Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January SS Read online

  LIBRE

  by Barbara Hambly

  [Insert Pic EQMM1106Stories02.jpg Here]

  Art by David Sullivan

  Barbara Hambly lived in New Orleans for three years with her late husband, science fiction writer George Alec Effinger. The city provides the setting for her crime fiction, the pre-Civil War Benjamin January series. What better way to begin a journey through time and the New Orleans of mystery-writing imagination than with a tale of January, former slave and sometime sleuth.

  Ms. Hambly’s new novel is Renfield, Slave of Dracula.

  “If they fear she has been kidnapped, why not call the City Guard?” Benjamin January paused on the steps that led up to the gallery of the garçonnière, looking down at his mother in the narrow yard. He’d just returned from teaching his first piano class of the winter—new students, Americans, in the suburb of St. Mary upriver—and had been hoping to get a few hours’ nap before he had to dress up again and play for a subscription ball over on Rue Orleans. There was a saying among the musicians of New Orleans, You can sleep during Lent—which wasn’t entirely true because the holy season was dotted with “exceptions,” like Washington’s Birthday balls—but the week or two after the first frost were always the worst. He’d played for the opening of the French Opera House last night, and had gone on to provide quadrilles and pantaleones at a ball at the townhouse of a wealthy sugar planter. The sellers of fresh milk and crayfish had been beginning their morning rounds when he’d finally returned to his room above his mother’s kitchen.

  Afternoon coffee with his mother’s friends was not something he wanted to deal with on three hours of sleep, particularly not when his mother had that glint in her eye.

  “The City Guard.” Livia Lev-esque sniffed. “You know what they are, my son. If a slave disappears they’ll sober up and hunt for the thief because the owner will give them a reward. If a libre disappears—” She used the Spanish term for their people, the free people of color, though Louisiana hadn’t been a possession of Spain for thirty years now. “—they have other things to do. You come downstairs now, Ben. Poor Madame Rochier is nearly mad with fear and grief.”

  That his mother was up to something—that there was something about the disappearance of eighteen-year-old Marie-Zulieka Rochier that she wasn’t going to admit in her first preemptory demand that he undertake the search—January guessed from his mother’s tone, and the way she held her head. He was forty-one, and had consciously noticed before the age of four—when she and he and his younger sister Olympe had all still been slaves on a sugar plantation upriver—all the signs when she was doctoring some unpalatable truth.

  When he followed her into the dining room of the trim little cottage on Rue Burgundy he was sure of it.

  Casmalia Rochier was certainly afraid, and certainly upset. But in her dark eyes and in the set of her perfect mouth, as she turned her head to reply to a question, was a world of suspicion and frozen rage.

  Like January’s mother—like the other four women sipping his mother’s cook’s excellent coffee around the cherrywood table—Casmalia Rochier was a plaçee, the free colored mistress of a wealthy white man. Many years ago, according to custom, banker Louis Rochier had bought her a house and settled on her the income to raise their mixed-race children in comfort and safety. A similar arrangement between January’s mother and St-Denis Janvier, now long gathered to his ancestors, had paid for both the music lessons that led to his current profession and the medical training in France that had proved to be so completely useless the moment he returned to the United States … and, of course, had paid for this house.

  A similar arrangement existed between January’s youngest sister Dominique—currently passing Casmalia the sugar—and a young sugar planter; between his old friend Catherine Clisson, who smiled a welcome to him as he came into the room, and another equally wealthy planter. An arrangement like that had provided the foundation of Bernadette Métoyer’s chocolate shop and the investments that paid for the gowns of the four daughters Agnes Pellicot was trying to “place” in arrangements of their own. Bernadette and Agnes were both angrily denouncing the New Orleans City Guards to Casmalia and barely glanced at January, but Dominique got to her feet and rustled to the sideboard for another cup of coffee for her older brother:

  “You are going to find Zozo for us, aren’t you, p’tit?”

  He was almost twenty years the elder and six feet, three inches tall, and smiled inwardly at being called “little one” by this piece of graceful fluff.

