Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  It was fortunate, too, that they didn’t have any great distance to cross from the door, because the moment January opened it, Belaggio’s eyes bulged in astonished relief and he cried, “Save us . . . !” causing Cavallo to swing around, gun at the ready. . . .

  “Pull that trigger an’ he’ll still die,” said Shaw, one arm hooked around Bruno’s throat, his pistol at the young man’s head.

  January crossed the room in a stride, wrenched the gun from Cavallo’s hand, and ducked in the same moment, knowing Tiberio would be armed and would have no hesitation about shooting, and he was right. The Sicilian whipped a pistol from his waistband and fired, not at January, but at Knight, blowing the top of the little man’s head off and spraying gore and brains on the green silk of the wall. He flung the empty weapon in January’s face as January grabbed at him, then leapt over the daybed, snatched open the door that led onto the gallery, and whipped through like a snake and into the wall of smoke.

  “Out of here!” January thrust Cavallo toward the secret stairway door, and fumbled for his knife—which he didn’t have, being still clothed in rumpled and bloody demon rags and hair-sewn tights. There were scissors on the dressing-table: he sliced through the scarves that bound d’Isola’s feet, then Hannibal’s, then Belaggio’s as the man bleated wildly.

  “Me, too! Don’t leave me! Dio, I am fainting . . . !”

  Flame billowed through the doorway with the draft of the opened door. The heat was unbelievable, a physical blow. Gasping, January dragged the impresario to his feet, shoved him after the others. As he stumbled last from the room, head swimming, he heard the roar of the paraffin jars exploding. Smoke choked the twisting stairway, smoke and hellish bronze light, and when he caught himself against the walls, they were like an oven’s, the wood itself pouring out smoke as it spiraled toward catching-heat.

  Head throbbing, barely able to see, January half fell down the last steps, tripped on the tangle of corpses, was dragged through the door by hands he could barely see. “Go!” he heard Shaw yell. “. . . Gate . . . Promenade . . .”

  The door transformed from blackness to a wall of fire, and January stumbled, chest heaving, into the stable yard’s flickering dark.

  Somebody threw a wet sheet around his shoulders, guided him to a bench. More water was dumped over his head. He could feel his skin blistering beneath the soaked cloth. Distantly, he was conscious of other people in the fire-streaked gloom; of the gang of men pumping wildly on a fire-engine, spewing water over the wall. Of Belaggio’s babbling about how he knew nothing, nothing, of why he’d been dragged up there with that perfidious Austrian spy Knight. Of Hannibal coughing like a dying horse.

  Falling timbers crashed—sparks flashed on soaked dirt and puddles. He opened his eyes and saw, like a black-and-gold painting of Rembrandt, Shaw and two of his men holding Cavallo and Ponte against the side of the stable while a third kept discreetly close behind Belaggio. Cavallo kept shaking his head. “You have no jurisdiction over me. I am not a citizen of your United States.”

  “You rather I call in them what do have jurisdiction over you?” asked Shaw reasonably. “Which I guess would be the Austrian consul in Havana?”

  January leaned back against the wall. He turned his head: Drusilla d’Isola sat beside him, ghostly in Euridice’s white grave-clothes. “Are you all right?” he asked her.

  She nodded. Her face was a mess of half-melted grease-paint and soot, tracked and smeared by tears and sweat. “I heard a noise in the stairway. I was lying down after getting dressed and made up, and I went to see. It was rats, there were . . . there were two dead men down there. I came back to my dressing-room; Silvio was there . . .”

  “And you left your satchel,” said January. “The satchel you carried the domino in to the Blue Ribbon Ball.”

  “Oh, you found it there?” Her beautiful brows puckered. “I was looking for it. How it got there . . .”

  “It had women’s things in it,” said January, and she hesitated, her frown deepening.

  “How odd,” she said.

  “It is.” From the hip of his ragged tights he unpinned the other thing he’d found in the stair. The tiny topaz, caught at the head of the thin gold shaft, winked again in the reflected glare of the burning theater. “I thought this was even odder.”

  Her breath caught; she put a hand to her lips.

