Free Hagar by Barbara Hambly Page A

am not going
to go out of the house in that !”), and when Rose refused
also to abandon her spectacles for the occasion it was agreed that
it was perfectly proper for Hagar’s son Ishmael to conduct his
“mother” about the gathering on his arm.
     
    *
     
    Belle Jour plantation lay some five miles
down-river from New Orleans. It was small, as plantations went,
only a few arpents of river-frontage, though it extended back from
the river for several miles into the swamp. While it wasn’t common
for a free man of color to own a plantation in these parts – most
free colored planters could be found in the western parishes of the
State, along the Cane River and in Natchitoches Parish – it wasn’t
unheard-of. Arnaud Levesque’s neighbors on both sides were of old
French Creole families who had no objections to his friends and
relatives from the New Orleans gens du couleur librés descending now and then upon his house for a little mild revelry.
It was technically illegal these days for that many people of color
to “assemble” unsupervised by whites, but “what les animaux
Americaines don’t know won’t harm them…” and in any case the
point was moot. Candide Levesque happened to share her birthday –
the fifteenth of March – with former President Andrew Jackson, and
every white planter for twenty miles up and down the river had gone
to New Orleans to participate in the glittering public subscription
ball and display of fireworks scheduled to commemorate the war
hero’s nativity.
    From the deck of a small wood-boat, Rose
watched the landings of the downriver plantations slip past in the
cool spring twilight, and wondered if this fact had anything to do
with Arnaud Levesque’s decision to celebrate his wife’s birthday
with a mid-Lent ball.
    “Only insofar as it gave him the chance to
make everybody he knows choose between his invitation and the
fireworks,” sniffed Rose’s mother-in-law, the beautiful – at age
sixty-three – and formidable Livia Levesque. “Anything Christophe
had planned, from a Sunday dinner to our wedding, Arnaud would
devise a fish-fry or a picnic or a ball on the same day, just to
see who’d come. Are you supposed to be Cleopatra?” She looked down
her nose at Rose’s close-fitted ensemble of old bed-sheets,
blue-and-gold Egyptian head-dress, serpent arm-band, and copious
eye-paint. “Because you look more like a servant.”
    “I am a servant,” agreed Rose cheerfully.
“Hagar, concubine to old Father Abraham.” She indicated the rest of
the Patriarch’s family with a nod. “And personally, I’d be very
curious to see what the Americans can produce in the way of
fireworks, since Mr. Davis has asked me again to do them for the
Opera next winter.”
    “I trust you turned him down,” said Livia,
who had little opinion of her daughter-in-law’s fondness for
chemical experimentation. She had sold her slaves (whom she’d fed
cheap and rented out at a profit) at the first sign of bank
closures, had re-invested in Bank of England bonds, and thus had no
need to make pennies stretch. “And as for Hagar, the little hussy
deserved what she got,” pronounced Livia, who had little opinion of
her daughter-in-law’s fondness for chemical experimentation. “I
only wonder that in the Bible Sarah didn’t turn Father Abraham out
of doors as well, taking her maid into his bed the minute his wife
got too old to please him, not that you could tell the pair of them
from Jupiter and Juno – or Father Time and Mother Goose – in those
horse-blankets and false whiskers. Did Louis Corbier shave off his
own beard to glue that atrocity to his face? It looks like half the
stuffing out of a mattress.”
    There was no mistaking who Livia Levesque was
supposed to be at any rate, reflected Rose admiringly. Where on
EARTH did she acquire an Elizabethan court gown ? The Mardi Gras
costume of some wealthy planter’s wife, probably – it must have
cost a fortune, even second-hand, and Rose