken ill again?” He glared pointedly around the backstage, as if expecting to see Consuela Montero emerge from her dressing-room resplendent in Euridice’s Act One cerements.

  James Caldwell, emerging from the prop-vault behind January with a bull’s-eye lantern in hand, cleared his throat diffidently and asked, “Is—er —is Madame Montero on the premises? Not that I’m saying we should cease our search for Mademoiselle d’Isola, of course, but in case something has . . . that is, in case she has been taken ill, and returned to her hotel— Has anyone gone to her hotel to look for her?”

  “And I suppose she just walked across Camp Street, dressed as she was?” demanded Belaggio sarcastically. He looked shaken. A month ago, January would have been touched at this evidence of concern. As it was, he only reflected, He still thinks Knight murdered Marsan.

  And why not? It would be like Knight to lie, to put Belaggio off his guard.

  “Who’d notice during Carnival?” responded Hannibal, emerging, fiddle in h
and, from Hell’s twisted gates rather like a down-at-heels Orpheus himself. Tiberio, carefully pouring water into the hidden pans that cradled the firepots, glared at him and went on muttering about the thieving ways of the Irish. “To answer your question, sir,” the fiddler added, “Madame Montero is, so far as I know, having supper at the Promenade Hotel and then plans to attend the performance of Fra Diavolo at the Théâtre d’Orleans.”

  “Could you . . .” began the theater owner, nervously straightening the outermost and gaudiest of his waistcoats. “Might you . . . that is, do you think she might . . . ?”

  “La d’Isola will be found!” Belaggio thundered, raising clenched fists in Jove-like anger.

  “Of course she will. Of course she will. Nevertheless . . .”

  “I just seen Mr. Knight out front,” murmured Abishag Shaw’s voice in January’s ear. January withdrew from the sextet forming around the Gate of Hell, and stepped to where the policeman slouched in the green-room door. “Escortin’ Marsan’s daughter an’ a couple of aunts. An’ Mr. Tillich is sure-enough indisposed back at his lodgin’s. I gather him an’ that Kate girl spent half the afternoon there drinkin’ champagne.”

  And helping herself to the contents of Tillich’s pockets and bureau, January reflected. Keeping behind the scenery, he made his way to the prop-room under the gallery, where the bloodied desk had been stowed. Hannibal had secreted the ragged tunic, fur-fringed tights, and mask of a member of the Demon Chorus behind the scrims. “What about Big Lou?” From the other side of the wall he could hear the muttering of the rest of the demons, shut up in the rehearsal-room. Locked in, as they’d been locked in before and after rehearsal Monday night and presumably last night as well.

  “They wander off, they get lost, they speak no French and no English, either,” he had overheard Belaggio explain to the doubtful Caldwell. “Their leader—the big one—he cannot watch over all of them, so to lock them in is the best thing.” He wondered if Caldwell accepted the explanation.

  “Big Lou busted Labranche and Boechter over the head and ran for it when they tried to take him,” said Shaw grimly, “just as he was comin’ here.”

  He raised the chimney of the oil-lamp he’d snagged from Caldwell’s office, but the orange light was little better than a candle’s. January was grateful he had only a mask to contend with, and not elaborate make-up.

  “Labranche is out yet. My guess is Lou’s out of town by this time, but I got my men watchin’ the theater for him. You’re just about his size, Maestro: with the mask an’ all, an’ the way they dim down the lights so the fire’ll show up, from the front I’m guessin’ Knight’s gonna think you’re him.”

  January drew on the tights, shook out the tangle of horsehair sewn to the knees and calves, and shivered in the prop-room’s stuffy chill. “What happened to d’Isola, do you know?”

  “She was here.” Shaw proffered a pot of white greasepaint he’d found tucked behind some buckets, with which January marked his chest and arms with signs he’d seen market-women paint on their baskets. “Like the hair-lady said, she got herself all gussied up, then went up to her room to lay down. That’s the last anybody saw of her. What with Big Lou absquatulatin’, an’ Tillich pukin’, an’ Belaggio pullin’ foot in the mornin’ for New York, whatever happens, we better get somebody on that stage or we lose our chance to hog-tie Knight.”

  “Wonderful.” January put on the mask and tried to get some idea of what he looked like in an ornate mirror. To his own eyes he appeared neither African nor diabolical, only goose-fleshed and rather silly. “Leaving him at large and still nervous about what Marguerite—or I— might remember from our days in Paris. Do you remember if anyone else from the Opera Society was backstage then? Anyone who might also be connected with Knight?”

  “They’s all in an’ out. That Burton fella, an’ Trulove—Mrs. Trulove, too, snoopin’ around tryin’ to catch her husband tradin’ the time of day with that Irish—er—damsel. What would Knight have against that little d’Isola gal? She don’t sing that bad.”

  What indeed? thought January, and he ducked through the prop-room door again, to find everyone clustered around Consuela Montero as she came up the stairs.

  “Bueno, bueno, I will sing,” she was saying crossly, shedding sables, bonnet, gloves already as she strode to her dressing-room. “First it is, O Consuela, you are not as good as that little Neapolitan tart. Then it is, O Consuela, you must learn Euridice in the next two days. . . . But oh, so sorry, we shall use this d’Isola after all. . . . Hannibal? Corazón?” She looked around her. “Ai, the man is never about when you have need of him!”

  The dressing-room door slammed behind her.

