Barbara Hambly: 01 A Free Man of Color

"And let people say he ran away?" contradicted Jacques unbelievingly. "I say eleven."

"That's William Granger?" Like everyone else who'd been following the escalating war of letters in the New Orleans Bee, January had pictured the railway speculator as, if not exactly a tobacco-spitting Kaintuck savage, at least the sort of hustling American businessman who came to New Orleans on the steamboats with shady credit and a pocket full of schemes to get rich quick.

That might, he supposed, be the result of the man's spelling, as demonstrated in his letters to the Bee's editor, or the speed with which his accusations against the head of the city planning council had degenerated from allegations of taking bribes and passing information to speculators in rival railway schemes to imputations of private misconduct, dubious ancestry, and personal habits un-suited to a gentleman, to say the least.

Not that Councilman Bouille's rebuttals had been any more dignified in tone, particularly after Granger had accused him of not even speaking good French.

January shook his head, and slid into the bright measures of Le Pantalon. The crowd swirled, coalesced, divided into double sets of couples in a rather elongated ring around the walls of the long ballroom. Creole with Creole, American with American, foreign French with foreign French... Bonapartist with Bonapartist, for all he knew.

He saw the young Prussian fencing master emerge from the passageway to the other ballroom, the offending newspaper tucked under one arm, and scan the crowd, like a scar-faced, beak-nosed heron in Renaissance velvet and pearls. The purple pirate stepped through the curtain behind him and conferred with him rapidly-a silk scarf covered the corsair's hair but nothing in the world could prevent his copper-colored Vandyke from looking anything but awful in contrast. Then Mayerling moved off through the crowd to speak with Granger, who had clearly brushed aside the encounter and was asking Agnes Pellicot if one of her daughters would favor him with a dance.

Agnes looked him up and down with an eye that would have killed a snap bean crop overnight and made excuses. January had heard his mother remark that her friend would have her work cut out for her to successfully dispose of Marie-Anne, Marie-Rose, Marie-Therese, and Marie-Niege, but Kaintucks were Kaintucks.

Her own protector having crossed over to join his fiancee in the Theatre, Phlosine Seurat waved, and Mayerling joined her in a set with a very young, fair, chinless boy in a twenty-dollar gray velvet coat.

The tide of the music drew January in-the "tour des mains," the "demi promenade," the "chaine an-glaise"-and for a time it, and the joy of the dancers, was all that existed for him. Hidden within the heart of the great rose of music, he could forget time and place, forget the sting of his cut lip and the white man who'd given it to him, who had the right by law to give it to him; forget the whole of this past half year. For as long as he could remember, music had been his refuge, when grief and pity and rage and incomprehension of the whole of the bleeding world overwhelmed him: It had been a retreat, like the gentle hypnotism of the Rosary. With the gaslight flickering softly on the keys and the subliminal rus-de of petticoats in his ears, he could almost believe himself in Paris again, and happy.

As a medical student he had played in the dance halls and the orchestras of theaters, to pay his rent and buy food, and after he had given up the practice of medicine at the H6tel Dieu, music had been his living and his life. It was one of his joys to watch the people at balls: the chaperones waving their fans on the rows of olive-green velvet chairs, the young girls with their heads together giggling, the men talking business by the buffet or in the lobby, their eyes always straying to the girls as the girls' eyes strayed toward them. January saw the American Granger stroll over to the lobby doors to talk to the gilt Roman,

controlled annoyance in the set of his back. Something about the way they spoke, though January could hear no words, told him that the Roman was American as well-when the Roman spat tobacco at the sandbox in the corner he was sure of it. Uneasiness prickled him at the sight of them. He neither liked nor trusted Americans.

The young man in the gray coat likewise made his way to the lobby doors, looked out uneasily, then gravitated back to the small group of sword masters and their pupils. Mayerling and Maitre Andreas Verret were conversing in amity unusual for professional fencers, who generally quarreled at sight; their students glared and fluffed like tomcats. Gray Coat orbited between the group and the doors half a dozen times, fidgeting with his cravat or adjusting his white silk domino mask. Waiting for someone, thought January. Watching.

"Drat that Angelique!" Dominique rustled up to the dais with a cup of negus in hand. "I swear she's late deliberately! Agnes tells me two of her girls need final adjustments in their costumes for the tableau vivant- they're Modi and Mustardseed to Angelique's Tita-nia-and of course Angelique's the only one who can do it. It would be just like her."

"Would it?" January looked up from his music, surprised. "I'd think she'd want her group to be perfect, to show her off better."

Minou narrowed her cat-goddess eyes. "She wants herself to be perfect," she said. "But she'd always rather the girls around her were just a little flawed. Look at her friendship with Clemence Drouet-who might stand some chance of marrying a nice man if she'd quit trying to catch a wealthy protector. She designs Clemence's dresses... Well, look at her."

She nodded toward the narrow-shouldered girl who stood in deep conversation with the fair young man in gray, and January had to admit that her dress, though beautiful and elaborately frilled with lace, accentuated rather than concealed the width of her hips and the flatness of her bosom.

"She designed the gowns for all the girls in her tableau," went on Dominique in an undertone. "I haven't seen them finished, but I'll bet you my second-best lace they make Marie-Anne and Marie-Rose look as terrible as Clemence's does her."

"She's that spiteful?" It was a trick January had heard of before.

Dominique shrugged. "She has to be the best in the group, p'tit. And the two Maries are younger than she is." She nodded toward Agnes Pellicot, a regal woman in egg yolk silk and an elaborately wrapped tignon threaded with ropes of pearls, now engaged in what looked like negotiations with a stout man clothed in yet another bad version of Ivanhoe. Marie-Anne and Marie-Rose stood behind and beside her, slim girls with abashed doe eyes.

They must be sixteen and fifteen, thought January- he recalled Agnes had just borne and lost her first child when he had departed for France-the same age, probably, at which Madeleine Dubonnet had been married to Arnaud Trepagier.

And in fact, he reflected, there wasn't that much difference between that match and the one Agnes was clearly trying to line up with Ivanhoe. They were technically free, as Madeleine Dubonnet had been technically free, marrying-or entering into a contract of placage- of their own free choice. But that choice was based on the knowledge that there was precious little a woman could do to keep a roof over her head and food on her table except sell herself to a man on the best terms she could get. Why starve and scrimp and sell produce on the levee, why sew until your fingertips bled and your eyes wept with fatigue, when you could dress in silk and spend the larger part of your days telling servants what to do and having your hair fixed?

A girl has to live.

Then Angelique Crozat stepped into the ballroom, and January understood the iciness in his sister's voice.

True, a girl must live. And even the most beautiful and fair-skinned octoroon could not go long without the wealth of a protector. That was the custom of the country.