Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 5 - Die Upon A Kiss

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Benjamin January
Book 5
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Die Upon A Kiss
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Barbara Hambly
?
For Adrian
Special thanks, as always, are due to Pamela Areeneaux and the Staff of the Historic New Orleans
Collection; to Paul, Bill, Sand, and Norman at Le Monde Creole; to Emily Clark; to Rebecca Witjas; to
Kate Miciak; to Laurie Perry; to Stephanie Hall; to Bob Moraski for all his time and knowledge; to Jill
and Charles for helping me through much awfulness; and to George.
?One
". . . nigger," muttered a man's voice, hoarse in the dark of the alley but very clear.
Benjamin January froze in his tracks. Would this, he wondered, be the occasion on which he'd be hauled
into court and hanged-or, more informally, beaten to death on the public street-for the crime of defending
himself against a white man's assault?
The gas-jet above the American Theater's stage door was out. A misty glimmer beyond the alley's
narrow mouth showed him that the gambling-parlor at the City Hotel on the other side of Camp Street
was still in operation, and above the wet plop of hooves, the creak of harness, a man's voice sang jerkily
in English about Ireland's em'rald hills. It was past three and bitterly cold. Even in Carnival season, New
Orleans had to sleep sometime.
January considered turning immediately back to the stage door and retreating through the theater and out
to the street by one of the side-doors that admitted patrons to its galleries or pit. He was a big man-six
feet three-and built on what the slave-dealers at the baracoons along Baronne Street liked to call
"Herculean" lines; he could have taken most assailants without trouble. But he was also forty-two years
old and had learned not to take on anybody in a pitch-dark alley less than five feet wide, especially when
he didn't know if they were a) armed b) white or c) alone. Words had been uttered: that implied one
auditor at least.
But Marguerite Scie, ballet mistress of the Theater's new Opera company, had locked the alley door
behind him. By this time, she'd have ascended from the prop room on the ground floor to the backstage
regions immediately above. She and January had been catching up on seven years worth of old times
since rehearsal had ended at eleven, and January wasn't sure there was anyone else in the building to hear
him pound the door and shout.
And he'd learned that when white men got drunk enough to go around looking for black ones to beat up,
flight was effective only if you were damn sure you'd get away. It was like escaping from a pack of wild
dogs. If you acted like prey, you'd become it.
For a time he stood listening in the darkness.
Anger smoldered in him that he'd even contemplate flight. In Paris, where he'd lived for sixteen years,
he'd been assaulted once or twice, coming home late from night surgery at the H6tel Dieu. Later, after his
marriage, he'd played piano until the small hours at society balls, at the Opera or the ballet jobs that paid
more than a junior surgeon ever earned-and had walked through darker streets than this. But even in the
Halles district, or the St. Antoine, few of the local orgues were dim-witted enough to take on someone
who bore that close a resemblance to an oak tree.
In New Orleans a white man would do it-and expect to get away with it-if his victim was black.
Music gusted over the alley's rear gate. That led to the stable yard of the Promenade Hotel, and would
be locked, too, at this hour, though the gaming-rooms were still running full-cock. Even in the slack days
of summer, when yellow fever stalked the town's fetid streets, the gamblingrooms were open, and it was
Carnival season now-January couldn't imagine what it would take to close them down.
Another carriage rattled by up Camp Street, its occupants blowing horns and banging tin pans. The hell
with this. January pulled off his gloves, shifted his music satchel to his left hand, and balled his right into a
fist the size of a cannonball. I can always tell the judge I couldn't tell if they were white or black, in the
dark. He took off his hat, and that annoyed him, too: if it came to fighting, he'd probably lose it, and it
was new. The old one had been demolished by a gang of drunk upriver Kentucky ruffians who'd
cornered him one night last October on his way back from playing at a ball. Hat and satchel in his left
hand, right hand freed and ready, heart hammering in his breast, January put his right shoulder to the
theater wall and moved forward again.
