A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [11]
Reaching out, he extracted two of the plumes from Dominique’s hat and twisted his own long hair into a knot on the back of his head, sticking the quill ends through like hairpins to hold it in place. “Full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.” Dominique slapped at his hands but gave him the flirty glance she never would have given a man of her own color, and he hid a grin under his mustache and winked at her, thin and shabby and disreputable, like a consumptive Celtic elf.
“I haven’t had the pleasure,” said January wryly. “Not recently anyway, though she did call me a black African nigger when she was six. But I’ve heard conversations she’s had with others.”
“I’ve done that two streets away.”
“She’ll be here.” Dominique’s tone was still reminiscent of the ominous drop in temperature that precedes a hurricane. “And I don’t think you’ll find her manners have improved. Not toward anyone who can’t do anything for her, anyway. Well, I understand a girl has to live, and I don’t blame her for entertaining Monsieur Peralta’s proposals, but …”
“What’s wrong with Peralta?” January realized he’d run aground on another of those half-submerged sandbars of gossip that dotted New Orleans society—Creole, colored, and slave—like the snags and bars of the river. One day, he knew, he’d be able to negotiate them as he used to, unthinkingly—as his mother or Dominique did—identifying Byzantine gardens of implication from the single dropped rose petal of a name. But that would take time.
As other things would take time.
In any case he couldn’t recall any scandal connected with that dignified old planter.
“Nothing,” said Dominique, surprised. “It’s just that Arnaud Trepagier has only been dead for two months. Arnaud Trepagier,” she went on, as January stared at her in blank dismay, his mind leaping to the fear that she had somehow recognized Madeleine, “was Angelique’s protector. And I think—”
“Filthy son of a whore!”
All heads turned at the words, ringingly declaimed. There was, January reflected, something extremely actor-like in the way the dapper little gentleman in trunk hose and doublet had paused in the archway that led through to the more respectable precincts next door, holding the curtains apart with arms widespread and raised above the level of his shoulders, as if unconsciously taking up as much of the opening as was possible for a man of his stature.
The next second all heads swiveled toward the object of this epithet, and there seemed to be no doubt in anyone’s mind who that was. Even January spotted him immediately, by the way some people stepped back from, and others closed in behind, the tall and unmistakably American Pierrot who’d been spitting tobacco in the courtyard earlier in the evening.
For an American, he spoke very good French. “Better a whore’s son than a pimp, sir.”
Waiters and friends were closing in from all directions as the enraged Trunk Hose strode into the ballroom, raising on high what appeared to be the folded-up sheets of a newspaper as if to smite his victim with them. A pirate in purple satin and a gaudily clothed pseudo-Turk in pistachio-green pantaloons and a turban like a pumpkin seized Trunk Hose by the arms. Trunk Hose struggled like a demon, neither ceasing to shout epithets nor repeating himself as they and the sword master Mayerling hustled him back through the curtain to the Théâtre d’Orléans again. The American Pierrot only watched, dispassionately stroking his thin brown mustache beneath the rim of his mask. A Roman soldier, rather like a bonbon in gilt papier-mâché armor, emerged from the passageway, flattening to the side of the arch to permit the ambulatory Laocoön to pass, then crossed to Pierrot in a swirl of crimson cloak. Pierrot made a gesture that said, It’s what I expected.
Hannibal tightened a peg and touched an experimental whisper from the fiddle strings. “I’ll put a dollar on a challenge by midnight.”
“You think that Granger’s gonna hang around