Free Benjamin January 1 - A Free Man Of Color by Barbara Hambly Page B

scattered across the gorgeous Turkey carpet, thickest just to the left of the low chair. A cluster of work candles stood on the small table immediately to the chair's right, draped with huge, uneven winding-sheets of drippings. They'd been there when he'd come in. She'd been fixing her wings, he remembered, by their light. In France it would have been an oil lamp, but mostly in New Orleans they used candles. The drippings were distorted from repeated draughts—people had been in and out of the parlor all evening, fixing their ruffles or looking for her. Froissart was lucky the table hadn't been kicked over in the struggle. The whole building could have gone up.
    Swansdown wasn't the only thing on the carpet. A peacock eye near the chair told him that Sultana girl in the blue lustring had been here. A dozen calibers of imitation pearls were trodden into the carpet: Marie-Anne had had large ones on her mask and bodice, and the drop-shaped ones he'd seen on the sleeves of the American Henry VIII's Anne Boleyn. Mardi Gras costumes were never made as well as street clothes, and ribbons, glass gems, and silk roses dotted the floor among thread ends of every color of the rainbow. In the padded arm of the velvet chair a needle caught the light like a splinter of glass.
    Drunken laughter floated in from the Rue Ste.-Ann through the single tall window that nearly filled one side of the room. The brass band still played in the street. Shouts of mirth, a woman's shrill squeak of not entirely displeased protest. Men cursed in French, German, slangy riverboat English, and there was a heavy splash as someone fell into the gutter, followed by whoops of drunken laughter.
    January glanced at the window, not daring to break Froissart's self-centered oblivion by walking over to check whether there were marks on the sill. The killer could have stepped out one of the ballroom windows and walked along the gallery, he supposed. But with the heat of the ballroom, other revelers had taken refuge on the gallery, and such an escape would not have gone unseen. Carnival rioted below, thick in these narrow streets of the old French town, drowning the sounds of the ballroom itself. In the growing upriver suburbs, in their tall brick American houses on the new streets along the tracks of the horse-drawn streetcars, Protestants would be shaking their heads about the goings-on. Though perhaps, reflected January, a number of those Protestant wives wondered—or tried not to wonder—where their husbands were tonight.
    Last summer everyone in the ballroom—everyone in the streets—everyone in the city—had been through the horrors of a double epidemic: yellow fever and Asiatic cholera, worse than any that had gone before. They had survived it, mostly by clearing out of town if they could afford to, taking refuge in the lakeside hotels of Mande-ville and Milneburgh or on plantations. Typical of the Creoles, they celebrated the victory rather than mourned the loss. But there was no guarantee that in five months it wouldn't return.
    He remembered Ayasha and crossed himself again. There was no guarantee about anything.
    “They simply do not understand.” Froissart's voice brought him back to the present. The man was now well worked into his theme. January kept an expression of fascinated interest in his face, but barely heard him. It was only a few hundred feet to the Cabildo, and ordinarily a woman—even a beautiful one—was quite safe walking about the streets alone, provided she kept out of certain well-defined districts: the waterfront or the bars along Rue du Levee; the Swamp or the Irish Channel.
    But Carnival was different.
    “Americans have no finesse, no sense of how things are done!” Froissart's gesture to heaven was worthy of Macbeth perishing in the final act.
    “They sure don't, sir.” If he's buying, I'll sell it to him.
    “The Americans, they don't know how to behave! They don't know how to take mistresses. They think it's all a matter of