A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [149]
January said ironically, “Of course not.”
The cathedral bell called out across the Place des Armes; Rue du Levée was filling up. The last mists of the morning were burning off and the day was already turning hot. Most of the planters had left the city right after Easter, which had fallen early that year. Already the dark striped cane was head high in the fields, and Bella had put up the mosquito bars in Livia’s house and the garçonnière.
A gray-suited form jostling along the banquette paused for a fraction of a second, and looking up, January met the blue eyes of Xavier Peralta. The planter paused for a moment, midstride, then turned his face away and kept walking.
“ ‘Why, thank you, I’m just fine too,’ ” murmured Shaw. “ ‘What? No, it weren’t no trouble to clear your son of murder, long as I was clearin’ my ownself anyway, glad to do it, sir.’ ”
January covered his mouth with his hand, but could not smother his laughter. He finally managed to say, “ ‘Sugar mill? What sugar mill?’ ” He didn’t know why he laughed. It was that, he supposed, or hate the man—and all planters—and all whites—forever.
But his laughter was bitter. Maybe he would hate them anyway. He didn’t know.
“Well, if you ever decide you do want to go back to Europe and be a doctor,” said Shaw at length, “I suppose you could go to him and ask for passage. I don’t think he’d thank you for it, though.”
At the foot of the Place des Armes along the levee, queer in the livid, soot-dyed glare of the sun, boats were loading with cotton, wines, pineapples, silk, coffles of slaves, and Russian cigarettes. Bound upriver, or out for New York or Philadelphia, for Le Havre or Liverpool. The Boreas, the Aspasia, the Essex, and the Walter Scott. Bound for anywhere but New Orleans.
January thought about it as he walked home.
Two evenings later there was a knock at the door of Livia Levesque’s cottage on Rue Burgundy, at the time when the oil lamps above the street were being lit.
Spring heat had settled on the city, and the air was thick with smudges of tobacco and lemon grass, burned to keep the mosquitoes at bay. Livia had spoken over dinner of renting lodgings out on the lake, as the Culvers were already doing and the parents of several others among January’s pupils. The French doors were open to the street and to the yard behind the house, so that the rooms all breathed with the smell of that afternoon’s light rain and the whiff of crawfish gumbo and red beans.
January’s shrunken class had taken their leave. In the weeks between Mardi Gras and Easter he’d acquired several new students, who would, he knew, be back in the fall, and one of them at least—a tiny boy named Narcisse Brêzé—showed promise of real genius. After the students departed January remained in the parlor, playing the pieces that pleased him, Bach and Haydn and von Weber, letting the music roll from the instrument as dusk gathered in the little cottage and slowly, unwillingly, the day’s heat withdrew. In time Hannibal appeared, waxen and shabby as usual—without saying a word about it, Livia had begun including him at her dinner table now that entertainments in the town were growing thin. He unpacked his violin and slipped into accompaniment, the fiddle like a golden fish in the dark strong waters of the piano’s greater voice: jigs and reels and sentimental ballads, and snatches of melody from the Montmartre cafés that had been popular in Paris two years ago. Dominique came in, and then Livia, simply sitting and listening as the evening deepened and the crickets began to cry.
Livia had just risen to kindle the lamp when the knock came. A hooded woman on the doorstep said, “I heard the piano and knew you had to be home.” The gold light flared and broadened. It was Madeleine Trepagier, discreetly veiled and dressed in a gown of dullrose