Barbara Hambly - 01 A Free Man of Color

"Come to watch the show?" January asked, as he, Mayerling, and Bouille got into the chaise. He stowed his medical bag under his feet-the usual collection of cupping glasses, calomel, opium, and red pepper. At least, he thought, this would be a straightforward matter of wounds, bleeding, possibly broken bones. The four revelers piled into the barouche and dragged Hannibal in after them, all plying him in turn with their flasks, to be rewarded with an impassioned recitation of Byron's "Destruction of Sennacherib," as the vehicles pulled forward.

"They have come to witness justice being done against a perjured and impotent Kaintuck swine," declared Bouille, with comparative mildness and restraint, for him. "For me, I am glad of their presence. I would not put it past that infamous yellow hound to appear with a gang of like-minded bravos and ambush us, for he knows well he cannot prevail honestly in a man's combat."

Mayerling only raised his colorless brows.

Crowded close against him-the single seat of the two-wheeled chaise barely accommodated three people at the best of times, and only the Prussian's slightness made it possible for a man of January's size to fit-January said softly, "Young Peralta's taking it hard, isn't he? Mademoiselle Crozat's death."

The strange eyes cut to him, then away.

"It takes a lot to make a Creole absent himself from backing a friend's honor."

"The boy is a fool to mourn," said Mayerling, his voice cold. "The woman was evil, a poisonous succubus with a cashbox for a heart. Whoever he marries will have cause to thank the person who wielded that scarf."

January glanced in surprise at the ivory profile. "I didn't know you knew her." He remembered the way the Roman had lurked and lingered in the ballroom, the way masculine conversation stopped when she appeared, like a glittering idol of diamonds, in the ballroom doorway, the way all men had clustered around her.

Except, now that he thought back on it, Mayerling.

"Everyone in this city knows everyone," replied the sword master. "Trepagier was one of my students. Did you not know?" He returned his attention to the road.

The duel itself went as such things customarily did. The two carriages followed the Esplanade to the leaden, cypress-hung waters of Bayou St. John, and as dawn slowly bleached, the mists reached a patch of open ground on the Allard plantation, near the bayou's banks, overshadowed with oaks the girth of a horse's body.

Granger, too, had decided against the possibility of being carried dead back to his family in the white baggy costume of Pierrot, and had worn evening dress instead. His second, however, still sported the gleaming pasteboard armor of the Roman legions, while the purple pirate with his unfortunate copper-colored beard held the heads of their phaeton's team. Both Granger and Bouille, January noticed, wore dark coats whose buttons were noticeably small and inconspicuous.

Mayerling produced the pistols, a pair of his own Mantons that Jenkins and the blue-and-yellow Ivanhoe examined minutely. While the fencing master loaded the pistols, the seconds made a last effort-albeit a fairly perfunctory one-to talk their principals out of battle: January heard Granger state loudly, "Were I not given the opportunity to sponge away this impudent crapaud's bilious spewings in blood I would be forced to reenact the final scenes of Macbeth upon his verminous person." A remark clearly intended for Bouille's ears since Granger, an American speaking to two other Americans, said it in French.

Bouille replied-to his own seconds, but in loud English-that he had no fear of "a canaille who can no more pass himself for a gentleman than our surgeon can pass himself for a white man. One cannot pretend to be what one is not."

And January, standing next to Mayerling, saw the sword master's ironic smile. Bouille, that champion of Creole culture, like Livia Levesque, had evidently forgotten that he'd fled a typesetter's job in France ahead of a couple of sordid lawsuits and a welter of bad debts. Mulattos were not the only ones to suffer amnesia on horseback.

January and Hannibal prudently retired to the shelter of the oak trees fifty feet away. Mayerling, with what January considered reckless confidence in both men's aim, remained where he was. "You going to bleed whoever gets hit?" inquired Hannibal irreverently, leaning his chin on a horizontal bough.

January nodded. "And purge them. Two or three times."

"Couldn't happen to more deserving men."

There were two loud reports. Egrets squawked in the misty bayou.

January peered around the deep-curved limbs of the tree in time to see William Granger stalk back to his phaeton and climb in. Bouille was expostulating to the little cluster of fencing students.

"You see?" the city councilman crowed triumphantly. "The coward has outsmarted himself! In fear of my marksmanship he selected an impossible distance- fifty feet-at which he himself could not hit the door of a barn! Myself, I saw the shoulder of his coat rent asunder by my bullet."

While the exultant Bouille and his fellow pupils toasted one another and Hannibal with more hip flask brandy, Mayerling, with the air of a naturalist in quest of a new species of moth, paced off the spot where Granger stood and searched the surrounding trees until he found the bullet. Given even the most flattering estimate of its trajectory, it would have missed the American by yards. "More work in the gallery," he

said to Bouille, returning like the ghost of another century through the knee-deep ground mist, white ruff and sleeves pale in the dawn gloom. "Or less at your writing desk."

They climbed into the vehicles once again.

The entire colored demimonde, past and present, turned out for Angelique's funeral, Euphrasie Dreuze weeping in too-tight weeds and covered with veils that hid her face and trailed to her knees. From his position at the organ of the mortuary chapel of St. Antoine, January counted and tallied them: The chapel itself was small, but the overwhelmingly female audience did not overcrowd its hard wooden pews. In New Orleans' climate of fevers and family ties there were few women who didn't possess mourning dresses, but January was aware that if Angelique had been better liked many of those tricked out in well-fitting plum- and tobacco-colored silks would have worn black even if it didn't show off their figures. Few women of color looked really good in black.

As the pallbearers-handsome if embarrassed-looking young men, Angelique's surviving brothers and two cousins-slid the coffin past the hanging curtain and into the oven tomb in the upstream wall of the cemetery, Madame Dreuze threw herself full-length on the ground before it, sobbing loudly.

"Oh, Madame," whispered Clemence Drouet, dropping to her knees beside her, "do not yield that way! You know that Angelique..." She was one of very few clothed in black, which did nothing for the ghastly pallor that underlay her warm, mahogany-red coloring. Her eyes were swollen, and tears had left gray streaks in the crepe of her bodice.

"Phrasie, get up," said Livia Levesque calmly. "You're going to trip the priest."

Euphrasie permitted herself to be raised to her feet by the younger of her two sons.

"There is no justice," she cried, in ringing tones. "That Woman used witchcraft to murder my girl, and no one will do anything to bring her to her just deserts." She turned toward the assembled group, the beautiful veiled ladies of the Rue des Ramparts, their servants, and a scattering of the merchants who served them. They stood crowded close, for the tombs rose up around them like a little marble village, tight-packed as the French town itself. January reflected that one didn't have far to seek for the source of Angelique's penchant for theatrics.

"I told that dirty policeman how it was! Told him about the injustices That Woman had perpetrated on my innocent, before she hounded her to death! And he as much as told me they weren't going to investigate, they weren't going to prosecute... they weren't going to lift a finger to avenge my child!"