01 A Free Man of Color

SIX

The ochre stucco cottage on Rue Burgundy was silent when January reached it. It was one of a row of four. He listened for a moment at the closed shutters of each of its two front rooms, then edged his way down the muddy slot between the closely set walls of the houses to the yard, where he had to turn sideways and duck to enter the gate. The shutters there were closed as well. The yard boasted a privy, a brick kitchen, and a garconniere above it.

When first he had lived there, his sister had occupied the rear bedroom, his mother the front, the two parlors -one behind the other-being used for the entertainment of St.Denis Janvier. Although he was only nine years old, Benjamin had slept from the first in the garconniere, waiting until the house lights were put out and then climbing down the rickety twist of the outside stair to run with Olympe and Will Pavegeau and Nic Gignac on their midnight adventures. He smiled, recalling the white glint of Olympe's eyes as she dared them to follow her to the cemetery, or to the slave dances out on Bayou St. John.

His younger sister-his full sister-had been a skinny girl then, like a black spider in a raggedy blue-and-red skirt and a calico blouse a slave woman would have scorned to wear. Having a back room with access to the yard had made it easy for her to slip out, though he suspected that if she'd been locked in a dungeon, Olympe would still have managed to get free.

Olympe had been fifteen the year of Dominique's birth. The two girls had shared that rear chamber for only a year. Then Dominique had occupied it alone, a luxury for a little girl growing up. But then, Dominique had always been her mother's princess, her father's pride.

Presumably Dominique had occupied the room until Henri Viellard had come into her life when she was sixteen. By that time St.Denis Janvier was dead, leaving his mistress comfortably off, and Livia Janvier had married a cabinetmaker, Christophe Levesque, who had died a few years ago. The rear room that had been Olympe's, then Dominique's, had been for a short spell Levesque's workshop. Now it was shut up, though Minou was of the opinion that her mother should take a lover.

January stepped to the long opening and drew back one leaf of the green shutters, listening at the slats of the jalousie for his mother's soft, even breath.

He heard nothing. Quietly, he lifted the latch, pushed the jalousie inward. The room was empty, ghosdy with dust. He crossed to the door of his mother's bedroom, which stood half-slid back into its socket. Slatted light leaked through the louvers of the doors to the street. The gaily patterned coverlet was dirown back in a snowstorm of clean white sheets. Two butter-colored cats -Les Mesdames-dozed, paws tucked, on the end of the bed, opening their golden eyes only long enough to give him the sort of gaze high-bred Creole ladies generally reserved for drunken keelboat men sleeping in their own vomit in the gutters of the Rue Bourbon. There was water in the washbowl and a robe of heavy green chintz lay draped over the cane-bottomed chair. The smell of coffee hung in the air, a few hours old.

Euphrasie Dreuze, or one of her friends, he thought. They had come to her for comfort, and Livia Janvier Levesque had gone.

January crossed the yard again, his black leather music satchel under one arm. There was still fire in the kitchen stove, banked but emitting warmth. The big enamel coffeepot at the back contained several cups' worth. He poured himself some and carried it up the twisting steps and drank it as he changed his clothes and ate the beignets and pastry he'd cadged from the ballroom tables in the course of the night. Half his gleanings he'd left at Hannibal's narrow attic, stowed under a tin pot to keep the rats out of it, though he suspected the minute he was gone one or another of the girls who worked cribs in the building would steal it, as they stole Hannibal's medicine, his laudanum, and every cent he ever had in his pockets.

Before eating he knelt on the floor beside his bed and took from his pocket the rosary he'd had from his childhood-cheap blue glass beads, a crucifix of cut steel -and told over the swift decades of prayers for the soul of Angelique Crozat. She had been, by his own experience and that of everyone he'd talked to, a thoroughly detestable woman, but only God could know and judge. Wherever she was, she had died unconfessed and would need the prayers. They were little enough to give.

It was nearly nine in the morning when he dismounted his rented horse at the plantation called Les Saules where, up until two months ago, Arnaud Trepagier had lived.

