" '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 stitching 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.
"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 shifts 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'Orl?ans, 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 An-gelique'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 clustered 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.
"I swear I didn't kill her." Madeleine Trepagier raised her eyes to his. "Please don't betray that I was there." January looked aside, unable to meet her gaze. I doctored enough of her bruises... washed enough blood out of her shifts and sheets and petticoats...
The house, like most Creole houses, was a small one. He wondered if the children, Philippe and Alexandrine, had heard and knew already that they couldn't not have.