Die Upon a Kiss (24 page)

“But what of Signora Scie, and Belaggio?” Bruno asked in his quiet voice. “And they waited for you, too, you say, Signor Janvier, in the dark.”

He propped himself up on one elbow in the blanket he had spread for himself and his friend: a difference from Americans, January reflected, who would each have appropriated one of the ragged coverings and left the black member of the party to make do with shivering in the hay. “It was to be expected that Drusilla would call on you for help, for you know the countryside. It was only chance that she encountered us on her way out of town. They might have seen us and thought,
Che culo! Now we
must kill three men rather than one,
and thought better of it.”

“Why would they think that?” demanded Cavallo. “We are alone. They are Austrians. Dead men tell no tales.”

The chorus-boy shrugged, and with a peasant’s matter-of-fact practicality scooped hay over to cover the two of them like an extra blanket, something January had already done for himself. “If Belaggio is one of them, perhaps he didn’t want to have to find someone to sing Masaniello at the last minute.”

“Well, if Madame Marsan has gone into town already for the opera,” said January in a dry voice, “that’s what he’s going to have to do.”

This led to heated speculation about how well Orlando Partinico—Cavallo’s cover for the role—would sing, and just where and how Madame Montero would have found bravos willing to lie in wait for her rival. Just as if, thought January wearily, they did not all stand in danger of losing their liberty and perhaps their lives the following morning. But oddly enough the argument— and its subsequent tangent about the necessity for Italian unification and the formation and composition of a legislature along American lines—proved a distraction from his own fears. On those few occasions on which he did fall asleep, January dreamed he was a supernumerary on-stage in an interminable opera consisting entirely of
récitatif.

It was nearly noon before the creak of carriage-springs and the slurp of hooves in the muddy yard announced the arrival of Madame Marsan. January and, perforce, Cavallo—the chain over the rafter was barely long enough for both men to stand side by side—went to the outer wall of their stall and peered through the gaping cracks to the misty sunlight of the yard, where a coachman was just climbing down from the box of a plain, scratched, and much-mended green landaulet.

Having seen the smart black phaeton Marsan drove in town, with its matched white team and sparkling brass, January felt a sort of shock of distaste. Not only the carriage was old. The horses, a black and a roan, were both decrepit and thin, and the roan’s knees were scarred. Not an animal a dandified seeker after perfection like Marsan would have tolerated in his stables. Certainly the dress worn by the woman Pickney helped down was as unfashionable as the carriage, and as frequently repaired, reminding January of the slightly outdated frocks she and her daughter had worn to the opera. As he watched her with the cracker, he could see fear of men in her rigid stance and the unconscious distance she kept from him, in the way she held her gloved hands folded tight before her breast. Like Rose, when first he’d met her. Wary as a fox scenting a trap.

She glanced in the direction of the barn when Pickney gestured and hesitated, as if she feared Pickney had sent for her only to lure her into that building and ravish her.

She signed to the footman standing on the carriage’s rear, an enormous man whose shaven head and massive shoulders were vaguely familiar to January. When he got down, the carriage rocking with his weight, and followed her and Pickney across to the barn, January recognized the rolling stride, the springy animal crouch.

It was the fighter Big Lou.

“. . . says they’s Italians,” Pickney was explaining as they approached. “But I seen octoroons lighter’n them, an’ it’s best to be sure. I am sorry if I kept you from startin’ for town. . . .”

“It is quite all right,” Madame Marsan replied in her uncertain English. Her bonnet was old, too, of a wide-brimmed, flat style January hadn’t seen in years. It threw a kind of pale shade on her thin face, like a veil that did not obscure the anxiety in her dark eyes. “But you understand I must not stay. My husband expects me. . . .” She didn’t turn her head, but January saw in her stance her awareness of Big Lou looming a pace behind her.

“We drives fast, we makes it by four, m’am.” There was a kind of careless sullenness in the big man’s curiously soft, high voice. “But best we drives fast. You know how Michie Vincent don’t like to be kept waitin’.”

The woman stiffened, though her slight, noncommittal half-smile didn’t alter. “Still,” she said, “one cannot refuse to help men in trouble.”

“Sounds like they got theirselves in their own trouble, m’am.” His words came out as a kind of crumbly mumble, as if no one had ever spoken much to him as a child, or expected words from him in return. “What I wants to know is, what’d a couple of Italians an’ a nigger be doin’ wanderin’ around the old Dougherty place that time of night anyways?”

