A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [38]
Presumably Dominique had occupied the room until Henri Viellard had come into her life when she was sixteen. By that time St.-Denis Janvier was dead, leaving his mistress comfortably off, and Livia Janvier had married a cabinetmaker, Christophe Levesque, who had died a few years ago. The rear room that had been Olympe’s, then Dominique’s, had been for a short spell Levesque’s workshop. Now it was shut up, though Minou was of the opinion that her mother should take a lover.
January stepped to the long opening and drew back one leaf of the green shutters, listening at the slats of the jalousie for his mother’s soft, even breath.
He heard nothing. Quietly, he lifted the latch, pushed the jalousie inward. The room was empty, ghostly with dust. He crossed to the door of his mother’s bedroom, which stood half-slid back into its socket. Slatted light leaked through the louvers of the doors to the street. The gaily patterned coverlet was thrown back in a snowstorm of clean white sheets. Two butter-colored cats—Les Mesdames—dozed, paws tucked, on the end of the bed, opening their golden eyes only long enough to give him the sort of gaze high-bred Creole ladies generally reserved for drunken keelboat men sleeping in their own vomit in the gutters of the Rue Bourbon. There was water in the washbowl and a robe of heavy green chintz lay draped over the cane-bottomed chair. The smell of coffee hung in the air, a few hours old.
Euphrasie Dreuze, or one of her friends, he thought. They had come to her for comfort, and Livia Janvier Levesque had gone.
January crossed the yard again, his black leather music satchel under one arm. There was still fire in the kitchen stove, banked but emitting warmth. The big enamel coffeepot at the back contained several cups’ worth. He poured himself some and carried it up the twisting steps and drank it as he changed his clothes and ate the beignets and pastry he’d cadged from the ballroom tables in the course of the night. Half his gleanings he’d left at Hannibal’s narrow attic, stowed under a tin pot to keep the rats out of it, though he suspected the minute he was gone one or another of the girls who worked cribs in the building would steal it, as they stole Hannibal’s medicine, his laudanum, and every cent he ever had in his pockets.
Before eating he knelt on the floor beside his bed and took from his pocket the rosary he’d had from his childhood—cheap blue glass beads, a crucifix of cut steel—and told over the swift decades of prayers for the soul of Angelique Crozat. She had been, by his own experience and that of everyone he’d talked to, a thoroughly detestable woman, but only God could know and judge. Wherever she was, she had died unconfessed and would need the prayers. They were little enough to give.
It was nearly nine in the morning when he dismounted his rented horse at the plantation called Les Saules where, up until two months ago, Arnaud Trepagier had lived.
A coal-dark butler clothed in the black of mourning came down the rear steps to greet him. “Madame Madeleine in the office with the broker,” the man said, gesturing with one black-gloved hand while a barefoot child took the horse’s bridle and led it to an iron hitching post under the willows scattered all around the house.
The house itself was old and, like all Creole plantation houses, built high with storerooms on the ground floor. The gallery that girdled it on three sides made it look larger than it was. “She say wait on the gallery, if it please you, sir, and she be out presently. Can I fetch you some lemonade while you’re waiting?”
“Thank you.” January was ironically amused to see that the servant’s shirt cuffs were less frayed and his clothing newer than the free guest’s. The long-tailed black coat and cream-colored pantaloons he’d worn last night had to be in good condition, for the appearance of a musician dictated in large part where he was asked to play. But though he’d made far more money as a musician than he’d ever made as a surgeon at