A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [61]
Only one person—Dominique herself—noted Clemence Drouet’s presence at the ball at all. Clemence was that kind of woman. She’d arrived at Angelique’s house the following morning in the expectation of seeing her alive, so she must in fact have left the building between her brief encounter with January, just before the quarrel, and the discovery of Angelique’s corpse.
And of course, no one had bothered to notify her.
The American Tom Jenkins had clearly been searching as well, if he’d left a laurel leaf in the parlor, but unless he was far cleverer than he looked, he wouldn’t have kept searching if he knew she was lying dead at the bottom of an armoire.
“I don’t know,” he said slowly. “On the face of it, I’d say yes.… Except for his age. He’s young, and he was crazy possessed by her, even before Trepagier died, I’ve heard. I’m not sure he’d have had the wits to hide the body and strip her jewelry to make it look like robbery. If he’d killed her, I think he’d have been found by the body.”
“You’d be surprised what you do when you have to,” pointed out Hannibal, warming his small, rather delicate-looking hands over the coffee cup’s aromatic steam. The light had faded from the windows, and Thérèse came in with a taper to light the branches of candles on sideboard, table, and walls. The gold gleam lent color to the fiddler’s bloodless features, banishing the dissipated pallor and camouflaging the frayed cuffs and threadbare patches of the black evening coat that hung so slack over his thin shoulders.
“For all he follows Augustus around like a puppy, he wasn’t at the duel this morning, and I’m told he didn’t attend the Bringiers’ ball last night. Not something his father would have let him miss.”
“No,” said January thoughtfully, leafing through the papers again. “No.”
Columbines, Pierrots, Chinese Emperors, Ivanhoes had filled the upstairs lobby and downstairs entry hall; Uncases and Natty Bumpoes (Bumpi?, wondered January, recollecting his Latin lessons); Sultans and Greek gods. Men in evening dress and dominoes. Women in unidentifiable garments described by Shaw’s laboring clerk as “lace with high collar, violet sash, pearls on sleeves” (except Livia would have pointed out those were not genuine pearls), to which Dominique’s more regular hand had appended “lilac princess—Cresside Morisset—w/Denis Saint-Roche (mother/fiancée in Théâtre).”
Out of curiosity, January asked, “Is Peralta Fils engaged to anyone?” The woman who marries him …
“Rosalie Delaporte,” reported Dominique promptly. “The Delaportes are cousins to the Dupages, and there was a big party at Grandpère Dupage’s town house on Rue Saint Louis. All of them were there.”
Jig/reel—Hubert Granville w/Marie-Eulalie Figes, Yves Valcour w/Iphègénie Picard, Martin Clos w/Phlosine Seurat … Marie-Toussainte Valcour and Bernadette Métoyer saw red/white Ivanhoe by buffet … green Elizabethan by doors …
He looked again. At least six people had seen “gold Roman” in the ballroom during the Rossini waltz. He’d been William Granger’s second for the duel, and thus in Froissart’s office at the bottom of the service stair. Xavier Peralta, who’d also been there, hadn’t put in a reappearance until almost the end of the progressive waltz, nearly ten minutes later.
He remembered the old man in the night-blue satin, talking long and earnestly with Euphrasie Dreuze, watching the crowds in the lobby, in the ballroom, looking for someone.
He, if not his son, would have had the measure of the cat-faced woman dressed like the Devil’s bride. He would have watched that come-hither scene with Jenkins, watched her