The open door flung a wan glare into the barn. Madame Marsan hastened forward, wobbling on her iron pattens in the muck. She was, January realized, actually a very pretty woman, dark and slim like an expensive greyhound. But long years of desperate invisibility had told on her, bleached her of anything that might trigger her gorgeous husband’s volatile wrath.

Cavallo and January, each guiding his end of the chain with a hand, came together along the path of the beam to the stall’s end as Bruno got to his feet and bowed.

“Bellissima madama.”
Cavallo bent over her hand. “Do you speak Italian? How can I convince you that I am who I say I am—Silvio Cavallo of Milan. . . .”

“Good heavens!” Madame Marsan’s free hand flew to her lips. “Oh, my dear sir . . . You’re the music master! From the opera Tuesday, the silly music master with the curled wig!”

Cavallo bowed again, still more deeply, kissing the gloved hand again.
“Bellissima madama,
my thanks. My eternal thanks.”

She turned to Bruno and asked in careful Italian, “And you are also one of the singers?”

“I am,
bella madonna.”
The young Sicilian likewise saluted her hand. “Bruno Ponte, of the chorus, now and forever at your service and in your debt. And this man is Signor Janvier, of the orchestra, who was good enough to come after us and Signorina d’Isola when we needed guidance and help.”

“But I am not Italian,” said January gravely in French. For one instant the woman’s dark eyes sparkled appreciatively—then wiped themselves clean of humor almost by reflex, as if even in his absence her husband would disapprove if she laughed. January wondered if Big Lou carried tales.

“Monsieur Pickney, these men are—are indeed who they say they are.” She turned back to the captain of the patrol with a stiff diffidence, bracing herself slightly, as if she expected anger, a curse or a blow.

And when Pickney immediately replied, “That’s good to know, m’am, an’ I thank you for troublin’ yourself to come here,” January saw how the woman’s shoulders relaxed. She had learned never to disagree with, or disappoint, a man.

“Best we be goin’, m’am,” mumbled Big Lou as Pickney knelt to unlock the shackle from January’s ankles. “I makes it noon now, an’ you know how Michie Vincent gits. . . .”

“Yes,” she said quickly, “yes, of course. I hope Mademoiselle Jocelyn has finished the packing and is ready—”

“Anybody to home?”

Big Lou spun, ready as an animal to respond to a threat as a gawky form ambled into the square of the open door’s light. At the fighter’s reaction, Abishag Shaw stepped back, neatly and unobtrusively, into safer distance: for one instant January was aware of each gauging the other. Then each relaxed just slightly, and Shaw came into the shadows of the barn. “Well, here’s where you got to, Maestro!” He pulled his hat off at the sight of Madame Marsan, but went on. “You never heard such a catawumptious conniption, with Belaggio an’ yore pal Sefton an’ it seemed like beat-all ever’body comin’ into the Cabildo durin’ the evenin’ sayin’ as how the four of you been murdered. . . .”

“The
four
of us?” January sat to pull on his boots again, making a play of searching for something among the tousled blankets to cover surreptitiously scooping his knife into his pocket. “Mademoiselle d’Isola didn’t return?”

“She ain’t with you?” The rain-colored eyes narrowed and cut sidelong to Pickney’s face. “Young Italian gal about twenty, wearin’ a yeller dress an’ white sash? My name’s Shaw, by the way, Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans City Guards. . . .”

“Sam Pickney.” The white men shook hands. “Mr. January here told us there was a young lady missin’. . . .”

“M’am,” interposed Big Lou again, and there was a meaningful edge to his words. “Best we be goin’, or Michie Vincent gonna be mad.”

“Yes,” said Madame Marsan hastily. “Certainly. Monsieur Pickney, if you’ll excuse me, I must return and get my daughter so that we . . .”

“M’am Marsan?” Shaw put his hat against his chest, looked down at the drab figure before him. “M’am Belle Marsan?”

“This here M’am Marsan.” Big Lou interposed himself between the woman and Shaw, watchful contempt in eyes like small black beads. Like his French, his English was slurred and crumpled, and there was neither fear nor diffidence in his voice. He was sure of his ground and apparently feared no white man’s retaliation. “Michie Vincent told me bring her on safe into town.”

Told you to keep Americans from her, too,
thought January, observing the tilt of the scarred bullet head, the compacting of the breast and belly muscles beneath the neat muslin shirt, the blue fustian coat. Instinctively readying himself to lash out.

