Benjamin January 1 - A Free Man Of Color (38 page)

The man January had struck came back at him like a bobcat, but January was a good five inches taller and far heavier and lifted him bodily, slamming him to the pavement like a sack of corn. He kicked him, very hard, then turned to seize the second man, who was wading knee-deep in the heaving stream of the gutter, knife flashing in his hand, above the billow of black petticoats and floating veils beneath him. He stomped his foot down, pinning Madame Trepagier under the water, then cursed in surprise and fell on top of her. January was on them by then, dragging him up by a wad of dripping, verminous hair.

The knife slashed and gleamed. January twisted sideways, losing his grip, and then the man was pelting away along the building fronts of Rue Chartres, as a slender old man with a coachman's whip came running up unsteadily, gasping for breath, his face ashy.

Madame Trepagier was trying to rise, her dragging skirts and veils a soaked confusion about her, trembling so badly she could barely stand. She shrank from January's steadying hand with a cry, then looked up at his face. For an instant he thought she would break down, cling to him weeping, but she turned away, hugging herself desperately in her soaked winding-sheets of veils. “I'm all right.” Her voice was tense as harp wire, but low and steady. “I'm all right.”

“Madame Madeleine, Madame Madeleine!” The old coachman looked as if he needed to be propped up himself. “You all right? You hurt?” In the shadows of the alley mouth only his eyes and teeth and silver coat buttons caught the reflection of the lights along the Cabildo's colonnade. Like a drenched crow in mourning weeds, wet veils plastered over her cheeks, Madame Trepagier was little more than a sooty cloud. “Come on, Madame Madeleine. I'll take you back to your Aunt Pi-card's, get those wet clothes off you—”

“No,” she said quickly. “Not my aunt's.”

Not, thought January, if she'd left there three hours ago with a manufactured headache.

He put a steadying hand under her elbow. She stiffened, but did not pull away.

“Come,” he said. “I'll get you to my sister's.”

“It . . . was foolish of me. Walking down that alleyway, I mean.” Madeleine Trepagier made a small movement with her hand toward her unraveled torrent of dark hair, and Dominique said, “Sh-sh-sh,” and moved the trembling fingers away. Her own hands worked competently with the soft pig-bristle brush, stroking out the long, damp swatches, less now to untangle them than to let them dry and to calm the woman who sat in the chair before her, laced into a borrowed corset and a borrowed dress and with a cup of herb tisane steaming before her. The honey-gold moire of the gown, with its ribbons of caramel and pink, set off Madeleine's warm complexion as beautifully as it did Dominique's. January wondered how long it would be before the woman abandoned her mourning and returned to wearing colors like this again.

“I never thought ruffians would be lurking that close to the police station,” continued Madeleine, folding her hands obediently in her lap. “I was just walking back from my Aunt Picard's over on Rue Toulouse.”

Dominique's dress was cut lower than a widow's high-made collar, and the small gold cross Madeleine wore around her throat was just visible in the pit between her collarbones. January saw again the way her head had fallen back to receive the sword master's mouth on hers, the desperate strength with which they had held each other in the thin spit of the rain.

Augustus and Madeleine. A glimpse of deerskin, as golden as the dress she wore now, in the doorway as he began the first waltz. Looking for him? And the Prussian in his black-and-green Elizabethan doublet, crossing the downstairs lobby as Galen Peralta descended after his fight with Angelique.

Questions crowded his mind, a jam of logs at high water behind his teeth, and the first of them, the largest of them, was always, What do I do?

He was glad of Dominique's prattle, of her presence in the room. It gave him time to think.

“Cathedral Alley isn't so very far from the levee,” he pointed out in time. “Or from Gallatin Street. We had Kaintucks all over town during Mardi Gras.”

Dominique sniffed. “And I'm sure the significance of Ash Wednesday completely escaped them. One would think after a week they would get the hint.” If she felt any uncertainty at all about the presence of a white lady in her parlor, she certainly didn't show it. “You poor darling, thank God Ben was there. What were you doing down on Rue Royale, anyway, Ben? I thought you were going to Olympe's.”

“I thought I saw someone who could give me an explanation about the night of the murder,” said January, and his glance crossed Madeleine's. Her eyes, downcast with confusion at finding herself in the house of a placed, went wide with shock and dread.