A coal-dark butler clothed in the black of mourning came down the rear steps to greet him. "Madame Madeleine in the office with the broker," the man said, gesturing with one black-gloved hand while a barefoot child took the horse's bridle and led it to an iron hitching post under the willows scattered all around the house.

The house itself was old and, like all Creole plantation houses, built high with storerooms on the ground floor. The gallery that girdled it on three sides made it look larger than it was. "She say wait on the gallery, if it please you, sir, and she be out presently. Can I fetch you some lemonade while you're waiting?"

"Thank you." January was ironically amused to see that the servant's shirt cuffs were less frayed and his clothing newer than the free guest's. The long-tailed black coat and cream-colored pantaloons he'd worn last night had to be in good condition, for the appearance of a musician dictated in large part where he was asked to play. But though he'd made far more money as a musician than he'd ever made as a surgeon at the Hotel Dieu -or probably would ever make practicing medicine in New Orleans-there'd never been a great deal to spare taxes in France being what they were. Now, until he made enough of a reputation to get pupils again, he would have to resign himself to being more down-at-heels than some people's slaves.

The butler conducted him up the steps to the back gallery and saw him seated in a cane chair before

redescending to cross the crushed-shell path through the garden in the direction of the kitchen. From his vantage point some ten feet above ground level, January could see through the green-misted branches of the intervening willows the mottled greens and rusts of home-dyed muslins as the kitchen slaves moved around the long brick building, starting the preparations for dinner or tending to the laundry room. It seemed that only those who went by the euphemism "servants"-in effect, the house slaves -warranted full mourning for a master they might have loved or feared or simply accepted, as they would have accepted a day's toil in summer heat. The rest simply wore what they had, home-dyed brown or weathered blue and red cotton calicoes, and the murmur of their voices drifted very faintly to him as they went about their duties.

Les Saules was a medium-size plantation of about four hundred arpents, not quite close enough to town to walk but an easy half-hour's ride. The house was built of soft local brick, stuccoed and painted white: three big rooms in a line with two smaller "cabinets" on the back, closing in two sides of what would be the sleeping porch in summer. Panes were missing from the tall doors that let onto the gallery, the openings patched with cardboard, and through the bare trees January could see that the stucco of the kitchen buildings was broken in places, showing the soft brick underneath. In the other direction, past the dilapidated gar?onni?re and the dovecotes, the work gang weeding the nearby field of second-crop cane looked too few for the job.

He recalled the heavy strands of antique pearls and emeralds on Angelique Crozat's bosom and in her hair. Old Rene Dubonnet, he remembered, had owned fifteen arpents along Lake Pontchartrain, living each year off the advances on next year's crop. Like most planters and a lot of biblical kings, he had been wealthy in land and slaves but possessed little in the way of cash and was mortgaged to his back teeth. There was no reason to think Arnaud Trepagier was any different.

But there was always money, in those old families, to keep a town house and a quadroon mistress, just as there was always money to send the sons to Paris to be educated and the daughters to piano lessons and convent schools. There was always money for good wines, expensive weddings, the best horseflesh. There was always money to maintain the old ways, the old traditions, in the face of squalid Yankee upstarts.

Many years ago, before he'd departed for Paris, January had played at a coming-out party at a big town house on Rue Royale. It had not been too many months after the final defeat of the British at Chalmette, and one of the guests, the junior partner in a brokerage house, had brought a friend, an American, very wealthy, polite, and clearly well-bred, and, as far as January could judge such things, handsome.

Only one French girl had even gone near him, the daughter of an impoverished planter who'd been trying for years to marry her off. Her brothers had threatened to horsewhip the man if he spoke to her again. "Monsieur Janvier?" He turned, startled from his reverie. Madeleine Trepagier stood in the half-open doors of the central parlor, a dark shape in her mourning dress. Her dark hair was smoothed into a neat coil on the back of her head, eschewing the bunches of curls fashionable in society, and covered with a black lace cap. Without the buckskin mask of a Mohican maid and the silly streaks of red and blue paint, January could see that the promise of her childhood beauty had been fulfilled.