Shaw met the big man’s eyes. “They’s time,” he said in English. After a long moment Big Lou dropped his gaze—far longer than any white man would have expected a black one to hold his eyes—and Shaw shifted his glance back to the woman. In execrable French he went on. “At Roseaux they told me as how you was comin’ here,” and a beat of silence followed the words, like the small deadly breath of wind that precedes the driving storm-rains. “Best you have a seat, m’am.”

She pulled her hand from Shaw’s—and Pickney’s— attempts to guide her to the nearest seat, which was in fact the top of a firkin outside the barn door. January could see in Pickney’s eyes, and Rufe’s, what he himself knew:
Best you have a seat, m’am
always translated to
I
have bad news for you. The worst of bad news.
She stiffened like a child bracing for a whipping. “Tell me.”

Shaw folded his big hands before him, respecting her choice of time and place. “Vincent Marsan was found dead early this mornin’,” he said. “In the alley beside the American Theater.”

FOURTEEN

January recognized the plantation of Les Roseaux immediately as one he’d visited on the same scouting mission in 1814 that had taken him to Cornouiller. On seeing the place from the back of Sam Pickney’s light wagon, however, he felt the same jolt of distaste he’d experienced at the sight of the carriage itself. Marsan’s finicking wardrobe, his mistress, and his lavish town equipage had all given January the unconscious expectation that at Les Roseaux he would see reflected the same prosperity.

Instead, he saw fields nearly as overgrown and neglected as those at La Cornouiller, run-down slave-cabins, a house in need of paint and patching. In all things, not just in women, Marsan was a man who would not share. He’d rather match his sapphire cuff-buttons than pay for a new dress for his wife. Even the sawmill, ostensibly the source of the plantation’s profits, had a dilapidated air. Only a few dozen cypress trunks lay outside it, and the piles of lumber stacked behind it were small.

“Far’s we can tell,” said Shaw quietly in French as much to include Cavallo as to exclude Rufe on the driver’s seat, “Marsan died sometime between midnight—which is when the last wagon came through that alley to the Promenade Hotel—and six, when the first couple horses went out.” He glanced ahead of them at the landaulet, but satisfied himself that there was no chance that Madame Marsan could possibly overhear. She sat like a wooden thing in the middle of its seat, tearlessly telling over her rosary with fingers that shook.

Nevertheless he edged his bony chestnut horse closer to the wagon—Big Lou had expressed the same sentiments about free colored riding in Michie Vincent’s carriage that the cabmen of New Orleans did—and kept his voice low. “Nobody heard nuthin’, nor saw nuthin’ from the street, an’ maskers goin’ back an’ forth along Camp Street most of the night. He was carved up bad. Face, chest, belly . . .”

“Hands?” asked January, and one of Shaw’s pale brows tilted.

“No,” he said. “No, he didn’t fight. He took one deep stab straight under the left shoulder-blade from behind, then all the rest in the front, like as if he’d fallen down an’ the man what did it knelt on top of him an’ cut. Somebody wanted to make damn sure Belaggio was dead this time.”

“Or somebody was damn mad.”

“If somebody was damn mad, he was damn careless, too.” Shaw turned his head aside and spit. “If’n you’re gonna kill somebody like that, you should at least take the trouble to make sure of your man.”

In his mind, January saw the two men together, framed in the lion-gold curtains of the Trulove ballroom. Saw how both towered over the cowering girl, almost obscuring her from sight. Of course an attacker would mistake the one for the other.

“Maybe he thought he had.” January remembered also the note that drew La d’Isola to this half-deserted countryside, d’Isola, who would naturally have been with Belaggio at that hour. After her unexplained absence from the dress rehearsal that afternoon, her name might have been enough to ensure Belaggio’s appearance at the theater after midnight. “What does Belaggio say?”

“Not much,” said the policeman. “Looked sick as a cat when I talked to him this mornin’, jumpin’ whenever one of them fireworks went off in the back. Say, they really gonna have a volcano erupt on-stage?”

“Such is the intention,” said January. “I feel certain that even if Mademoiselle d’Isola isn’t found—or isn’t well enough to perform when she
is
found—Madame Montero will be more than ready to step into the role.” And he outlined to Shaw the tale of the “opera lesson” and its sequel, continuing with La d’Isola’s discovery of the “note” that had brought her to Bayou des Familles. “As Signor Cavallo said yesterday, it would make a good deal more sense to have set the trap today—the night of the performance itself—if the intention was to disrupt the opera, or substitute Madame Montero for d’Isola on-stage. Obviously,” he added grimly, “it wasn’t. I take it this isn’t a simple case of robbery.”

