A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [135]
“So you can get a note to him?” asked January.
Her eyes flinched, then returned to his. “No, of course not. It’s just that—”
She got no further. Hannibal Sefton, threadbare coat and long hair damp with the rain, singing a von Weber aria and more than slightly drunk, sprang lightly through the French door from the banquette outside directly behind Madeleine’s back, caught her around the waist, and gave her a resounding kiss on the neck.
Madeleine screamed, pure terror in her voice. She wrenched herself free with a violence that knocked away the chair by which she stood and ripped her assailant’s face with the clawed fingers of both hands. Hannibal recoiled with a gasp of shock, almost falling back through the doorway. January caught at the terrified woman but she tore herself from him and staggered a step or two into the middle of the room, sobbing and shaking. The next instant Dominique came flying through the dining room door and caught her in her arms.
“It’s all right! It’s all right! Darling, it’s all right, he’s a friend of mine—a very impudent friend.”
Hannibal stood, violin case forgotten on the floor beside him, clinging to the doorjamb with one hand while the other felt his bleeding face. His eyes were those of a dog who has come up expecting a pat and received instead a forceful kick in the teeth. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Madame, I’m so sorry, I didn’t—” He looked pleadingly from Dominique to January, aghast and helpless. “I thought it was Minou. I swear I thought it was Minou.”
“Oh, and that’s how you treat me, is it?” retorted Minou, furious at the result rather than the deed, but furious nonetheless. Held tight in her arms, Madeleine was still racked with long waves of shaking, head bowed over, as if she were about to be sick. If she was faking, thought January, he had never seen it so well done.
And somehow, he did not think her horror at a man’s touch was a fake.
“It’s all right.” He put a hand on Hannibal’s shoulder. “I’ll explain outside. Minou, would you go out to Les Saules with Madame Trepagier? I don’t think she should be alone.”
“Oh, of course! I’ve already told Thérèse to tell Henri—if that slug ever puts in an appearance—that I’ve been called away by an emergency, and to give him tisane and flan and everything he might need. Now you get out of here, you bad man.” But she touched Hannibal’s forearm to reassure him, as January herded him out the long doors and onto the banquette once more.
Glancing back, January saw his sister help Madame Trepagier into a chair, still trembling violently; heard Madame Trepagier whisper “Thank you.… Thank you.”
“Augustus Mayerling, hm?” said Hannibal, when January had finished his narration. Even along a relative backstreet like Rue Burgundy, oil lamps still burned on their curved brackets from the stucco walls of the houses, their light gleaming in the gutters and the wet pavements beyond. Beneath the outthrust galleries of the town houses and shops and the abat-vents of the line of cottages, they were almost completely protected from the increasing rain.
In every house, past the iron-lace balconies and behind spidery lattices of wooden louvers, warm light shone, working a kind of magic in the night. Somewhere someone was playing a banjo—strictly against the rules of Lent—elsewhere voices sounded from the two sides of a corner grog-shop, shutters opened all the length of the room onto the street, where free blacks and river-trash played cards, cursed, laughed.
“I hate to think it was him,” January finished after a time, “because I like the boy. But of everyone in the Orléans ballroom that night, it sounds to me like Mayerling had the best reason for wanting