Die Upon a Kiss (8 page)

Dominique closed her eyes for a moment, her face seeming suddenly old in the warm amber of the candlelight. January remembered her telling him once that Henri would always come to see her—even for a short while, even if it was late—on the first night of his return from whichever of the family plantations he was obliged to visit, and wished it were possible to strangle their mother.

“It’s a good match,” his mother went on. No doubt, January reflected, she’d negotiated Dominique’s contract of plaçage to Henri with that same cool, hard blitheness: a house worth so much, and so much maintenance money per month. As every woman of the free colored demimonde negotiated their quasi-legal contracts with the white men who would be their daughters’ protectors, lovers, the fathers of their children. No young man wants to bicker over money with the damsel he means to take to bed; it takes a woman who has passed down that road to know what provisions her child will need on the journey.

“Duquille’s son never wed, you know, and both daughters died of consumption, in ’eighteen and ’twentyone.” Livia Levesque sipped her wine and made a face, though it was French and of good quality; her eyes never left Dominique. “Poor breeding, I call it. He should never have married a Blancheville. The whole family’s weak and Julietta Blancheville—Duquille’s cousin—looks like a rabbit. The St. Chinian girl’s likely to inherit everything from that side of the family, as well as half-interest in the St. Chinian cotton press and a dowry that’s certain to top a hundred thousand dollars.”

She clapped her hands impatiently for Bella to bring the cheese, the port wine, and nuts. “So if your Henri puts you aside, make him pay.”

“She didn’t have to break it to you like that.” January came quietly over to his sister when, a half-hour later, the meal was concluded and the party foregathered in the parlor for coffee. The early winter twilight had fallen— music sounded from one of the big town houses around the corner, a lively Chopin galop. The red glare of flambeaux in the Rue Burgundy made a shadowed pattern of curtain-lace flowers flit across his mother’s face.

“. . . Italians.” Livia dismissed the peninsula with a wave. “Always killing one another over something—no wonder they think poor M’sieu Davis hired ruffians! As if the man doesn’t have better things to do with his money, besides having plenty of friends who’d do it for free if he asked them. And well he should, the amount I hear he’s in debt these days. What the Americans would want an opera for anyway, I can’t imagine. . . .”

The little square box-clock of gilt and cobalt on the mantelpiece chimed six-thirty. It would soon be time for January and Hannibal to go.

“Don’t be silly, p’tit.” Dominique reached up to touch January’s cheek. “It took me by surprise, that’s all. You know how Mother is.”

“. . . Aunt Semiramis had an Italian cook who was the toast of Dublin,” Hannibal was saying. “She used to get three proposals a week, plus offers from my aunt’s friends, smuggled in by every post, of better pay. . . .”

“And of course I’ve always known Henri was going to marry someone.” Dominique decanted the coffee from the bright-hued pot into cups, and arranged, with unconscious artistry, Bella’s beignets and jelly-cakes on the smaller plates to carry them to the others. Les Mesdames—Livia’s two chubby yellow cats—rose from dozing by the hearth and padded, with artless artistry, to the sideboard, pretending they were simply taking a walk because they found the fire uncongenially warm and not because anyone was about to leave the cream-pitcher unguarded. “I’m just glad for his sake she—this girl—is disgustingly rich. I mean, yes, Henri is very wealthy himself.” She handed January the tray, and intercepted the cats, tucking one under each arm. “But think how much he’ll have to pay anyone to marry those sisters of his.”

And she made herself twinkle, fragile glass pretending to be adamant.

At Fitzhugh Trulove’s ball later that evening, January had ample opportunity to observe Henri Viellard from behind the trellis of ivy and silk roses that half concealed the musicians’ dais.

He’d seen the obese, fair-haired, myopic young planter at any number of receptions and balls over the past two years, though his only direct dealings with him had been in connection with the birth of Dominique’s child the summer before last. Henri, whose family’s chief plantation lay just across the lake, had been at one of his mother’s social engagements when Dominique gave birth. He had come when he could, and had held the infant in his arms before it died. This was more than numerous white men did for their plaçées, but January knew that his sister had spent many uncomforted nights in the wake of little Charles-Henri’s death.

