A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [53]
A crashing, thumping noise woke him, like giant’s footfalls in the room beside his bed. Bella, he realized. She was hitting the ceiling of the kitchen with a broom handle to tell him it was seven o’clock. The Grand Ball of the Faubourg Tremé Militia Company began in two hours. His head thick with the dissatisfied, incompleted ache of daytime sleep, he lay for a moment feeling the moist air from outside walking over his face, rippling silently at the thin white curtains. The smell of lost bread and coffee drifted up with the kitchen’s warmth, and the ache, the longing, the wanting to wake up completely and find Ayasha still lying in the bed beside him passed over him as a dark wave would have passed across a sleeper on the beach, salt wetness lingering for hours after the drag and force were gone.
Somewhere in his mind an image lingered—part of a dream?—of the slave block in the St. Charles Hotel, empty save for a couple of black cock feathers and a lingering sense of despair.
Angelique’s funeral was to be at noon.
Sipping what he hoped would be a restorative cup of café noir at one of the tables scattered under the market’s brick arcade and listening to the cathedral clock chime four-thirty, January wondered if he’d be able to sneak in some sleep before then.
“Maybe they’re both terrible shots,” said Hannibal, dusting powdered sugar from the beignets off his sleeves. New Orleans had one of the best systems of street lighting in the country, and even beyond the arcade the sooty predawn murk was streaked and blotted with amber where iron lanterns hung high above the banquettes. “Maybe they’ll just miss each other and we can all go home.”
“Maybe somebody’ll discover I’m the long-lost heir to the throne of France, and I can give up teaching piano.”
January glanced uneasily around him. Curfew was seldom enforced during Carnival, and for the most part the city guardsmen only bothered those who were obviously slaves or poor, but still he felt wary, unprotected, to be abroad this late.
“Creoles will end a swordfight after first blood—everybody in town is each other’s cousins anyway. With bullets it’s hard to tell.” He shrugged. “With Americans it’s hard to tell. Mostly they shoot to kill.”
Across the street the shutters of the Café du Levée were still flung wide, the saffron light blurred by river mist but the forms within still visible: the elderly men who had fled the revolution in Santo Domingo and younger men who were their sons, playing cards, drinking absinthe or coffee, denouncing the filthy traitorous Bonapartists and lamenting the better life that had existed before atheism, rationalism, and les américains. Many wore fancy dress, coming in as one by one the balls and dances around the French town wound to conclusion, and all around January at the tables beneath the arcade, men—and a scattering of women—in evening clothes or masquerade garb rubbed elbows with market women and stevedores just starting their day as the revelers were ending theirs. Pralinières and sellers of beignets or callas moved among them, peddling their wares fresh from the oven out of rush baskets; a coffee-stand sent white steam billowing into the misty dark. If some few of the gentlemen at the other tables looked askance at Hannibal for eating with a colored man, the lateness of the hour and the laxness of Carnival season kept them quiet about it. In any case, Hannibal was well enough known that few people commented on his behavior anymore.
Beyond the arcade’s brick pillars dyed gold by lamp-light, past the dark lift of the levee, the black chimneys of steamboats clustered like a fire-blasted forest in the dark, spiked crowns glowing saffron with the fire reflected within and glints of that feral light catching the gilded trim of flagstaffs and pilothouses. The thin fog tasted of ash, and drifting smuts had already left streaks on the two men’s shirtfronts and cuffs.
“Monsieur Janvier.”
Augustus Mayerling