He'd seen no forms silhouetted against the street's dim glow. Only one niche broke the hundred feet of
brick theater wall between him and the alley mouth-the door from which stairs ascended to the slaves'
section of the gallery, and the half-tier of boxes reserved for the free colored. He cursed himself Why
couldn't he remember if there were two or three doorways in the wall of Chaney's cotton yard on the
other side, or where they were, after all the times he'd been up and down this alley?
Cursed himself, too, for coming back to New Orleans at all-to a town where he could be beaten up by
white men with impunity.
Wondered, for the thousandth time since coming back thirty months ago, why he hadn't stayed in Paris.
Going insane from grief couldn't be that unpleasant, could it?
The creak of boot-leather, in touching-distance of his own long arm. Stale sweat, stale liquor, dribbled
tobaccospit, and long-abiding dirt ...
Beside him in the dark. Behind him in the dark. Nothing.
To turn and look, much less to break into a run, would invite attack. His breath sounded like a bellows in
his own ears and his heart like a bamboula drum. Nothing.
The dim radiance from the street strengthened before him. Still no squish of striding boots in the
horse-shitsmelling black stillness at his back. Not even a spit-warm wad of tobacco juice on the back of
his neck. He slid out into the flame-dotted murk of Camp Street and turned immediately right, taking
shelter behind one of the marble piers that flanked the American Theater's front stairs.
At that point, he reflected later, he should simply have crossed the street and made his way back to his
lodgings in the old French town on the other side of Canal Street like a good, uninquiring nigger should.
Then he would have been able to say, with perfect truth, I know nothing of murder, I know nothing of
blood, I know nothing of why anyone would crush skulls or burn buildings or try to kill me and my friends
in the dark. . . .
But the circumstance of not being attacked-not even spit on-by at least two drunk river-rats at three in
the morning in a back alley was so unusual that January set his hat and music-satchel safely out of the
way on the marble steps, settled himself farther back into the pier's inky shadow, and waited to see who
they were after.
And in doing so, almost certainly saved Lorenzo Belaggio's life.
The eight gas-lamps that so brilliantly illuminated the theater's façade earlier in the night-its owner, James
Caldwell, was also part owner of the new municipal gasworks-were quenched. Now and then a carriage
rattled by, driven full-speed by improbably costumed Mohicans or Musketeers on their way to one last
drink, one last round of faro or vingt-et-un after whatever party or ball had occupied their evening, but no
one gave him a glance. A blue-uniformed representative of the City Guards, January supposed, would be
along shortly to demand an account of his business so long after curfew and a look at the papers that
proved him a free man.
But before that could happen, he heard a man shout "Dio mio!" and then, `Nierdones!Assassini!" and
recognized the Milanese voice of the impresario who'd spent the evening taking orchestra and company
through the first rehearsal of his new opera, Othello. January lunged to his feet, down the alley, hearing
rather than seeing the flopping, wrenching suggestion of struggle, the thud of bodies on the brick walls,
and the grunt of impact.
Then he smelled blood.
He grabbed the nearest form-coarse wool and greasy hair slithered under his fingers heaved the man off
his feet, and flung him toward Camp Street. Indistinct forms writhed in the murk; a man shrieked in pain.
He grabbed again; slipped in the muck of horse-shit and rainwater. Edged metal bit his arm. He seized
the attacker's hand and twisted it; a moment later, arms hooked around his body from behind.
He dropped his weight, turned, grabbed the front of a rough shirt, hauled his assailant into a punch like
the driving-rod of a steamboat's engine. More blood-smell and the crash of a body against the wall.
Someone opened the gate at the end of the alley, said, "Holy Jesus!" and slammed it again, and voices
hollered confusedly on the other side of the wall. The same instant light speared from the stage door and
Madame Scie called, "Who's there?" Almost under January's feet, Lorenzo Belaggio screamed,
"Murder!" again.
Someone blundered into January, throwing him against the wall. Footsteps pounded and he saw two
forms-he thought there were two-stagger against the smudgy glow of the street. A startled horse
whinnied; a man cursed in English, cracked a whip.
"I'm killed!" howled Belaggio. "Dio mio, I am dying!" January knelt in the filth at his side.