He rose and bowed. "Madame Trepagier." She took a seat in the other cane chair, looking out over the turned earth and winter peas of the kitchen garden. Her mourning gown, fitting a figure as opulent as a Roman Venus's, had originally been some kind of figured calico, and the figures showed through the home-dyed blackness like the ghostly tabby of a black cat's fur, lending curious richness to the prosaic cloth. Her fingers were ink-stained, and there were lines of strain printed around her mouth and eyes.

And yet what struck January about her was her serenity. In spite of her harried weariness, in spite of that secret echo of grimness to her lips, she had the deep calm diat arose from some unshakable knowledge

rooted in her soul. No matter how many things went wrong, the one essential thing was taken care of.

But she looked pale, and he wondered at what time she had returned to Les Saules last night.

"Thank you for your concern last night," she said in her low voice. "And thank you for sending me away from there as you did."

"I take it you reached home safely, Madame?"

She nodded, with a rueful smile. "More safely than I deserved. I walked for a few streets and found a hack and was home before eight-thirty. I... I realize it was foolish of me to think... to think I could speak to her there. I'd sent her messages before, you see. She never answered."

"So she said."

Her mouth tightened, remembered anger transforming the smooth full shape of the lips into something bitterly ugly and unforgiving.

January remembered what Angelique had said about "little Creole tricks" and his mother's stories about wives who'd used the city's Black Code to harass their husbands' mistresses. For a moment Mme. Trepagier looked perfectly capable of having another woman arrested and whipped on a trumped-up charge of being "uppity" to her-though God knew Angelique was uppity, to everyone she met, black or colored or white-or jailed for owning a carriage or not covering her hair.

But if Angelique had told him to take her a warning about it last night, it was clear she hadn't exercised this spiteful power.

The woman before him shook her head a little and let the anger pass. "It wasn't necessary for you to come all the way out here, you know."

Something about the way that she sat, about that strained calm, made him say, "You heard she's dead."

The big hands flinched in her lap, but her eyes were wary rather than surprised. She had, he thought, the look of a woman debating how much she can say and be believed; then she crossed herself. "Yes, I heard that."

From the woman who brought in her washing water that morning, thought January. Or the cook, when she went out to distribute stores for the day. Whites didn't understand how news traveled so quickly, being too well-bred to be seen prying. Having set themselves up as gods and loudly established their own importance, they never ceased to be surprised that those whose lives might be affected by their doings kept up on them with the interest they themselves accorded only to characters in Balzac's novels.

"You heard what happened?"

Her hands, resting in her lap again, shivered. "Only that she was... was strangled. At the ballroom." She glanced quickly across at him. "The police... Did they make any arrest? Or say if they knew who it might be? Or what time it happened?"

Her voice had the flat, tinny note of assumed casual-ness, a serious quest for information masquerading as gossip. Time? thought January. But as he studied her face she got quickly to her feet and walked to the gallery railing, watching an old man planting something in the garden among the willows as if the sight of him dipping into his sack of seed, then carefully dibbling with a little water from his gourd, were a matter of deepest importance.

"Did they say what will happen to her things?" she asked, without turning her head.

January stood too. "I expect her mother will keep them."

She looked around at that, startled, and he saw the brown eyes widen with surprise. Then she shook her head, half laughing at herself, though without much mirth. When she spoke, her voice was a little more normal. "I'm sorry," she said. "It's just that... All these years I've thought of her as some kind of... of a witch, or harpy. I never even thought she might have a mother, though of course she must. It's just..." She pushed at her hair, as if putting aside tendrils of it that fell onto her forehead, a gesture of habit. He saw there were tears in her eyes.

He had been her teacher when she was a child, and something of that bond still existed. It was that which let him say, "He gave her things belonging to you, didn't he?"

