Part 12 (1/2)

”Huh,” said the butler. ”You coulda had three of that Sally gal and they wouldn't have done the work Judith did, besides always complaining and carrying on, and like as not I'd have to go back and do it myself.”

The butler spoke French well, but out of the presence of whites his speech slipped back into the looser grammar and colloquial expressions of the gombo patois. ”When she was back doing sewing and laundry, you never heard nuthin' but how the work was too hard and Ursula expected her to do more than her share, but the minute she had to do Judith's work, all we got was how sewing and laundry was what she was really good at, and how could she do this other work? She was a thief, too. She helped herself to handkerchiefs and stockings and earbobs, just as if Madame Madeleine didn't have enough stolen from her by that yeller hussy.”

They pa.s.sed through the brown earth beds and ta.s.seled greenery of the kitchen garden to where the whitewashed brick service buildings stood. Beneath the second-floor gallery the kitchen's shutters were thrown wide, the heat of its open stove warming the cool, mild afternoon air and the smell of red beans cooking sweetly pervasive even against the rich thickness of damp gra.s.s. Sheets, petticoats, stockings, tablecloths, and napkins flapped and billowed on clotheslines stretched among the willows that shaded the building's rear, and under the gallery two crones were at work at a table, one of them stuffing a chicken, the other slicing a litter of squash, onions, and green apples.

”Claire, get some tea and crullers for a white gentleman up at the house and some lemonade for Michie Janvier here,” said Louis. ”You might spare us a cruller or two while you're at it. It's that buckra McGinty again,” he added, as the older and more bent of the two women got to her feet and moved into the kitchen with surprising briskness to s.h.i.+ft the kettle of hot water more directly onto the big hearth's fire.

”Well, Albert said they didn't find him Sat.u.r.day when they went into town,” remarked the other woman, whose kilted-up skirts were liberally splotched with damp and smelled of soap. ”And you know Madame Alicia-that's Madame Madeleine's aunt,” she explained in an aside to January, ”wouldn't deal with him for her, since he's an American; why Michie Arnaud would deal with an American broker in the first place instead of a good Frenchman is more than I can tell.”

”Because they played poker together.” Claire came out of the kitchen with a highly decorated papier-mache tray in her hands. Two cups, saucers, a teapot, a pot of hot water, and a plate of small cakes were arranged with the neatness of flowers on its gleaming dark red surface. ”And because he advanced him more money than the Frenchmen would, when he started selling things off to keep that trollop from looking at other men.”

There was a brightly colored pottery cup of lemonade on the tea tray, too. This the old cook removed and set on the table and handed the tray to Louis, who carried it back along the brick-paved way toward the rear flight of stairs that led up onto the back gallery of the house.

”Can I help you with any of that?” January nodded toward the pile of vegetables heaped on one end of the table. ”There's a word or two I still need to speak with Madame Trepagier after she's done with this Monsieur McGinty, and I hate to sit idle while you ladies work.”

His mother would have been shocked and dragged him off to sit at a distance under the trees rather than let him gossip with Negroes, but it crossed January's mind that these two old women might know a good deal more about Angelique's other flirtations than Madame Trepagier would.

The offer to help worked like a charm. Literally like a charm, thought January, sitting down with the blue china bowl of lady peas Claire set in front of him to sh.e.l.l: If he'd gone to a voodooienne for a zinzin to make the cook talk, he couldn't have gotten better results.

”She was flirtin' and carryin' on, and sayin' yes and no and maybe about other men, from the minute she met Michie Arnaud.” For hands lumpy and twisted with arthritis, the old cook's fingers seemed to have lost none of their swiftness, mincing, chopping, sweeping aside small neat piles of finely cut peppers and onions as she spoke. ”He never knew where she stood with him, so of course no one in his life ever knew where they stood either. That was how she liked it.”

”How long ago did he meet Angelique?”