This was a choice a girl of color made, he understood, when first she dressed in her finest and went—almost invariably with her mother—to the Blue Ribbon Balls.

January’s friends in the Paris demimonde—the courtesans whose lovers paid for flats for them in the fashionable St. Honoré district, not the streetcorner whores or the little grisettes who labored by day making hats—had asked him about the Blue Ribbon Balls, half expecting him to say that the women who attended them were slaves. January had disabused them of this notion—like most of the Parisian
demi-castors,
the majority of the plaçées had been raised by plaçée mothers with the hope and intention of entering a permanent relationship with a wealthy gentleman. Of “finding a place,” or “being placed.” The only difference lay in the fact that the plaçées, though free, were all women of color.

The ladies of the Rue des Ramparts implicitly understood the price they would have to pay.

To have a wealthy lover, but not a husband.

To love, maybe, and have love, but never to be secure in that love.

To bequeath to her children the property and education that they might not otherwise have. And with that property and education, to bequeath the fairer skin that altered the way people looked at you, white and black and colored alike.

Henri Viellard had done well by his sister, January knew. And yes, of course Minou had always known that one day the man she loved would take a wife, and do his duty to the family property, the family name.

Viellard was there with his mother, a massive woman nearly as tall as her six-foot son and swathed in a terrifying confection of eggplant-hued velvet. “There’s never any keeping up with them!” Madame Viellard cried, surveying her audience, the French Creole portion of the company in the pillared ballroom, which had fractured along its usual lines. That the Creole French attended at all was a tribute to Fitzhugh Trulove’s long residence in the town, dating back to the days of Spanish governorship. His position as a bridge between the two societies, as much as his wealth, was the reason the canny Caldwell had sought him for the Opera Society. “What should war in Spain have to do with the price of sugar, I ask you? What are they fighting about anyway? Or these ridiculous countries popping up in South America, always changing their names and fighting each other and making everything awkward for everyone? One simply cannot keep track of them.”

The galaxy of candles—in mirrored sconces on the walls, on the double line of painted columns, in the four chandeliers, on girandoles like a forest of silver trees rising among the heaped platters of the buffet—picked a second galaxy of brightness in the diamonds on Madame Viellard’s massive bosom as she turned. “They should make up their minds once and for all what sugar is to sell for and then hold to it! One simply cannot get business done any other way!”

“But one never knows,” demurred Mr. Knight, folding small, neat hands gloved in dandyish lavender kid, “what the markets in Europe will demand in any given year.”

On their side of the ballroom—the side that encompassed the buffet—the Americans present muttered in English of slave prices and the profits to be made from cotton in the newer states and territories of the north and west, of tight money and buying stock on credit, as if Europe didn’t exist. The little stack of
Othello
libretti sat untouched on a marquetry side-table.

And perhaps for them, reflected January, between the light, flowing minuet from
Don Giovanni
and a sentimental rendering of a Beethoven nocturne, Europe
didn’t
exist. Six weeks’ steady vomiting in a cramped cabin if you went by steam packet, with high seas and bad food and the possibility of the boiler blowing up as lagniappe. Three weeks if you wanted to pay clipper prices. And to most Americans it was only stories: castles and churches and crowded streets, and we have all that and more and better in America, don’t we? And for a quarter the price!

Descriptive words meant little. You
didn’t
understand, unless and until you’d actually walked through the green magic of the Versailles gardens in morning fog, or come out from between those crowding soot-stained buildings to see Notre Dame’s square towers soaring up and up above you for that first time. Until you’d heard real opera sung by professionals in a good hall with a full orchestra, or rambled from bookshop to bookshop to bookshop along a cobbled street delirious with the knowledge that you could find anything you wanted
—
anything—
somewhere along the way.

“One
should
know, Mr. Knight,” declared Madame Viellard. “That is precisely my point.” One side of the huge double parlor faced out onto a formal garden, and with the heat of the hundreds of candles—Trulove would never subject his guests to the smuts and stink of gas— long windows had been opened, admitting the green scent of wet foliage and the occasional rattle-winged palmetto-bug. The matron glared at her son as if demanding support, but Henri, consuming pâté in wretched silence, would not meet her eye.