She averted her face again, and nodded. He could almost feel the heat of her shame. "Jewelry, mostly," she said in a stifled voice. "Things he'd bought for me when we were first married. Household things, crystal and linens. A horse and chaise, even though it wasn't legal for her to drive one. Dresses. That white dress she was wearing was mine. I don't know if men feel this way, but if I make a dress for myself it's... it's a part of me. That sounds so foolish to say out loud, and my old Mother Superior at school would tell me it's tying myself to things of this world, but... When I pick out a silk for myself and a trim, and linen to line it with-when I shape it to my body, wear it, make it mine... And then to have him give it to her..."

She drew a shaky breath. "That sounds so grasping. And so petty." They had the ring of words she'd taught herself with great effort to say. "I don't know if you can understand." She faced him, folded her big hands before those leopard-black skirts.

He had seen the way women dealt with Ayasha when they ordered frocks and gowns, when they came for fittings, and watched what they had asked for as it was called into being. "I understand."

"I think that dress made me angriest. Even angrier than the jewelry. But some of the things-my things- he gave her were quite valuable. The baroque pearls and emeralds she was wearing were very old, and he had no right to take them..."

She paused, fighting with another surge of anger, then shook her head. "Except of course that a husband has the right to all his wife's things."

"Not legally," said January. "According to law, in territory that used to be Spanish-"

"Monsieur Janvier," said Madeleine Trepagier softly, "when it's only a man and a woman alone in a house miles from town, he has the right to whatever of hers he wishes to take." The soft eyes burned suddenly strange and old. "Those emeralds were my grandmother's. They were practically the only thing she brought with her from Haiti. I wore them at our wedding. I never liked them- there was supposed to be a curse on them-but I wanted them back. I needed them back. That's why I had to speak to her."

"Your husband died in debt." Recollections of his mother's scattergun gossip slipped into place.

She nodded. It was not something she would have spoken of to someone who had not been a teacher and a friend of her childhood.

"It must have been bad," he said softly, "for you to go to that risk to get your jewels back. Do you have children?"

"None living." She sighed a little and looked down at her hands where they rested on the cypress railing

of the gallery. He saw she hadn't resumed the wedding band she'd put off last night. "If I lose this place," she said, "I'm not sure what I'm going to do."

In a way, January knew, children would have made it easier. No Creole would turn grandchildren out to starve. His mother had written him of the murderous epidemic last summer, and he wondered if that had taken some or all. Louisiana was not a healthy country for whites.

"You have family yourself?" He recalled dimly that the Dubonnets had come up en masse from Santo Domingo a generation ago, but could not remember whether Rene Dubonnet had had more than the single daughter.

She hesitated infinitesimally, then nodded again.

A governess to nieces and nephews, he thought. Or a companion to an aunt. Or just a widowed cousin, taken into the household and relegated to sharing some daughter's room and bed in the back of the house, when she had run a plantation and been mistress of a household of a dozen servants.

"There any chance of help from your husband's family?"

"No."

By the way she spoke the word, between her teeth, January knew that was the end of the topic.

She drew breath and straightened her back, looking into his face. "You said there are... rules... about that world, customs I don't know. I know that's true.

We're all taught not to look, not to think about things. And you're right. I should have known better than to try to find her at the ball." Against the pallor of her face her eyebrows were two dark slashes, spots of color burning in her cheeks. What had it cost her, he wondered, to go seeking a woman she hated that much? To take that kind of risk?

Why was she so concerned about what time Angelique had died?

"Is there some sort of rule against me going to speak to her mother? Surely there wouldn't be gossip if I went to pay my respects?"

"No," said January, curious and troubled at once. "It isn't usual, but as long as you go quietly, veiled, there shouldn't be talk."

"Oh, of course." Her brows drew down with quick sympathy. "I'm sure the last thing the poor woman needs is... is some kind of lady of the manor descending on her. And the less talk there is, the better." She moved toward the parlor doors in a rustle of starched muslin petticoats, then paused within them. For a woman of her opulent figure she moved lightly, like a fleeing girl. "Is she-Madame... Crozat?"

"Dreuze," said January. "Euphrasie Dreuze. She went by both. Placees sometimes do." Dominique was still called Janvier, but his mother had been called that, too, for the man who had bought her and freed her.