"Hideputa!" In the jerking flare of two whale-oil lamps the darkest-voiced of the Opera company's three
sopranos, Consuela Montero, strode up the alley a step behind Madame Scie, velvet skirts hitched high
above plump knees.
"Is he all right?"
"Oh, I am dying!"
"Scarf," said January tersely. "Ruffle, kerchief, anything you've got."
Madame Scie thrust the lamp at her companion, flipped up her schoolgirlish gauze dancer's skirt to get at
a petticoat-ruffle. Yellow light glistened on blood. Most of it seemed, in fact, to be coming from
Belaggio's left arm rather than his torso, but January jerked the black longtailed coat back from the
impresario's bulky shoulders, searching for telltale spreading red on the white of his shirt, the
azure-stitched gold of his waistcoat. Before the ballet mistress could rip free her ruffle, a male voice said,
"Here," and a mauve silk handkerchief was passed down over January's shoulder by a man's hand in a
mauve kidskin glove. "Did you see who did it?"
January glanced around and dimly recognized one of the gentlemen who'd come to watch the rehearsal.
Handsome as Apollo, French Creole by his speech, wealthy by the cut of the mauve velvet coat. Even
the buttons on its sleeve, and on the glove, were amethyst, flashing in the lantern-light as he stretched a
hand down to Belaggio. "Are you well, Monsieur?"
"Lorenzo!" shrieked Drusilla d'Isola, the prima donna, and fainted in the Creole gentleman's arms.
"Get him inside." January's own arm ached damnably from the knife-slash he'd taken and he still couldn't
find any wound on Belaggio other than the cut on his arm, which he bound up with petticoat-ruffle and
purple silk. He got a glimpse of a bloody skinning-knife lying in the mud, but lost sight of it as Madame
Scie stepped back to make way for first violinist Hannibal Sefton-hired, like January, for the Italian
opera's first season at the American Theater-and Silvio Cavallo, tenor.
The sight of young Cavallo seemed to miraculously revive the swooning impresario. "Assassin!" Belaggio
cried, jabbing his forefinger at the tenor, then sagging dramatically back against January's injured arm like
a dying steer. "Murderer! Conspirator! Carbonaro!"
Cavallo, who'd stepped forward to help support him-Belaggio was nearly January's height and anything
but slender-fell back, dark eyes flashing, and Hannibal said reasonably, "Not conspirator, surely?
Conspire with whom?"
As if to answer the question, Cavallo's friend from the chorus, a dark, squat Hercules named Bruno
Ponte, appeared panting from the darkness.
"They have conspired to murder me ... !"
Belaggio was definitely not wounded anywhere but in the arm. "Begging your pardon, Signor," January
pointed out as they lugged the impresario in through the stage door to the vault where the props were
kept; "Signor Cavallo's clothing is unmuddied. I believe that you knocked down one of your attackers in
the fray." With a Creole gentleman present-tenderly depositing the unconscious d'Isola on a Roman
dining-couch while young Ponte and Hannibal dragged a gilded daybed out of the jumble of flats, carts,
lampstands, chairs, statues of Aphrodite, and stuffed or carven livestock that crammed this low brick
vault beneath the theater itself-he wasn't about to admit to having laid a finger on white men.
"Argue it later," commanded Madame Scie. "We need more light."
"Go upstairs and get candles," ordered Cavallo, giving Ponte a shove toward the stairs. "Get bandages,
too, and brandy from the wardrobe room. I'll fetch the City Guards."
"If you can find any sober at this hour," Madame Scie retorted as the tenor bolted through the outer
door. Madame Montero located a box of fat yellow candles among the props for the castle hall scene in
the upcoming La Muette de Portici. "Good. Thank you." The Creole gentleman still sat on the edge of the
banqueting-couch, gently chafing d'Isola's fragile hand. "Are you hurt, Benjamin?" Madame was the only
one, apparently, who had noticed.
"Just a scratch."
"Dear Virgin Mary, help me!" Belaggio sagged back onto the striped cushions, clutching his arm again.