“Marsan had a hundred and fifty dollars in the inside pocket of his coat, not to mention his watch an’ a ring an’ a stickpin with a topaz in it the size of your fingernail. Caldwell says the dress rehearsal finished at six—barely time for Mr. Russell’s stage crew to set up for that night’s performance of
The Forty Thieves—
an’ when he mentioned Belaggio came back to the theater after it was done, Belaggio remembered as how yes, he’d come back to fetch a couple of them liber-ettos he’d left in his office. He didn’t stay, though, he says.”

“He does, does he?” The house at Roseaux came into view around the cluster of bayou oaks, and on the steps stood Mr. Knight, looking even more prim and disapproving than usual, his hand on the shoulder of the young Mademoiselle Jocelyn Marsan.

“My dear Madame . . .” The business manager hastened down the steps.

“Is it true, Mama?” Mademoiselle Marsan’s voice had a dead quality to it, all emotion boned tight as her straight-fronted schoolgirl corset. Her frock had been cut down from a woman’s, with too little fabric in the skirt, and telltale lines where seams had been picked out and pieces skillfully joined. Her black hair hung in braids, fine as silk.

“This gentleman says that it is.” Isabella Marsan drew a deep breath, steadying herself on Mr. Knight’s arm as she descended. “If you’ll go around to the back gallery, Messires, one of the men will take your horse and bring you . . . bring you coffee and sandwiches.” Her glance encompassed Cavallo and Ponte, settling instinctively the conundrum of the logistics of Creole hospitality by which Europeans—even Europeans in muddied boots with soot crusted on their shirts—rated an invitation to the parlor while Kaintucks would be relegated to the back gallery, if that. “Monsieur Knight, if you would be so good . . .”

“Of course, Madame.” The factor led her up the steps to the house, where a tall, thin man in a butler’s livery waited just within the French door that led to the women’s side of the house.

By the time Rufe had let Cavallo and Ponte off by the brick piazza at the rear of the house, and a servant came to take Shaw’s horse, most of the housemaids, the plantation laundress and carpenter, the sawmill boss, Big Lou’s trainer, and the cook were clustered behind the kitchen, just out of the line of sight from the back gallery. Rufe drew rein and January sprang down as the butler came down the gallery steps and crossed the yard—

“It true?” asked the sawmill boss, glancing from Rufe to January to the butler as all three came around the corner of the little building, with that instinctive sense of where those places were that the white folks couldn’t see. “Jules?”

In English, Rufe replied, “It’s what the man say,” and Jules the butler nodded. January felt the ripple of exhaled breath among the assembled men and women. Saw how shoulders relaxed, bodies loosened. Eyes shut in brief prayers of thanks. Given the near-certainty of sale that would result in the death of the Master, the breaking of communities and families—given the fact that the devil one knew was nearly always less terrifying than the unknown darkness of the future—it was a devastating indictment of the man as a master.

He’s gone. He’s dead.

Whatever’s going to happen now, it surely can’t be worse.

Since Rufe didn’t speak more than a few words of French, January filled in what details he knew: that Marsan had been stabbed to death, his body found in an alley in town; that he had not been robbed. “Was it the family of that girl?” asked Jules, speaking better French than January commonly heard even among house servants. Speaking, too, as if even here he feared to be overheard. “That girl he killed?”

“They don’t know who it was.” January stepped aside from the servants around Rufe. He was about to say,
He
was killed by accident, in mistake for someone else,
but instead, he asked, thinking of Dominique, “What was the girl’s name?”

“Sidonie Lalage.” The butler was a few years younger than January, though his hair was grayer and he’d lost quite a few teeth. Two small fresh scabs marked the left side of his face:
riding-whip,
January identified them at once. Similar, slightly older marks welted the cheekbones of one laundress and the cook. “I always said no good would come of that, for all that white jury let him off. No proof he done it, they said. Of course there was proof. An’ it wasn’t the first time he beat her for speakin’ to another man.” He shook his head. “I always knew there’d be trouble from the girl.”

“Could this have been the smugglers?” asked January even more softly.
Ask me no questions . . .

Maybe Belaggio had asked more questions than he should have. Maybe Captain Chamoflet had simply resented someone moving in on the illicit importing of slaves.

“I don’t know anything about that.” The butler lowered his dark eyes. “It’s better, hereabouts, not to know.”

