Die Upon a Kiss (16 page)

“Jealous?” Dominique stared at him as if he’d idly put himself forward as a prospective husband for Andrew Jackson’s sister. “P’tit, don’t you know? Vincent Marsan
killed
a plaçée of his just for speaking with another man.”

“Killed
her?”

“Slashed her to death with his sword-cane.”

“A free woman?” January stared at her, stunned. He had, in two years, reaccustomed himself to the yawning chasm between the rights of the whites and the ever-diminishing legal position of the free colored; still, this was more than he’d expected or feared. “Do they know this?” He remembered the hardness of those blue eyes, the way Marsan had lunged for Belaggio at Trulove’s; saw that powerful pale-blue figure retreating down Rue St. Louis in casual chat with Trulove. Saw him dancing with Anne Trulove, with Henrietta Granville, while their husbands looked on.

When Knight had said,
You faced ruin,
January thought the man spoke of money.

“Was it proven?”

“Yes!
There was a terrific scandal over it. They found his gloves on the scene, and his cane, or anyway rose-colored gloves that were like the pair he’d bought the week before and a cane with a big rose-colored stone in its head, though of course Marsan said they weren’t his. Even ten years ago, near-bankrupt as he was then with only that wretched little plantation, he always had things that matched. He has them made specially, to his orders, by Dumetz in the Rue Chartres—who charged Iphigénie’s friend Yves Valcour
five dollars
to make a coat, out of ivy-green superfine, but it was so beautiful, I went to him to have a jacket made—out of that clay-colored silk-satin, you remember? He made a big show in court of trying to get the gloves on his hands—M’sieu Marsan, I mean— and swearing they were too small. . . .”

“If I were on trial for murder, I’d make sure I couldn’t get the gloves on, either.” Hannibal bit into a beignet in a snowfall of powdered sugar.

“It came to trial?”

“Of
course,
p’tit,” said Dominique patiently. She leaned forward, the diamond clusters at her ears swinging like chandeliers. “Her family made sure of that. But of course the jury were all white men. Even the ones who weren’t related to Marsan or his wife—and just about half the Creoles in town are—do business with him, or his family, or his wife’s family. Hiring men to kill Signor Belaggio because he was jealous over Mademoiselle d’Isola would be
nothing
to him.”

“And he could get away with it,” said January slowly, “because Belaggio is a foreigner.” There was a sour taste in his mouth. “The Austrians don’t even have a consul in town to look after the affairs of their subjects here. No one would inquire.”

He thought again about Marsan’s striking beauty that so dazzled La d’Isola; of how cold that marble-fine countenance was, until rage or jealousy transformed it. D’Isola’s sweet, desperate voice came back to his mind, and the doomed Desdemona’s words,
Sing willow, willow,
sing willow. . . . His stubbornness and frowns, these I embrace. . . .

But I love him.
As if that would somehow change what Marsan was.

Rising, he picked up his music-satchel, and that which Belaggio had given La d’Isola. “I’ll walk you home,” he told Dominique.

“Will you be all right?” he asked as the three of them made their way up Rue Du Maine away from the torchlight and music of the square. The fog was thinner away from the river, but the light that suffused the mist failed quickly. The clouded glare of the iron lanterns on their chains above the intersections failed to do more than guide pedestrians from one street to the next. January kept glancing at the dark mouths of the passways between the houses, listening behind him for the wet step of other boots on the banquette.

He had a knife,
Madame Bontemps had said.

And he knew where January lived.

If he existed at all.

The dark air breathed of dampness, of chimney-smoke and sewage. Dominique’s pattens scraped metallically on the brick underfoot, and her enormous white wig made a bobbing splotch, like an overfed ghost in the dark.

“I think so.” She drew a deep breath and pulled her bronze silk cloak closer about her shoulders. “Yes, of course I’ll be all right, p’tit. Even if the worst happens and Henri—decides to sever our friendship, I know he’ll be generous.” The brittle note was back in her voice. The artificial airiness of a woman pretending not to care. Pretending not to hurt.

