Barbara Hambly - 01 A Free Man of Color

"You got quite an eye for furbelows." Shaw strolled back, hands in pockets, as if only such bracing kept his gawky body upright. "That was smart, 'bout the costumes."

"My wife was a dressmaker." January turned the bits of thread, pearl, ribbon in his kid-gloved fingers. There were two ways a man could have said what Shaw did, even as there were two ways he could have earlier remarked on Minou, Beautiful gal. "There never was a time when I wasn't surrounded by ribbons and lace and watching her match them up into some of the prettiest gowns you ever saw."

He smiled, remembering. "There was a lady-some baron's wife-who drove her crazy, asking for more of this and more of that and not offering to pay a sou for it. Ayasha put up with this till this old cat started coming on to her about how a Christian woman would have thrown it in as lagniappe. Then she just changed the color of the ribbons on the corsage-and mind you, that color was all the crack that year, and this old harpy was delighted with the change-and I've never seen one woman get so ugly so fast."

He shook his head, and saw Shaw's gray eyes on him again, as if hearing the pain that lurked under the joy of any memory of her.

"Your wife was an Arab?"

"Moroccan-Berber," said January. "But a Christian, though I don't know how much of any of it she believed. She died last summer."

"The cholera?"

He nodded and picked up a pink velvet rose that had to have come from Dominique's mask, tiny in his huge hands. "She would have been able to tell you every person who'd been in this room from these bits. My sister can probably tell you most of them."

"Don't mean whoever done it leaked beads and ribbons here to be obligin'," remarked Shaw. "If that Peralta boy was in plain evenin' dress, less'n she tore off a button there'd be nuthin' to show. Now that Jenkins..."

"He was looking for her," said January. "Prowling in and out of the ballroom and the lobby. He could have come in here."

"You hear this tiff of theirs? In the lobby?"

"Everybody did. She flirted with Jenkins. From what I hear, she flirted with everybody, or at least everybody who had money."

"Even though Peralta's daddy's been... What? Buyin' her for his son?"

"Not buying her" said January, though he could tell from Shaw's voice that the policeman knew the placees were technically free. "Bargaining to buy her contract. That way the boy doesn't get skinned out of his eyeteeth, and the girl doesn't have to look like a harpy in front of her protector-and her mother can come right out and say, 'I want to make sure you don't marry some Creole girl and leave my child penniless with your baby,' where the girl can't. It's all arranged beforehand. Signed and sealed, no questions."

Shaw considered the matter, turning the leaf of swamp laurel in his hand. "Smart dealin'," he said. "What kid's gonna pick himself even a half decent girl on his first try? When I think about the first girl I ever fell

in love with-Lordy!" He shook his head. "You think Miss Crozat was flirtin' with the Noblest Roman of 'em All to run up her price?"

"If she was, it was working. The boy was wild when he came into the room. But whether an American would have arrived at the same arrangement as a Frenchman is anybody's guess."

Shaw regarded him for a moment from narrowed eyes, as if weighing this criticism of the habit American planters had of simply buying a good-looking slave woman and taking her whether she would or no. But he only stepped to the window and spat again.

January followed him to the lobby, where Hannibal Sefton slept curled on a sofa under the flicker of the gaslights while two servants picked up stray champagne cups and swept beads and silk flowers, cigar butts and ribbons, from the brightly colored rugs. The ballroom gaped dim and silent to their right. When they descended the main stair, Shaw sliding snakelike into his weary old green coat, even the gambling rooms behind their shut doors were growing quiet.

A constable met them in the downstairs lobby, where a broad hall led to the silent dark of the court. The air smelled of rain and mud. Dawn light was bleeding through the half-open doors.

"We've searched the building and the attics, sir," said the man, saluting. "Nothing."

"Thank you kindly, Calvert." He pronounced it as the French did. Someone-probably Romulus Valle- had placed January's hat and music satchel on a console in the lobby. January and Shaw walked out into the courtyard together, Shaw turning back to crane his neck and look up at the Salle d'Orleans, rising above them in a wall of pale yellow and olive green.

There was always something indescribably shabby about this time of the morning in Carnival season, with streets nearly empty under weeping skies and littered with vivid trash. Crossing the courtyard, Shaw looked around him at the gallery, the plane trees, the colored lanterns doused and dark, then walked down the carriageway that let onto Rue Ste.-Ann, watching the occasional fiacre pass filled with homebound revelers and hearing the deep-voiced hoots of the steamboats on the river.

A woman strolled by, singing "Oystahs! Git yo' fresh oystahs!" in English, and on the opposite banquette two gentlemen in evening dress, still masked, reeled unsteadily from post to post of the overhanging gallery. A woman improbably clad as a Greek goddess accosted them, her masked face beaming with smiles.

"Now I wonder what she does for a livin'?" Shaw mused, and spat copiously in the gutter.

"Not the same as these ladies here tonight," January said quietly, hearing again the man in the ballroom and Froissart's dismissive, she is only a platfe, after all... He stooped to pick up the single curl of black cock feather that lay wet and forgotten against the alley wall.

Shaw looked back at him, surprised. "Now I may be a upriver flatboat boy with no classical education, but I know the difference between a courtesan an" a streetwalker, mask or no mask."

"Does it make a difference?" asked January. "Sir?"

"To me?" asked Shaw. "Or to Mr. Tremouille, when I go back to the Cabildo an' tell him what we got here?" January started to say, You tell me, and shut his mouth on the words. The man was police, the man was white, the man was American. He might have said it to a Creole under the same circumstances, but the uneasiness returned to him, consciousness of the man's power to harm.

Shaw rubbed his face again, grubby with brown stubble like a layer of dirt.

"A woman was kilt," he said. "She bein' a free woman, an' a householder in this city, that meant the tax she paid was payin' my salary, so it sorta obligates me to avenge her death, don't it? I be violatin' any code of conduct if I was to call on your sister this afternoon?" He patted the sheaf of yellow notepapers that stuck out of the pocket of his sagging coat, and donned his disreputable hat.

"Send her a note this morning giving her the time," advised January. "That way she can get one of her girlfriends, or probably our mother, to play duenna. Four o'clock's a good time. She'll be awake and made up by then, and whatever's going on at the Crozats' won't be until eight or so. You have her address?"

Shaw nodded. "Thank you kindly," he said. "I was a constable here last Carnival time-and Lordy, I thought I'd stepped into one of my granny's picture books!-and it stands to reason there's gonna be more pockets picked now than any other time. And if a stranger kills a stranger, you don't hardly never catch him, less'n he does something truly foolish with his loot. But somethin' tells me it's a rare thief who'd kill for jewels at a ball in a place like this. And there was plenty of women comin' an' goin' through this tunnel, gussied up just as costive or more so. If somebody killed Miss Crozat for them necklaces she was wearin', it was a damn fool way to go about it."