No wonder Agnes Pellicot's face was stone when she hurried through the ballroom and then out again. No wonder there was poison in her eyes as she watched Euphrasie Dreuze trip by, an overdressed, overjeweled pink dove. Where January sat at the pianoforte he could look out through the triple doors of the ballroom to the lobby and see men and women-clothed in dreams and harried by the weight of their nondream lives-as they came and went.
Angelique's mother caught Peralta Pere as the elderly planter reentered the ballroom, asked him something anxiously. The old man's white brows pulled together and his face grew grim. Telling him about the quarrel, guessed January, and asking if he's seen either Galen or Angelique. The old planter turned and left abruptly, pausing in the wide doorway to bow to a group of chattering young girls who entered, clothed for a tableau as the Ladies of the Harim.
January returned his attention to the keys. That was one dream he preferred not to regard too near.
There were about six of them, mostly young girls- he didn't know their names. Minou had told him, of course, but even after three months back he was still unfamiliar with the teeming cast of the colored demimonde. Though he had never in his life seen Ayasha in anything but sensible calicos or the simple, ivory-colored tarlatan that had been her one good dress-the dress in which they had buried her last August-still the sight of the Arabian ladies tore at the unhealed flesh of his heart. From the waltz they slid into another Lancers, almost without break. Dimly, the sounds of quarreling could be heard when the curtain to the passageway was raised. The night was late enough for just about everybody to be drunk, both on that side of the passageway and this. Still he didn't look up, seeking such nepenthe as the music had to offer.
Maybe it was because Ayasha had laughed at the latest fad for things Arabic. "They think it's so glamorous, the life of the harim," she had said, that lean, hooknosed face profiled in the splendor of the cool Paris sun that poured through the windows of their parlor in the Rue de 1'Aube. Beadwork glittered in her brown hands.
"To do nothing except make yourself beautiful for a man... like your little placees. As if each of them assumes that she's the favorite of the harim, and not some lowly odalisque who spends most of her day polishing other women's toenails or washing other women's sheets. And the harim is of course always that of a wealthy man, who can afford sorbets and oils and silken trousers instead of cheap hand-me-downs that have to last you three years."
She shook her head, a Moroccan desert witch incompletely disguised as a French bonne femme. The huge black eyes laughed in a face that shouldn't have been beautiful but was. "Like dreaming about living in one of these castles up here, without having seen a castle, which look horribly uncomfortable to me. And of course, the dreamer is always the queen."
Ayasha had left Algiers at the age of fourteen with a French soldier rather than go into the harim her father had chosen for her. When January met her, even at eighteen she had risen from seamstress to designer with a very small-but spotlessly clean-shop of her own, and had little time for the romantic legends of the East.
But the sight of a woman with henna in her hair, the smell of sesame oil and honey, could still shake him to his bones.
He could not believe that he would never see her again.
When he looked up at the conclusion of the Lancers, the sword master Augustus Mayerling stood beside the piano.
"Monsieur Janvier?" He inclined his head, neat pale features overweighted by a hawk-beak nose and marred from hairline to jawbone with saber scars. His eyes were a curious light hazel, like a wolf's. "I am given to understand that you've practiced as a physician."
"I'm a surgeon, actually," said January. "I trained at the Hotel Dieu in Paris. After that I practiced there for three years."
"Even better." The Prussian's fair hair was cropped like a soldier's; it made his head seem small and birdlike above the flare of his Elizabethan ruff. Like Hannibal, he spoke with barely an accent, though January guessed it came from good teaching rather than length of time spent in the United States.
"Bone and blood is a constant. I would prefer a man who understands them, rather than one who spent six years at university learning to argue about whether purges raise or lower the humors of the human constitution and how much mercury and red pepper will clarify a man's hypothetical bile. That imbecile Bouille's challenged Granger to a duel," he added, evidently not considering a Paris-trained surgeon's current position at the piano of a New Orleans ballroom a subject of either surprise or comment. "Children, both of them."
The lines at the corners of his eyes marked Mayerling as older than he looked, but he was still probably younger than either his student or the man that student had challenged. January didn't say anything, but the lines deepened just slightly, ironically amused. "Well-paying children," admitted Mayerling, to January's unspoken remark. "Nevertheless. Bouille's wife is the sister to two of the physicians in town-physicians who actually studied medicine somewhere other than in their uncles' back offices, you understand-and the third has money invested in Monsieur Granger's prospective LaFayette and Pontchartrain railway company. The others who have been recommended to me seem overfond of bleeding... I trust that your remedy for a bullet in the lung does not involve a cupping glass? It is to my professional interest, you understand, to know things like this."
Considering how nearly every young Creole gentleman bristled and circled and named his friends at the most trivial of slights, it wasn't surprising that Mayerling, Verret, Crocquere, and the other fencing teachers would be on intimate terms with every medical man for fifty miles.
January shuddered. He knew several who would resort to just that, accompanied by massive purges and a heavy dose of calomel-salts of mercury-for good measure.
"You think they'll accept a physician of color?"
The sword master appeared genuinely surprised. "It is of no concern to me what they accept. Jean Bouille is my student. The American shall accept your ministrations or die of his wounds. Which, it is of little interest to me. May I count upon you, sir?"
January inclined his head, hiding his amusement at the extent of the Prussian's imperial arrogance. "You may, sir."
Mayerling produced his card, which January pocketed, and accepted one of January's in return. Mayerling's said simply, Augustus Mayerling. Sword Master. January's was inscribed, Benjamin Janvier. Lessons in Piano, Clavichord, Harp, and Guitar. Underneath the lines were repeated in French.
"I can't find her anywhere," wailed Marie-Rose at twenty minutes until midnight, coming up while Minou was flirting with Hannibal across the palmettos that screened the dais on both sides. Henri had returned to the respectable purlieus of the establishment with promises to be back in time for the tableaux; even the senior M. Peralta, pillar of rectitude that he was and assiduous in his attentions to Euphrasie Dreuze, had been back and forth several times.
By the way the old man was watching the lobby outside the ballroom, January guessed he had no idea where his son was. The boy was only seventeen. If he'd sent him home or banished him to the Theatre he wouldn't be watching like that.
And Euphrasie Dreuze, quite clearly aghast at the possibility that her daughter might have whistled at least
some percentage of the Peralta fortune down the wind, was like a pheasant in a cage, flitting in and out from ballroom to lobby in a fluffy scurry of satin and jewels. January dimly recalled his mother telling him that Etienne Crozat, owner of the Banque Independent and stockholder in half a dozen others, had paid Euphrasie Dreuze off handsomely upon his marriage. Her concern might, of course, stem entirely from care for her daughter's welfare, but the woman's reputed fondness for the faro tables and deep basset were probably the actual cause of the increasingly frenzied look in her eye.