Barbara Hambly - 03 Graveyard Dust

Voices around them, rough and nasal in the harsh English tongue January hated: "Oh, hell, it's just a matter of time before the Texians have enough of Santa Anna. Just t'other day I heard there's been talk of them breakin' from Mexico..."

"Paid seven hundred and thirty dollars for her at the downtown Exchange, and turns out not only was she not a cook, but she has scrofula into the bargain! "

Colonel Pritchard was an American, and a fair percentage of New Orleans's American business community had turned out to sample Aeneas's cold sugared ham and cream tarts. But here and there in the corners of the room could be heard the softer purr of Creole French. "Any imbecile can tell you the currency must be made stable, but why this imbecile Jackson believes he can do so by handing the country's money to a parcel of criminals..." And, ominously, "My bank, sir, was one of those to receive the redistributed monies from the Bank of the United States "

"You all right?" Uncle Bichet leaned around his violoncello to whisper, and January nodded. A lie. He felt as if knives were being run into his back with every flourish of the piano keys. In the pause that followed the lie, while January, Hannibal, Uncle Bichet, and nephew Jacques changed their music to the "Lancers Quadrille," the drums could be clearly heard, knocking and tapping not so very far from the house.

You forget us? they asked, and behind them thunder grumbled over the lake. You play Michie Mozart's little tunes, and forget all about us out here drumming in the cipri?re?

All those years in Paris, Michie Couleur Libre in your black wool coat, you forget about us?

About how it felt to know everything could be taken away? Father-mother-sisters all gone?

Nobody to know or care if you cried? You forget what it was, to be a slave?

If you think a man has to be a slave to lose everything he loves at a whim, January said to the drums, pray let me introduce you to Monsieur le Cholira and to her who in her life was my wife.

And with a flirt and a leap, the music sprang forward, like a team of bright-hooved horses, swirling the drums' dark beat away. Walls of shining gold, protecting within them the still center that the world's caprices could not touch.

In the strange white gaslight, alien and angular and so different from the candle glow in which most of the French Creoles still lived, January picked out half a dozen women present in the magpie prettiness of second mourning, calling cards left by Monsieur le Cholera and his local cousin Bronze John, as the yellow fever was called. Technically, Suzanne Marcillac Pritchard's birthday ball was a private party, not a public occasion, suitable even for widows in first mourning to attend-not that there weren't boxes at the Theatre d'Orl?ans closed in with latticework so that the recently bereaved could respectably enjoy the opera.

And in any case, it would take more than the death of their immediate relatives to keep the ladies of New Orleans's prominent French and Spanish families from a party. Marion Desdunes-that very young widow gazing wistfully at the dancers-had lost a brother to the cholera last summer and a husband the summer before. Delicate, white-haired Madame Jumon, talking beside the buffet to Mrs. Pritchard, had only last summer lost her middleaged son.

Always entertained by the vagaries of human conduct, January distracted himself from the pain in his arms and back by picking out exactly where in the ballroom the frontier between American and French ran, an invisible Rubicon curving from the second of the Corinthian pilasters on the north wall, to a point just south of the enormous, carven double doors opening to the upstairs hall. French territory centered around Mrs. Pritchard, plump and plain and sweet faced, and the brilliantly animated Madame Jumon, though now and then a Creole gentleman would pass that invisible line to discuss business with the Colonel's friends: bankers, sugar brokers, importers, and landlords, the planters having long since departed New Orleans for their acres. Every so often one of the younger Americans would solicit the favor of a dance with one of Mrs. Pritchard's younger Marcillac or Jumon cousins and to do them justice, January had to admit that for Americans they were as well behaved as they probably knew how to be. For the most part, the damsel would be rescued by a brother or a cousin or a younger uncle twice-removed who would reply politely that Mademoiselle was desolate, but the dance was already promised to him. When MadamMjumon's surviving son, a craggily saturnine gentleman of forty-five, showed signs of leading Pritchard's middle-aged maiden sister out onto the floor, Madame quickly excused herself from conversation and intercepted the erring gallant; January was hard put to hide a smile. "Don't see what they got to be stuck-up about," grumbled a short, badly pomaded gentleman with a paste ruby the size of an orange pip in his stickpin. "I don't care if their granddaddies were the King of Goddam France, they're citizens of the United States now, just like we are. I got a good mind to go back and take that gal's brother to account..."

"Mr. Greenaway, please!" Emily Redfern, a stout little widow-who a moment ago had been bargaining like a Levantine trader with the burly Hubert Granville of the Bank of Louisiana-laid a simpering black-mitted hand on the pomaded gentleman's arm. "That was Desiree Lafrenniere! Of course her family..." The Widow Redfern, January knew, had been trying for years to get on the good side of the old Creole families. Little did she know how impossible that task was. Mr. Greenaway's pale blue eyes moved from the widow's square-jawed, cold-eyed countenance to her exceedingly expensive pearls. He smiled ingratiatingly. "Well, if it wouldn't intrude on your grief too much, M'am, perhaps you would favor me by sitting this one out with me..." "I'll lay you it'll be Greenaway and Jonchere, before midnight," said Hannibal Sefton, when an hour and a half later he and January slipped down the back stairs for a breath of air. "Greenaway's been drinking like a fish and he always starts up on the Bank of the United States when he does that. Jonchere's called out the last two men who supported Jackson..."

"I'll put my money on the Colonel himself," said January, and gingerly moved his shoulder again. There had to be some position in which he didn't hurt.

"Call out one of his own guests?" Hannibal took his laudanum bottle from his pocket and took a swig; then offered it hospitably to January, who waved it away. He'd seen, and heard, Hannibal play like the harps of Heaven when he was so lubricated as to be barely coherent, but for himself music was a matter for the mind as well as for the soul. And the thought of being that defenseless terrified him. Being barely able to lift his own arms was fearful enough.

"A Frenchman? I think he'll call out either Bringier or Madame Jumon's son..." For close to a year now January and Hannibal had entertained themselves at every engagement they played by laying wagers on who would challenge whom to an affair of honor before the evening was through. It was fortunate they played for pennies-or picayunes, at this low ebb of the season-for January could have won or lost a fortune at the game.

"Mathurin? With the Jumon money I'd think Pritchard would thank him for showing interest in that poor sister of his."

A sharp rustle sounded in the trees to the side of the house. January held up his hand, listening. The drums were silent.

Aeneas and the original waiter had been joined by a third man, young and barely five feet tall, hastily buttoning a white linen jacket and rinsing something off his hands with water dipped from the rain barrel. With him was a young woman in the first stages of pregnancy, retying the headscarf that all women of color, slave or free, were by law required to wear. They turned immediately to lay out the slices of beef and ham, the tarts and cakes and petits fours, on the yellow-flowered plates. "I'll be back," said January softly. He slipped down the gallery steps and around the corner of the house into the trees.