Free Ran Away by Barbara Hambly

nobility who had returned to France in the wake of the Kings. He hid his smile as he watched the Comtesse – daughter in tow – bestow her convent-bred charm upon the assortment of bankers, financiers, and government contractors that the Old Duc so resolutely ignored. One could almost hear her saying: Ah, M’sieu Savart, and how is your so-distinguished son . . . ?
    ‘Even the ones without sons, she smiles upon,’ whispered Jeannot to January between minuets, and he shook the moisture from his flute. ‘They know people who have sons.’
    ‘In New Orleans,’ replied January thoughtfully, ‘when I would play at the Blue Ribbon balls for the demi-mondaines to meet their white protectors, the older ladies would bring their young daughters, to introduce in just the same way. Although mind you,’ he added, ‘the young ladies were far better dressed than Mademoiselle de Villeneuf—’
    ‘Hssh!’ Old Lucien poked him in the back with his fiddle bow. ‘D’you want the Duc to throw you out? Then what would we do for a piano?’
    The resemblance to New Orleans balls didn’t end there, January reflected as the little orchestra glided into the first exquisite bars of a Mozart contredanse. When the fed-up populace of Paris had started murdering aristocrats in the streets – or, more usually, murdering in the streets the hapless soldiers that the aristocrats had hired to protect themselves – large numbers of those aristocrats had fled to the great French sugar-island of St-Domingue, where many of them had family. Others fled to New Orleans, still a very French town though it had been ruled by the Spanish for a generation at that point. When the fed-up slaves of St-Domingue had started murdering whites – to the horror of the French originators of liberté, egalité , etc. – the aristocrats and every other white on the island had quickly decamped to New Orleans as well. There they had encountered a great many French who were all in favor of the Revolution, about whose opinions they could do nothing – the country being under the control of the Spanish – except write scathing diatribes against them in New Orleans’ several newspapers and be as rude as possible to them at social events.
    Thus, any ball in New Orleans had an air about it of a badly-made béchamel sauce, its elements separating to opposite ends of the ballroom: Republicans not speaking to Royalists, Napoléonistes snubbing Republicans, and nobody speaking to the Americans, who showed up in greater and greater numbers, with money falling out of their pockets  . . . 
    Here in France, the old nobility resolutely snubbed the Ducs and Marquises created by Bonaparte in his years of imperial rule, the Ultras refused to speak to the Liberal Royalists, the Liberal Royalists (not to be confused with the actual Liberals, whom no one invited anywhere) turned their backs on the Doctrinaires. Nobody invited the Constitutionnels anywhere either – the rich, educated middle-class and professionals.
    Unless, of course, they had marriageable sons.
    ‘My dear Benjamin  . . .’
    At the conclusion of the minuet, Daniel ben-Gideon appeared on the other side of the banked foliage.
    ‘You’re in luck.’ He nodded toward the elderly gentleman at the center of a group of Liberal Royalists: tasteful in dark grays in contrast to the ancient nobility, many of whom wore the brilliant uniforms of the Army. ‘Jacob L’Ecolier has numerous family connections in Cairo and in Constantinople – where the family name is Talebe; Heaven only knows what it is in Egypt. They import wheat and finance slave-vessels to Brazil. And that –’ he gestured with a kid-gloved hand in the direction of a stout, hook-nosed man in conversation with the Napoleonic Baron DesMarines – ‘is Abraham Rothenberg, first-cousin to the primary banker of the Khedive of Egypt and related to half the Israelites in Alexandria.’
    Ben-Gideon himself, perfumed and pomaded and resplendent in a