Free Dead and Buried by Barbara Hambly

particular customer – when the young clerk himself walked in. Because the French Town and the American sector were very much separate worlds – January knew nearly everyone in the former and tended, like most Creoles, to keep his distance from anything to do with the latter – until last week he had never laid eyes on the undertaker’s half-brother. This morning, when the young white man had grudgingly assisted in the carrying away of palls and plumes so that Patrick Derryhick could be laid out in the chapel, was the first time he had been in a room with him that hadn’t been occupied by half a dozen chattering whores.
    Martin Quennell, almost fifteen years younger than his half-brother, looked much like Beauvais Quennell would have done at that age, had the undertaker been white instead of octoroon: handsome in his way, brown curls carefully pomaded beneath a stylish high-crowned hat, with the same sharp features, the same round chin. He gave no sign of recognizing January, which was just as well and not surprising: at the undertaker’s that morning had been the first time January had not been sitting on a piano-bench in his presence, and few white men looked at black men anyway unless they had to.
    Certainly not with Trinchen’s peach-like little breasts to ogle instead.
    This morning at his half-brother’s, Martin had been dressed as befitted a middle-level clerk at a small private bank: a well-worn cutaway coat that was slightly shiny at the elbows, gray-checked trousers, and a turkey-red waistcoat. Now, entering the parlor with a couple of refulgently wealthy Americans, he had attired himself to match them: one of the new frock coats in a stylish snuff-brown, trousers with a gay scarlet stripe up the side, and no fewer than four silk waistcoats layered one atop the other – two in different shades of green, one scarlet, and one gold.
    January’s first wife, Ayasha, whose death in Paris had precipitated his return to New Orleans four years ago, had been a dressmaker. January mentally priced the new coat, the silk of the waistcoats, the fine gloss of the beaver hat, and came up with a figure that no bank clerk had any business spending on something to put on his back.
    Interesting.
    The men were drunk and arguing politics with the ferocity of the semi-informed. ‘Country needs a strong bank,’ proclaimed their grizzle-haired leader. ‘Too many shanty Irish, thinkin’ they can set up as gentlemen. Too many Krauts, frogs, god-damn Freemasons, drivin’ up the prices of things every way you look. What’s this country comin’ to, Schurtz? I ask you?’
    ‘Confusion to ’em!’ The man addressed raised the bottle of the Countess’s champagne he was holding in his hand in a toast. He was tall and built flat, like a tabletop stood up on end, and had a square face with black hair that gleamed with pomade in the gaslight. Like Grizzle-Hair he wore an expensive coat and a number of gaudy waistcoats, hung across the belly with three watch chains and any number of gold and silver fobs.
    Martin Quennell, who was taking some care, January observed, to keep at this man Schurtz’s side – to the point of turning his face away from Trinchen’s beckoning poitrine – brandished another bottle: ‘Confusion to ‘em all!’
    This made the black-haired Schurtz bray with laughter, and he caught Quennell in a headlock of drunken friendliness and poured his own champagne over the smaller man’s head.
    For one instant, January saw in Quennell’s flinch of horror, and aghast expression as he clutched at his wine-splashed silk vests, that the young man was not, in fact, as drunk as he seemed, and was perfectly well aware that he could not afford the ruin of his new clothing. But Schurtz only tightened his grip when Quennell struggled and broke into a drunken rendition of ‘Little Wat Ye Wha’s A-Comin’ – an anti-Jackson song from a previous election – of which January obligingly took up the tune.
    ‘Got to christen