“The question is,” put in Hannibal, his breath laboring as he walked, “how generous will Mama Viellard and Mademoiselle Chloë allow him to be? This is a girl who had her own nurse and half-sister sold at auction when her father died.”

“I think we can trust Mama,” said January grimly, “to make sure your rights, at least, are protected.”

“Oh, yes,” replied Minou in a tiny voice. “Yes.”

“She may have her faults,” mused Hannibal, “but give your mother a dollar to fight for and there will be blood in the gutters.” He stopped, leaning against the wall, and tucked his violin case beneath his arm to press one hand to his side. “Shall I continue on with you to your doorstep,
amicus meus?
Not that I’ll be a great deal of help to you against such hearties as
La Gougière
described to us this afternoon, but if one of them’s asking for water transport out of town next week, it’s a sporting bet the other one’s wounded. Since Davis paid us, I can get a cab home.”

“Thank you,” January said. “I’d appreciate that.” If the presence of Madame Bontemps—unnerving but certainly not threatening—had been enough to put last night’s “devil” to flight, it was a good chance the attacker was more worried about an alarm being spread than about the physical might of a second opponent. “Hannibal’s right,” he added in a low voice as he climbed the two brick steps that led up to Dominique’s bedroom door. A lamp burned within. Through the gauze curtains January could see his sister’s maid, Thérèse, dozing in a chair beside the tall half-tester bed, waiting up to unlace her, make her some cocoa, brush out her hair. “I certainly wouldn’t want to try to get around Mother on a contract. Whatever happens with Viellard, I don’t think you need be afraid of poverty—or of having to return to living under Mother’s roof.”

Dominique mimed a great, exaggerated shudder. “P’tit, you know I love our maman very much, but when you were living there, my heart absolutely
bled
for you. I’ll be all right. It’s just that . . .”

She hesitated, twisting a curl of her wig, and glanced past January to where Hannibal waited out of earshot.

“For what it’s worth,” January told her, “I’m pretty sure Henri loves you.”

“I know he does, poor lamb,” whispered Minou. “But you know, Madame Viellard controls all the family money. It’s how she forced him to offer for that
dreadful
girl in the first place. And poor Henri has never done anything in his life except read Rousseau and press flowers and do the accounts when they grind the sugar. He can’t go against them. Not his mother and a wife both. And I’m afraid.” A tear crept down her lashes, and she touched it away, mindful of her rouge even on the threshold of her own bedroom.

January thought again of his landlady, eking out a living by taking in boarders, spending hours a day on her hands and knees scrubbing floors, scrubbing steps. Keeping up the only thing that remained to her from her days of plaçage. True, she hadn’t had Minou’s quick wit or Minou’s ferocious mother. Still . . .

He put his big hands gently on his sister’s arms, the silk crinkling with a sigh like dry leaves. “I know you don’t think this now,” he told her, “but there are other men.” As the words came out of his mouth, he remembered his wife sitting in the window of their little room in Paris, combing out the black bewitching midnight of her hair. Smiling at him under her long, straight lashes, like a desert sprite masquerading in her proper Parisian dress.

Would he have understood, in the horrible days following her death, that there were other women in the world?

That Rose Vitrac existed in Louisiana, scholarly and bespectacled, thumbing through Lyell’s
Principles of Geology
with her ink-smudged fingers and then looking up with that fugitive sunshaft smile?

“I know,” answered Dominique in a beaten voice. “Only I’ve just recently discovered I’m with child. And I don’t know what to do.”

NINE

Rehearsal Monday was marked by the same eddies of activity that had characterized the Salle d’Orleans the previous night. During the dance rehearsal—long before any of the principals put in an appearance—James Caldwell prowled the backstage, severely discomposing the new ballet master and causing the latter to trip over the silk-leaved rose-bushes of Count Almaviva’s garden. Throughout endless repetitions of the fandango in Act Three and the Act Four ballet, January heard the staccato chatter from behind the flats: had Signor Belaggio been heard from yet? Had Monsieur Marsan sent a note? “What are we going to do?” wailed Mr. Trulove’s voice as Herr Smith attempted for a fifth time to instruct Oona Flaherty in the execution of a simple pirouette that did not hopelessly entangle her in her own supporting wires. “Can we get someone else to manage these performances?”

