Her right hand flashed to her left, covering the worn place in the glove. She had big hands for a woman-even as a little girl, he remembered, her gloves had always been mended on the outside edge, as these were. Maybe that was what had triggered the recollection in his mind. As she fumbled with the faded kid he went on.
"Second, this isn't anyplace for you. I know it isn't my place to say so, but why ever you're here-and I assume it's got something to do with a man-go home. Whatever you're doing, do it some other way."
"It isn't..." she began breathlessly, but there was guilty despair in her eyes, and he held up his hand for silence again.
"Some of these ladies may be as light as you," he continued gendy, "but they were all raised to this world, to do things a certain way. They mostly know each other, and they all know the litde tricks-who they can talk to and who not. Who each other's gentlemen are and who can be flirted with and who left alone. Even the young girls, with their mothers bringing them here for the first time for the men to meet, they know all this. You don't. Go home. Go home right now."
She turned her face away. She had always blushed easily, and he could almost feel the color spreading under the feathered rim of the mask. He wondered if she'd grown up as beautiful as she'd been when he taught her pianoforte scales, simple bits of Mozart, quadrilles and the rewritten arias on which he got his students used to the flow and the story of sound. She had a wonderful ear, he recalled; those hands that tore out the sides of her gloves could span an octave and two. He remembered how she'd attacked Beethoven, devouring the radical music like a starving woman eating meat, remembered the distant, almost detached passion in her eyes.
Horns blatted and drums pounded in the street, as a party of maskers rioted by. Someone yelled "Vive Bonaparte! A bas les americains!" What was it now? Ten years? Twelve years since the man's death? And he was still capable of starting riots in the street. "Salaud!" "Crapaud!" "Atheiste!" "Orleaniste...!"
He saw the quicksilver of tears swimming in her eyes.
"I'm telling you this for your own protection, Mademoiselle Dubonnet," he said. "If nothing else, I know these girls. They gossip like cannibals cutting up a corpse. You get recognized, your name'll be filth. You know that." He spoke quietly, as if she were still the passionate dark-haired child at the pianoforte, who had shared with him the complicity of true devotees of the art, and for a moment she looked away again.
"I know that." Her voice was tiny. From his pocket January drew one of the several clean handkerchiefs he always carried, and she took it, smudging her war paint a little in the process. She drew a deep breath, let it go, and raised her eyes to his again. "It's just that... there was no other way. My name is Trepagier now, by the way."
"Arnaud Trepagier?" His stomach felt as if he'd miscalculated the number of steps on a stairway in the dark.
He'd heard his sister's friends gossip about the wives and the white families of the men who bought them their houses, fathered their children, paid for their slippers and gowns. For any white woman to come,
even masked, even protected by the license of Carnival, to a Blue Ribbon Ball was hideous enough. But for the widow of Arnaud Trepagier to be here, dressed like Leatherstock-ing's worst nightmare less than two months after her husband's body had been laid in the Trepagier family crypt at the St. Louis cemetery...
She would never be received anywhere in the parish, anywhere in the state, again. Her husband's family and her own would cast her out. The Creole aristocracy was unforgiving. And once a woman was cast out, January knew, whether here or in Paris, there was almost nothing she could do to earn her bread.
"What is it?" he asked. She had never been stupid. Unless she had fallen in love with intense and crazy passion, it had to be something desperate. "What's wrong?"
"I have to speak with Angelique Crozat."
For a moment January could only stare at her, speechless and aghast. Then he said, "Are you crazy?'
He'd only been back in New Orleans for three months, but he knew all about Angelique Crozat. The free colored in their pastel cottages along Rue des Ramparts and Rue Claiborne, the French in their close-crowded town houses, and the Americans in their oak-shaded suburbs where the cane fields had been-the slaves in their cramped outbuildings and attics-knew about Angelique Crozat. Knew about the temper tantrums in the cathedral, and that she'd spit on a priest at Lenten confession last year. Knew about the five hundred dollars' worth of pink silk gown she'd ripped from bosom to hem in a quarrel with her dressmaker, and the bracelet of diamonds she'd flung out a carriage window into the gutter during a fight with a lover. Knew about the sparkle of her conversation, like bright acid that left burned holes and scars in the reputations of everyone whose name crossed her lips, and the way men watched her when she passed along the streets.
"I must see her," repeated Madame Trepagier levelly, and there was a thread of steel in her voice. "I must"
The door opened behind them. Madeleine Trepagier's eyes widened in shock as she stepped around Froissart's desk, as far from January as the tiny chamber would permit. January's mind leaped to the soi-disant Cardinal Richelieu, and he turned, wondering what the hell he would do in the event of another assault-in the event that someone guessed that Madame Trepagier was white, alone here with him, to say nothing of the woman she was seeking.
But it was only Hannibal Sefton, slightly drunk as usual, a wreath of flowers and several strings of iridescent glass Carnival beads looped around his neck. "Ball starts at eight." His grin was crooked under a graying mustache, and with alcohol the lilt of the well-bred Anglo-Irish gentry was stronger than usual in his speech. "Like as not Froissart'll fire your ass."
"Like as not Froissart knows what he can do with my ass," retorted January, but he knew he'd have to go. He'd been a performer too long not to begin on time, not only for the sake of his own reputation but for those of the other men who'd play in the ensemble. Managers and masters of ceremonies rarely asked who was at fault if the orchestra was late.
He turned back to Madame Trepagier. "Leave now," he said, and met the same quiet steeliness in her eyes that he had seen there as a child.
"I can't," she said. "I beg you, don't betray me, but this is something I must do."
He glanced back at Hannibal, standing in the doorway, his treasured fiddle in hand, and then back at the woman before him. "I can leave," offered Hannibal helpfully, "but Froissart'll be down here in a minute."
"No," said January, "it's all right."
Madeleine Trepagier's face was still set, scared but calm, like a soldier facing battle. She'd never survive, he thought. Not if La Crozat guessed her identity...
"Listen," he said. "I'll find Angelique and set up a meeting between you at my mother's house, all right? I'll send you a note tomorrow."
She closed her eyes, and some of the tension left her shoulders and neck; she put out a hand to the corner of the desk to steady herself. She too, realized January, had heard everything there was to hear about Angelique Crozat. A deep breath, then a nod. Another black cock feather floated free, like a slow flake of raven snow.
"All right. Thank you."
They left her in the office, Hannibal checking the corridor, right and left, before they ducked out and hastened up the narrow, mildew-smelling flight of the service stair. In the hall January retrieved another cock feather from the bare cypress planks of the floor, lest Richelieu happen by and be of an observant bent. With luck once the music started everyone would be drawn up to the ballroom, and Madame Trepagier could slip away unnoticed. It shouldn't be difficult to hire a hack in the Rue Royale.