A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [6]
“Second, this isn’t anyplace for you. I know it isn’t my place to say so, but why ever you’re here—and I assume it’s got something to do with a man—go home. Whatever you’re doing, do it some other way.”
“It isn’t …” she began breathlessly, but there was guilty despair in her eyes, and he held up his hand for silence again.
“Some of these ladies may be as light as you,” he continued gently, “but they were all raised to this world, to do things a certain way. They mostly know each other, and they all know the little tricks—who they can talk to and who not. Who each other’s gentlemen are and who can be flirted with and who left alone. Even the young girls, with their mothers bringing them here for the first time for the men to meet, they know all this. You don’t. Go home. Go home right now.”
She turned her face away. She had always blushed easily, and he could almost feel the color spreading under the feathered rim of the mask. He wondered if she’d grown up as beautiful as she’d been when he taught her pianoforte scales, simple bits of Mozart, quadrilles and the rewritten arias on which he got his students used to the flow and the story of sound. She had a wonderful ear, he recalled; those hands that tore out the sides of her gloves could span an octave and two. He remembered how she’d attacked Beethoven, devouring the radical music like a starving woman eating meat, remembered the distant, almost detached passion in her eyes.
Horns blatted and drums pounded in the street, as a party of maskers rioted by. Someone yelled “Vive Bonaparte! À bas les américains!” What was it now? Ten years? Twelve years since the man’s death? And he was still capable of starting riots in the street. “Salaud!” “Crapaud!” “Athéiste!” “Orléaniste …!”
He saw the quicksilver of tears swimming in her eyes.
“I’m telling you this for your own protection, Mademoiselle Dubonnet,” he said. “If nothing else, I know these girls. They gossip like cannibals cutting up a corpse. You get recognized, your name’ll be filth. You know that.” He spoke quietly, as if she were still the passionate dark-haired child at the pianoforte, who had shared with him the complicity of true devotees of the art, and for a moment she looked away again.
“I know that.” Her voice was tiny. From his pocket January drew one of the several clean handkerchiefs he always carried, and she took it, smudging her war paint a little in the process. She drew a deep breath, let it go, and raised her eyes to his again. “It’s just that … there was no other way. My name is Trepagier now, by the way.”
“Arnaud Trepagier?” His stomach felt as if he’d miscalculated the number of steps on a stairway in the dark.
He’d heard his sister’s friends gossip about the wives and the white families of the men who bought them their houses, fathered their children, paid for their slippers and gowns. For any white woman to come, even masked, even protected by the license of Carnival, to a Blue Ribbon Ball was hideous enough. But for the widow of Arnaud Trepagier to be here, dressed like Leatherstocking’s worst nightmare less than two months after her husband’s body had been laid in the Trepagier family crypt at the St. Louis cemetery …
She would never be received anywhere in the parish, anywhere in the state, again. Her husband’s family and her own would cast her out. The Creole aristocracy was unforgiving. And once a woman was cast out, January knew, whether here or in Paris, there was almost nothing she could do to earn her bread.
“What is it?” he asked. She had never been stupid. Unless she had fallen in love with intense and crazy passion, it had to be something desperate. “What’s wrong?”
“I have to speak with Angelique Crozat.”
For a moment January could only stare at her, speechless and aghast. Then he said, “Are you crazy?”
He’d only been back in New Orleans for three months, but