A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [13]
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 Mâitre 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 Moth and Mustardseed to Angelique’s Titania—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 plaçage—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