A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [56]
Bouille replied—to his own seconds, but in loud English—that he had no fear of “a canaille who can no more pass himself for a gentleman than our surgeon can pass himself for a white man. One cannot pretend to be what one is not.”
And January, standing next to Mayerling, saw the sword master’s ironic smile. Bouille, that champion of Creole culture, like Livia Levesque, had evidently forgotten that he’d fled a typesetter’s job in France ahead of a couple of sordid lawsuits and a welter of bad debts. Mulattos were not the only ones to suffer amnesia on horseback.
January and Hannibal prudently retired to the shelter of the oak trees fifty feet away. Mayerling, with what January considered reckless confidence in both men’s aim, remained where he was. “You going to bleed whoever gets hit?” inquired Hannibal irreverently, leaning his chin on a horizontal bough.
January nodded. “And purge them. Two or three times.”
“Couldn’t happen to more deserving men.”
There were two loud reports. Egrets squawked in the misty bayou.
January peered around the deep-curved limbs of the tree in time to see William Granger stalk back to his phaeton and climb in. Bouille was expostulating to the little cluster of fencing students.
“You see?” the city councilman crowed triumphantly. “The coward has outsmarted himself! In fear of my marksmanship he selected an impossible distance—fifty feet—at which he himself could not hit the door of a barn! Myself, I saw the shoulder of his coat rent asunder by my bullet.”
While the exultant Bouille and his fellow pupils toasted one another and Hannibal with more hip flask brandy, Mayerling, with the air of a naturalist in quest of a new species of moth, paced off the spot where Granger stood and searched the surrounding trees until he found the bullet. Given even the most flattering estimate of its trajectory, it would have missed the American by yards. “More work in the gallery,” he said to Bouille, returning like the ghost of another century through the knee-deep ground mist, white ruff and sleeves pale in the dawn gloom. “Or less at your writing desk.”
They climbed into the vehicles once again.
The entire colored demimonde, past and present, turned out for Angelique’s funeral, Euphrasie Dreuze weeping in too-tight weeds and covered with veils that hid her face and trailed to her knees. From his position at the organ of the mortuary chapel of St. Antoine, January counted and tallied them: The chapel itself was small, but the overwhelmingly female audience did not overcrowd its hard wooden pews. In New Orleans’ climate of fevers and family ties there were few women who didn’t possess mourning dresses, but January was aware that if Angelique had been better liked many of those tricked out in well-fitting plum- and tobacco-colored silks would have worn black even if it didn’t show off their figures. Few women of color looked really good in black.
As the pallbearers—handsome if embarrassed-looking young men, Angelique’s surviving brothers and two cousins—slid the coffin past the hanging curtain and into the oven tomb in the upstream wall of the cemetery, Madame Dreuze threw herself full-length on the ground before it, sobbing loudly.
“Oh, Madame,” whispered Clemence Drouet, dropping to her knees beside her, “do not yield that way! You know that Angelique …” She was one of very few clothed in black, which did nothing for the ghastly pallor that underlay her warm, mahogany-red coloring. Her eyes were swollen, and tears had left gray streaks in the crepe of her bodice.
“Phrasie, get up,” said Livia Levesque calmly. “You’re going to trip the priest.”
Euphrasie permitted herself to be raised to her feet by the younger of her two sons.
“There is no justice,” she cried, in ringing tones. “That Woman used witchcraft to murder my girl, and no one will do anything to bring her to her just deserts.” She turned toward the assembled group, the beautiful veiled ladies of the Rue des Ramparts, their servants, and a scattering of