  “You know what it is?” he asked.

  “Of course. It was—it was Vincent’s.” A tear trickled from her eye. “He must have dropped it, one of the nights he came to me.”

  “Very true,” agreed January, holding the toothpick back when she reached to touch it. “But which night?”

  Her glance flickered, for one instant, to his face, and there was nothing of grief, nothing of love, in that dark, watchful alertness.

  Only a moment. Then she buried her face in her hands.

  January took her hands gently and drew them away from her face. “The first time he visited you,” he went on, “—the night Belaggio was attacked—he wore mauve, his usual complete ensemble with amethysts on his watch-fob and glove-buttons and toothpick. And the night of the Truloves’ ball he wore green. I think the only time he wore a suit of pale yellow—the shade that would go with this topaz—was the night he died. We can check with his valet, of course, and the men in the morgue. That was the night you—and Silvio and Bruno and I—were all lured together out to Bayou des Familles.”

  “Alas, that I was not there! Daily I have wondered if my foolishness in going out to the countryside . . .” She glanced around her, but Shaw and Cavallo were still arguing in the whirlwind of firelight and shadow. Most of the few spectators in the yard were clustered near the gate.

  “I couldn’t understand,” said January, “why nothing happened to us at La Cornouiller once we were imprisoned. Only when I realized who you had to be did I see that the point of the entire excursion was for us to be imprisoned together. For me to be the witness that your friends Cavallo and Ponte weren’t in New Orleans the night Vincent Marsan died. And that you weren’t there, either.”

  “I wasn’t!” protested the girl. “This is madness, Signor! I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Her lips trembled; tears welled again in her soft eyes, and she tried once more to bring up her hands to hide her face. “Who do I have to be? These—these men, these slave-stealers . . .”

  “I think if we show you to the deck-hand on the Algiers ferry,” said January gently, “—not dressed in organdy with your hair up, I mean, but in a calico frock and a tignon—he’d recognize the ‘li’l nigger gal’ who took the ferry into town at seven or eight o’clock Thursday evening. Almost certainly he’d recognize the one who left town as soon as it was light enough for her to travel safely the next morning. And we probably won’t have any trouble at all finding the stable in Algiers where you put up M’sieu Desdunes’s white-stockinged bay gelding for the night.”

  D’Isola sat silent, looking at him as he turned the toothpick in his big fingers, catching the firelight in the jewel at its head.

  “You waited a long time for him, didn’t you?” he asked softly. “And I understand. Killing your brother—a man whose name wasn’t even mentioned by the newspaper, a cab-driver even more insignificant to the white jury and the white murderer than the plaçée over whom such fuss was made—did more than rob you of the only person who cared for you. You were twelve. There’s few ways a twelve-year-old girl can make her living once the only person who cares for her is gone.”

  She said nothing, but the reflections of the flames that filled those huge, dark eyes swam again with tears. These, he guessed, were real.

  “You sang,” said January gently. “Beautifully, according to old M’sieu Faon at the stable, when I went back and asked him. I’m not sure how you managed to reach Naples or who it was who taught you. . . .” She jerked her head aside, but not before he saw the self-loathing in her face, and he remembered Cavallo’s words, She obtained her training in whatever fashion she could. . . .
“It’s very easy to pass an Italian as an octoroon, and vice versa, if they don’t have the African features. Once you met Belaggio, it was easy. If the Gower boys hadn’t made a mistake and attacked the wrong man—and in doing so threw suspicion on your friends—everything would have gone very simply.”

  He thought she flinched at mention of the Gower boys, but still she said nothing. Only gazed stonily into the leaping shadows of the yard, tears running down her face.

  Seeing what? The face of her brother Aucassin Couvent?

  The greedy flame in the eyes of Vincent Marsan, just before he died, like Othello, upon a kiss?

  “It had nothing to do with me!” Belaggio wailed. “A babe unborn is not more innocent! Bene, I had a few harmless dealings with Signor Marsan, but I have no idea why these men would say that I took money from the Austrians or anyone else. . . .”