  “If I can. Have you notified the City Guards?” He looked across at Casmalia Rochier, and her eyes ducked away from his. “They may display little interest in recovering artisans’ wives or market girls when they go missing, but they’re going to look for the daughter of Louis Rochier, even one born on the shady side of the street.”

  He didn’t add, And what’s more, you know it. But it was in his eyes when she looked back at him. What is it you all aren’t telling me?

  “My mother tells me Marie-Zulieka disappeared this morning. When? How?

  Surely she wasn’t out by herself?”

  “Of course not!” Casmalia’s back went even more rigid at the suggestion.

  “She went to the market with her sister and Marie-Therese Pellicot. But Marie-Therese was taken ill, and Zozo left little Lucie with Marie-Therese and hurried home to fetch Tommy, our yardman, to help her get home—”

  Seventeen years of living in Paris brought, Why didn’t she fetch a cab? to January’s lips, only to be reminded, with a small stab of too-familiar anger, that it was against the law for a man or woman of color to ride in a cab.

  Except, of course, as the driver or as a servant perched on the box.

  Catherine Clisson finished softly, “She never made it home.”

  “Lucie and Marie-Therese waited for almost an hour,” added Agnes, her round, rouged face puckered with distress at the memory of her daughter’s illness and the fear that stalked every libre—the fear of kidnap by slave traders. Of being taken out of New Orleans and sold. “Finally Lucie asked one of the market women’s children to run see what was keeping Tommy.”

  “That was the first I heard.”

  “Is Marie-Therese all right?”

  Agnes nodded, and her plump shoulders relaxed. “Just a little indisposition of the stomach, you know. I tell the girls, never buy snacks and treats from those market women unless you know them—who knows what goes into those ices? But of course girls never listen. She’ll be well for the ball at the Salle tonight.” There was an edge to Agnes’s voice. Marie-Therese had not yet found a protector after one season of attending the quadroon balls at the Salle d’Orleans, and her mother wasn’t going to let another season go by, however poorly the girl might feel.

  January’s glance returned to Casmalia. “Has your daughter a lover?”

  “My daughter has accepted a most flattering offer from Jules Dutuille.” The woman brought forth the name of the sugar broker with a slow flourish, like a card player spreading four of a kind beneath the noses of her enemies. But January saw the look that flashed between Catherine Clisson and his sister, and remembered hearing something—he couldn’t place what—disparaging about the man.

  He knew the odds were only fifty-fifty that he’d get a truthful answer to his next question. “Was there anyone else?”

  “No!” Casmalia dabbed—very carefully—at her painted eyes with a tiny square of lawn and lace, and Clisson and Dominique again traded a glance.

  “Benjamin, it is vital— vital—not only that my daughter be found swiftly, but that no word of this—this terrible tragedy—be allowed to reach M’sieu Dutuille’s ears … or those of M’sieu Rochier. Po
or M’sieu Dutuille would be devastated—”

  “I understand.” And he did understand, seeing how his mother, Bernadette Métoyer, and Agnes Pellicot all leaned forward to catch and sift every word. Gossip was the lifeblood of the free colored demimonde. The fact that Casmalia Rochier, devastatingly elegant in her expensive simplicity, was inclined to boast virtually guaranteed that her misfortune would be trumpeted abroad.

  Her own business, of course, but dispensing with an audience would greatly increase his chances of getting anything like truthful answers. “Maman, with Madame Rochier’s permission I’m going to walk her home. Please, all of you ladies, finish your coffee. I’ll return in a few minutes. Madame?” He held out his arm, onto which Casmalia Rochier laid one exquisitely kid-gloved hand.

  “You don’t think it was slave-stealers, do you?” he asked, very quietly, as he led Casmalia out through the long French doors of his mother’s cottage and onto Rue Burgundy. Even this far from the river—nearly half a mile—the sound of the levee made a jumbled background to the closer noises of passing carriages, of servants and women talking in doorways and breezeways, of dogs barking in yards: the noises of New Orleans in the winter season, between cotton harvest and sugar-boiling, when the planters came into town and opened up their houses and the city came alive.