"Brandy!" The Creole gentleman withdrew a flask from his pocket-mauve Morocco leather with an
amethyst on its silver cap-and held it out. Hannibal took a hearty swig before passing it on to January,
who put it to Belaggio's lips.
"Lorenzo, Lorenzo!" Drusilla d'Isola sat up and pressed lace-mitted hands to her bosom. "Ah, God, they
have killed him! Without him I shall die!" And fainted again. Gracefully, wrist to brow, into the mauve
Creole's powerful arms.
"Hannibal, fetch cloaks from the wardrobe." Marguerite Scie was fifty-seven years old and had seen,
from a garret window, her father and two of her brothers go to the guillotine. Histrionics did not impress
her. "You, Benjamin, sit down and get your coat off. M'sieu Marsan-" This to the Creole gentleman bent
tenderly over La d'Isola, the lamplight new-minted gold on his shining curls. "Where might we find M'sieu
Caldwell at this hour?" In any city but New Orleans, at any time but Carnival, the answer to such a
question at this hour would be, self-evidently, Home in bed. But there was no telling. Considering
Caldwell's former profession as an actor, and his current involvement in a dozen other money-making
schemes in the American community of New Orleans, the theater owner could be anywhere.
"Check the Fatted Calf Tavern," advised M'sieu Marsan, raising his head. The Creole's voice was both
light and melodious, with the soft slur to his speech. His eyelashes were dark, making his sky-blue eyes
all the brighter. "I believe he was going there with M'sieu Trulove to confer about the Opera Society, but
they may have gone on."
As he eased Belaggio out of his coat and waistcoats-the impresario affected the dandyish habit of
wearing two-and made another futile search for anything else resembling a wound, January wondered
what any of these people, let alone all of them, were doing in and around the American Theater at twenty
minutes after three in the morning.
Himself, and Marguerite Scie, he understood. While a twenty-four-year-old student of surgery in Paris,
he had made ends meet by playing piano for the ballet school at the Theatre de l'Odeon. Though close to
forty then, Madame had still been dancing, precise and perfect as Damascus steel. They had been lovers,
the first white woman he had had. When, much later, he had met and sought to marry the woman he
loved, it was Madame who had gotten him a job playing harpsicord for the Comedie Française-the job
that had let him and Ayasha wed. Madame had, over the next few years, sent piano pupils his way, and
had recommended Ayasha's skills as a dressmaker to both the Comedie's costume shop and to the
actresses of the company: even in the heartland of Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternite, there were few who
would choose a surgeon of nearly-pure African descent over white Frenchmen.
When January had entered the American Theater yesterday to meet the opera company Mr. Caldwell
had brought to New Orleans from Havana, Marguerite Scie's first words to him had been I grieved to
hear of your wife's death.
They had had much to talk about. The others ...
January wrapped Belaggio's shuddering bulk in a kingly cloak of beggar's velvet and dyed rabbit-fur
someone handed him, and tallied the faces in the candle-light.
Hannibal Sefton's presence, if unexplained, at least wasn't sinister. January had known the fiddler for two
and a half years now and knew the man didn't have a violent bone in his opium-laced body. Through the
evening's rehearsal, as he'd sat at the piano, January had heard Hannibal's stifled coughing behind him,
and whenever he turned, it had been to see his friend's thin face white and set with pain. As usual when
his consumption bore hard on him, Hannibal had taken refuge in laudanum to get him through rehearsal,
and January guessed, by the creases in his rusty black coat and the way his graying hair straggled loose
over his back from its old-fashioned queue, that he'd simply fallen asleep afterward in a corner of the
green room. How he managed to play as beautifully as he did under the circumstances was something
January had yet to figure out, but that was the only mystery about Hannibal.
The presence of the others was less easily accounted for.
Drusilla d'Isola, girlishly slim and frail-looking, he knew to be Belaggio's mistress, and it didn't take much
guessing to place her there. Her dressing-room was on the second floor above the rehearsal-room and
offices. According to company gossip, it included a daybed among its lavish amenities, as well as gas
lighting-the only dressing-room so supplied-a gilt-footed bath-tub, a coffee-urn, a French armoire painted
with cupids, and even a small dining table. Her hair, the color of refined molasses, was no longer in the
elaborately upswept Psyche knot in which it had been dressed at rehearsal, and January could tell by the
fit of her plum-colored moire dress that it had been laced hastily-probably by herself-and that she wore
neither corset nor petticoats beneath.