  From the front, through the curtains, through the flies and scrims and clustered trees of Arcady, January could hear the murmur of voices, the boisterous whoop of some Kaintuck in the stalls, and a woman’s coarse, shrill laugh.

  Orfeo ed Euridice, before THAT audience. God help us.

  January stepped once more into the concealing shadows of the flats as the chorus filed on past him. In the hall the overture had started, beautiful and delicate, muffled by velvet, by bodies, by paper-leaved trees and canvas. Cavallo in his black tunic paused, his broken lyre in hand, to trade a quick whisper with Tiberio—“. . . in La Scala,” he said, naming the greatest theater in Milan, where presumably the impresarios didn’t deal in slaves on the side. The heat of the gas-jets flowed back, the smell thick and gritty. Caldwell’s voice echoed in the backstage. “But where could she have gone to?”

  The curtain went up.

  The first act was, mercifully, short. January gritted his teeth, torn between the grief and beauty of the music and the rising noise of the pit. Conditions were not ideal and Cavallo, who had arrived late with Ponte, was nervous and out of voice, but had Orpheus himself been singing January doubted the Americans would have sat still for it. There was no getting around the fact that for most of the act it was one man in a golden wig alone on-stage singing in a language nobody understood.

  “Give that feller a musical saw!” somebody shouted about two verses into “Cerco il mio ben cosi,” and was joined by other cries: “Kin you at least juggle them apples?”

  In the wings, January understood.

  Euridice dead, and yet I breathe . . .

  Return her to me, or shut me up in death myself. . . .

  Thus his own heart had cried to the dark of the empty Paris streets, those smothering weeks of the cholera, following his wife’s death. The dark had not replied.

  But no one in the pit, unfortunately, understood Italian. “I like that dress you’re wearin’!” “How about singin’ ‘Sweet Violets’?” Howls, whoops, and whistles greeted the descent of Love from the flies, and January knew exactly why a few moments of quiet greeted the beginning of Madame Chiavari’s “Se il dolce suon.” I am that sweetest song. . . . They were hoping now that something would happen.

  And, of course, it didn’t.

  “Pigs!” Cavallo flung himself off-stage like a man into battle. “Swine grunting and nosing at the most beautiful music . . .” He sprang out of the way as Paddy and Liam shoved sections of rock past him, and Tiberio ran to join the hosepipes to the gas-jets that would illuminate the fanged and towered doors of Hell. Amid her attendant Nymphs and Heroines, Montero was re-arranging the black curls of her wig and talking impatiently to Bruno Ponte, her ample curves beneath the white grave-robe and bandages the least ghost-like thing imaginable.

  “Where has he got to, then? He said he had a thought as to where that provoking girl had got to, and this was the last I saw . . .”

  Ponte, transformed from Arcadian shepherd to fuzzy-legged demon, shook his head. “I told him myself I had checked all the boxes, and the attics, though what she would be doing in those places in the first place I cannot imagine. . . .”

  Belaggio emerged from his office, glanced around him as if seeking someone—Big Lou, probably, thought January—then hastened to the rehearsal-room door with the a
ir of a man hoping for the best. “On-stage, go, now,” he heard the impresario saying in rough Spanish, gesturing to the horrifically-costumed men as they emerged. “Bruno . . .”

  Ponte dashed to lead the demons onto the stage. None of the African women, January noted, were in the actual performance—he wondered how Belaggio had explained them to Caldwell. Of course the selected members of the Opera Society would ask for women. Every breeder of new slaves was a plus.

  January stepped into the line of demons as they streamed past, and searched out a place for himself as close to the concealing rocks as he could manage. Between the footlights, the firepots, and the gas-jets, the whole stage was like an oven; for a moment all he could think of was that.

  Then it came to him that after nearly twenty years of playing in anywhere from two to thirty operas in a year, this was the first time he had ever actually been on a stage. Even in Paris no one hired black men, even for chorus work. For a moment he was seized with an almost unbearable terror, a quaking conviction of nakedness, and a certainty that when the Chorus of Devils leapt forward to surround Orfeo, he, Benjamin January, was going to trip on his own big feet and fall flat on his face in front of everyone in New Orleans.

  He wanted to flee to the darkest corner of backstage and vomit.

  The ballet dancers blew like bright-colored leaves through the wings to change into Blessed Spirits in double time.

  Gluck’s unearthly music replaced the Boston Woodcutter’s March.

  The curtains parted.

  Flame glared and burst from the black-and-red gates of stone and iron, and steam billowed from the jets of the machine beneath the stage. The audience—returned to good humor by the ballet—fell silent as the demons surged forward, leaping and cavorting before the doors of Hell.

  Given the relatively few actual singers and dancers in the crowd on-stage, January thought the angular, disharmonious Demon Chorus went quite well. The Africans kept to the rocks at the stage’s edge, as they’d been instructed, leapt, bounced, strutted, and spun, shouting and shaking their make-believe weapons with the enthusiasm of men who have learned to take each day as it comes. Orfeo, arrayed in white now and clutching Apollo’s golden lyre, stepped to the gates and was surrounded, shrieked at, and threatened, while Tiberio laid on greater columns of fire from the gas-jets and Paddy and Liam shook the smoke-painted scrims to catch the filtered crimson light. January had always respected this scene in an opera whose basic premise—the original legend’s tragedy of lost trust transformed by a banally happy ending—annoyed him.