”Five years,” said the cook. ”He had another gal in town before that, name of Fleur. Pretty gal, real light like Angelique, and a little like her to look at-that height and shapely like her. But when he saw Angelique it was like he was. .h.i.t by lightning. He followed her for a year, talkin' with her mother and ignorin' Madame Madeleine and Mamzelle Fleur both, and that Angelique would draw him on one day and fight with him the next, swearin' she'd throw herself in the river 'fore she'd let the likes of him touch her...and then turn around all sweet and helpless and funny as a kitten, askin' for earbobs or a pin, just to prove he cared. She'd dance with other men at the b.a.l.l.s, then lure him on into fights with her about it. He slapped her around, but she knew how to use that, too.”

January remembered the mockery in her voice, the way her body had swayed toward young Peralta's even as she'd reviled him. Inviting a blow, which would then turn into a weapon in her hands. Remembered the way her eyes had gazed into his, daring, challenging, as she'd let another man lead her into the waltz.

”And what happened to this Mademoiselle Fleur?” he asked. Claire looked questioningly up at Ursula the laundress, who had come and gone silently during this conversation, carrying away hot water from the boiler in the kitchen and returning to mix up a batch of biscuits.

”She died, along of the fever in 'twenty-eight,” said the laundress.

”'Twenty-eight it was,” affirmed the cook. ”But even before that happened, Michie Arnaud had put her aside, paid her something and set Angelique up in a house. He bought her a different house, of course, than Mamzelle Fleur. Mamzelle Fleur's mama saw to that. And the new house had to be better, more costive. There are those who said poor Mamzelle Fleur died of shame or grief or whatever Creole ladies die of when they go into a decline, but believe me, Michie Janvier, the fever's always there waitin'.”

With an emphatic nod she swept the vegetables she'd chopped into a porcelain dish.

He removed the gris-gris from his pocket, unwrapped it from the handkerchief. ”You know anyone who'd have paid to have this put under Angelique's mattress?”

The woman crossed herself and turned back to finish st.i.tching up the chicken's skin. ”Anyone on this place would, if they could,” she said simply.

”Sally, maybe?” There was something about the timing of her escape that snagged at the back of his mind.

The cook thought about it, then shook her head. ”Too lazy,” she said. ”Too took up with her 'gentleman friend,' with his earbobs and his trinkets and his calico. I ain't surprised she took off, me. We're not so very far from town that she couldn't have just walked in, leastwise to the new American houses on what used to be the Marigny land, and from there she could take that streetcar. Judith, more like. She hated Angelique even before Michie Arnaud gave her to her.”

”That Angelique, she had the Devil's temper.” Ursula came back drying her hands. ”Judith would come back here with her back all in welts and cry with her head in Madame Madeleine's lap, out here in the kitchen where Michie Arnaud couldn't see. He caught 'em once and whipped the both on 'em.”

The old woman sat down, glanced across at her still-older friend: wrinkled faces under frayed white tignons. Too old for work in the fields, even in these short-handed times. An inventory would list them as no value. no value.

”Thirteen years they was married,” said Ursula slowly. ”Thirteen years...Michie Philippe, he was ten when he died, in the big yellow fever last summer. Little Mamzelle Alexandrine was six. Madame Madeleine, she took on bad after Mamzelle Alexandrine. But after Michie Arnaud took up with Angelique, there wasn't no more children.”

”There wasn't no more children for long before that,” said Claire, her bright small black eyes cold with anger. ”I doctored enough of her bruises, and you, Ursula, you washed enough blood out of her s.h.i.+fts and sheets and petticoats, to know that.”

She turned back to January, toothless face like something carved of seamed black oak. ”It got worse after he started up with Angelique, and worse after the children died, but you know he always did knock her around after he'd been at the rum. No wonder the poor woman got the look in her eyes of a cat in an alley, 'fraid to so much as take a piece of fish from your hand. No wonder she couldn't come up with so much as a tear after the cholera squished him like a wrung-out rag. No wonder she turned down those cousins of his, Charles-Louis and Edgar and whoever all else, when they asked her to marry them, wanting to keep the land in the family-asked her at the wake after the funeral, if I know Creole families when there's land to be had!”