Consuela Montero's raven hair was dressed, shining with an unbroken pomaded luster in its fantasia of
loops, tulle bows, and blood-red ostrich-tips, and the crimson gown that made her creamy skin glow
almost golden was laced and trussed as only a maidservant's attentions could make it. The soprano had
protuberant brown eyes that reminded January of a wild horse ready to kick or bite or bolt. At the
moment she was regarding La d'Isola with undisguised contempt as the prima donna emerged with
fluttering eyelids from her swoon.
"Are you all right?" Monsieur Marsan tenderly stroked d'Isolas wrists. Even his stickpin matched, an
amethyst like a pale iris's heart set in a twilight-hued cravat.
"M'sieu, the brandy, if you would. . ."
January passed the brandy back to Hannibal, who took another gulp before returning it to Marsan. "It is
not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door," observed the fiddler, leaning over January's
shoulder as January checked Belaggio's hammering pulse. Fortunately he spoke English, since the wound
so described in Romeo and Juliet had proved fatal and Belaggio was making a sufficiently Senecan
tragedy of his injury as it was. "Shall I get more blankets, or shall we move him-them"-he glanced back at
La d'Isola, whom Monsieur Marsan had wrapped in his coat "upstairs, where it's warmer?"
"By all means." Marsan lifted the prima soprano as if she were a doll; La d'Isola sagged gracefully back
so that her head hung over his elbow, her hair a rippling curtain halfway to the floor. January had seen her
take the identical pose earlier that evening in the first rehearsal of Othello, when Staranzano the baritone
bore her to the bed.
Marsan's dandyish ensemble had caught January's eye at rehearsal, added to the fact that he'd sat apart
from the other members of the newly-founded St. Mary Opera So ciety. That separation, at least, was
now made clearJanuary wondered how it came about that a Creole Frenchman was a member of the
Society at all. As a rule, the French Creoles who owned most of the plantations and who still controlled
the money and power in the city avoided the newly-come, newly-wealthy Americans, treating even the
representatives of the best families of New York, Virginia, Philadelphia, and Boston as if they were
tobacco-spitting filibusters straight off the keelboats.
This antipathy was in fact the genesis of the St. Mary Opera Society. The money contributed by the
wealthy inhabitants of that new upriver American suburb was what enabled James Caldwell to go to
Havana and enlist Belaggio, to bring to New Orleans a company which sang in the sweetly musical Italian
style-pointedly different, Caldwell and Belaggio both assured their patrons, from the more lavish, but
more harshly sung, French-style opera presented by the French Creole John Davis at his theater on the
Rue d'Orleans.
Curious, thought January, that a Creole like Marsan would be part of the St. Mary Society...
"Is Mademoiselle better?" Marsan's boyishly handsome face creased with concern as he touched La
d'Isola's hair in the candlelight. "Come, we will take you somewhere warm and comfortable. . . ."
Well, perhaps not so curious at that.
"I faint!" croaked Signor Belaggio when January tried to get him to his feet. "I die!"
January had the distinct impression that the impresario was angling to be borne upstairs like a slaughtered
hero. January could have done it-he'd lugged and man handled bigger men in his years as a surgeon-but
his slashed arm smarted and he was beginning to feel lightheaded himself. "Signor Ponte," he called out as
the chorus-boy darted down the stairs with voluble excuses about not having been able to find bandages
or brandy or anything else where they should have been. "Help me, if you would be so kind."
"Keep him from me!" Belaggio directed a withering glare at Bruno Ponte. "It was he, he and his keeper,
who attempted to assassinate me! You think he would not take the moment of holding me up to slip a
little dagger between my ribs?"
Ponte's cupid-bow lips pulled back in rage. "Tisciasotto!"
"Recchione!"
"F'regatura!"