“Now, don't talk about murders,” said Dominique severely, and patted Madeleine's shoulders. She hesitated for a long moment, then picked her words carefully. “My brother is helping the police investigating Angelique Crozat's murder—for all they're doing,” she added tartly. “Personally, I'm astonished the one who was strangled wasn't that awful harpy of a mother. I was speechless when I heard how she'd sold off all your jewelry and dresses . . . and do you know, Ben, she's been flouncing around town for days in a mourning veil down to her feet, and the most dreadful cheap crepe dress. It streaked black all over Mama's straw-colored divan cushions. Excuse me, dears, I'll just go to the kitchen and see if your coachman is all right.”

Not even random violence that could have ended in murder,
thought January wryly, could shake Dominique's sense of caste. Watching his sister through the arch into the rear parlor, and thence through the French door at the back and into the rainy yard, he knew that the coachman would be shown all consideration, given a cup of coffee and some of Becky's wonderful crepes, in the kitchen. The rain had let up almost completely, and through the open French doors to the street a few droplets still caught the lamplight as they fell. The streaming brightness flashed on the millrace of the gutter, and on the slow, lazy drips from the abat-vent overhead. A fiacre passed, the driver cursing audibly at the Trepagier carriage that stood, horse blanketed, before the cottage. A few streets away a man's voice bellowed, “Now, don't you push me, hear! I am the child of calamity and the second cousin to the yellow fever! I eats Injuns for breakfast. . . .”

Madeleine shuddered profoundly and lowered her forehead to her hand. Very softly, she said, “Don't ask me about it tonight, Monsieur Janvier, please. Thank you —thank you so much—for helping me, for being there.” Her shoulders twitched a little, as if still feeling the grasp of heavy hands, and she brought up a long breath. “I know why you were there. You followed me from . . . from Rue Bienville, didn't you? I thought I saw you as the fiacre pulled away.”

“Yes,” said January softly. She raised her face, her eyes meeting his, steadily, willing him to believe.

“He is innocent. I swear to you he had nothing to do with the murder. I—” She took a deep breath. “I strangled Angelique. Please, please, I beg you . . .”

“You didn't,” said January quietly, “and I know you didn't, Madame. That outfit of yours was leaking black cock feathers all over the building and you were never near that parlor. And you had nothing on you that could have been used for a garrote. Did you stay to see him?”

“No! He had nothing to do with it, I swear to you.”

“Were you with him?”

She hesitated, searching in her mind for what the best answer would be, then cried “No!” a few instants late. “I saw him—that is, I saw him across the lobby. ... I saw him the whole time. But we weren't ... we didn't ...”

She was floundering, and January turned away. The woman sprang to her feet, caught his arm, her face blazing like gold in the soft flicker of the lamp. “Please! Please don't go to the police! Please don't mention his name! Come . . .” She hesitated, stammering, scouting, staring up into his face, trying to read his eyes. “Come to Les Saules tomorrow. I'll talk about anything you want me to then. But not tonight.”

“So you can get a note to him?” asked January.

Her eyes flinched, then returned to his. “No, of course not. It's just chat—”

She got no further. Hannibal Sefton, threadbare coat and long hair damp with the rain, singing a von Weber aria and more than slightly drunk, sprang lightly through the French door from the banquette outside directly behind Madeleine's back, caught her around the waist, and gave her a resounding kiss on the neck.

Madeleine screamed, pure terror in her voice. She wrenched herself free with a violence that knocked away the chair by which she stood and ripped her assailant's face with the clawed fingers of both hands. Hannibal recoiled with a gasp of shock, almost falling back through the doorway. January caught at the terrified woman but she tore herself from him and staggered a step or two into the middle of the room, sobbing and shaking. The next instant Dominique came flying through the dining room door and caught her in her arms.

“It's all right! It's all right! Darling, it's all right, he's a friend of mine—a very impudent friend.”

Hannibal stood, violin case forgotten on the floor beside him, clinging to the doorjamb with one hand while the other felt his bleeding face. His eyes were those of a dog who has come up expecting a pat and received instead a forceful kick in the teeth. “I'm sorry,” he said. “Madame, I'm so sorry, I didn't—” He looked pleadingly from Dominique to January, aghast and helpless. “I thought it was Minou. I swear I thought it was Minou.”

