“Why not?” asked January, curious, though it was a conclusion he’d already arrived at.
Dominique shrugged again. “Because if she had, she’d have taken her jewels, silly! That appalling ruby parure is worth over a thousand dollars! With his debts, he’d never have let her pass up that chance. On the other hand...”
She hesitated, and January finished softly, “On the other hand, Nicholas might have thought himself justified under the circumstances in slipping poison into Marie-Therese’s coffee himself, and kidnapping Zozo, guessing she’d go without a fuss.”
The young woman nodded. “I think that’s what her mama fears.”
“And if she didn’t take her jewels,” he continued, “which are worth a thousand dollars, there’s no telling when Nicholas might decide that once Marie-Zulieka has run off to Mobile with him, she herself is worth fifteen hundred dollars.”
Dominique’s eyes widened. The thought had clearly never crossed her mind. “Oh, no,” she breathed. “No, p’tit, he wouldn’t...”
“Don’t underestimate what a white man would or wouldn’t do when there’s money involved, and a woman not of his own race,” said January quietly. “One more thing, and then we have to get back to the ballroom. Is Nicholas Saverne here tonight?”
Dominique silently shook her head.
“I don’t understand,” said Hannibal, some hours later when next the Théâtre musicians had a break. “Your sister and her friends are free women, aren’t they? If Jules Dutuille is such a blackguard — and I must say in the defense of us devotees of Dionysus that a man needn’t be a drunkard to treat women like cattle — Marie-Zulieka can say no. Her mother might put up a fuss — God knows my aunts did when a cousin of mine refused to marry a chinless viscount who would have paid off my uncle’s gambling debts — yet there’s no way she or anyone can force her compliance.”
January was silent for a few moments, reflecting on the width of the gulf that even after several years’ residence still separated the shabby Irish fiddler from the world of New Orleans. Even Dominique, raised in the free colored demimonde, was separated from the world of her brother and her older sister Olympe, who remembered what it was to be slaves. The narrow brick corridor to which they’d retreated — it led to the kitchen quarters of the Salle d’Orleans — was at least warm. From it, he and Hannibal could look across the rear courtyard to the lighted windows both of the Salle and, beyond, to those of the Théâtre where the well-bred French and Spanish Creole ladies were still pretending their vanished husbands and brothers were “out having a smoke” or “down in the gambling rooms.” Another world.
Another universe.
“Your cousin is white,” he said at last. “And presumably lives in a land where law applies to everyone. Maybe the law isn’t always just, and maybe it’s not enforced equally, but it is recognized to apply. You have to understand that nothing that concerns the free colored here in New Orleans is legally clear, or as it seems to be. Rules change with a few degrees difference in the color of a woman’s skin. They shift from one hour to the next, from one house to the next. It’s all the custom of the country, and nothing that concerns us — slaves, or ex-slaves, or the children or grandchildren of ex-slaves — is official or truly legal or truly illegal.
“Casmalia Rochier and her children are legally free. But since she isn’t legally married to Louis Rochier, he can make things far more difficult for her and her family than your uncle could ever make things for your aunt. It isn’t simply a matter of Uncle Freddy going to the sponging house. Rochier has it in his power to end the education of the boys, possibly to sell Casmalia’s servants — the yardman and the cook. If he’s angry enough to cast Casmalia off, it would be disaster for the family. Free or not, there was no question of the girl not agreeing to become the mistress of anyone her father ordered her to. And no one who matters to him — none of his white relatives or acquaintances — will think or say a thing about it.”
The fiddler opened his mouth to say something — probably along the lines of, Would a man do that to his own children? — and closed it. The lights of the Salle’s kitchen, where the other three musicians joked and laughed with the cook and waiters who served both Salle and Théâtre, reflected in the dark of his eyes. Reflected the recollection, January guessed, of the number of Englishmen and Americans and Irishmen and Frenchmen they’d both known in their lives who were capable of doing exactly those things to even their legitimate families, let alone their mistresses and bastards.
Some white men of January’s acquaintance loved and cared for their “Rampart Street families,” their “alligator eggs,” as tenderly as they did their white wives and white children.
Some didn’t.
The difference was that for the libres, there was neither legal, nor social, recourse.
No wonder women like his mother, and Agnes Pellicot, and Bernadette Métoyer, made damn sure the money was in the bank and in their own names.
In time, Hannibal asked, “Do you think Nicholas Saverne kidnapped this girl?”
January shook his head. “He might have, but I doubt it.”
“Then where is she?”
A clamor of voices from the kitchen broke his thought. Uncle Bichet, who played the bull fiddle, called out, “Gotta get back to the ballroom, boys, ‘fore old Davis has an apoplexy and fires the lot of us.”
January extended a hand down to help Hannibal to his feet. “I think I know; by noon tomorrow I’ll be sure.”
Though Nicholas Saverne wasn’t at either the respectable Théâtre ball that night or the quadroon festivities next-door, Louis Rochier attended both. January observed him on those occasions when he was in the Théâtre with his wife and daughters, a square pink-faced man with an incongruous cupid-bow mouth. Most of the time, however, Rochier spent in the Salle d’Orleans with his mistress Casmalia, with his son and the other men of the New Orleans business community who likewise either had mistresses or simply liked to flirt with lively ladies.
After the whites went home — and French Creoles were notorious for the lateness of their dancing — January and the other musicians drifted down the passageway and sat in with their colleagues in the Salle’s little orchestra until nearly four, when the quadroon ladies and their patrons finally, as they said, “broke the circle” and headed home. Rochier had sent his white family home in the carriage; January saw the tension as the man spoke with Casmalia, and guessed that the banker had demanded where his daughter was, and had been fobbed off with a lie.
It was still pitch-black, and thickly foggy, when January returned home. Dim clamor still drifted from the wharves along the levee, and the gambling rooms of Rue Royale, but as he walked along the Rue Burgundy the stillness was eerie, thick with the molasses reek of burnt sugar from the plantations along the Bayou Road, and the cold-stifled stench of the gutters. At his mother’s house, Bella the cook was already starting the kitchen fires. She sniffed in disdain — like her mistress, Bella had little use for musicians — but gave him a cup of coffee and bread and butter before he went upstairs to his garçonnière to change clothes. She didn’t even come to the glowing kitchen door when he came down again a few minutes later and crossed to the passway beside the house that led back to the street.