Above him, one of Henry VIII's wives trilled with laughter and threw a rose down to a tobacco-chewing Pierrot in the court below. The gaudy masks of the wives set off their clouds of velvety curls, chins and throats and bosoms ranging from palest ivory through smooth cafe-au-lait. In London, January had seen portraits of all the Tudor queens and, complexion aside, none of the originals had been without a headdress. But this was one of the few occasions upon which, licensed by the anonymity of masks, a free
woman of color could appear in public with her hair uncovered, and every woman present was taking full and extravagant advantage of the fact.
The French doors beneath the gallery stood open. Gaslights were a new thing-when January had left in 1817 everything had been candlelit-and in the uneasy brilliance couples moved through the lower lobby and up the curving double flight of the main stair to the ballroom on the floor above. As a child January had been fascinated by this festival of masks, and years had not eroded its eerie charm; he felt as if he had stepped through into a dream of Shelley or Coleridge where everything was more vivid, more beautiful, soaked in a crystalline radiance, as if the walls of space and time, fact and fiction, had been softened, to admit those who had never existed, or who were no more.
Marie Antoinette strolled by, a good copy of the Le Brun portrait January had seen in the Musee du Louvre, albeit the French queen had darkened considerably from the red-haired Austrian original. January recognized her fairylike thinness and the way she laughed: Phlosine Seurat, his sister Dominique's bosom friend. He couldn't remember the name of her protector, though Dominique had told him, mixed up with her usual silvery spate of gossip-only that the man was a sugar planter who had given Phlosine not only a small house on Rue des Ramparts but also two slaves and an allowance generous enough to dress their tiny son like a little lace prince. At a guess the Indian maid was another of his sister's friends.
He looked around the courtyard again.
There were other "Indians" present, of course, among the vast route of Greek gods and cavaliers, Ivanhoes and Rebeccas, Caesars and corsairs. The Last of the Mohicans was as popular here as it was in Paris. January recognized Augustus Mayerling, one of the town's most fashionable fencing masters, surrounded by a worshipful gaggle of his pupils, and made a mental note to place bets with his sister when he saw her on how many duels would be arranged tonight. In all his years of playing the piano at New Orleans balls, January had noticed that the average of violence was lower for the quadroon balls, the Blue Ribbon Balls, than for the subscription balls of white society.
And even on this night of masks, he noted that those who spoke French did not mingle with those who spoke English. Some things Carnival did not change.
He'd laughed about that, too, in Paris, back when there'd been reason to laugh.
Don't think about that, he told himself, and opened the service door. Just get through this evening. I wonder if that poor girl...?
She was standing in the service hall that led to the manager's tiny office, to the kitchen and the servants' stair.
At the sound of the opening door she whirled, her face a pale blur under the mask and the streaks of war paint. She'd been watching through the little door that led into the.corner of the lobby, and for a moment, as she lifted her weight up onto her toes, January thought she'd flee out into the big room, into which he could not follow. He noted, in that instant, how absurdly the cheap buckskin costume was made, with a modern corset and petticoat beneath it, and a little beaded reticule at her belt. Her dark plaits were a nod to Monsieur Cooper, but she wore perfectly ordinary black gloves, much mended, and black slippers and stockings, splashed with mud from the street.
She seemed to lose her nerve about the lobby and turned to flee up the narrow stair that led to the upstairs supper room and the little retiring chamber beside it, where girls went to pin up torn flounces. January said, "It's all right, Mademoiselle. I just wanted to be sure you were all right."
"Oh. Of course." She straightened her shoulders with a gesture he knew-he'd seen it a hundred times,
or a thousand, but not from an adult woman... "Thank you, Monsieur Janvier. The man was... importunate." She was trying to sound calm and a little arrogant, but he saw from the way the gold buckskin of her skirt shivered that her knees were still shaking. She nodded to him, touched her absurd headdress, loosing another two cock feathers, and started to walk past him toward the courtyard again. It was well done and, he realized later, took nerve. But when she came close January got a better look at what he could see of her face and knew then where he had seen that squaring of the shoulders, those full lips; knew where he had heard that voice.
"Mademoiselle Madeleine?"
She froze, and in the same moment realization took hold of him, and horror.
"Mademoiselle Madeleine?"
Her eyes met his, her mouth trying for an expression of cool surprise and failing. She was a woman now, wasp-waisted with a soaring glory of bosom, but the angel-brown eyes were the eyes of the child he remembered.
She moved to dart past him but he put his body before the door, and she halted, wavering, tallying possible courses of action, even as he'd seen her tally them when her father would come in after the piano lessons and ask whether she would like a lemon ice before her dancing teacher arrived.
Mostly, January remembered, she would ask, "Might we play another piece, Papa? It's still short of the hour."
And old Rene Dubonnet would generally agree. "If it's no trouble for Monsieur Janvier, ma chere. Thank you for indulging her-would you care for some lemon ice as well, when you're done, Monsieur?"
Not an unheard-of offer from a white Frenchman to his daughter's colored music master, but it showed more than the usual politeness. Certainly more politeness than would be forthcoming even from a Frenchman these days.
He realized he didn't know what her name was now. She must be all of twenty-seven. If she hadn't spoken he might not have known her, but of course she had known him. He and the waiters in their white coats and the colored croupiers in the gaming rooms were the only men in the building not masked.
All this went through his mind in a moment, while she was still trying to make up her mind whether to deny that she knew him at all or to deny that she was the child who had played modern music with such eerie ferocity. Before she could come to a decision he gestured her to the empty office of the Salle's master of ceremonies and manager, one Leon Froissart, who would be safely upstairs in the ballroom for some time to come. Had he been in Paris January might have taken her arm, for she was trembling. But though she must be passing herself as an octoroon-and there were octoroons as light as she- as a black man he was not to touch her.
Only white men had the privilege of dancing, of flirting with, of kissing the ladies who came to the Blue Ribbon Balls. The balls were for their benefit. A man who was colored, or black, freeborn or freedman or slave, was simply a part of the building. Had he not lost the habit of keeping his eyes down in sixteen years' residence in Paris, he wouldn't even have looked at her face.
She left a little trail of black cock feathers in her wake as she preceded him into the office. The room was barely larger than a cupboard, illumined only by the rusty flare of streetlights and the glare of passing flambeaux that came in through the fanlight over the shutters; the cacophony of brass bands and shouting in the street came faintly but clearly through the wall.
She said, still trying to bluff it through, "Monsieur Janvier, while I thank you for your assistance, I..."