Toe-dancing—usually with the assistance of wires— had been the rage at the Odéon and the Paris Opera for years, but it was new here. Only Tiberio—and January, thanks to Marguerite—had the slightest idea how the system of pulleys and counterweights operated, but Trulove was adamant. Oona Flaherty would be the “Queen of the Milkmaids,” and she would dance on her toes.

“Cafone,”
muttered the little prop-master as he and January adjusted the sandbags for La Flaherty’s not-inconsiderable weight, and she bounced delightedly, testingly, up and down on her wool-stuffed toes.
“Pezzu di
carne cu l’occhi.
It isn’t enough to have these candles and trellises and summerhouses to keep track of? Now I have to make this
butana
fly. And by the beautiful Mother and verily,
now
must he go sell those who were to help me,
ptui!”

Tiberio spit with Levantine eloquence. On-stage, Herr Smith fluttered his hands and cried, “No, and
no,
Fräulein—I mean, Mademoiselle
—Miss—
do
not
lift the skirts! I don’t
care
if no one can see your toes, you will
not
transform the classical beauty of the dance into a peep-show for every lust-ridden savage from the riverbanks!”

Eyeing the wires, January guessed that even with the borderlights concealed in the proscenium arch burning at full, the light wouldn’t be strong enough to show up the support.

“Irish, he says, I will hire you Irish.
Malòcchio
on his Irish!
Cornutu e cornutu abbiveratu,
with more horns to him than a basket of
babaluci. . . .”

Whatever,
reflected January, losing the thread of the little man’s Sicilian,
babaluci are
—

“Hideputa!”
shrieked Consuela Montero’s rich voice from backstage. “What do you mean, he has sold Nina? Who will dress my wig? What are the rest of us to do for dressers tomorrow night, eh? Are we chambermaids? Peasants?”

January sighed, gathered his music into his satchel again, and made his way from the stage into the wings. Most of the principals were having their lunch in the green room: Signora Chiavari gravely discussing the length of Susanna’s skirts with Madame Rossi, while Cavallo and Ponte shared the hard Italian sausage and wine in the rose-shadowed lattices of the dissected summerhouse. Caldwell had cornered Belaggio near the steps up to the gallery, gesturing persuasively around him at the growing clusters of singers and ancillaries, to which entreaty the impresario only shook his head. At the same time, Mr. Knight’s clerk was trying to explain something to Mr. Rowe—Caldwell’s manager for the American Theater—and the Austrian bass Cepovan sat at the Contessa’s white-and-gold writing-desk explaining to Cochon Gardinier and the Valada brothers that during his Act Three solo they were to take their cues from
him,
not from Belaggio on the conductor’s stand.

January took bread and cheese from his satchel, and the bottle of lemonade he’d left stashed in the prop-room, and settled himself on the lower slopes of Vesuvius to eat. Cochon joined him, and Jacques, and Ramesses Ramilles. “M’am Scie all right?” asked Bichet in an undervoice, and January shook his head.

“Still unconscious,” he replied. “I was there this morning, before the dance rehearsal. She hasn’t stirred. Mr. Caldwell gave me a bank-draft to pay Olympe for her care.” It grieved him that Marguerite would be stricken like this in a foreign country, where she knew no one and was without family or friends. According to Olympe, none of the company had come to the cottage on Rue Douane to ask after her. He supposed this was as well. When he had examined her again early this morning, he had seen how livid the marks of huge fingers stood out against the waxy skin of her throat.

Whatever else Incantobelli might have done, the hands that went with those neat, narrow boot-prints in Trulove’s garden-maze, with that trim figure in Puss in Boots garb, would not have made those.

“You were in the kitchen when the lights went out, weren’t you, Jacques?” he asked. “Was there anybody at your place that evening who could have been mistaken for me in the dark?”

“Ben, the side of the
house
could have been mistaken for you in the dark,” retorted the flautist. “But I don’t know who else. There’s damn few niggers your size in this town, and that’s a fact.”

