A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [44]
Agnes only sniffed. January deduced the matter of young Peralta still rankled.
“Judith,” Clisson went on in her soft voice, “please be so good as to fetch Monsieur Janvier some coffee. Or should I say Ben?” she added, her dark eyes sparkling with a friendship she’d never shown him when they were young. “I’ve missed you twice by your mama’s. It’s good to catch up with you at last.”
January smiled, too. He’d been fourteen when she, far too proud of her own position to take the slightest notice of a gawky coal-black lout such as he had been, had become the mistress of a middle-aged Creole with a plantation on Lake Pontchartrain. January’s adoration had lasted for years. On the nights when Monsieur Motet came into town he had been drawn to loiter on the opposite banquette of her cottage on Rue des Ramparts in an agony of jealous speculation, though they had not spoken since she had left Herr Kovald’s class.
Funny, what time did.
The memory brought back all those other memories. He’d played with Odile and her brother as children, though her parents had looked askance at a plaçée’s son, and had sent her to a Select Academy for Colored Females at an early age. A queer sense of pain touched him, which he recognized as a kind of pins-and-needles of the heart: feeling coming back into memories long buried and numb.
This city had been his home. These people had been his home.
In turning his back on Froissart and Richelieu, and on the thick heat of the fever summers, he had turned his back on them as well.
“I’d forgotten how beautifully you played.” Clisson laid down her fan, French lace on sandalwood sticks, costly and new. “I didn’t even think about it during the dancing, but afterward, when you were playing to keep everyone amused … The Rossini almost made me cry. I was sorry to hear about your wife.”
He smiled down at her from his height. “I didn’t think you even noticed how I played when we had class together,” he said, with the rancorless amusement of shared old times. “You’re still with Monsieur Motet?”
Her smile was no more than the tucking back of the corners of her lips, the velvet warming of her eyes. It told him everything even before she nodded, and he felt for her a rush of gladness. “Are you taking students, now you’re back?” she asked. She spoke almost as if it had been a given, a foregone conclusion for all those years, that he would eventually return. He wanted to tell her he hadn’t intended to return at all.
“I think your mama said you were. My daughter Isabel’s eight. I’ve taught her a little, but it’s time she had a good teacher.”
January was opening his mouth to reply when a woman’s voice cried out in the rear of the house, a sharp gasp, rising to a shriek. “There it is! There! I told you! Oh God—”
A break, a murmur, January and Clisson and Gignac all on their feet in the sliding doorway that separated the darkened parlor from the still-darker bedchamber. “Oh, my child! Oh, my poor little one! Murder! Oh God, murder—”
“What the—” began January.
“Of course it was murder,” said Clisson, puzzled. “Nobody ever said it wasn’t.”
The door to the bedroom sliced open and Euphrasie Dreuze stumbled through, clutching something in her fat jeweled hand. “My God, my God, look!” she sobbed at the top of her lungs. “My poor little girl was hexed to death! Someone hid this in her mattress; she was sleeping next to this all along! It drew death down on her! It drew death!”
“Phrasie, don’t be a goose.” Livia Levesque emerged from the bedroom on her friend’s heels and made an unsuccessful grab at the filthy little wad of parchment and bone.
Euphrasie Dreuze wrenched herself free. Only five years older than January, she was plumper than she’d