A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [89]
A rickety stair led up the back of the whorehouse to a ramshackle attic under the roof. January had to bend his tall height to edge through the narrow door, stoop even in the center of the pointed room under the ridgepole. At the far end, under one of the dusty dormers, he could make out books stacked against the wall and a mattress laid on the floor. Mice fled squeaking from the sound of his feet. Down below, he heard the thump and creak of a bed frame striking a flimsy wall and a man’s piglike grunts.
“I don’t know where they get the energy at this hour of the morning,” came Hannibal’s voice plaintively from the mattress. “The Glutton—she’s the second from the far end—has been at it since eight o’clock. Even at five cents a turn she has to be making a fortune. Nine of them so far. I’ve been married to women who didn’t perform that much in a year.”
January knelt beside the mattress. In the dusty light the fiddler looked awful, his face ghastly white and sunken in the dark frame of his long hair. Blood spotted the sheet over him and blotched the rags thrown down near a water pitcher not far away, and the threadbare nightshirt he wore was damp with sweat. His pulse was steady, however, and his nails, when pinched, returned to color quickly, and when January put his ear to his friend’s chest he heard none of the telltale rattle of pneumonia.
“I’m sorry I missed the Hermanns’ ball,” said Hannibal, when January sat up again. “Did you get someone to replace me?”
“Bichet’s nephew Johnnie.”
“Then I completely abase myself. That’s the best you could do? The boy couldn’t keep time with a clock in his hand to help him. I’ll be there tonight, I promise.”
January looked gravely down at him, the bled-out pallor and shaky hands. “You sure?”
“‘How has he the leisure to be sick, in such a justling time?’ I’ll be there. I need the money.”
More thumping and rattling below. A man cried out, as if startled or hurt. Hannibal shut his eyes.
“Besides, this place was bad enough last night. Tonight’s Mardi Gras, and I’d much rather be at the Théâtre d’Orléans snabbling oysters than here listening to the bedstead symphony and the fights in the barroom. The Butcher came up and sat with me a little last night—she’s the one who brought me the water—but they’ll all be busy tonight, so I’d just as soon brush up my good coat and make my appearance in society. Which reminds me, I don’t know what French privies are like, but in this country we go into them from the top, not the bottom.”
January looked down at his coat and laughed bitterly. “Evidently not in Kentucky,” he said, and Hannibal looked quickly away.
“Ah. I should have … Well.”
“My mama’d tell me that’s what you get when you go past Canal Street and mix with the Americans. She—”
The outside door opened. The big woman entered, having replaced the baby with a bowl of grits and gravy in one enormous hand, two cups of coffee on saucers balanced easily in the other. In spite of her size and girth—coupling with her would be like mounting a plow horse, thought January admiringly—she was beautiful, if one had not been raised to believe white skin and delicate features constituted all of beauty.
“I saw you was up here, Ben,” she said, kneeling beside him and handing him the cup. It wasn’t clean, but he’d drunk from far worse, and the coffee was strong enough to kill cholera, yellow fever, or such of this woman’s customers as survived the woman herself. “How you feelin’, Hannibal?”
“Ready to imitate the action of the tigers.” He sat up a little, poked at the contents of the dish, and ate a few mouthfuls without much enthusiasm. The woman reached into her dress pocket and produced a small bottle. “I found this in Nancy’s room. There ain’t much left, but if you water it some it may last you.”
Hannibal held the bottle to the light, and January smelled the swoony alcohol bitterness of laudanum. The fiddler’s mouth quirked—evidently Nancy had consumed most of the contents—but he