“It’s a dreadfully ill-regulated place anyway, Europe,” laughed Trulove, and he cast a fond glance toward Oona Flaherty, done up in lilac tulle and an astonishing three-lobed topknot bedecked with artificial grapes, clinging dutifully to the arm of one of Mr. Knight’s clerks. January smiled at the burly young man’s expression of grim concentration: it was one of the duties of a planter’s business agent to purchase and send upriver whatever the family might require in the way of tools or supplies: chinaware, spices, salt, coffee, or wine. Presumably a screen for an employer’s
amours—
Knight also handled the Truloves’ business—came under the same heading.

“Nonsense,” retorted Mr. Knight. “You have been away from it for too long, sir. Since the Congress, Europe has been one of the most peaceful and best-ruled places on earth.”

“If one equates good rule with oppression,” returned another voice, and January, eliding smoothly from schottische to waltz, broke off for a moment, turning his head, seeking the owner of the voice—

Knowing absolutely that it had to be Belaggio’s former partner, Incantobelli.

He could think of no other reason for a castrato—as the lead in
Giulio Cesare
had to be—to be in New Orleans.

“True enough, one does not see the blood of kings washed down the gutters much anymore, nor hear the tocsins ringing through the night,” that soft, sweet alto continued. All January could glimpse was a flash of white hair, something he’d already deduced the man must have: even during the early days of his stay in Paris the fashion for those heartstopping, magical voices had been a thing of the past. For Incantobelli to have had enough of a career to make him an impresario now, he would have to be sixty at least.

“Yet as the price for that peace was to hand the states of Italy and Germany around to the victors like petitsfours, to rule and tax as they choose and to infest with their secret police, one cannot but reflect that there must have been some middle ground.”

A frilled ruffle of violin music at his back reminded January what he was there for: Hannibal covering up for the fact that the piano had fallen out of the waltz in mid-bar. He fumbled, pulling his mind back to the piece, annoyed and embarrassed, and when next he tried to listen for that curious combination of child’s voice and man’s, all he could hear was Jed Burton complaining to the banker Hubert Granville about a horse someone had tried to sell him.

“What happened?” asked Hannibal quietly when the waltz curtsied to its end. “I thought your piano had broken a string.”

January shook his head. “Incantobelli’s here.”

“Half a reale says Belaggio calls him out,” replied Hannibal with barely a pause for breath.

“Who’s Incantobelli?” demanded Jacques Bichet, shaking the spit out of his flute. “I have five cents on Davis. . . .”

“Oh, I’m still covering Davis,” said the fiddler. “I’ve got my money down for ten-thirty, five minutes either way. Incantobelli’s Belaggio’s former partner.”

“Two cents on nine-thirty,” chipped in Cochon Gardinier, an enormously fat man who was probably the best fiddler, after Hannibal, in New Orleans.

“It’s nearly quarter-past now.” Hannibal glanced at the intensely ormolued case-clock that dominated the far end of the parlor. “And Belaggio hasn’t even arrived yet. Incantobelli will have to be standing on the front porch for a challenge at nine-thirty. . . .”

“Considering Incantobelli wasn’t invited,” said January grimly, “that’s probably exactly where he’ll be.” Not far from the leafy screen that half hid these negotiations from their employer, John Davis was gesticulating angrily and saying something to Vincent Marsan. Marsan, resplendent in pale jade-green down to his gloves and the emeralds in his breast-pins, nodded sympathetically and stroked his golden mustache. But the sky-blue eyes never left the doorway to the hall. January heard
“La Muette de
Portici”
and “—accuses me of hiring men . . .”

“On the other hand,” he said, and brought out the music to the first quadrille of the evening, “I’ll lay you that Davis gets in with a challenge first.”

“Never!” Cochon whipped a Mexican reale from his pocket and slapped it down on the corner of the piano. “I’m for this Italian.”