“She’s passing herself off as a Spaniard, then?” inquired Hannibal, when January met him later in the day, at one of the coffee stands at the downstream end of the market. From the rickety table where they sat between the market’s square brick pillars, January could see the wharves, piled with cargo and milling with stevedores, sailors, and whores. Down at this end of the market where the river turned around Algiers Point, they were crowded with ocean-going ships: the Constellation and the Tribune, the Waccamaw and the Martha, bound for Baltimore, Vera Cruz, Liverpool, New York.
Paris, thought January, feeling the stabbing pinch of regret. As if he’d inadvertantly put weight on an unhealed break in his leg, he drew back from the thought that he one day might return to the city where he had truly been free.
He lived in New Orleans now, despite all things, because it was the home of the only family he had. But he remembered what it had been like, to know that one’s family wasn’t enough.
“I thought she would be,” he continued. “I knew from what Casmalia said — and from the color of her dresses and her jewels — that Marie-Zulieka was fair enough to pass. And she’d clearly planned her escape. The only reason she would have worn evening jewels to the market was because she planned to sell them and flee.”
“The rubies were worth more,” pointed out the fiddler.
“If she was the kind of girl who’d take jewels from one suitor to hand to another, she might have.” January picked apart the little screw of newspaper the coffee woman had sold him for a penny, fished forth a broken lump of strong-tasting muscovado sugar. “She could have stuffed them into her marketing basket, along with the worming medicine that she used to poison Marie-Therese.”
Behind and around them, market women, porters, slaves with shopping baskets came and went among the stalls with their bright heaps of vegetables, their silver cascades of fish; a thousand elbows and basket rims brushed his shoulders from behind, like the leaves of a gently moving tree. “But their disappearance would announce her intentions more quickly. It’s just possible that Nicholas Saverne would know the voodoos in town, and where to find poison like that to slip into Marie-Therese’s coffee; if he was disguised he could probably have done it undetected. But if Zozo didn’t expect to disappear, why would she have worn any jewels? No,” he said softly. “She planned it herself. And she wanted no fortune to hand to an indebted lover; nothing that came from her family, or the protector she was leaving behind. That much was clear. She took only what her grandmother had given her — and her gris-gris. Even if she were fleeing New Orleans, taking another life and another name, she would not leave that behind.”
“Is that what she did? What she’s doing?”
January nodded. Behind Hannibal’s shoulder, he caught a brief glimpse of a thin, stooped, scholarly old man in a rusty black coat, leading a young woman along the wharves toward the gangplank of the Mary, bound for Boston, according to the chalked board outside the shipping office. A lovely eighteen-year-old with dark curls escaping from beneath her bonnet, and the gray eyes that told nothing of her heritage.
I will not be what my mother was, he heard her voice again in his mind, the words she had spoken to him that morning in old m’sieu Vouziers’s little house. I will not take a kind protector, only to save me from an unkind one. It is the world that I must flee, and not only one man.
The crowd closed around them and they were gone.
“I knew she spoke Spanish from the copy of Don Quixote I saw in her room — well, half the people in New Orleans do. And since the only family she has are under the thumb of her father, I guessed she’d go to her tutor, for advice at least. If old m’sieu Vouziers trusted her enough to lend her books that he’d owned for years — books he’d brought with him from Paris — that argued a bond beyond what her family would comprehend or even be aware of. I’ll have to get the books back from her mother, by the way, and return them to the old man. I’ll do that sometime after I slip this under the door, early tomorrow morning.”
He held up the note she’d given him. A single pale spot on one edge of the wafer marked where her tear had fallen as she’d sealed it up.
Hannibal coughed, the racking wheeze of a consumptive that shook his whole thin frame. “You’ll have to be quick about it, before she sells them.” He fished in his pocket for his laudanum bottle as January tucked the note back into his jacket. “She won’t have an easy time, you know.”
“She knows that. It’s infinitely harder for a woman to leave a man not for another man but for herself,” he went on softly. “And harder for a woman of color than for a white woman; a woman of color moreover whose family can conceive of no other position for a woman, if she’s fair-skinned and pretty, than the plaçee of a white. Not only her family, but her friends — literally every other person she knows.”
“I suppose King Solomon’s family thought him insane when he chose wisdom over riches — not that, as King of Israel, Solomon was ever in a position of having to wonder whether he’d eat on any given day. At least in Boston she’ll be allowed to hold a position in a girls’ school somewhere. Louis Rochier won’t really cast the whole family off because Zozo put a spoke in his wheel with his business partner, will he?”
“I hope not. I don’t think so, since she’s disappearing from town. She meant to literally disappear, you know, without a trace, for that very reason. I convinced her to write to her mother, at least. Casmalia can let Rochier know, or not.”
“Care to take a small wager on what she’ll decide to do?”
January sniffed with bitter laughter. “Not a chance.”
“I didn’t think you would.” Hannibal poured another dollop of laudanum into his coffee, raised the cup in a toast. “To Marie-Zulieka, then — or whatever name she’ll take in her new life. Macte nova virtute, puella, sic itur ad astra, as Virgil said. Blessings on your youngcourage; that’s the way to the stars. Though we had best pray she succeeds. I doubt Casmalia will welcome her, if she ever comes back.”
“No.” January watched, above the milling crowd on the wharves, as the Mary’s white sails half unfurled, and the current took the ship from the dock. A dark small form still stood at the rail, watching the water widen between herself and all the world as she had known it. “No, she won’t be back.”
Copyright © 2006 Barbara Hambly
When Hurricane Katrina swept through New Orleans she devastated not only a place belonging to the real landscape of America, but a resource for the creative imagination. For what city presented to the mind more possibilities for romance, drama, mystery, and intrigue than the Big Easy before Katrina?
Will the New Orleans that emerges after Katrina be as inspiring to musicians, artists, and writers as NOLA before the storm? Much will depend on how many of its people return to reconstitute the mix of cultures that gave rise to New Orleans’ verve.
The fiction in this issue, devoted entirely to NOLA, is a tribute to its unique weave of traditions and ethnicities. We’ve chosen chronological order for the 11 stories, which portray the city in various phases of its history — from before the Civil War to the early and middle 20th century, and finally to the days just before and after Katrina. It is our hope that the inspiration the writers found in their material will communicate itself to readers as a desire to participate in New Orleans’ rebuilding.