  “I don’t think anyone would have suspected you,” January went on, “or thought to connect you with Aucassin Couvent, dead ten years and buried in some nameless grave. Why should they? You’d been in town only a day or two. You had no connection with M’sieu Knight’s skulduggeries, or Incantobelli’s schemes of revenge. Putting the blood in the drawer was very good, by the way; a way to attack yourself without coming to any real harm. Unlike the bruises you later put on your own wrists, or the razor-cuts on your fingers. Certainly no connection with Sidonie Lalage.”

  D’Isola—the Isolated One, the name meant in Italian, January remembered: the One who is Alone—turned her head back sharply. Had it not been for the two long tear-streaks in the grimed paint on her face, he would never have thought she had wept at Aucassin Couvent’s name.

  In a very clear, cold voice she said, “Signor, I have no idea what you are talking about. You warned me of Signor Marsan once. Since your sister is a courtesan, I assume she knew of what she spoke, though he was never anything but kind and gentle to me.” She drew her hands away from his, but her glance flickered to Shaw, standing a little distance away in the firelight. January saw desperation in her eyes.

  “Who these other people are of whom you speak, and why you would imagine that I would have wished to harm a hair of my beautiful Vincent’s head, I cannot think. But if you take this ridiculous tale to anyone, I will be forced to . . .”

  “Besides,” said a girl’s voice in halting Italian, and a girl’s slim form stepped from the darkness, “you were asleep in the jail-house by the bayou that night. I took you out a blanket, and something to eat, remember? Why did you leave like you did, before it got light?”

  For one instant Drusilla d’Isola’s eyes widened with shock, staring up into the bright black gaze of Vincent Marsan’s daughter. For one instant January saw in her eyes the shaken, almost unbelieving relief he had seen at Trulove’s reception, when he’d offered her a simpler song to sing, to save her the humiliation of Anne Trulove’s steely gaze. With barely a pause for breath, she said, “I got to thinking that you might be with them—with the men who tied me up and took me away. The place was a—a jail.”

  “But I told you my father was away,” said Jocelyn Marsan, perhaps a little more emphatically than normal conversation required. She cocked her head a little, to regard January. “I didn’t tell Mother—didn’t tell anyone— that I’d found someone there, because I was afraid I’d be punished. Father had very—distinct—ideas about where girls should and shouldn’t go.” She hitched around her shoulders the blanket someone had given her, to cover her soot-stained white petticoats: white and black, like her colorless face with its streaks of smoke and grime.

  He would even beat his own . . . Judy the cook had started to say, and stopped herself. And January recalled the bruises on Jocelyn’s arms.

  “She was gone when I went out in the early morning.” The girl’s voice was matter-of-fact. “But I didn’t dare say anything, because of Big Lou.”

  Big Lou’s dark form stood silhouetted by the dimming gold light in the stable-yard gate, swaying a little between two City Guards and two men in soaked and mud-smeared evening-dress. Beyond the wall, the flame could no longer be seen; the smell of fresh smoke had given way to the wet pong of ashes. Somewhere January heard Caldwell talking about fire insurance: “I’m only glad no one was killed. It’s almost a miracle so few were injured. Fire usually spreads so fast in theaters. . . .”

  The light of cressets, borne into the yard by hotel servants, took the place of the wild flare of the fire, and by it Jocelyn Marsan’s thin face looked older, and very calm.

  She turned to look down at d’Isola again. “Were you my father’s . . . friend?”

  “I knew your father, yes,” said the singer, still a little hesitant, but settled now into her role. “It is strange that it would be his daughter who helped me that night. I never even thought to ask your name.” And she clasped the young girl’s hands. “Thank you, Signorina . . . Jocelyn, is it? Thank you.”

  For a moment their eyes locked.

  “And so you see . . .” Jocelyn transferred her gaze to January, bright black eyes like a lizard’s, or a bird’s. “You must have been mistaken about this person you think killed my father. Because this is the woman who spent that night in the jail-house at Les Roseaux.” One hand rested on the white cerement of her shoulder, and the small, pointed chin lifted a little. “She could not possibly have killed my father, sir. And that I will swear in court.”

