Benjamin January 1 - A Free Man Of Color (24 page)

January's stomach turned as he remembered those two quiet-faced young men carrying their sister's coffin —those boys who would have nothing further to do with their mother.

“So she hardly needs your services in that direction anymore, p'tit.” Livia wrapped two fingers in the gathering threads and pulled the long band of hemmed silk into ruffles with a gesture so heartbreakingly like Ayasha's that January looked aside. Did all women learn the exact motions, the same ways of doing things with needle and cloth, like the positions and movements of ballet? “I hope,” she went on crisply, “that we will have no more trouble of that kind. By the way,” she added, as January opened his mouth to inform her that yes, they were going to have a good deal more trouble of that kind if they didn't want to see him hanged. “Uncle Bichet's nephew came by to tell you they've had to find another fiddler for tonight. Hannibal's ill.”

Minou's dark eyes filled with concern. “Should one of us go down to his rooms? See that he's well?”

“I'll go tomorrow.” January got to his feet, glanced at the camelback clock on the sideboard as he put up his coffee cup. The dancing started at eight-thirty at Hermann's, and his bones ached for sleep.

“I've told Bella to get you some supper in the kitchen,” said his mother, threading another needle and beginning to whip the ruffles onto the skirt. “Your sister and I will be working for a few hours yet.”

Not “I'm sorry you spent last night in the Calaboza,”
thought January, half-angry, half-wondering as he stepped through the open doors to the courtyard in the back. Not “I'm sorry I didn 't come and get you out.” She didn't even bother to make an excuse: “I broke my leg. A friend died. I was kidnapped by Berber tribesmen on my way down Rue Saint Pierre.”

Not “Are you in any danger still, p'tit?”

Not “Can I help?”

But he could not remember a time when she would ever have said such a thing.

The company crowded into the great double parlor of the Hermann house on Rue St. Philippe was smaller than that of the Blue Ribbon Ball but considerably more select. Still, January saw many of the costumes he'd been seeing on and off since Twelfth Night, and thanks to Dominique's notes, he could now put names to the blue-and-yellow Ivanhoe, Anatole—attending tonight with the fair Rowena rather than the dark Rebecca—to the Jove with the gold wire beard, to various corsairs, Mohicans, lions, and biblical kings. The Creole aristocracy was out in force, and Uncle Bichet, who knew everyone in the French town by sight and reputation, filled in the gaps left in his knowledge between waltzes, cotillions, and an occasional, obligatory minuet.

Aunt Alicia Picard was the massive-hipped, clinging woman in the somber puce ball gown who never ceased talking—about her rheumatism, her migraines, and her digestion, to judge by her gestures. She had a trick of standing too close to her peevish-faced female companion—her son's wife, according to Uncle Bichet—and picking nervously at her dress, her glove, her arm. January noticed that every time the daughter-in-law escaped to a conversation with someone else, Aunt Picard would feel faint or find some errand that could be done by no one else.

“I'd rather peddle gumbo in the market than live with Alicia Picard,”
his mother had said. He began to understand why Madeleine Trepagier would do almost anything rather than be forced by the loss of Les Saules to live in this woman's house.

When Aunt Picard came close to the musicians' bower, January could hear that her conversation centered exclusively on her illnesses and the deaths of various members of her family insofar as they had grieved or inconvenienced her.

Indeed, most of the Creole matrons wore the sober hues suggestive of recent mourning. Madame Trepagier had not been the only one to suffer losses in last summer's scourge. There could not have been a family in town untouched.

“The chances of the cholera returning?” The voice of Dr. Soublet, one of the better-known physicians of the town, carried through a lull in the music. “My dear Madame Picard, due to the expulsion of the febrile gasses by the burning of gunpowder to combat the yellow fever, all the conditions conducive to the Asiatic cholera have been swept from our city, and in fact, there were far fewer cases than have been popularly supposed.”

Xavier Peralta, as regal in dark evening dress as he had been in the satins of the ancien regime, frowned. “According to the newspapers, over six thousand died.”