"Gentlemen!" Hannibal shoved two candles into Ponte's hands and went to help January himself. "There
are ladies present." And it was a good bet, thought January, that though La d'Isola was unconscious,
both Madame Scie and Madame Montero knew enough Italian-even the highly dialectical Sicilian and
Milaneseto understand what was being said.
Between them they got Belaggio up the wide stairs that ascended from the brick-pillared gloom of the
propvault to the backstage. This cavernous space was already a jumble of wings and flats,
cupid-bedecked gilt furniture from next Tuesday's presentation of Le Nozze di Figaro mixed with blue
and green glass lamp filters and a nearly full-sized gondola from the melodrama The Venetian's Revenge,
which had been staged that evening for an audience that consisted largely of Kentucky backwoodsmen,
filibusters, gun-runners, and riverfront rowdies. In the background loomed the half-finished plaster
sections of what would hopefully become Mount Vesuvius in time for next Friday's performance of La
Muette de Portici, though at the moment the ramshackle collection of lathe, canvas, and sheets of red and
orange silk bore little resemblance to the fire-spewing colossus that dominated the posters pasted to
every wall in town.
"Would someone stir up the fire in Signor Belaggio's office? Madame..." Hannibal suggested as Belaggio
jerked the key back from Ponte's extended hand.
With a sigh, Madame Montero took the key and went to open the office, the ballet mistress following
with still more candles. Since these were tallow work-candles from the chorus-men's dressing-room, the
office quickly filled with their faint, sheep-like odor. January and Hannibal deposited Belaggio in the
massive armchair beside the desk, then withdrew to the backstage again.
"I've taken the liberty of carrying Mademoiselle d'Isola to her dressing-room." The planter Marsan
descended the stairs from the gallery off which the principals had their dressing-rooms, resplendent in
waistcoat, shirtsleeves, and a pale-purple glitter of amethyst and silk. "Perhaps if you would be so good
as to see to her, Madame. . ." Marsan divided his glance equally between Mesdames Scie and Montero;
Hannibal bowed tactfully to Marguerite and said, "Might I escort you up, Madame? The stairs are very
dark." He took a candle and guided her out; the Mexican soprano's scarlet-painted lips twisted with
scorn and January reflected that it was just as well Montero wasn't going to be left alone in a room with
the unconscious prima donna-not that he supposed for a moment Drusilla d'Isolas swoon to be real.
"Five cents says La d'Isolas back inside ten minutes." Hannibal clattered down the steps again and led
January to the carved and gilded throne of the Doge of Venice.
"Seven, that she faints again the minute she's got an audience. I nicked Belaggio's brandy from his desk."
By the light of his single taper he eased January out of the rough jacket he'd put on for the walk home,
and picked the slashed and sodden shirtsleeve away from the cut. "What bloody man is this?" he added,
dropping from French to Shakespearean English, something Hannibal did with even greater facility than
January, who was himself long used to switching from French to Spanish to English and back.
"It looks worse than it is."
"It better, or we'll be calling in the undertakers." He doused January's handkerchief in the brandy, took a
gulp from the bottle, and daubed the wound. January flinched at the sting of it. Behind them in the office,
Belaggio's groans, gasps, and accusations continued for the benefit of Madame Montero and M'sieu
Marsan. "Did you notice young Ponte changed his coat?"
"Are you sure?"
"Fairly." Hannibal tried to open the folding penknife he'd taken from his pocket, but his skeletal fingers
were unsteady; January took the knife from him, opened it, and handed it back to cut away the sleeve of
his shirt. "He and Cavallo both were wearing long-tailed coats at rehearsal, and I think they were in the
same outfits when I first saw them in the alley. Cavallo was, I know-a blue cutaway with a velvet collar."
He nodded toward Ponte, emerging from the office to hurry up the stairs. The chorus-boy's boots were
mud-splashed, January noticed, but the dove-colored trousers above them spotlessly clean. Even
Hannibal, who'd come out of the theater only in the battle's aftermath, had fresh spatters of mud on his
calves.