  Casmalia Rochier glanced right and left, as if making sure none of her friends had tiptoed after them to listen, and let out her breath in an angry sigh. “Ben, it is absolutely imperative—”

  He held up a hand. “I know. That M’sieu Dutuille doesn’t hear of it—or M’sieu Rochier. Who do you think it was?”

  “Nicholas Saverne.” Her eyes, green-gray like those of so many libres, turned steely. “A lawyer from Mobile, absolutely no family, and encroaching as a weed. He swears he’ll be the wealthiest man in the parish in a year, but I know his kind!”

  “Would your daughter have gone with him willingly?”

  “Of course not!” But her glance again fleeted from his. “Her father went to great lengths to arrange this match with M’sieu Dutuille, who is absolutely infatuated with her. She would never do a thing like that to me.”

  Not, January was interested to note, to him.

  “She is a most dutiful girl—and needless to say, deeply in love with M’sieu Dutuille.”

  By the defensive note in her voice it was clear to January that Marie-Zulieka had been nothing of the kind. He handed Casmalia across the plank that bridged the gutter of Rue des Ursulines; they had reached the pale-green cottage, with its fresh pink trim, that Louis Rochier had twenty years ago purchased for his plaçee.

  Because January was a man—and no Creole, black or white, would walk straight through the French doors of the parlor like a barbarian—he followed her down the narrow breezeway that separated her cottage from the next, and through the yard into the dining room: Any of her woman friends would have been escorted through her bedroom. This custom allowed him to note the layout of the house, which was substantially the same as his mother’s and that of every other plaçee in the French town. The four-room cottage faced the street, and the building behind housed kitchen, laundry, slave quarters, and the garçonnière: the room or rooms for the growing sons of the house.

  A girl who had to be Lucie darted out of the French doors at the rear of the house as January and Casmalia approached: “Did you find her?” She raised frightened eyes up to her mother. “She didn’t really get stolen away by the American animals, did she?”

  January replied reassuringly, “I don’t think so, p’tit. But if she gets stranded on foot someplace far away, she might have to sell her earrings to get home. Might I see her jewel box, so we can tell how much she’ll have with her to sell?”

  After a quick glance at her mother, Lucie led the way self-importantly to the door into the bedroom she clearly shared with her sister. January had already noted the three sets of bedding that the housemaid was hanging to air on the railings of the gallery: Between Marie-Zulieka and Lucie, who looked to be eight or nine, Casmalia had evidently borne at least three sons. They would be out, he guessed, either at school or more probably at whatever shops or businesses to which they’d been apprenticed. The daughters of plaçees almost routinely became plaçees themselves, the sons almost universally artisans or clerks.

  He recalled, too, from his own childhood, how he—the ungainly son who too closely resembled his mother’s slave husband—had been early relegated to the garçonnière, and how Dominique, from her birth, had been given her own pretty room in the cottage, much like this that Marie-Zulieka and Lucie shared. The walls were papered with green-and-white French wallpapers; armoire, bureau, and the bed beneath the looped-back pink cloud of the mosquito bar were French, and new. Like Dominique, obviously her mother’s lace-trimmed princess, clothed in white mull muslin with whose simple prettiness even the most exacting Frenchwoman could not have found fault.

  Of a piece with her mother, he thought, glancing back at Casmalia. Aside from the tignon—the wrapped head scarf mandated by law to mark all women of color, slave and free, apart from white women—Casmalia’s simple elegance would not have been out of place in Paris or London.

  Yet he’d seen her wearing diamonds, when he played music for the quadroon balls. Louis Rochier was obviously a generous patron.

