The woman hesitated, then said, "She bearin' up."
There was a. world of weighted words and unspoken thought in that short phrase.
"Bearin' up, huh," said Agnes Pellicot shortly, from the green brocaded settee she shared with two other beautifully dressed, still-handsome women with fans of painted silk in their hands. The older, Catherine Clisson, had been three years ahead of January in Herr Kovald's music classes, a slim girl with high cheekbones for whom, at the time, he had nursed a sentimental and hopeless love. The younger, rounded and pretty in an exquisite rose-and-white striped dress, was Odile Gignac, his mother's dressmaker.
"Bearin' up enough to collect every earbob and pin, and cut the silver buttons off every one of her daughter's dresses, is how she's bearin' up."
"A woman can grieve her daughter and still fear for her own future, Agnes," said Clisson gently. "You know she had nothing beyond what Angelique sent her every month."
"God knows it was Angelique who paid her bills, more times than not," added Gignac, crossing herself. The daughter of respectable free colored parents, she was one of the small minority of sang meles who accepted the plafees on their own terms as friends as well as customers, though it was understood they did not speak on the public streets. "And her gambling debts, from what I hear. It's that poor child Clemence that fainted dead away when she came here this morning and heard."
Agnes only sniffed. January deduced the matter of young Peralta still rankled.
"Judith," Clisson went on in her soft voice, "please be so good as to fetch Monsieur Janvier some coffee. Or should I say Ben?" she added, her dark eyes sparkling with a friendship she'd never shown him when they were young. "I've missed you twice by your mama's. It's good to catch up with you at last."
January smiled, too. He'd been fourteen when she, far too proud of her own position to take the slightest notice of a gawky coal-black lout such as he had been, had become the mistress of a middle-aged Creole with a plantation on Lake Pontchartrain. January's adoration had lasted for years. On the nights when Monsieur Motet came into town he had been drawn to loiter on the opposite banquette of her cottage on Rue des Ramparts in an agony of jealous speculation, though they had not spoken since she had left Herr Kovald's class.
Funny, what time did.
The memory brought back all those other memories. He'd played with Odile and her brother as children, though her parents had looked askance at a placee's son, and had sent her to a Select Academy for Colored Females at an early age. A queer sense of pain touched him, which he recognized as a kind of pins-and-needles of the heart: feeling coming back into memories long buried and numb.
This city had been his home. These people had been his home.
In turning his back on Froissart and Richelieu, and on the thick heat of the fever summers, he had turned his back on them as well.
"I'd forgotten how beautifully you played." Clisson laid down her fan, French lace on sandalwood sticks, costly and new. "I didn't even think about it during the dancing, but afterward, when you were playing to keep everyone amused... The Rossini almost made me cry. I was sorry to hear about your wife."
He smiled down at her from his height. "I didn't think you even noticed how I played when we had class together," he said, with the rancorless amusement of shared old times. "You're still with Monsieur Motet?"
Her smile was no more than the tucking back of the corners of her lips, the velvet warming of her eyes. It told him everything even before she nodded, and he felt for her a rush of gladness. "Are you taking students, now you're back?" she asked. She spoke almost as if it had been a given, a foregone conclusion for all those years, that he would eventually return. He wanted to tell her he hadn't intended to return at all.
"I think your mama said you were. My daughter Isabel's eight. I've taught her a little, but it's time she had a good teacher."
January was opening his mouth to reply when a woman's voice cried out in the rear of the house, a sharp gasp, rising to a shriek "There it is! There! I told you! Oh God-"
A break, a murmur, January and Clisson and Gignac all on their feet in the sliding doorway that separated the darkened parlor from the still-darker bedchamber. "Oh, my child! Oh, my poor little one! Murder! Oh God, murder-"
"What the-" began January.
"Of course it was murder," said Clisson, puzzled. "Nobody ever said it wasn't."
The door to the bedroom sliced open and Euphrasie Dreuze stumbled through, clutching something in her
fat jeweled hand. "My God, my God, look!" she sobbed at the top of her lungs. "My poor little girl was hexed to death! Someone hid this in her mattress; she was sleeping next to this all along! It drew death down on her! It drew death!"
"Phrasie, don't be a goose." Livia Levesque emerged from the bedroom on her friend's heels and made an unsuccessful grab at the filthy little wad of parchment and bone.
Euphrasie Dreuze wrenched herself free. Only five years older than January, she was plumper than she'd been when first he had seen her but retained the impression of kitten-soft cuddliness that had attracted a well-off young broker thirty years before. Her chin was pouchy and deep lines graven on either side of her painted mouth, but she was still a lovely woman, fair-skinned even among quadroons, with small, grasping hands. Even for day wear her tignon was orange silk, glittering with an aigrette of jewels.
With a shattering sob she brandished what she held. January took it, turned it over in his hands. A dried bat, little bigger than a magnolia leaf.
A gris-gris. A talisman of death.
"Madame Dreuze, Madame Dreuze," bleated Clem-ence Drouet, fluttering at her heels the way she had fluttered at Angelique's, her round face still gray with shock and tears. "Please don't..."
"Throw that piece of trash out," commanded Livia sharply and snatched it from her son's hands.
Even as she did so, Euphrasie turned with a hysterical cry upon the servant girl Judith, frozen in the act of pouring coffee from a pot at the sideboard.
"You did this!" Euphrasie shrieked, smashing cup and saucer from the girl's hands. "You black slut! You planted it there, you wanted my child to die!" Her hand lashed out, quick as a cottonmouth striking, and clapped the girl on the ear. Judith gasped and tried to run, but the room was choked with furniture, new and English and thick with carving. Odile and Pellicot clogged the door to the other half of the parlor, Clemence and Euphrasie herself that to the bedroom.
"You did it, you did it, you did it!" Euphrasie struck her again, knocking her white head scarf flying, her gesture almost an identical echo of Angelique's last night, when she had struck young Peralta. "You cheap, lazy whore! You dirty black tramp!" She caught Judith by the hair, dragging her forward and shaking her by the thick pecan-colored mass until the girl screamed. "You wanted her dead! You wanted to go back to that mealymouthed white bitch! You hated her! You got some voodoo and got her to make gris-gris!"
"Phrasie!" Clisson caught the hysterical woman's wrist. "How can you, with Angelique dead in her bed there?"
"Phrasie, don't be a fool." Livia thrust herself into the fray, slapped Euphrasie loudly on her plump cheek.
Euphrasie fell back, opening her mouth to scream, and Livia picked up the water pitcher from the sideboard. "You scream and I dump this over you."
Clisson, Odile, and Agnes Pellicot promptly retreated to the doorway, hands pressing their mountains of petticoats back for safety. January reflected that they'd all known his mother for thirty years.
Euphrasie, too, wisely forbore to scream. For a moment the only sound was the girl Judith sobbing in the corner, her hair a tobacco-colored explosion around her swollen face. The smell of coffee soaking into wool carpet hung thick in the air. Outside a woman sang "Callas! Hot callas hotl"
Then Euphrasie burst into fresh tears and flung herself onto the bosom of the only male present. "They murdered my little girl!" she howled. "My God, they witched her, put evil on her, so someone was drawn to kill her!"