Working carefully, and turning aside now and then to cough, the fiddler sliced the clean lower portion of
the linen sleeve from the bloodied, and used it to form a bandage. His breath labored in the silence, but
he seemed better than he had earlier in the evening.
"You, boy." Marsan's tall form blotted out the light of the office doorway. "We need water in here to
make coffee."
Sixteen years ago, before he'd gone to Paris, it hadn't bothered January to be addressed by strangers by
the informal tu. That was just something that white men did when addressing slaves-though sixteen years
ago most French Creoles were fairly careful to use the polite vous in speaking to men they knew were
free colored, albeit they occasionally forgot and called black freedmen tu, as they would slaves, horses,
children, or dogs. In Paris, everyone had spoken to him in the polite form-vous. He'd felt a kind of elation
in it, as if it were a mark of an adulthood impossible in New Orleans. It surprised him sometimes, after
two and a half years, how much he still minded.
Sometimes it surprised and shamed him that he didn't mind more.
"M'sieu Janvier was hurt saving Signor Belaggio's life," said Hannibal, and he stood up, his hand
unobtrusively on the back of the throne for support. "I'll get the water." He picked up the single candle
and turned away toward the stairway down to the vault, where the big clay jars of drinking water stood.
He hadn't reached the stair, however, when the outer doors banged below, and lantern-light jostled over
the brick of the walls.
". . . borne them upstairs," Cavallo's voice said in his lilting English, and boots clattered, first on the soft
brick, then hollow on the wooden steps.
"Them?" The light, scratchy tone of Abishag Shaw, Lieutenant of the New Orleans City Guards, veered
skittishly between the Milanese's faulty pronunciation of a French plural subjunctive and his own
idiosyncratic comprehension of the language.
As two blue-uniformed Guards, Shaw in his stained and sorry green coat, and Cavallo came into view,
Hannibal explained. "Signorina d'Isola was overcome by the sight of the blood-" He switched from
French to the Spanish that he was fairly certain only January would understand, and added, "-and I
daresay by the spectacle of someone other than herself holding center stage." He dropped back into
French again to include the handsome young tenor and the guards. "M'sieu Janvier was injured, too, but
not badly. Coffee for everyone?"
He rattled down the steps to fetch the water, coatskirts billowing around him, like an underfed and
slightly pixilated grasshopper. January carefully kept himself from smiling at the expression of alarm that
flashed across Marsan's face at the prospect of sharing refreshment with one who was-by his slouched
hat and straggling hair, his drawling river-rat English and the tobacco he spit casually on the floor-the
brother-in-arms of every Kaintuck, keelboatman, filibuster, and Yahoo that had drifted downriver to
invade what had been for so many years the haven of French civilization in the New World.
If there were a form of address less respectful than tu, January reflected, leaning back in the deceptive
goldcrusted cushions of the throne and closing his eyes, Marsan would use it to Shaw. He wondered
how soon it would occur to the French Creoles to write to the Academie Française and ask that one be
invented.
Closing his eyes was like letting go of a rope and dropping into warm water fathoms deep. Full fathom
five thy father lies . . .
His arm throbbed, and reaction to the fray tugged him down.
Coffee, he thought. There was an urn and spirit-kettle in the green room. Probably Italian-style, strong
and bitter, but still nothing to the Algerian black mire Ayasha had made.
His beautiful Ayasha. His wicked-eyed desert afreet whose death in the cholera had sent him, in grief too
great to bear alone, from Paris back to New Orleans. Back to the only home he knew.
Two years and six months. The fifteenth of August 1832. He recalled it to the day, and each day without
her since, not yet quite a thousand of them. Beads of bloodstained jet on a string that might extend
another thirty years before he reached his allotted threescore and ten.
There had been a time when he'd wondered how to endure a single one of them.
He had endured, of course. One did. He had learned to breathe again, and learned to laugh. Even to
love-though the love he bore for the dear friend of his heart now was as different from Ayasha's as a
poppy in sunlight differs from the heavy beat of the summer ocean. But it was like learning to walk on
wooden legs after a crippling injury. He couldn't imagine ever not knowing exactly how many days had
passed.
