A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [36]
“Don’t mean whoever done it leaked beads and ribbons here to be obligin’,” remarked Shaw. “If that Peralta boy was in plain evenin’ dress, less’n she tore off a button there’d be nuthin’ to show. Now that Jenkins …”
“He was looking for her,” said January. “Prowling in and out of the ballroom and the lobby. He could have come in here.”
“You hear this tiff of theirs? In the lobby?”
“Everybody did. She flirted with Jenkins. From what I hear, she flirted with everybody, or at least everybody who had money.”
“Even though Peralta’s daddy’s been … What? Buyin’ her for his son?”
“Not buying her,” said January, though he could tell from Shaw’s voice that the policeman knew the plaçées were technically free. “Bargaining to buy her contract. That way the boy doesn’t get skinned out of his eyeteeth, and the girl doesn’t have to look like a harpy in front of her protector—and her mother can come right out and say, ‘I want to make sure you don’t marry some Creole girl and leave my child penniless with your baby,’ where the girl can’t. It’s all arranged beforehand. Signed and sealed, no questions.”
Shaw considered the matter, turning the leaf of swamp laurel in his hand. “Smart dealin’,” he said. “What kid’s gonna pick himself even a half decent girl on his first try? When I think about the first girl I ever fell in love with—Lordy!” He shook his head. “You think Miss Crozat was flirtin’ with the Noblest Roman of ’em All to run up her price?”
“If she was, it was working. The boy was wild when he came into the room. But whether an American would have arrived at the same arrangement as a Frenchman is anybody’s guess.”
Shaw regarded him for a moment from narrowed eyes, as if weighing this criticism of the habit American planters had of simply buying a good-looking slave woman and taking her whether she would or no. But he only stepped to the window and spat again.
January followed him to the lobby, where Hannibal Sefton slept curled on a sofa under the flicker of the gaslights while two servants picked up stray champagne cups and swept beads and silk flowers, cigar butts and ribbons, from the brightly colored rugs. The ballroom gaped dim and silent to their right. When they descended the main stair, Shaw sliding snakelike into his weary old green coat, even the gambling rooms behind their shut doors were growing quiet.
A constable met them in the downstairs lobby, where a broad hall led to the silent dark of the court. The air smelled of rain and mud. Dawn light was bleeding through the half-open doors.
“We’ve searched the building and the attics, sir,” said the man, saluting. “Nothing.”
“Thank you kindly, Calvert.” He pronounced it as the French did. Someone—probably Romulus Valle—had placed January’s hat and music satchel on a console in the lobby. January and Shaw walked out into the courtyard together, Shaw turning back to crane his neck and look up at the Salle d’Orléans, rising above them in a wall of pale yellow and olive green.
There was always something indescribably shabby about this time of the morning in Carnival season, with streets nearly empty under weeping skies and littered with vivid trash. Crossing the courtyard, Shaw looked around him at the gallery, the plane trees, the colored lanterns doused and dark, then walked down the carriageway that let onto Rue Ste.-Ann, watching the occasional fiacre pass filled with homebound revelers and hearing the deep-voiced hoots of the steamboats on the river.
A woman strolled by, singing “Oystahs! Git yo’ fresh oystahs!” in English, and on the opposite banquette two gentlemen in evening dress, still masked, reeled unsteadily from post to post of the overhanging gallery. A woman improbably clad as a Greek goddess accosted them, her masked face beaming with smiles.
“Now I wonder what she does for a livin’?” Shaw mused, and spat copiously in the gutter.
“Not the same as these ladies here tonight,” January said quietly, hearing again the man in the ballroom and Froissart’s dismissive, she is only