January glanced toward the house. Shaw and the two Italians sat on wicker chairs on the rear gallery, talking to Mr. Knight, who sat as far from the Kaintuck as was possible within the same group. The plump cook emerged from the kitchen, bearing a tray that contained sandwiches and lemonade. As she handed this to Jules, she looked up at January and said, “As if everyone in this countryside doesn’t know about Captain Chamoflet. Don’t you listen to Jules, sir. But if you’re thinking it was the captain, or any of his boys, that’s ridiculous. Michie Vincent always kept on the good side of the captain when they dealt together, and how not? He wasn’t stupid, Michie Vincent, except about that temper of his.”

“And even there,” said the trainer in a quiet voice, “I did notice that he never gets real mad, killin’ mad, at anyone who can fight back, or hurt him later.”

“Besides,” the cook went on, “Captain Chamoflet, he doesn’t go up to town much. Why kill a man there with the police all around, when you know he’ll have to come riding down here some night?”

January watched Jules cross the yard with the tray, mount the steps of the rear gallery. Shaw was sketching out directions with his big, lumpy-knuckled hands, gesturing toward the bayou, toward the town. A search party for d’Isola, almost certainly. By the shadow of the kitchen’s sagging roof on the dirt of the yard, it was nearly two. January’s silver watch had stopped—he’d forgotten to wind it last night, sitting awake listening for the tread of slave-stealers in the damp dark of the barn.

The curtain would go up on
La Muette de Portici
at seven, d’Isola or no d’Isola.

Did that make a difference? he wondered. Had someone sent a note to Belaggio last night, telling him to be at the theater?

Or had he gone there to meet Marsan? Marsan, who had acted as go-between for his slave-dealing? Who less than a week ago had challenged him to a duel? Marsan, who had a furious temper, and the devil of jealousy in his heart?

Conversely, had Marsan gone there, arriving after Belaggio’s departure, and seen something—or someone— at the theater? Tinkering, maybe, with Mount Vesuvius in order to guarantee a disaster at the performance tonight?

The blood in the drawer. The milky sunlight on the burned house at La Cornouiller. A voice whispering “nigger” in the alley’s darkness, and Marguerite lying in Olympe’s house, sinking deeper and deeper into cold and silence. . . .

Where did that nagging sensation come from in his mind, the feeling that he’d heard something recently that didn’t fit?

“. . . duels over the damnedest stupid things!” The cook’s voice brought him back to the present. “He killed a fellow named Brouillard ’cause of the color of his necktie— his
necktie!
’Cause Brouillard said it didn’t match his waistcoat or some fool thing like that. Poor M’am Marsan lost a night’s sleep weeping till she was near sick over it with fear, for, of course, if Michie Vincent were to die, she’d never keep this place, and her with a young daughter and no son, and the whole crop borrowed against before the cane stood three feet tall.”

January looked back toward the house. The coachman was leading out the carriage again with a new team—as mismatched and sorry as the former—preparatory to taking the widow to town to claim her husband’s body at the Charity Hospital morgue. One of the maids emerged from the cabinet that housed the attic stairs, her arms full of mourning dresses, and with the girl Jocelyn at her heels crossed to the door into Madame Marsan’s bedroom.

Absurd to think that even with the money from smuggling slaves, Marsan hadn’t been in debt. Having been married for ten years to a dressmaker, January had a good idea of what it cost to be a dandy: to indulge the obsession with clothing to that meticulous degree.

Shaw’s horse was hitched to the footman’s dickey, the scar-kneed roan saddled beside it on a lead. More logistics of hospitality, thought January wryly. Cavallo and Ponte would of course be invited to ride in the landaulet. They were, after all, Europeans, and civilized men. The Kaintuck would ride behind. Under ordinary circumstances January would be left to walk, but his inclusion in the party with those Madame Marsan considered his betters required some means of transportation be found for him as well.

“Did he fight?”

“That he did, sir, and was brought back here three-quarters dead on a plank. Michie Knight was fit to split his corset-lacings, he was so mad, and you could hear M’am Marsan weeping clear out to the quarters.”

On the gallery Cavallo sprang to his feet, hammered one fist into his palm. L’Italiana in Algeri. January remembered ironically the opera of that name, and tried to imagine the lovely soprano tricking her way out of a lustful Pasha’s harem and escaping to a convenient ship with her own true love.

But her own true love was dead, he thought, in the place of the lover she’d sought to escape. And d’Isola herself . . .

If worse came to worst, he supposed Captain Chamoflet could be traced through one of Hannibal’s disreputable connections in the Swamp, and the girl ransomed. If Belaggio’s jealousy—or avarice—proved unequal to the task, they could probably apply to the Sicilian consul, whose jurisdiction also covered Neapolitans.