A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [46]
“It was that woman,” Euphrasie wailed, clutching January’s lapels. “That stuck-up white vache! That nigger bitch, she’d run off, trying to go home, and that Trepagier, she’d tell that girl how if my Angelique were to die, she’d take her back. I know it. That Trepagier set her up to murder my child, my only little girl! Oh, what am I going to do? They drew down death on her and left me to starve!”
“Phrasie, you know as well as I do Etienne Crozat left you with five hundred a year,” said Livia tartly. “Benjamin, pull her loose or she’ll hang on to you weeping till doomsday. You’d think it was her funeral tomorrow and not her daughter’s.”
Odile Gignac meanwhile had helped Clemence Drouet to one of the overstuffed brocade chairs, where the girl burst into shuddering tears, handkerchief stuffed in her mouth, as if all her life she had been forbidden to make a sound of discontent or grief. “There, there, chérie,” murmured the dressmaker comfortingly. “You mustn’t cry like that. You’ll make yourself ill.”
January had to reflect that his sister was right about the Drouet girl’s dresses: Like her costume last night, this one—also designed by Angelique, if Dominique spoke true—though costly and beautiful, made her look like nothing so much as a green-gold pear.
“That Trepagier put her up to it! She put her up!” It was astonishing how Madame Dreuze could keep her face buried in his sleeve without either muffling her voice or disarraying her tignon. “She hated her like poison! They poisoned my child, the two of them together!”
“Angelique was strangled,” Livia reminded her dryly. She went to the sideboard and handed January a clean napkin from a drawer as he fished vainly in his pockets for a handkerchief. “And you can’t very well say Madeleine Trepagier turned up at the Orleans ballroom and did it. Get that child out of here, Odile. She’s been nothing but underfoot since …”
“Why not? She could have come in through the Théâtre …”
“With all the Trepagier family in the Théâtre to recognize her? And that hag of an aunt of hers?”
“That black slut Judith did, then! Why not? She hated my child.…”
At Livia’s impatient signal, Catherine Clisson came forward and eased the weeping woman from her leaning post. Clisson relieved Ben of his napkin and proceeded to dry Euphrasie’s eyes as she guided her toward the settee. Livia Levesque took her tall son’s arm and steered him briskly toward the door, and January went willingly, unnerved by the accuracy of Madame Dreuze’s chance shot.
“I swear,” declared Livia, as they descended the two high brick steps to the banquette, “it’s like a summer rainstorm in there, between those two watering pots.” She pulled her delicate knit-lace gloves on and flexed her hands. “Give me my parasol, Ben.”
“Why does she say the girl Judith hated Angelique?” January handed his mother the fragile, lacy sunshade she had thrust into his hands on the way through the door. “I take it Judith belonged to Madeleine Trepagier?”
Like the jewels and the dresses, he thought. When there’s only a man and a woman alone in a house miles from town …
The thought conjured up was an ugly one.
Livia opened the sunshade with a brisk crackle of bamboo and starch, despite the fact that the day was milkily overcast. Even so far back from the river, the air smelled of steamboat soot.
“She’s carrying on as if she were wronged, not her daughter murdered,” the elderly lady sniffed. “And not her only child, as she’s been saying. She has two sons still living, one of them a journeyman joiner with Roig and the other a clerk at the Presbytère, but they’re not the ones who’ve been giving her gambling money and buying her silk dresses. Etienne Crozat left her a house and five hundred a year when he married André Milaudon’s daughter in ’28, so she hasn’t any room to talk.” She moved with