  And a generous father. The jewel box Lucie opened for his inspection was a miniature treasure-house of pearls, sapphire, and aquamarine, expensive and yet carefully chosen to be not one carat more than rigidly appropriate for a girl just

  “out.” Yet something was missing…

  “These are the things M’sieu Dutuille sent to her, on the occasion of her contract being signed.” Rather impatiently, Casmalia cleared the small stack of books from the corner of the bureau, and spread out upon it a much costlier parure of rubies. “Of course completely unsuitable for her to wear as yet—perhaps ever, if you ask my opinion. She’s so fair they’re not her color at all.”

  It was a subtle brag. Like the white, upon whose power they depended, most libres saw greater beauty in pale complexions and silky hair than in the reminders of a slave-born past. “I suppose she’ll have to wear them to please him,” Casmalia continued airily. “When the time comes, I’ll suggest she have them reset.”

  “I think they’re pretty,” ventured Lucie, and her mother sniffed.

  “Vulgar. But as you can see, Ben, she certainly did not abscond. Not and leave all this behind. I don’t see her pearls here—there was a pearl-and-aquamarine set that her grandmother gave her, God rest her soul: far too showy for morning. I can’t imagine she’d have worn it…”

  “She did,” provided Lucie. “And I think it was beautiful.”

  “Nonsense. It was incorrect to wear in the daytime—what on earth can she have been thinking? And no one is interested in what little girls think.”

  “And I’ll bet you have jewels just as beautiful, Lucie,” said January, who had carefully taken everything out of Marie-Zulieka’s jewel box and gently probed with his fingers every corner of its satin lining. “Would you show them to me, before I go?”

  They were, as he’d guessed, just as carefully chosen to be suitable for a girl of nine: a single pearl on a fine gold chain, coral beads, a gold cross to wear on Sundays … “And what’s this?” With great care he lifted the tiny, brittle bundle no bigger than the joint of his little finger, wrapped in pink paper, though quite properly he didn’t open it.

  One didn’t, with such things. Not without permission.

  “That’s my gris-gris.” Lucie took the bundle, unwrapped it to show the tiny dried foot of a bird, a sparrow or a wren by its size. “It brings me good luck. Zozo has one, too.”

  “And does Zozo keep hers in her jewel box?”

  Lucie nodded.

  He refilled and closed the box, and replaced on the corner of the bureau the books Casmalia had tossed aside: Böckh on ancient Greece and Lamarck on animals, a Spanish edition of Don Quixote, and a text on the stars that had been much
talked of in Paris when he was there a few years ago. Inside the cover of each was marked A. Vouziers, 12 Rue de la Petit Monaie—that address was crossed out, along with two others he recognized as being in the same maze of ancient streets behind the Louvre in Paris, and then— 53 Rue Marigny.

  He said, “Then we can be sure it will bring Zozo good luck as well.”

  “I consulted with my sister,” said January that evening to Hannibal Sefton, at a break during the dancing in the Théâtre d’Orleans while the guests made serious inroads on the buffet and the musicians sorted through their music and flexed the cramp from their hands. Needless to say, the sister January referred to was not the lovely Dominique but Olympe, his full-blood sister who’d run off with the voodoos at the age of sixteen. “She says she didn’t sell Zozo Rochier anything to make Marie-Therese Pellicot sick, but the symptoms sound like hellebore of some kind.

  My aunties back on the plantation would give the children something of the kind when we got worms. I hope Agnes didn’t force Marie-Therese out of bed to come to the ball.”

  His eyes strayed across the dance floor that had been raised over the backs of the seats in the pit to the wide double doors that led through to the lobby. From the lobby a discreet passageway connected to the building next-door—the Salle d’Orleans—where a ball was going on for the ladies of the free colored demimonde, the plaçees and their daughters.

  M’sieu Davis, who owned both buildings, was careful to stagger the intermissions so that the husbands and brothers of the respectable ladies attending the ball at the Théâtre could sneak back in good time to have a cup of punch with their wives, after dancing with their mistresses next-door.

  “Surely she wouldn’t.” Hannibal set his violin on top of January’s piano, unobtrusively collected two champagne glasses from the tray of a passing waiter, and led the way to the lobby. It wouldn’t do for the musicians to be seen drinking the same champagne as the guests. “Even Agnes…”