"I do not forget myself!" screamed Bouille. "Nor who I am. I am a gentleman! This canaille has insulted me in public, and I will have my satisfaction!"
Granger inclined his head. His accent was a flatboat man's twangy drawl but his French was otherwise good. "When and where you please, sir. Jenkins..."
The Roman soldier stepped forward, putting up anervous hand to steady his laurel wreath as he inclined his head.
"Would you be so good as to act for me?"
"Only think!" wailed Monsieur Froissart. "I beg of you, listen to Monsieur Peralta's so sensible words! Surely this is a matter that can be regulated, that can be talked of in other circumstances."
The city councilman sneered contemptuously and lifted his cane as if fearing his opponent would turn tail; Granger returned the look with a stony stare and spat in the direction of the sandbox. Froissart looked frantically around him for support, and at the same moment January felt a touch on his shoulder. It was Romulus Valle, the ballroom's majordomo.
"Maybe you best get another set started, Ben?" The elderly freedman gestured at the eager faces crowding to see more of the drama. "Give these good people something else to think about?"
January nodded. If there was one thing that could distract Creoles from the prospect of a duel, it was a dance. Jacques and Uncle Bichet took their places; though Hannibal's hands shook a little as he picked up fiddle and bow, there was nothing unsteady about the way he sliced into the most popular jig and reel in their repertoire. Sets were forming even as Froissart and the senior Monsieur Peralta shepherded the combatants out into the lobby and presumably down to the office.
And let's hope, thought January dourly, that our bonny Galen and la belle dame sans merci didn't decide the office was a more private venue for their tete-a-tete than the parlor. That would be all it needs, for Galen's father to find the pair of them coupling like weasels on the desk.
Cross passes. Footing steps. Casting off and casting back, and swooping into the grand promenade.
"I'm going to strangle that woman!" Dominique had changed into her costume for the tableaux, and, as Guenevere, had dispensed with the corsets and petticoats of modern dress, unlike at least four of the assorted Rebeccas and Juliets circulating in the crowd. Without them she looked startlingly sensual, thin and fragile and very reminiscent of the girls of January's young manhood in their high-waisted, clinging gowns. He had never adjusted to the sight of women in the enormous petticoats and mountainous sleeves of modern dress.
"Not only does she disappear without helping Marie-Anne and Marie-Rose-and after making them wear those frightful dresses in the first place, and Agnes is ready to spit blood!-but because I'm hunting high and low for her I miss the only real excitement of the evening!"
"She'll be in the parlor," pointed out January mildly. "She still has to fix her wings."
"Ben, I looked in the parlor. It was the first place I looked. And in the supper room. And it would have served that... that uppity tart right if he'd torn those wings right off her back." Minou adjusted the fall of one floor-length sleeve of buttercup yellow and straightened the dark curls of her chignon. "Did you hear what she told her mama about price and terms to take back to Peralta Pere? If I ever saw such a..."
"I've looked everywhere." Marie-Anne Pellicot, her long oval face visibly beautiful despite a domino mask of exactly the wrong shade of gray-green for her pale creme-cafe complexion, hurried up, vexation replacing her earlier tears. "It's nearly eleven! She promised to dress our hair..."
Her sister was right behind her. January heard Ayasha's voice in his mind: A designer who knows what she's doing can guide beauty to a woman's form or make that selfiame woman ugly, just in the way she cuts a sleeve. He knew what his wife would have guessed-and said- about Angelique, just from looking at those two dresses, on those two particular girls.
For all her tartness, Ayasha had been a kind woman. She'd never have let Angelique anywhere near those poor children's hair.
"If the parlor is the first place you looked, look again," advised January. The music had soothed away his anger, and he was able to look dispassionately at Angelique and at the situation, only wondering what he was going to say to Mme. Trepagier to keep her from undertaking some other mad attempt to see the woman. He hadn't liked the hard desperation in her eyes as she had said, "I must see her. I MUST." She and Galen may have gone somewhere else for their quarrel, but if she's going to repair those wings she'll have to go back where there's light."
"Galen?" Marie-Anne looked surprised. "Galen left after what she said to him in the lobby. "Which was
horrible, I thought-he can't help it if he stammers."
"Galen." January sighed. "He came back."
"Tiens!" Dominique flung up her hands. "Just what we need! That... that..."
"Wasn't that you who slammed the door?" asked Marie-Rose, trying vainly to tug the lower edge of her bodice into a more flattering position on her hip.
"Have you checked the attics?" Hannibal swiped rosin onto his bow with an expert lightness of touch. "Those back stairs go up as well as down."
"I swear I'm going to... Ah! There's Henri." The annoyance melted from Minou's face, replaced by a mischievous brightness at the sight of her elephantine beau emerging awkwardly through the curtain of the passageway to the Th6atre. She stroked a tendril of her hair into the slightest hint of seductive dishabille. "I must go, p'tit. It's one thing to let your protector see you in all your glory in a tableau, but it does mean he's wandering about the ballroom unattended while you're getting yourself ready." She flitted away like a primrose-and-black Gothic butterfly, leaving Marie-Anne and Marie-Rose to their own devices.
"Clemence might know," said Marie-Anne, not in the least disconcerted by the abrupt departure. As January had said to Mme. Trepagier, they all knew the rules. "Is she still here? I thought she went after Galen." Hannibal poked January in the back with the bow, and mimed fingering a keyboard. "She'll have to comb her hair when she's done, anyway," the violinist pointed out practically. "They can catch up with her then." And he led the way into the opening bars of a waltz.
In the blaze of gaslight and candle glow, January's eyes followed his sister and her protector around the double circle of the waltzers, annoyed in a tired way-as Angelique annoyed him now-at the thought of how she literally dropped everything to dance attendance on this man whose mother, sisters, female cousins, and quite possibly fiancee were standing stiff-backed in a corner of the Theatre d'Orleans, chatting with other deserted ladies and pretending they had no idea where their errant menfolk had got to just now.
Marie-Anne and Marie-Rose deserved better.
Minou deserved better.
Didn't they all?
The ballroom was full, this waltz among the most popular of the repertoire. There were more men than women present now, watching the dancers, talking, flirting a little with the unmarried girls under their mamas' wary eyes. The costumes made a fiery rainbow, bright and strange, in the brilliant light, like the enchanted armies of a dream. He could identify groups from the tableaux vivants, theme and design repeated over and over, nymphs and coquettes of the ancien regime. Dreams for the men who owned these women, or sought to own them; a chance to see their mistresses in fantasy glory. You don't love a sang mele whose mother bargained with you for her services. You love Guenevere in her bower, you love the Fairy Queen on Midsummer's Eve. For the young girls, the girls who were here to show off their beauty to prospective protectors, the occasion was more important still.