"Let's get you home." He smelled coffee, and Hannibal's voice broke into the stillness of his thought. The
fiddler set the cup on the floor beside the throne. "You look all in."
"I'll stay."
"Shaw knows where to find you."
Behind them in the office Marsan was saying, ". . . some business with Monsieur Belaggio. I remained for
a time after rehearsal . . ."
For three and a half hours? What business couldn't wait for day?
"I think I need to speak with him tonight."
". . . shall manage somehow to be here in the morning. Never would I oblige Signor Caldwell to one day
of worry, one hour, over the obligations which we have to his opera season here in New Orleans. Evero,
I can conduct rehearsal from a chair, if I can but be borne in from my carriage . . ." Belaggio's voice
faltered artfully, like a tenor dying at the end of Act Three.
"They're going to try again, you know."
"What?" Hannibal paused in the act of collecting his long hair back into its straying pigtail.
"To kill him." January opened his eyes. "Have you read the libretto of the opera we rehearsed tonight?"
"Othello?" He thought about it, and something changed in the coffee-dark eyes. "Ah." He coughed.
"Yes."
"It's probably the most beautiful setting I've ever encountered for that play," said January quietly. "The
version Belaggio has written makes Rossini's look like a second-rate commedia at a fair. Everything
Shakespeare said, or implied, about jealousy, about passion, about the meanness of heart that cannot
abide the sight of good. . ."
"And all the audience will see," finished Hannibal, "is a black man kissing a white woman." He coughed
again, and dragged up a gilt-tasseled footstool with a kind of swift, unobtrusive urgency.
"Kissing her." January glanced back through the lighted doorway of the office, where Belaggio, forgetful
of the fatal gravity of his wound, was on his feet, declaiming the details of the fray to Shaw. "And then
murdering her out of a love too great for his heart to endure."
"Hmmm." Hannibal chewed for a time the corner of his graying mustache. Though the fiddler never spoke
of his family or home, January guessed from things he had said-from the lilt of his speech-that Hannibal
came of the Anglo gentry that had lands in the Irish countryside and a town house in London, the gentry
that sent their sons to Oxford to become good Englishmen on money abstracted from a peasantry that
eked out a starving living on potatoes and barely understood a hundred words that were not in Gaelic.
Raised on Shakespeare and on the classics of Rome and Greece, it was almost beyond the fiddler's
comprehension that one man would feel revulsion for another of equal merit for no other reason than the
color of his skin.
"And you think someone told him not to put on that particular opera?"
"You think someone didn't?"
Hannibal picked up the coffee-cup again, offered it to January, then, when it was refused, sipped it
himself. "And he doesn't understand."
"Could you have written a piece that perfect," asked January softly, "and not want to put it on? Not have
to put it on?" His eyes turned toward the black door of the rehearsal-room next to the offices of Belaggio
and Caldwell. There the company had spent most of the evening familiarizing themselves with the libretto
of the new piece that would be the center of Caldwell's Italian season. The other six operas-not all of
them Italian, but sung in the melodic Italian style-were in repertory, having been performed at one time or
another, somewhere, by everyone in the company. Even small towns in Italy had their opera houses, and
for every production at La Scala or La Fenice, there were hundreds of minor Figaros and Freischiitzes
and Barbers of Seville, done two or three a week.
But every season had its new opera, its premiere. The one no one in town had yet seen. John Davis, at
the French Opera, had invested a great deal of money and time in arranging to premiere La Muette de
Portici which Belaggio, out of sheer effrontery, had selected to present as the second opera of his own
season, on the night before Davis's scheduled production.
摘要：

BenjaminJanuaryBook5?DieUponAKiss?BarbaraHambly?ForAdrianSpecialthanks,asalways,areduetoPamelaAreeneauxandtheStaffoftheHistoricNewOrleansCollection;toPaul,Bill,Sand,andNormanatLeMondeCreole;toEmilyClark;toRebeccaWitjas;toKateMiciak;toLauriePerry;toStephanieHall;toBobMoraskiforallhistimeandknowledge;...

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