Free Dead and Buried by Barbara Hambly Page A

our new partner as a good Whig!’ declared Grizzle-Hair, a statement that made January – who would himself have voted Whig had he been considered a citizen in the country of his birth – cringe and wish he were a Democrat.
    ‘Hold still, Baby,’ trumpeted a fourth member of their party, a foxy little red-haired man with a diamond ring on one pinkie. ‘Got to let us christen you, partner! Confusion to Jackson and Van Buren!’
    ‘God damn Freemasons!’ added Grizzle-Hair, picking up another bottle of champagne.
    And Quennell – January was fascinated to note – ceased resisting, whooped, ‘God damn Van Buren! God damn the Freemasons!’ and stretched out his arms, allowing the other three to pour champagne over clothing worth at least a year’s salary.
    Partner? Interesting .
    And more interesting still, while Schurtz and Grizzle-Hair staggered, whooping with laughter, up the stairs with Fanny and Sybilla, both Foxy Red and young Mr Quennell elaborately denied any immediate interest in copulation and settled to smoke, drink, talk politics with the Countess, and keep a watchful eye on the stairs and on each other. Trinchen approached, ran an inviting hand along Quennell’s arm, and was brushed away.
    So it isn’t just a question of staying in the running with his American friends .
    ‘Oh, they’ll come to cutting one another, by and by,’ theorized the Countess, when at last the house cleared out, and January asked her what the hell was going on. ‘The red-haired one – Lloyd he is called, Dominic Lloyd – he courts Schurtz’s sister. So me, I think our Trinchen’s sweetheart has set his sight upon the same goal. She’ll bring money to the wedding bed, Miss Schurtz.’
    The gas-lamps were extinguished, leaving only a prism-bedecked oil burner on the gilt marble table. Elspie the parlormaid and her brother Little J moved about in the shadows, clearing up forgotten glasses and moving the brass spittoons out on to the back porch for cleaning in the morning. Auntie Saba emerged from the back kitchen, a coffee cup full of rum for the Countess, a beer for January, and a couple of glasses of champagne for those girls who hadn’t yet gone up to their rooms to sleep: actual champagne, and not the thinned apple juice and soda water that the unknowing customers paid champagne prices for the girls to drink with them.
    The Countess lit a cigarette off the lamp. ‘They’re trying to show Schurtz how respectfully they’ll treat his little sister. So they can’t be seen, either of them, slavering over one of these popottes .’ She gestured toward Sybilla and La Habañera, who were braiding each other’s hair in the corner.
    ‘He thinks they’re visiting here just for the pleasure of his company?’
    ‘You know blankittes .’ All trace of Italian disappeared from the Countess’s voice, and her full lips looked suddenly very African in the glimmer of the lamp prisms. ‘They know, all right, but they don’t want to be reminded. Like those New Englanders who talk about how much they hate slavery but don’t mind running factories to make “nigger-shoes” to sell down here, which is what makes Schurtz’s family so rich.’
    January turned back to the keys. Though his hands ached and his mind had the stretched, slightly fuzzy distortion of perception that comes at four in the morning, he played a little Creole lullaby his sister Dominique’s nurse had sung to Minou when she was a baby: ‘ By an’ by, by an’ by, gonna lay down easy by an’ by  . . .’
    On his way out, he went around the back of the house and helped Elspie and Auntie Saba carry out and empty the heavy dish pan from the kitchen into the darkness at the far end of the yard, and brought them in water for the morning. It never hurt to make friends, and there was a good chance, now, that any information he could get about Martin Quennell’s finances and behavior wasn’t going to come from Trinchen.
    In the morning – although it was in