“Oh, and that's how you treat me, is it?” retorted Minou, furious at the result rather than the deed, but furious nonetheless. Held tight in her arms, Madeleine was still racked with long waves of shaking, head bowed over, as if she were about to be sick. If she was faking, thought January, he had never seen it so well done.

And somehow, he did not think her horror at a man's touch was a fake.

“It's all right.” He put a hand on Hannibal's shoulder. “I'll explain outside. Minou, would you go out to Les Saules with Madame Trepagier? I don't think she should be alone.”

“Oh, of course! I've already told Therese to tell Henri—z/that slug ever puts in an appearance—that I've been called away by an emergency, and to give him tisane and flan and everything he might need. Now you get out of here, you bad man.” But she touched Hannibal's forearm to reassure him, as January herded him out the long doors and onto the banquette once more.

Glancing back, January saw his sister help Madame Trepagier into a chair, still trembling violently; heard

Madame Trepagier whisper "Thank you. . . . Thank you.

“Augustus Mayerling, hm?” said Hannibal, when January had finished his narration. Even along a relative backstreet like Rue Burgundy, oil lamps still burned on their curved brackets from the stucco walls of the houses, their light gleaming in the gutters and the wet pavements beyond. Beneath the outthrust galleries of the town houses and shops and the abat-vents of the line of cottages, they were almost completely protected from the increasing rain.

In every house, past the iron-lace balconies and behind spidery lattices of wooden louvers, warm light shone, working a kind of magic in the night. Somewhere someone was playing a banjo—stricdy against the rules of Lent—elsewhere voices sounded from the two sides of a corner grog-shop, shutters opened all the length of the room onto the street, where free blacks and river-trash played cards, cursed, laughed.

“I hate to think it was him,” January finished after a time, “because I like the boy. But of everyone in the Orleans ballroom that night, it sounds to me like Mayerling had the best reason for wanting Angelique dead. And Madame Trepagier knows it. And much as I like him, and much as I don't blame him for doing it, it's him or me ... and I want to look around his rooms for that necklace.”

“And if you don't find it, then what?” asked Hannibal. His voice was a faint, raw rasp, and he coughed as they crossed the planks at the corner of Rue Conti. “It could have been anyone in the ballroom, you know.”

“Then why protect him? Why beg me not to so much as speak his name to the police? Why risk her own neck, if all that would happen to him was a night or two in jail until he was cleared? Other women have lovers. It isn't spoken of, but everyone in town knows who they are. It isn't as if she were deceiving a husband, and the plantation is hers to dispose of as she will, no matter what her family says. She doesn't have to say they were together in the ballroom. She can say they met elsewhere, if she's going to lie about it. But she doesn't. Why would she deny his involvement in anything so completely, if what he did doesn't bear scrutiny? It's not what he did,” said Hannibal quietly. “It's what he is.”

January looked at him blankly. For a moment he thought, With that complexion he can't POSSIBLY be an octoroon trying to pass.

Hannibal hesitated a moment, then said, “Augustus Mayerling is a woman.”

“What?”
It stopped January dead on the banquette.

“Augustus Mayerling is a woman. I don't know what his—her—real name is.” Hannibal started walking again, with that kind of loose-jointed scarecrow grace, his dark eyes turned inward on the recollection.

“But it isn't that unusual, you know. There was that woman who served for years as a man in the Russian cavalry recently. Women fought at Trafalgar and Waterloo disguised as men. I've talked to men who knew them. I found out about Augustus—well, I guessed—almost by accident. About two years ago he picked me up outside a saloon in Gallatin Street where I'd been playing for dimes. Of course they robbed me the minute I was out the door, and he took me back to his place, since I was almost unconscious. I was feverish all night, and he cared for me, and I—it was probably the fever—I could tell the difference. I kissed his hand—her hand—we just looked at each other for a minute. I knew.”

Of all people,
thought January, Hannibal would know.

The fiddler shrugged. “Later we talked about it. I think he was glad to have someone else who knew. I've covered for him now and then, though he seems to have worked out long ago all the little dodges, all the ways of getting around questions, things like keeping shaving tackle in his rooms and staying out of certain situations. But, that wouldn't be possible, for even a day or two, in jail. God knows he's far from the first person to manage it. You're the only one I've told. Don't ...”