A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [136]
“And if you don’t find it, then what?” asked Hannibal. His voice was a faint, raw rasp, and he coughed as they crossed the planks at the corner of Rue Conti. “It could have been anyone in the ballroom, you know.”
“Then why protect him? Why beg me not to so much as speak his name to the police? Why risk her own neck, if all that would happen to him was a night or two in jail until he was cleared? Other women have lovers. It isn’t spoken of, but everyone in town knows who they are. It isn’t as if she were deceiving a husband, and the plantation is hers to dispose of as she will, no matter what her family says. She doesn’t have to say they were together in the ballroom. She can say they met elsewhere, if she’s going to lie about it. But she doesn’t. Why would she deny his involvement in anything so completely, if what he did doesn’t bear scrutiny?”
“It’s not what he did,” said Hannibal quietly. “It’s what he is.”
January looked at him blankly. For a moment he thought, With that complexion he can’t POSSIBLY be an octoroon trying to pass.
Hannibal hesitated a moment, then said, “Augustus Mayerling is a woman.”
“What?” It stopped January dead on the banquette.
“Augustus Mayerling is a woman. I don’t know what his—her—real name is.” Hannibal started walking again, with that kind of loose-jointed scarecrow grace, his dark eyes turned inward on the recollection.
“But it isn’t that unusual, you know. There was that woman who served for years as a man in the Russian cavalry recently. Women fought at Trafalgar and Waterloo disguised as men. I’ve talked to men who knew them. I found out about Augustus—well, I guessed—almost by accident. About two years ago he picked me up outside a saloon in Gallatin Street where I’d been playing for dimes. Of course they robbed me the minute I was out the door, and he took me back to his place, since I was almost unconscious. I was feverish all night, and he cared for me, and I—it was probably the fever—I could tell the difference. I kissed his hand—her hand—we just looked at each other for a minute. I knew.”
Of all people, thought January, Hannibal would know.
The fiddler shrugged. “Later we talked about it. I think he was glad to have someone else who knew. I’ve covered for him now and then, though he seems to have worked out long ago all the little dodges, all the ways of getting around questions, things like keeping shaving tackle in his rooms and staying out of certain situations. But, that wouldn’t be possible, for even a day or two, in jail. God knows he’s far from the first person to manage it. You’re the only one I’ve told. Don’t …”
“No. Of course not.” January walked along, feeling a little stunned.
Fighting is either for joy, or for death.…
He could still see the Prussian’s cold yellow eyes as he said that, bright as they spoke about the passion of his art. And he’d seen Mayerling fight, in the long upper room that was his salle des armes on Exchange Alley: whalebone and steel and terrifyingly fast. He’d heard about the men he had killed.
Suddenly he remembered Madeleine Trepagier as a child, attacking the Beethoven sonatas like a sculptor carving great chunks of marble in quest of the statues hidden within, drunk with the greedy strength of one lusting to unite with the heart of an art.
Hers was music, like his own. Her lover’s was steel.
But the passion was the same. Of course they would find it in each other.
“I understand,” he said softly. “In a way it could be no one else.”
“No,” said Hannibal. His dark eyes clouded. “Too many women who have been … injured like that … don’t find anyone.”
But that was not what January had meant.
They walked in silence, January remembering the occasional couple in Paris—usually prostitutes who came from five or ten or twenty men a day back to the arms of their lady friends. But there had been one pair of middle-aged and smilingly contented daughters