A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [35]
The colorless eyebrows quirked. “Now, where you get that from?”
“Here.” January got to his feet, Shaw following in his wake. They climbed the dark of the back stairs, turned right at the top, to where a sleepy constable still guarded the parlor door. A cup and a half-eaten pastry lay on the floor beside his chair. He got to his feet and saluted.
“We got everything up off that rug, Mr. Shaw. The mother took the girl away, like you said she could.”
“And no sign of them geegaws that’s missin’?”
“No, sir.” The man unlocked the door.
The candles were guttering in here, too. The windows had been shut, and the room had a crumpled look and smelled of smoke and death. The brass band outside had silenced itself, and the voices of the few passersby rang loud.
January crossed at once to the stiffened gauze wings, still leaning where Dominique had propped them, against the armoire that had concealed Angelique’s body. He reached down, very carefully, and touched the needle, hanging by the end of the thread. “Mostly if a woman stops sewing she’ll stick the needle into the fabric to keep the thread from pulling free,” he said. “Few things drive a woman crazier than having to rethread a needle when she hasn’t planned on it. I don’t know why this is.”
Shaw’s ugly face cracked into a smile again. “Now, there’s a man been married.” He looked around for someplace to spit, found no spittoon, and opened the window and shutter a crack to spit out across the balcony. January hoped Cardinal Richelieu was on the street beneath.
While Shaw was so engaged, January glanced down at the table, where the candles had been pushed aside around the top of a cardboard dress box. January lifted the box gently and angled it to the light, studying the dozen different colors of ribbon laid out in it, the innumerable tag ends of thread; two needles and fourteen pins; the peacock eye and the pearls and a large number of shreds of dyed and undyed ostrich plume. A ball of swansdown shreds the size of a sheep’s stomach. Lace snagged from someone’s petticoat.
Half a dozen hooks and eyes. Somebody’s corset lace. The servants of both ballroom and theater would be picking up pounds of this kind of trash all morning.
From the midst of it he picked a leaf of swamp laurel. “The Roman in the golden armor,” he said. “Jenkins, I think Granger said his name was. He was wreathed for victory.”
“You got quite an eye for furbelows.” Shaw strolled back, hands in pockets, as if only such bracing kept his gawky body upright. “That was smart, ’bout the costumes.”
“My wife was a dressmaker.” January turned the bits of thread, pearl, ribbon in his kid-gloved fingers. There were two ways a man could have said what Shaw did, even as there were two ways he could have earlier remarked on Minou, Beautiful gal. “There never was a time when I wasn’t surrounded by ribbons and lace and watching her match them up into some of the prettiest gowns you ever saw.”
He smiled, remembering. “There was a lady—some baron’s wife—who drove her crazy, asking for more of this and more of that and not offering to pay a sou for it. Ayasha put up with this till this old cat started coming on to her about how a Christian woman would have thrown it in as lagniappe. Then she just changed the color of the ribbons on the corsage—and mind you, that color was all the crack that year, and this old harpy was delighted with the change—and I’ve never seen one woman get so ugly so fast.”
He shook his head, and saw Shaw’s gray eyes on him again, as if hearing the pain that lurked under the joy of any memory of her.
“Your wife was an Arab?”
“Moroccan—Berber,” said January. “But a Christian, though I don’t know how much of any of it she believed. She died last summer.”
“The cholera?”
He nodded and picked up a pink velvet rose that had to have come from Dominique’s mask, tiny in his huge hands. “She would have been able to tell you every person who’d been