When the Roman, Jenkins, returned from negotiations downstairs, he, too, loitered around the lobby with an air of searching for someone, but at the moment January couldn't see him.
"It's just like her," sighed Minou, as Marie-Anne, Marie-Rose, and one of the Ladies of the Harim-shedding an occasional peacock eye in her wake-scampered off after the next waltz to make another canvass of the courtyard. "I asked Romulus to check the gambling rooms, but even Angelique wouldn't have gone down there. Maybe vanishing like this is part of her plan."
"No woman wears a getup like that and disappears before the tableaux vivants," Hannibal pointed out. He turned away to cough, pressing a hand briefly to his side to still it, and the candlelight glistened on the film of sweat that rimmed the long fjords of his retreating hairline.
"No," retorted Minou. "But if she's not back in another few minutes Agnes is going to have to fix her daughters' hair, and everybody knows Agnes is just dreadful at that sort of thing. And now we can't find Clemence either. If Henri comes back and so much as speaks to another woman, have a waiter slip some mysterious potion to him to render him unconscious, would you, p'tit?"
"You'll need a sledge to get him home."
"I'm sure Monsieur Froissart will oblige. Why does everything have to go wrong at these affairs?" She fluttered away again, sleeves billowing like white and gold sails.
"I don't know why she'd take an hour and a half at it," said Hannibal, plucking at the strings again, and turning a key. "Any of the girls down in the Swamp- the Glutton or Railspike or Fat Mary-can have you begging for mercy inside five minutes. Seven, if you're dead to start with." He coughed again.
"Maybe that's the reason they're working the Swamp instead of having some banker buy them a house on Rue des Ursulines?"
"Surely you jest, sir." The fiddler grinned, and drained the last of his second bottle of champagne. "Though I'd trade a week's worth of opium to see what the Glutton would wear to one of these balls."
"What I'd trade for," remarked January, beginning to sort through his music and his notes for which tableau would be first, "is to know where they could have gone for an hour and a half. The building's filled. If Peralta Pere and Phrasie Dreuze are that puzzled, it's got to mean they've asked in the courtyard and the gambling rooms whether anyone saw the two of them leave." He reached up and took the empty bottle from Hannibal's unsteady grasp.
"Easy," said Hannibal. "They could have gone through the passageway to the Theatre. Those boxes above the stage are curtained. Angelique's white enough to pass. It's not easy to tup a woman in a gown like that -twelve petticoats at the least, not to speak of the wings -in a box, but it can be done, if you don't mind leg cramps."
"Peralta would know that," pointed out January.
"And there's lot o' competition for them boxes," added Uncle Bichet, who had been following the entire
intrigue with interest.
Minou strode over to them from the direction of the lobby doors, Agnes Pellicot at her heels, like a pair of infuriated daffodils. January saw both of them look automatically in the direction of Euphrasie Dreuze, seated in the triple bank of spindly gilt chaperones' chairs with two of her cronies, fanning herself with what looked like an acre of ostrich plumes and watching the archways into the lobby with a wild and distracted eye.
"I have done what I can," announced Agnes, her protuberant brown eyes flashing grimly. "Whore and bitch she might be, but she can fix hair. How such a woman could have been so..." She gave up with a gesture. "This is the big chance for Marie-Anne and Marie-Rose to be seen, to be admired at their best. If that conceited light-skirt doesn't turn up..."
"I'll move her tableau to last." January shifted the Rossini aria he'd arranged as Angelique's music in behind the Mozart dances that would usher in the Harim.
"Don't you dare!" cried a masked woman in a red-and-gold hashish dream of a Sultana costume. Her fantasia of dyed ostrich plumes tossed like storm clouds as she shook her head and shed a faint snowfall of shreds, "We're on last. It serves her right if she misses her place."
"Rachelle, of course if she shows up after you go on, we'll put her on last," said Minou coaxingly. "Think how unfair it would be to punish Emilie and Clemence and the two Maries. And where is Clemence?"
"I think she left when Galen did," put in Marie-Rose. "Iphegenie's aunt saw someone wearing that gray-green dress in the courtyard."
"Tell you what," said January, as the Sultana Rachelle's bronze mouth puckered dangerously. "We'll do that mazurka as an extra, to give everybody a little more time. Minou, you checked back on the parlor lately? She's got to go back there one time or another if she's going to fix those wings of hers. It's the only place where she'd have room to work."
"Hussy," whispered Agnes Pellicot, her face like a hurricane sky. "Bandeuse! Coming to the ball like this, two months or less after Arnaud Trepagier is in his tomb, to see what else she can catch! If she'd had any decency she would have left the tableau, turned her position in it over to someone else! She can't be needing money. After all he gave her, the jewels he lavished on her, slaves, a house fit for royalty, horses and a carriage, even! You saw those pearls and emeralds she had about her neck! He'd ride in from his plantation every night to be with her, even took her to the opera... fie!"
She stormed out into the lobby again in wrath.
"Dare one infer," murmured Hannibal, turning over a page of the mazurka, "that Mama had some plans for Peralta Fils and the fair Marie-Rose?"
"Sounds like it," agreed January philosophically. "Shall we?"
The brisk dance was entering its third variation when Minou reappeared in the hall, her face ashy in the dark frame of her hair. January, glancing up from the piano, saw the flutter of her sleeves with the shaky wave of her hands, the way the jeweled pomander chain at her waist vibrated with the trembling of her knees. With a quick gesture he signaled Hannibal to carry the figure as a solo -hoping his colleague wasn't going to engage in any adventures with the tempo, as he sometimes did at this stage of an evening-and leaned from the piano's seat.
"What is it?"
"I..." Minou swallowed hard. "You'd better come."
"What happened?" He hadn't known his sister long, but he knew that under the empty-headed frivolity lay considerable strength of mind. It was the first time he'd ever seen her unnerved.
"In the parlor," she said. "Ben, I think she's dead."
FOUR
From the time he was fourteen years old, January had wanted to study medicine.
St.Denis Janvier had sent him to one of the very fine schools available to the children of the colored bourgeoisie-where he had been looked upon askance, as he had in his music lessons, for his gangly size and African blackness far more than for his mother's plafage-which boasted a science master who had trained in Montpellier before returning to his native New Orleans to teach.
Monsieur Gomez had been a believer in empiricism rather than in theory and had trained him as a surgeon rather than a physician. For this direction January was infinitely and forever grateful, despite his mother's sneer and frown: "A surgeon, p'tit? A puller of teeth, when you could have an office and a practice of wealthy men?"
But his reading of the medical journals, the endless quibblings about bodily humors and the merits of heroic medicine-his experience with the men who prescribed bleeding for every ill and didn't consider a patient sufficiently treated until he'd been dosed with salts of mercury until his gums bled-convinced him early on that he could never have adopted a livelihood based so firmly on ignorance, half truths, and arrogant lies.