”It didn't do her any good with the Trepagiers when she turned them down,” added Ursula grimly. ”Nor will it do her good with them, or with Madame Alicia Picard, if they learn she's tryin' to raise money some other way to keep the place goin', 'stead of marryin' into their families like they think she oughta.”

”Raise money how?” asked January curiously. ”And I thought Aunt Picard's son was already married.”

”Raise money I don't know how,” replied the old laundress, rising to head back to the open brick chamber that shared a chimney with the kitchen. ”But I can't think of any other reason for her to slip out quiet like she done Thursday night, and take the carriage into town and have Albert let her off in the Place des Armes instead of at her Aunt Picard's. And when she came back, in a hired hack with its lights put out like she didn't want to wake no one up, and came slippin' back into the house through the one door where the shutters hadn't been put up, it was close on to eleven o'clock at night.”

THIRTEEN.

”Why did you stay?”

”I...” Her hand flinched and she wet her lips quickly with her tongue. In the shadows of the gallery she looked battered and brittle and he regretted asking her, regretted having to ask her.

But if the police were talking about ropes and Benjamin January in the same breath these days, he didn't have much choice.

”What makes you think I ...?” She collected herself quickly. ”Stayed where?”

”Three people in the police notes mention seeing a Mohican Princess in the Salle d'Orleans, upstairs, late, long after you said you'd gone.” No sense getting Claire and Ursula in trouble. In fact two of the people who'd seen her in the upstairs lobby had no idea when they had done so, and the third had mentioned that she'd been present during the first waltz.

”Friday morning you told me you were home by eight-thirty, which would mean you had to have left almost immediately after talking to me. But you mentioned the white dress Angelique was wearing and the necklace of emeralds and pearls. So you stayed long enough to see her.”

Her face did not change, but her breath quickened, and long lashes veiled her eyes. She said nothing, and he wondered if silence were the defense she'd tried to use against her husband.

”Was it a man?”

She flinched, the revulsion that crossed her face too sudden and too deep to be anything but genuine. ”No.” Her voice was small, cold, but perfectly steady. ”Not a man.”

He felt ashamed.

”You were in the building, then?”

She drew a deep breath, as if collecting herself from the verge of nausea, and raised her eyes to his face again. There was something opaque in them, a guardedness, choosing her words carefully as she had always chosen them. ”The reason I stayed had nothing to do with Angelique's death. Nothing to do with her at all.”

Every white man of wealth and influence in the city had been there that night. And their wives next door.

But after she'd spoken to him, she'd had reason to hope that Angelique could be met with, pleaded with.... Against that hope was the fact that she'd already sent her notes and been snubbed more than once.

Somewhere an ax sounded, distant and clear, men chopping the wood they'd be stowing up all year against grinding time late in fall. The tall chimney of the sugar mill stood high above the willows that surrounded the house, dirty brick and black with soot, like the tower of a dilapidated fortress watching over desolate land. You couldn't get ten dollars an acre for it, his mother had said, and he believed her: run-down, almost worthless, it would take thousands to put it back to what it had been.

Yet she clung to it. It was all she had.

”Yes,” the woman went on after a time. ”I saw her when she came upstairs, when the men all cl.u.s.tered around her. The way every man always did, I'm told. I can't...I can't tell you the humiliation I've suffered, knowing about Arnaud and that woman. Knowing that everyone knew. I was angry enough to tear my grandmother's jewels off her myself and beat her to death with them, but I didn't kill her. I didn't speak to her. To my knowledge I've never spoken to her.”

The muscle in her temple jumped, once, with the tightening of her jaw. Standing closer to her, January could see she had a little scar on her lower lip, just above the chin, the kind a woman gets from her own teeth when a man hits her hard.