"I see. I... didn't know how that was... dealt with. Would she see me? Would it be better for me to wait a few days? I'm sorry to ask, but you know the family and the custom. I don't."

He remembered the despairing screams from the parlor where Euphrasie Dreuze's friends had taken her, and Hannibal's tale about the son who had died. Remembered Xavier Peralta crossing the crowded ballroom full of angrily murmuring men, a cup of coffee carefully balanced in his hand, and how the

gaslight had spangled the jewel-covered tignon as the woman had caught the boy Galen's sleeve, babbling to him in panic of her daughter's love.

"I don't know," he said. "I knew Madame Dreuze when Angelique was a little girl. She worshiped her then, treated her like a porcelain doll. But women sometimes change when their daughters grow."

His own mother had. Nothing had been too good for Dominique: Every bump and scratch attended by a doctor, every garment embroidered and tucked and smocked with the most delicate of stitches, every toy and novelty that came into port purchased for the little girl's delight. Three months ago, just after his return from Paris, he'd come down to breakfast in the kitchen to the news that Minou had contracted bronchitis-"She's always down with it, since she had it back in "30" had been his mother's only comment as she casually turned the pages of the Bee. It had been January, not their mother, who'd gone over to make sure his sister had everything she needed.

Certainly his mother had never wasted tears over him. The news of Ayasha's death she greeted with perfunctory sympathy but nothing more. There were days when he barely saw her, save in passing when he had a student in the parlor. But then, he'd never had the impression his mother was terribly interested in him and his doings.

Because he had three black grandparents instead of three white ones?

It was with Dominique-who had been only a tiny child when he'd left-that he had wept for the loss of his wife.

"A moment." Madame Trepagier vanished into the shadows of the house. January returned to his chair. From the tall doorway of one of the side rooms a girl emerged, rail slim and ferret faced, African dark, wearing the black of home-dyed mourning but walking with a lazy jauntiness that indicated no great sense of loss. She sized up his clothing, his mended kid gloves, the horse tethered beneath the willows in the yard, and the fact that he was sitting there in a chair meant for guests, with a kind of insolent wisdom, then tossed her head a little and passed on down the steps, silent as slaves must be in the presence of their betters.

And indeed, he could scarcely imagine Angelique Crozat or her mother or his own mother, who had been a slave herself, speaking to the woman.

The woman was a slave, and black.

He was free, and colored, though his skin was as dark as hers.

He watched the slim figure cross through the garden toward the kitchen, like a crow against the green of the grass, saw her ignore the old man tending to the planting, and noted the haughty tilt of shoulder and hip as she passed some words with the cook. Then she went on toward the laundry, and January saw the cook and another old woman speak quietly. Knowing the opinions his mother's cook Bella traded with the cook of the woman next door, he could guess exactly what they said.

Not something he'd want said about him.

"I've written a note for Madame Dreuze."

He rose quickly. Madame Trepagier stood in the doorway, a sealed envelope in her hand. "Would you be so good as to give it to her? I'm sorry." She smiled, her nervousness, her defenses, falling away. For a moment it was the warm smile of the child he had taught, sitting in her white dress at the piano-the sunny, half-apologetic smile of a child whose playing had contained such dreadful passion, such adult

ferocity. He still wondered at the source of that glory and rage.

"I always seem to be making you a messenger. I do apologize."

"Madame Trepagier." He took the message and tucked it into a pocket, then bowed over her hand. "I'm a little old to be cast as winged Mercury, but I'm honored to serve you nevertheless."

"After two years of being Apollo," she said smiling, "it makes a change."

He recognized the allusion, and smiled. In addition to being the god of music, Apollo was the lord of healing. "Did you keep up with it?" he asked, as he moved toward the steps. "The music?"

She nodded, her smile gentle again, secret and warm. "It was like knowing how to swim," she said. "I thought of you many times, when the water was deep. You did save my life."

And turning, she went back into the house, leaving him stunned upon the steps.