Madeleine screamed, pure terror in her voice. She wrenched herself free with a violence that knocked away the chair by which she stood and ripped her assailant's face with the clawed fingers of both hands. Hannibal recoiled with a gasp of shock, almost falling back through the doorway. January caught at the terrified woman but she tore herself from him and staggered a step or two into the middle of the room, sobbing and shaking. The next instant Dominique came flying through the dining room door and caught her in her arms.
"It's all right! It's all right! Darling, it's all right, he's a friend of mine-a very impudent friend."
Hannibal stood, violin case forgotten on the floor beside him, clinging to the doorjamb with one hand while the other felt his bleeding face. His eyes were those of a dog who has come up expecting a pat and received instead a forceful kick in the teeth. "I'm sorry," he said. "Madame, I'm so sorry, I didn't-" He looked pleadingly from Dominique to January, aghast and helpless. "I thought it was Minou. I swear I thought it was Minou."
"Oh, and that's how you treat me, is it?" retorted Minou, furious at the result rather than the deed, but furious nonetheless. Held tight in her arms, Madeleine was still racked with long waves of shaking, head bowed over, as if she were about to be sick. If she was faking, thought January, he had never seen it so well done.
And somehow, he did not think her horror at a man's touch was a fake.
"It's all right." He put a hand on Hannibal's shoulder. "I'll explain outside. Minou, would you go out to Les Saules with Madame Trepagier? I don't think she should be alone."
"Oh, of course! I've already told Therese to tell Henri-zthat slug ever puts in an appearance-that I've been called away by an emergency, and to give him tisane and flan and everything he might need. Now you get out of here, you bad man." But she touched Hannibal's forearm to reassure him, as January herded him out the long doors and onto the banquette once more.
Glancing back, January saw his sister help Madame Trepagier into a chair, still trembling violently; heard
Madame Trepagier whisper "Thank you... Thank you.
"Augustus Mayerling, hm?" said Hannibal, when January had finished his narration. Even along a relative backstreet like Rue Burgundy, oil lamps still burned on their curved brackets from the stucco walls of the houses, their light gleaming in the gutters and the wet pavements beyond. Beneath the outthrust galleries of the town houses and shops and the abat-vents of the line of cottages, they were almost completely protected from the increasing rain.
In every house, past the iron-lace balconies and behind spidery lattices of wooden louvers, warm light shone, working a kind of magic in the night. Somewhere someone was playing a banjo-stricdy against the rules of Lent-elsewhere voices sounded from the two sides of a corner grog-shop, shutters opened all the length of the room onto the street, where free blacks and river-trash played cards, cursed, laughed.
"I hate to think it was him," January finished after a time, "because I like the boy. But of everyone in the Orleans ballroom that night, it sounds to me like Mayerling had the best reason for wanting Angelique dead. And Madame Trepagier knows it. And much as I like him, and much as I don't blame him for doing it, it's him or me... and I want to look around his rooms for that necklace."
"And if you don't find it, then what?" asked Hannibal. His voice was a faint, raw rasp, and he coughed as they crossed the planks at the corner of Rue Conti. "It could have been anyone in the ballroom, you know."
"Then why protect him? Why beg me not to so much as speak his name to the police? Why risk her own neck, if all that would happen to him was a night or two in jail until he was cleared? Other women have lovers. It isn't spoken of, but everyone in town knows who they are. It isn't as if she were deceiving a husband, and the plantation is hers to dispose of as she will, no matter what her family says. She doesn't have to say they were together in the ballroom. She can say they met elsewhere, if she's going to lie about it. But she doesn't. Why would she deny his involvement in anything so completely, if what he did doesn't bear scrutiny? It's not what he did," said Hannibal quietly. "It's what he is."
January looked at him blankly. For a moment he thought, With that complexion he can't POSSIBLY be an octoroon trying to pass.
Hannibal hesitated a moment, then said, "Augustus Mayerling is a woman."
"What?" It stopped January dead on the banquette.
"Augustus Mayerling is a woman. I don't know what his-her-real name is." Hannibal started walking again, with that kind of loose-jointed scarecrow grace, his dark eyes turned inward on the recollection.
"But it isn't that unusual, you know. There was that woman who served for years as a man in the Russian cavalry recently. Women fought at Trafalgar and Waterloo disguised as men. I've talked to men who knew them. I found out about Augustus-well, I guessed-almost by accident. About two years ago he picked me up outside a saloon in Gallatin Street where I'd been playing for dimes. Of course they robbed me the minute I was out the door, and he took me back to his place, since I was almost unconscious. I was feverish all night, and he cared for me, and I-it was probably the fever-I could tell the difference. I kissed his hand-her hand-we just looked at each other for a minute. I knew."
Of all people, thought January, Hannibal would know.
The fiddler shrugged. "Later we talked about it. I think he was glad to have someone else who knew. I've covered for him now and then, though he seems to have worked out long ago all the little dodges, all the ways of getting around questions, things like keeping shaving tackle in his rooms and staying out of certain situations. But, that wouldn't be possible, for even a day or two, in jail. God knows he's far from the first person to manage it. You're the only one I've told. Don't..."
"No. Of course not." January walked along, feeling a little stunned.
Fighting is either for joy, or for death...
He could still see the Prussian's cold yellow eyes as he said that, bright as they spoke about the passion of his art. And he'd seen Mayerling fight, in the long upper room that was his salle des armes on Exchange Alley: whalebone and steel and terrifyingly fast. He'd heard about the men he had killed.
Suddenly he remembered Madeleine Trepagier as a child, attacking the Beethoven sonatas like a sculptor carving great chunks of marble in quest of the statues hidden within, drunk with the greedy strength of one lusting to unite with the heart of an art.
Hers was music, like his own. Her lover's was steel.
But the passion was the same. Of course they would find it in each other.
"I understand," he said softly. "In a way it could be no one else."
"No," said Hannibal. His dark eyes clouded. "Too many women who have been... injured like that... don't find anyone."
But that was not what January had meant.
They walked in silence, January remembering the occasional couple in Paris-usually prostitutes who came from five or ten or twenty men a day back to the arms of their lady friends. But there had been one pair of middle-aged and smilingly contented daughters of returned aristo emigres who ran a hat shop in the Bois de Boulogne and made fortunes off their bits of flowers and lace.
But none of that, he thought, meant that Augustus Mayerling hadn't been the one to wind that scarf around Angelique's neck.
"I still want to have a look around his rooms," said January after a time. "In any case he'll want to hear what happened tonight."
He cannot pass himself off as a gentleman, Jean Bouille had said of the American Granger, little realizing that the spidery-thin sword master who had taught him was doing exactly that.