Free Days of the Dead by Barbara Hambly Page B

introductions as the de Bujerios ascended the stairs, he heard Ylario say to Hannibal: “Do not think that you can hide behind your patron forever, Señor. Justice will not be cheated. And you will hang.”
             
    Under the circumstances, one could scarcely expect dinner to be a scintillant meal, and it was not. Santa Anna, the Napoleon of the West as he modestly referred to himself a number of times, monopolized the conversation with an air of gracious condescension, speaking of his own exploits and glories—and of his upcoming march to slaughter the
Norteamericano
bandits disrupting the peace of Cohuila-Texas—and making sure nobody listened to anything else. The General’s young officers were clearly torn between being a reverent audience and flirting with Don Prospero’s angel-faced daughter Valentina, who did her best to distract them. She was, January guessed, sixteen, her fair hair and blue eyes attesting to pure Spanish blood. Clothed in black, with a pair of sapphire girandole earrings sparkling in the candle-light, she was seated next to the elegant Don Rafael, who graciously explained to her—and to the young officer on her other side—exactly why it was important for Mexico that the American colonists be evicted from Texas, and how much he had paid his tailor for his suit.
    “The girl will have horns on him before the dishes from their wedding-breakfast are washed,” muttered Consuela at January’s elbow. “She was flirting with the priest at her First Communion, that one.”
    In New Orleans—where he had for years earned his living playing the piano at subscription dances and private balls among the Americans, the French, and the free colored—one of January’s favorite pastimes had always been watching people.
I don’t see why white folks’ business is any affair of yours,
his mother would sniff—not that his mother wasn’t one of the best-informed gossips in Orleans Parish. But January was fascinated by what went on beneath the surface of all those polite exchanges: by who spoke to whom, and who snubbed whom; by glares and crossed glances and eyelids lowered above the sandalwood filigree of a fan.
    Additionally, he realized, most of these people had been present at Don Fernando’s ill-fated wedding-feast. They had seen what went on. Was it beyond the realm of possibility that one of them had found some way to slip poison into Don Fernando’s food and shift the blame onto Hannibal’s bony shoulders?
    He leaned over to Consuela. “How was the table arranged on the night of Fernando’s death?” he asked her quietly. “Who sat next to him?”
    “It was almost exactly as you see it,” she replied. “Except that Franz, not my father, was at the head. Like my father, Franz would rather have Santa Anna sit at his right than Doña Imelda, who should by rights be there—” Doña Imelda, ignored on the dictator’s right, glared smoulderingly at her host, furious at the snub, as she must have been at the wedding-banquet, too. “Santa Anna would much rather sit at my father’s right—or Franz’s, that night—than at Josefa’s right . . . as who wouldn’t?” She nodded toward the foot of the table, where Doña Josefa presided over her single small hunk of bread, her coarse black dress smelling of unwashed flesh and unhealed abrasions underneath, and her emaciated hands folded in prayer.
    So Franz had been flanked—as Don Prospero was flanked tonight—by his fiancée, Natividad Lorcha, on his left and President Santa Anna on his right. And judging by the way Doña Imelda and Josefa were glaring at the shapely young woman, he guessed that Natividad would have found it impossible to dump poison onto her intended’s plate undetected, had she so desired.
    The food was served
à la française:
turtle
en croute,
game-bird hash, glacéed venison
à la Turque,
and a dozen removes cramming the long table, from which the guests helped themselves or were helped by the servants,