Barbara Hambly - 01 A Free Man of Color

Only one person-Dominique herself-noted Clemence Drouet's presence at the ball at all. Clemence was that kind of woman. She'd arrived at Angelique's house the following morning in the expectation of seeing her alive, so she must in fact have left the building between her brief encounter with January, just before the quarrel, and the discovery of Angelique's corpse.

And of course, no one had bothered to notify her.

The American Tom Jenkins had clearly been searching as well, if he'd left a laurel leaf in the parlor, but unless he was far cleverer than he looked, he wouldn't have kept searching if he knew she was lying dead at the bottom of an armoire.

"I don't know," he said slowly. "On the face of it, I'd say yes... Except for his age. He's young, and he was crazy possessed by her, even before Trepagier died, I've heard. I'm not sure he'd have had the wits to hide the body and strip her jewelry to make it look like robbery. If he'd killed her, I think he'd have been found by the body."

"You'd be surprised what you do when you have to," pointed out Hannibal, warming his small, rather delicate-looking hands over the coffee cup's aromatic steam. The light had faded from the windows, and Therese came in with a taper to light the branches of candles on sideboard, table, and walls. The gold gleam lent color to the fiddler's bloodless features, banishing the dissipated pallor and camouflaging the frayed cuffs and threadbare patches of the black evening coat that hung so slack over his thin shoulders.

"For all he follows Augustus around like a puppy, he wasn't at the duel this morning, and I'm told he didn't attend the Bringiers' ball last night. Not something his father would have let him miss."

"No," said January thoughtfully, leafing through the papers again. "No."

Columbines, Pierrots, Chinese Emperors, Ivanhoes had filled the upstairs lobby and downstairs entry hall; Uncases and Natty Bumpoes (Bumf if, wondered January, recollecting his Latin lessons); Sultans and Greek gods. Men in evening dress and dominoes. Women in unidentifiable garments described by

Shaw's laboring clerk as "lace with high collar, violet sash, pearls on sleeves" (except Livia would have pointed out those were not genuine pearls), to which Dominique's more regular hand had appended "lilac princess-Cresside Morisset- wDenis Saint-Roche (motherfiancee in Theatre)."

Out of curiosity, January asked, "Is Peralta Fils engaged to anyone?" The woman who marries him...

"Rosalie Delaporte," reported Dominique promptly. "The Delaportes are cousins to the Dupages, and there was a big party at Grandpere Dupage's town house on Rue Saint Louis. All of them were there."

Jigreel-Hubert Granville wMarie-Eulalie Figes, Yves Valcour wIphe'ge'nie Picard, Martin Clos wPhlosine Seurat... Marie-Toussainte Valcour and Bernadette Mttoyer saw redwhite Ivanhoe by buffet... green Elizabethan by doors...

He looked again. At least six people had seen "gold Roman" in the ballroom during the Rossini waltz. He'd been William Granger's second for the duel, and thus in Froissart's office at the bottom of the service stair. Xavier Peralta, who'd also been there, hadn't put in a reappearance until almost the end of the progressive waltz, nearly ten minutes later.

He remembered the old man in the night-blue satin, talking long and earnestly with Euphrasie Dreuze, watching the crowds in the lobby, in the ballroom, looking for someone.

He, if not his son, would have had the measure of the cat-faced woman dressed like the Devil's bride. He would have watched that come-hither scene with Jenkins, watched her eyes, her body, as she teased and laughed among the men; watched his son following her, crazy in love. Not being stupid, he would already have asked his friends about her.

A valuable piece of downtown property, a substantial sum monthly, and all the jewels, dresses, horses, and slaves she could coax out of a lovestruck seventeen-year-old boy.

The woman who marries him...

A poisonous succubus with a cashbox for a heart.

The meeting in Froissart's office could have continued with Granger and Bouille, of course, after the seconds were dismissed. And Shaw was the only one who would know that.

January folded the papers together, gazing out sightlessly into the early dark. Euphrasie Dreuze's ravings about the dead bat aside, it was quite possible that Lt. Shaw had looked over his notes and come to his own conclusions about just who had the most motive in An-gelique Crozat's death: the passionate son, or that powerful, courtly, white-bearded old man.

Maybe he only remembered with the memory of an idealistic young man, but it was his recollection that sixteen years ago, before he left Louisiana, had a white man murdered a free colored woman, the police would have investigated and the murderer been hanged. It had been a French city then, with the French understanding of who, and what, the free colored actually were: a race of not-quite-acknowledged cousins, neither African nor European, but property holders, artisans, citizens.

Shaw had, for a time, appeared to understand. But that was before he'd read these notes.

There was a difference between not quite trusting whites, and this. Being struck in the street had not been as shocking, or as painful, as the realization of what exactly the American regime meant.

" 'Put them aside,' " he quoted dryly, handing the folded sheets back to Dominique, " 'in some safe place where they will not be seen.' It looks like this isn't any of our business anymore."

And so the matter rested, until Euphrasie Dreuze took matters into her own grasping little ring-encrusted hands.

They were all raised to this world, he had said to Madeleine Trepagier three nights ago, with the bands of greasy light falling through the window of Froissart's office onto her masked and painted face. To do things a certain way. They mostly know each other, and they all know the little tricks-who they can talk to and who not...

January shook his head ironically at the memory of his words as he lounged up Rue DuMaine, with the lazy, almost conversational tapping of African drums growing louder before him beyond the iron palings of the fence around Congo Square.

You don't. Go home, he had said. Go home right now.

Even with his papers in his pocket-the pocket of the shabby corduroy roundabout he'd bought for a couple of reales from a backstreet slop shop in the Irish Channel-he felt a twinge of uneasiness as he crossed the Rue des Ramparts.

Last night he had said to Dominique, This isn't any of our business anymore. Now who's being a fool?

He slipped his hand in his pocket, fingering the papers with a kind of angry distaste. Before he'd left for Paris, sixteen years ago, the assumption of his status had been unquestioned. He was a free man-black, white, or tea, as Andrew Jackson had said when he'd recruited him to fight the redcoats at Chalmette. He had been shocked when the official at the docks had looked at him oddly, and said, "Returnin" resident, eh? You might want to get yourself papers, boy. They's enough cheats and scum in this city who'd pounce on a likely lookin' boy, and you'd find yourself pickin' cotton in Natchez before you kin say Jack Robinson. Till you do, I'd stay out of barrooms." He had grown up being called "boy" by white men, even as a grown man. It was something he'd half forgotten, like his wariness of authority. In any case what one accepts as a twenty-four-year-old musician is different from what one expects when one is forty and a member of the Paris College of Surgeons, though he hadn't practiced in ten years. But that at least was something he'd thought about on the boat from Le Havre.

His mother had confirmed that these days a man of color, no matter how well dressed and well spoken, needed to carry proof of his freedom-and a slave of his business-in order to walk the streets alone.