  D’Isola’s hand stole up and touched those square-ended, stick-thin fingers. The face she turned to January, with its paint smeared and smuts and streaks of ash clinging to her hair, was serene and just the tiniest bit defiant. Susanna facing down Count Almaviva. The lovely Anna defying the evil steward Gaveston to take her castle and her lover away from her. And in Jocelyn’s face, equally steady, equally still, January saw the dilapidated house at Les Roseaux, the terror in Madame Marsan’s eyes when Big Lou said, Michie Vincent don’t like to be kept waitin’. The bruises on the faces of the slaves.

  Sidonie Lalage—and Aucassin Couvent—had gone unavenged because no white jury would credit the evidence of a person of color against a white. This, too, was in Jocelyn’s eyes.

  January sighed. “Then I don’t think there’s anything more to be said.” He rose, and nearly fell to his knees. Every limb ached searingly; nausea swept from his blistered shoulders and back. He staggered, and then straightened up. Shaw and Hannibal were coming toward him, as more and more lanterns and torches were brought into the stable yard. More and more men and women in mud-bespattered evening-dress or gaudy and improbable costumes, nursing bruises and abrasions but, January gathered, no burns. He saw Rose slip in through the crowd by the gate, stand looking around for him. Saw Dominique, with a half-dozen of her girlfriends, exclaiming on ruined skirts and ripped petticoats but already beginning to shake their heads and negotiate whose house they’d go to for coffee . . .

  Across the yard, a small, pale woman called out Jocelyn’s name, and the girl waved, called back, “I’m here, Tante Louise!” She turned back to January and held out her hand. “May I have my father’s toothpick? We’ll be selling most of his things in order to get along.”

  January laid it in the small, black-gloved palm.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Of the fifty Africans who comprised the Demon Chorus, about two dozen were eventually rounded up in diverse parts of the city. Those members of the St. Mary Opera Society who applied to the Cabildo for recovery of their errant human property—Mrs. Redfern, Fitzhugh Trulove, Jed Burton, and others—swore they’d bought them from Erasmus Knight in good faith, and variously stormed, cursed, and threatened legal action when Shaw informed them that the slaves had been smuggled into the country and would be shipped back to Cuba by the next boat. They were repaid out of the money found in Belaggio’s satchel, which Bruno Ponte had had in his hands at the time of his arrest.

  The rest of the slaves were never found.

  At least, not by anyone who ever reported them so.

  Lorenzo Belaggio, Silvio Cavallo, and Bruno Ponte were i
ncarcerated in the Cabildo for two weeks, until an attaché arrived from the Austrian consul in Havana to take them back to that city. John Davis, still awaiting trial in the same cell, was forbearing and affable to his newest room-mates but took approximately two hundred dollars in IOUs from Belaggio at faro, for which his lawyer was subsequently forced to sue the Assistant Police Commissioner of Milan. Knight’s clerk Tillich, who was also arrested that night at his lodgings near the Circos Market, spent some weeks in the prison before being hanged on charges of attempted murder against Marguerite Scie, accessory to the murder of Orfeo Castorini—known also as Incantobelli— and treason. Big Lou did not testify in court, but as he was sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor, January assumed that he must have told Shaw enough to put him on the trail of evidence that led to conviction. With the papers found in Knight’s brief, there was very little question of Tillich’s guilt.

  No trace was ever found of Gaio Tiberio, either in the gutted ruin of the American Theater or elsewhere. The theater itself was repaired, and re-opened the following autumn with a complete season of Italian Opera, which was extremely well received. The following year Caldwell opened a second and larger theater immediately behind it on St. Charles Avenue.

  Drusilla d’Isola checked quietly out of the City Hotel the day after the theater fire, and took ship for New York.

  “It may be that’s what hurt her most,” said January a few weeks later, when Marguerite Scie asked him about the events surrounding the St. Mary Opera Society’s first New Orleans season, “that after she did everything she could to make sure that her two friends had alibis for the night of the murder, they were lukewarm—to say the least—in trying to get her away from Tiberio.”