A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [140]
“It refreshes me to know,” said Mayerling, never taking his eyes from the road, “that upon occasion, some people do get what they deserve. By the way,” he added, “thank you for telling her to get out of there. I had no idea of her intention until I saw her, looking in at the ballroom door.”
“She was with you until ten, wasn’t she?” January kept his voice steady with an effort, for Mayerling drove like the Wild Hunt, and once beyond the lamps of the Faubourg Marigny the road beneath the overhanging oaks was pitch-dark. An occasional glimmer of soft gaslight through colored curtains flickered through the trees like a fashionable ghost to show where houses stood, but even those grew more sparse as the road got worse.
“Yes,” said the sword master. “I glimpsed her outside the ballroom and slipped away from that silliness in Froissart’s office as quickly as I could. I suppose I should have simply put her in a fiacre at once and sent her home, but instead we went through the passageway to the Théâtre and found our way up to one of the private boxes. We have, you understand, little chance to be together. Foolish, I admit, and dangerous. I beg you make allowances for a man in love.”
January glanced sharply sidelong at him, suddenly conscious of the thinness of those shoulder bones pressed so tightly into his arm. Mayerling met his gaze with frosty challenge, then returned his attention to the road as the chaise crashed through a minor lake across their way, water spraying around them in muddy wings.
“It is a long time,” said the Prussian quietly, “since I have thought of myself as anything else. I suppose in France you ceased after a time to think of every white man as someone to beware of. To look down when one spoke to you?”
“In France I didn’t have to lie every day about what I am.”
“Every day I tell the truth about what I am,” replied Mayerling calmly. “I merely leave out the one fact—the one facet of my entirety—which would, in everyone’s eyes, obliterate all the rest. Two facets, now. I used to lie awake nights, worrying about what would happen if I fell in love.”
The thin face split into a sudden grin, like an impish boy’s, save for the saber scars. “I never thought it would be a woman I fell in love with, you see. Not until I met her. And then it was like coming out of a dark room into sunlight.”
He shrugged. “But, I have the advantage of being physically mannish enough to—as the octoroons say—pass, something I have done since the age of seventeen. Pass for a gentleman, I believe Monsieur Bouille put it.… There!”
Through the metallic glint of carriage lamps on rain the slow-moving brougham appeared, a dark loom in the road ahead. Mayerling slashed with the reins again, and the horse leaped forward heavily, the chaise rocking like a drunken thing in the flooded ruts. Beyond the narrow zone of the lamps’ illumination, nothing could be seen, the evergreen roof of live oak shutting out the black sky above, the Spanish moss dripping in wet curtains of cobweb around about. The coachman, rigid with disapproval of Madame Madeleine’s choice of companions, half-turned on his box, trying to maneuver the carriage out of the narrow way to let the swifter vehicle pass. Mayerling pulled his horse to a walk, leaned from the chaise to cry, “Albert! It’s me, Mayerling!”
“Monsieur Mayerling, sir!” The coachman saluted with his whip. “What you doin’ out on a night like this? And that horse of yours look in a regular lather.”
The door of the carriage opened abruptly, Madeleine’s face framed suddenly in its darkness, and she had to stop herself visibly from speaking her lover’s Christian name in front of her servant. “What is it?” Her voice sounded perfectly composed, but her face was haggard with exhaustion and strain.
January shook himself forcibly free of the sensation of foolishness that overwhelmed him at the sight of the carriage, unmolested, unambushed, untouched. There