A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [60]
January remembered himself, standing on the banquette opposite Catherine Clisson’s house all those hot nights of his youth and shook his head. It did only hurt more. And he knew that it was a rare man, white or black or colored, who would truly give up a mistress because of the pleading or nagging of a wife. They simply hid them deeper or put them aside for a while only to go back.
He turned the lists over in his fingers, the scribbled and amended and much-crossed chronology of the evening, arranged, he was interested to note, like a dance card, by what songs were being played. Minou’s dance card from the evening was included in the bundle—with every dance taken, naturally—and even Shaw’s original questions were linked to what music was being played.
Dominique must have suggested it to him. He spelled waltz, “walce.”
No one had seen Galen Peralta after he’d stormed downstairs following his initial spat with Angelique.
“Was there ever anything between Augustus Mayerling and Angelique?”
Dominique trilled with laughter. “Mayerling? Good heavens, no! He hated Angelique almost from the day they met.”
The woman who marries him will have cause to thank the one who wielded that scarf.
“Because of the way she treated young Peralta?”
“If Trepagier and the Peralta boy were both his students,” pointed out Hannibal, “it’s my guess that’s how Angelique met our boy Galen to begin with. Augustus would have had a front-row seat on the whole seduction from the first dropped handkerchief, meanwhile watching her take Arnaud for every cent he had. His … antipathy … could have been as much disgust as hatred. He’s fastidious about things like that.”
Hardly a reason for murder, thought January, no matter how fond he was of Galen Peralta. But now that he thought of it, Augustus Mayerling had been absent from the ballroom for far longer than would be accounted for by the conference over the duel.
Four dances—slightly under an hour—had intervened between Bouille’s challenge and Mayerling’s reappearance to ask January to preside as physician over the duel. During those dances—the most popular of the evening—the lobby had been almost deserted. For the same reason, none of Dominique’s friends had been willing to absent themselves from the ballroom no matter what portions of their tableau costumes remained unfinished. Galen, storming out of the building, had been smitten with l’esprit d’escalier and had gone back to renew his quarrel with Angelique, ascending by the service stair. If Clemence had gone after him down the main stair, she would have missed him. He had presumably departed the same way, and the murderer could have entered quietly from the lobby.
Always assuming, of course, that Galen was not the murderer himself.
“Those names on the last page?” Dominique reached over his shoulder to tap the papers. “Those are the people—Thank you, Thérèse.” She smiled at the maid who came in to refill the coffee cups. “Those are the people we know were there that weren’t on Lt. Shaw’s list, so they must have left either before the murder or just after it, or sneaked out before Shaw could speak to them. Catherine Clisson was one of the ones who sneaked out—or Octave Motet did and insisted she go with him because if anyone recognized her, they’d know he’d been there, too. He’s the president of the Banque de Louisiane; he doesn’t dare let his name be connected with anything like this. Do you think Galen Peralta was the one who did it? Strangled Angelique, I mean?”
January moved the papers again, studied the lists—who