A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [83]
Dominique measured a length of pink silk thread from the reel, snipped it off with gold-handled scissors, neatly threaded her needle again and tied off with a knot no bigger than a grain of salt. “Fleur deeded the house to the Convent of the Ursulines when she entered as a lay sister, and that’s where she was living when she died.”
“And from what I understand, Euphrasie Dreuze tried to get her hands on that, too,” put in Livia. “On the grounds that it was still Trepagier’s property, of all things. But what do you expect of a woman who’d use her own daughter to keep her lover interested in her, when the girl was only ten?”
“What?”
“Don’t be naïve.” She raised her head to blink at him, emotionless as a cat. “Why do you think Etienne Crozat suddenly got so interested in finding Angelique’s killer? He was having the both of them. Others, too, the whiter the better and not all of them girls. Whomever Euphrasie could find.”
January’s stomach turned as he remembered those two quiet-faced young men carrying their sister’s coffin—those boys who would have nothing further to do with their mother.
“So she hardly needs your services in that direction anymore, p’tit.” Livia wrapped two fingers in the gathering threads and pulled the long band of hemmed silk into ruffles with a gesture so heartbreakingly like Ayasha’s that January looked aside. Did all women learn the exact motions, the same ways of doing things with needle and cloth, like the positions and movements of ballet? “I hope,” she went on crisply, “that we will have no more trouble of that kind. By the way,” she added, as January opened his mouth to inform her that yes, they were going to have a good deal more trouble of that kind if they didn’t want to see him hanged. “Uncle Bichet’s nephew came by to tell you they’ve had to find another fiddler for tonight. Hannibal’s ill.”
Minou’s dark eyes filled with concern. “Should one of us go down to his rooms? See that he’s well?”
“I’ll go tomorrow.” January got to his feet, glanced at the camelback clock on the sideboard as he put up his coffee cup. The dancing started at eight-thirty at Hermann’s, and his bones ached for sleep.
“I’ve told Bella to get you some supper in the kitchen,” said his mother, threading another needle and beginning to whip the ruffles onto the skirt. “Your sister and I will be working for a few hours yet.”
Not “I’m sorry you spent last night in the Calabozo,” thought January, half-angry, half-wondering as he stepped through the open doors to the courtyard in the back. Not “I’m sorry I didn’t come and get you out.” She didn’t even bother to make an excuse: “I broke my leg. A friend died. I was kidnapped by Berber tribesmen on my way down Rue Saint Pierre.”
Not “Are you in any danger still, p’tit?”
Not “Can I help?”
But he could not remember a time when she would ever have said such a thing.
The company crowded into the great double parlor of the Hermann house on Rue St. Philippe was smaller than that of the Blue Ribbon Ball but considerably more select. Still, January saw many of the costumes he’d been seeing on and off since Twelfth Night, and thanks to Dominique’s notes, he could now put names to the blue-and-yellow Ivanhoe, Anatole—attending tonight with the fair Rowena rather than the dark Rebecca—to the Jove with the gold wire beard, to various corsairs, Mohicans, lions, and biblical kings. The Creole aristocracy was out in force, and Uncle Bichet, who knew everyone in the French town by sight and reputation, filled in the gaps left in his knowledge between waltzes, cotillions, and an occasional, obligatory minuet.
Aunt Alicia Picard was the massive-hipped, clinging woman in the somber puce ball gown who never ceased talking—about her rheumatism, her migraines, and her digestion, to judge by her gestures. She had a trick of standing too close to her peevish-faced female companion—her son’s wife, according to Uncle Bichet—and picking nervously at her dress, her glove, her arm. January noticed that every time the daughter-in-law escaped to a conversation with someone else, Aunt Picard would