A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [9]
If that was what she was going to do.
The skipping rhythms of the cotillion drew at his mind. He knew that for the next hour, music would be all he’d have time to think about. Whatever she decided to do, she’d be on her own.
It was her own business, of course, but he had been fond of her as a child, the genius and the need of her soul calling to the hunger in his. She had to be desperate in the first place to come here. Quiet and well-mannered and genuinely considerate as she had been as a child, she had had the courage that could turn reckless if driven to the wall. He wished heartily that he’d had time to escort her back to the Trepagier town house himself.
He was to wish it again, profoundly, after they discovered the body in the parlor at the end of the hall.
TWO
Benjamin January’s first public performance on the piano had been at a quadroon ball. He was sixteen and had played for the private parties and dances given during Christmas and Carnival season by St.-Denis Janvier for years; he was enormously tall even then, gawky, lanky, odd-looking, and painfully shy. St.-Denis Janvier had hired for him the best music master in New Orleans as soon as he’d purchased—and freed—his mother.
The music master was an Austrian who referred to Beethoven as “that self-indulgent lunatic” and regarded opera as being on intellectual par with the work hollers Ben had learned in his first eight years in the cane fields of Bellefleur Plantation where the growing American suburb of Saint Mary now stood. The Austrian—Herr Kovald—taught the children of other plaçées and seemed to think it only the children’s due that their illegitimate fathers pay for a musical as well as a literary education for them. If he ever thought it odd that Ben did not appear to have a drop of European blood in his veins it was not something he considered worthy of mention.
Ben was, he said quite simply, the best, and therefore deserved to be beaten more, as diamonds require fiercer blows to cut. Common trash like pearls, he said, one only rubbed a little.
Herr Kovald had played the piano at the quadroon balls, which in those days had been held at another ballroom on Rue Royale. Then, as now, the wealthy planters, merchants, and bankers of the town would bring their mulatto or quadroon mistresses—their plaçées—to dance and socialize, away from the restrictions of wives or would-be wives; would also bring their sons to negotiate for the choice of mistresses of their own. Then, as now, free women of color, plaçées or former plaçées, would bring their daughters as soon as they were old enough to be taken in by protectors and become plaçées themselves, in accordance with the custom of the country. Society was smaller then and exclusively French and Spanish. In those days the few Americans who had established plantations near the city since the takeover by the United States simply made concubines of the best looking of their slaves and sold them off or sent them back to the fields when their allure faded.
At Carnival time in 1811, Herr Kovald was sick with the wasting illness that was later to claim his life. As if the matter had been discussed beforehand, he had simply sent a note to Livia Janvier’s lodgings, instructing her son Benjamin to take his place as piano player at the ball. And in spite of his mother’s deep disapproval (“It’s one thing for you to play for me, p’tit, but for you to play like a hurdy-gurdy man for those cheap hussies that go to those balls …”), he had, as a matter of course, gone.
And, except for a break of six years, he had been a professional musician ever since.
The ballroom was full by the time the cotillion was done. January looked up from his music to scan the place from the vantage point of the dais, while Hannibal shared his champagne with the other two musicians and flirted with Phlosine Seurat, who had by this time discovered that powdered wigs and panniers were designed for the stately display of