“My dear Monsieur Peralta,” exclaimed the physician, “please, please do not consider a word of what those ignoramuses say in the paper! They persist in the delusion that a disease is a single entity, a sort of evil spirit that seizes on a man and that can be chased away with a single magic spell. Disease is dis-ease—a combination of conditions that must be separately treated: by bleeding, to lower the constitution of the patient, while certain ill humours are driven out with heroic quantities of calomel. What are popularly ascribed as cases of Asiatic cholera may very well have had another source entirely. For instance, the symptoms of what are lumped together as cholera morbus are exactly those of arsenical poisoning.”

“I say,” laughed one of the Delaporte boys, “does that mean that six thousand wives poisoned their husbands in New Orleans last summer?”

“Slaves poisoned their masters, more like,” declared a tall, extremely beautiful Creole lady in dark red. She turned burning black eyes upon Peralta's companion, a tallish trim gentleman in a coat of slightly old-fashioned cut and a stock buckled high about his neck. “You cannot tell me you haven't seen such, Monsieur Tremouille.” The commander of the New Orleans City Guard looked uncomfortable. “On rare occasions, of course, Madame Lalaurie,” he said. “But as Dr. Soublet says, a variety of causes can engender the same effect. Frequently if a servant considers himself ill-used—”

“Dieu, servants always consider themselves ill-used,” laughed Madame Lalaurie. “If they are but chided for stealing food, they whine and beg and carry on as if it were their right to rob the very people who feed and clothe them and keep a roof above their heads. Without proper discipline, not only would they be wretchedly unhappy, but society itself would crumble, as we saw in France and more recently in Haiti.”

“Servants need discipline,” agreed a tall man, gorgeously attired as the Jack of Diamonds. “Not only need it, but crave it without knowing it. Even as wives do, on occasion.”

“That is a matter which can easily be carried to extreme, Monsieur Trepagier.” An enormous, ovine-countenanced woman, whom January would have deduced as Henri Viellard's mother even without Uncle Bichet's sotto voce identification, turned to face him, a maneuver reminiscent of the Chateau of Versailles executing a 180-degree rotation with all its gardens in tow. “And an opinion I would show a certain reticence in expressing, were I in quest of a bride.”

“Trepagier?” January glanced over at the cellist. “Not the long-lost brother?”

“Lord, no.” Uncle Bichet shook his head over his music. “Brother Claud took off right after the wedding with one of Dubonnet Pere's housemaids and five hundred dollars' worth of Aunt Paulina Livaudais's jewelry. That's Charles-Louis, from the Jefferson Parish branch of the family. He was there at the Theatre d'Orleans t'other night, but spent most of his time dallyin' in one of the private boxes with Madame Solange Bouille.”

Trepagier's cheeks darkened with anger below the edge of his mask. “Well, begging your pardon, Madame Viellard, but I suspect the women who go on about it are making more of it than it is. Women need to feel a strong hand, same as servants do.”

“I was never conscious of such a need.”

Surveying Madame Viellard, January suppressed the powerful suspicion that the woman had never been married at all and had produced Henri and his five stout, myopic, and nearly identical sisters by spontaneous generation.

“Yet I must agree with Monsieur Trepagier,” said Madame Lalaurie in her deep, beautiful voice. “A woman respects strength, needs it for her happiness.” Her eye lingered dismissively on Henri Viellard, clothed for the occasion in a highly fashionable coat of pale blue and several acres of pink silk waistcoat embroidered with forget-me-nots. “There is no shame in a young man displaying it. Perhaps your young Galen, Monsieur Peralta, took the matter to an extreme, when not so long ago he took a stick to an Irishwoman who was insolent to him in the street, but ferocity can more easily be tamed than spinelessness stiffened to the proper resolution.”

Her husband, pale and small and silent in the shadow of her skirts, folded gloved hands like waxy little flowers and vouchsafed no opinion.

“That incident was long ago,” said Peralta quickly. “He was little more than a child then, and believe me, these rages of his have been chastised out of him.” His blue eyes remained steady on the woman's face, but January could almost sense the man's awareness of Tremouille —wholly occupied himself with a cup of tafia punch—at his elbow. "These days he would not harm so much as a fly.quot;

“It is his loss,” said Madame Lalaurie gravely. “And your error, to rob him of the very quality that will one day make of him a good husbandman for your lands.”