“And who says it was a nigger?” argued Cochon reasonably. He settled his three hundred-plus pounds on the rim of the volcano’s lowest caldera, a deep bowl in which wet clay would be packed to avoid, if possible, setting the entire theater alight. A few feet away, Caldwell and Knight intercepted Mademoiselle d’Isola: Knight gripped the young girl’s hand desperately. “You cannot allow our season to end before it begins, Signorina! Not after all the work we have done to bring proper opera to this city!” He sounded on the verge of tears. January couldn’t imagine that the girl’s intercession between the two men would do anything but fan the flames.

“Once people started blowin’ out those candles,” Cochon went on, “the King of England could have walked into that kitchen and grabbed Madame’s hand. Didn’t Hannibal say one of the men you pulled off Michie Belaggio in the alley was darn near your size?”

“Maybe,” January agreed doubtfully. But a little later he sought out old Tiberio again, where the Sicilian sat glumly, connecting what appeared to be miles of hosepipe with young Ponte’s good-natured aid, and asked him, “Did you know Incantobelli? Was he mad enough to—to attack, or have attacked, the other members of the company as well as Belaggio? To destroy the opera season as well as the man who wronged him?”

Tiberio cocked his head a little sideways. Something about the way he stood reminded January of the buzzards near the stock-pens, angry black eyes glinting among the heavy folds of skin. “You don’t know Sicilians, do you, Signor?” he said. “Sicilians and Neapolitans. Even the Milanese, and the stuck-up Florentines, even the block-headed Romans, they don’t know us. We’re a poor people, Signor. We scratch in the dirt to raise a little food for ourselves and our children, and we see the nobles,
i padroni,
who sell us the very water we need to survive, take it away from us. We pray and do penance and we see the
parrinu—
priests, you understand—get fat on the tithe we pay.”

Ponte set down a coil of thick leather tubing and said, “This is true, Signor.”

“So the thing that is truly important,” the prop-master went on in dialect so thick that January had to bend all his attention to understanding, “the thing that makes a man a man and not a beast—this thing men call Honor—that we hold to, for it is all we have. And the man who takes that away, or tries to take it away—that man will suffer. And he must be made to suffer so that all that see, understand.”

January was quiet for a time, thinking about that. Behind him he heard Belaggio say, “What is between Signor Marsan and myself is a thing of honor, but for the other, I could not agree with you more, Signor Caldwell. . . .” And a little farther off, Cepovan shouted at someone, “Young Italy! Don’t talk to me of Young Italy! Traitors, and cut-throats, Carbonari! Looking only to stir up discontent and bring back the horror and bloodshed of Napoleon’s time!” And Hannibal’s light, hoarse voice added,
“Video meliora, proboque,
as the poet says—not that there’s a superabundance of
meliora
about Perdidio Street. . . .”

“So you think Incantobelli would value his honor above an innocent woman’s life?”

“What woman is truly innocent, Signor?” asked Tiberio. “Or what man? Sometimes honor demands more.”

Cavallo appeared in the door of the little hallway that led back to the prop-room, looking around the backstage as usual for his friend. Ponte set aside his hoses and rose to go. “Myself,” he said, “I would not have thought it in Incantobelli to do such. But neither would I have thought it in Signor Davis, who has as much reason as any to wish that Milanese
cornutu
ill.”

“Incantobelli was castrated as a young boy so that his voice would remain beautiful forever,” said Tiberio as the chorus-boy walked away. “There are men who accept the knife as a gift, and men in whom the theft of their manhood burns like a secret canker throughout their lives, so that they think of nothing but evil and revenge. And it is not always possible to know which man is which.”

Dress rehearsal proceeded uneventfully enough. The only interruption came from James Caldwell’s suggestion that since the American audience was unfamiliar with both Mozart and the Italian language, the talents of the lovely Miss d’Isola and the equally lovely Mrs. Chiavari might be better showcased were certain more popular— and more familiar—American songs inserted at key points into
Le Nozze di Figaro.

“What?” said Cavallo, shocked.

“You’re joking,” said Hannibal.