“Still,” began the pinch-lipped Madame Picard the Younger, “I've heard that young Galen is an absolute fiend in the salon d'epee. He—”

“Lisette!” Aunt Picard materialized at her elbow, fanning herself and rolling her eyes. “Lisette, I'm suddenly feeling quite faint. I'm sure it's la grippe . . . I've felt a desperate unbalance of my vitreous humors all evening. Be a good girl and fetch me a glass of negus. Oh, and Dr. Soublet . . .” She contrived to draw the physician after her as she pursued her hapless daughter-in-law toward the refreshment tables. “Perhaps you could recommend to me . . .”

“Please do not betray me,”
Madeleine Trepagier had begged, on the gallery of that dilapidated, worthless plantation. To betray her, January understood—as he led the musicians into a light Schubert air and the talk in the room drifted to other matters—would be to cut her off entirely from both the Picards and the Trepagiers. She had rejected their help already, help that would reduce her to the status of a chattel once again, and he guessed it would not take much to widen the rift.

Without the families behind her . . .

What?
he asked himself. They'll hang her instead of me? He didn't think it likely. And in any case, he knew that whoever it was who'd twisted that scarf or cord or whatever it had been around Angelique Crozat's neck, it hadn't been her.

Near the buffet table a woman was saying, “. . . Well, of course I knew Caroline had actually broken it, but I couldn't say so in front of the servants, you know. I mean, she is my niece. So I slapped Rose a couple of licks and told her never to let it happen again.” Cold stirred within him, a dense dread like a lump of stone in his chest.

No matter how many of its younger scions Madeleine Trepagier refused to marry, her family would stand by her if she were accused of a colored woman's murder. And in the absence of hard evidence of any kind, the city would much prefer a culprit without power, a culprit who wasn't white.

January's head ached, fear that it was hard to banish coming back over him in the music's gentle flow. What made it all worse was that he liked Madeleine and respected her: the child he had taught, with her eerie passion for music and her grave acceptance of him as he was; the woman who was fighting to keep her freedom, who trusted him.

He did not really want the decision to come down to a choice between her or him.

He suspected he knew what the choice of those in power would be.

The Peralta town house stood on Rue Chartres, not far from the Place des Armes. A stately building of lettuce-green stucco, it stood three stories high and three bays broad, ironwork galleries decorating the second and third floors and a shop that dealt in fine French furniture occupying the ground floor. At this hour the pink shutters over the shop's French windows had just been opened. A sprightly-looking white woman with her black curls wrapped against the dust swept the banquette outside her doors, while an elderly black man set out planks over the gutter in front of the flagstone carriageway that ran from the street back into the courtyard.

January watched from the corner of Rue St. Philippe until the shopkeeper had gone inside, then walked casually along the banquette, looking about as if he had never seen these pink and yellow buildings, these dark tunnels and the stained-glass brightness of the courts at their ends, until he reached the carriage entrance.

It was not quite eight in the morning. Only servants, or market women in bright head scarfs, were abroad, and few of those. By the smoke-yellowed daylight the street seemed half asleep, shutters closed, gutters floating with sodden Carnival trash.

In his most Parisian French, January said, “Excuse me, good sir. Will this street take me to the market?” He pointed upriver along Rue Chartres.

The slave bowed, frowned, and replied, “I'm not rightly sure, sir.” The sir was a tribute to the accent: January was not well dressed. “I'm new here in town. Yetta!” He called back over his shoulder. “Yetta, gentleman here wants to know where the market is. You know that?”

A harassed-looking woman appeared, drying her hands on her apron, from the courtyard. “Should be down that ways, I think. . . .” She pointed vaguely in the direction of the river. Her French was the kind called “mo kuri mo vini,” heavily mixed with African idiom. “I'm sorry, sir,” she added. “We're all of us new here in town, just this week, we're still findin' our way around our ownselves. You from outa town too?” She gave him a sunny gap-toothed smile.

“Paris.” January shook his head. “I was born here, but that was some while ago. I haven't been in Louisiana since I was no higher than your knee. I thought I'd remember more, but I confess I feel I've been set down in Moscow.”

“Try askin' by the shop,” suggested Yetta. “Helga— Mamzelle Richter, what owns the place—she knows this city like a mouse knows the barn. She can tell you the best place to buy what you're after, too.”

“Thank you.” He smiled and slipped them each a couple of reales, then went into Mademoiselle Richter's shop and asked, just to make sure, commenting that Carnival seemed an odd time to entirely change one's household staff.