January knew better than to state any opinion of his own to a white man in the State of Louisiana, but he did ask himself whether he’d assisted the wrong parties in the alley last Thursday night.

And the lovely Mademoiselle d’Isola turned wide eyes to Cavallo and whispered,
“Qual’? Di cos’ sta parlan’?”

“I’ve marked in the libretto where these should go,” Caldwell continued. “Here—you see?—in Act Two, we have the Countess singing ‘Soft as the Falling Dews of Night’ when we first see her, and then ‘Blest Were the Hours.’ Both very pretty songs, I’m sure you’ll agree.”

“Are you
crazy
?” demanded Hannibal, lowering his music to stare at the theater owner. “You want to put ‘Soft as the Falling Dews of Night’ into
Mozart
?”

“Well, that’s precisely our point,” explained Trulove, his pink oval face beaming with satisfaction at his own cleverness. “It’s a little too much Mozart, if you take my meaning. . . .”

“I agree,” chimed in Belaggio, “I agree completely.”

January found himself wondering what Anne Trulove would have to say on the subject, if anything. Or did she content herself with operating the plantation, the sawmills, the brick-yard, and the cotton-press, and leave her husband to pursue his hobbies as he pleased?

“Now, we have the dance number in Act Three, which I think would go just as well with the John Quincy Adams Grand March and Quick-Step—”

Herr Smith opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

“—and then Susanna in Act Four can sing ‘Look Out Upon the Stars, My Love,’ when she’s in the garden at the beginning, and follow it up with ‘Cherry-Cheeked Patty.’ ”

Hannibal repeated soundlessly,
Cherry-Cheeked Patty
? while Belaggio nodded and approved, “Yes, of course— just the songs for my beautiful d’Isola, are they not?”

“I will have to learn them in English?” Drusilla looked as discomposed as if the lyrics had been in Mandarin.

“A few run-throughs merely,” declared the impresario. “I’m sure the musicians won’t mind staying a bit later after rehearsal.”

“You’ll see,” said the theater owner encouragingly. “It’ll bring the American audiences back shouting for more.”

“And add immeasurably to
our
reputation as musicians,” muttered Hannibal under his breath as Caldwell, Trulove, and Belaggio—hugely pleased with themselves— turned away. He reached beneath his chair and brought out his hat, a shaggy, flat-brimmed chimneypot that hadn’t been fashionable since Napoleon’s day, and turned it over like a beggar’s bowl. “Anyone want to start a fund,” he inquired, “to purchase bullets for M’sieu Marsan?”

January sighed, and dropped a couple of silver half-reales into the hat. Cavallo threw in a franc; stout Herr Pleck left his double-bass and made a contribution, remarking in German to the ballet master, “I cannot approve of violence, you understand, Herr Faber, but under the circumstances . . .”

“It is Smith,” corrected the ballet master stiffly, “in this country—and has been since Messires Talleyrand and Metternich between them chose to give most of my country to the Prussians to thank them very much for Waterloo.”

“Naturally this facetiousness must be displeasing to any man of pretension to taste,” remarked Mr. Knight. Disapproval radiated visibly from his prim, pale face. A silver English shilling clinked into the hat. “And yet . . . ‘Cherry-Cheeked Patty.’ ” He shuddered, and went to follow Belaggio and the others to the stage.

Whether through the tearful pleadings of La d’Isola, or the more monetary objurgations of Mr. Knight, the following morning’s
Louisiana Gazette
carried the following letter from Vincent Marsan:

In the words of the great gentleman Lord Chesterfield, Si fueris Romae, Romano vivito more—When
in Rome, live in the Roman way—
January winced at the misquote
—the true gentleman does not
place the same expectations upon men of foreign extraction as upon those with whose ways he is familiar. In view of the representations made to me by
those more familiar with the Italian customs and
sensibilities, I have come to accept as bona fide the
assurances that no insult was intended in the words
spoken by Signor Lorenzo Belaggio to me at an entertainment given by Monsieur Fitzhugh Trulove
on the 24
^th
inst.—fortunately, before fatal shots
could be fired in anger. May this incident be an example and a warning. . . .