Die Upon a Kiss Read Free

I shall die!” And fainted again. Gracefully, wrist to brow, into the mauve Creole’s powerful arms.
    “Hannibal, fetch cloaks from the wardrobe.” Marguerite Scie was fifty-seven years old and had seen, from a garret window, her father and two of her brothers go to the guillotine. Histrionics did not impress her. “You, Benjamin, sit down and get your coat off. M’sieu Marsan—” This to the Creole gentleman bent tenderly over La d’Isola, the lamplight new-minted gold on his shining curls. “Where might we find M’sieu Caldwell at this hour?” In any city but New Orleans, at any time but Carnival, the answer to such a question at this hour would be, self-evidently,
Home in bed.
But there was no telling. Considering Caldwell’s former profession as an actor, and his current involvement in a dozen other money-making schemes in the American community of New Orleans, the theater owner could be anywhere.
    “Check the Fatted Calf Tavern,” advised M’sieu Marsan, raising his head. The Creole’s voice was both light and melodious, with the soft slur to his speech. His eyelashes were dark, making his sky-blue eyes all the brighter. “I believe he was going there with M’sieu Trulove to confer about the Opera Society, but they may have gone on.”
    As he eased Belaggio out of his coat and waistcoats— the impresario affected the dandyish habit of wearing two—and made another futile search for anything else resembling a wound, January wondered what any of these people, let alone all of them, were doing in and around the American Theater at twenty minutes after three in the morning.
    Himself, and Marguerite Scie, he understood. While a twenty-four-year-old student of surgery in Paris, he had made ends meet by playing piano for the ballet school at the Théâtre de l’Odéon. Though close to forty then, Madame had still been dancing, precise and perfect as Damascus steel. They had been lovers, the first white woman he had had. When, much later, he had met and sought to marry the woman he loved, it was Madame who had gotten him a job playing harpsicord for the Comédie Française—the job that had let him and Ayasha wed. Madame had, over the next few years, sent piano pupils his way, and had recommended Ayasha’s skills as a dressmaker to both the Comédie’s costume shop and to the actresses of the company: even in the heartland of Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité, there were few who would choose a surgeon of nearly-pure African descent over white Frenchmen.
    When January had entered the American Theater yesterday to meet the opera company Mr. Caldwell had brought to New Orleans from Havana, Marguerite Scie’s first words to him had been
I grieved to hear of your wife’s
death.
    They had had much to talk about.
    The others . . .
    January wrapped Belaggio’s shuddering bulk in a kingly cloak of beggar’s velvet and dyed rabbit-fur someone handed him, and tallied the faces in the candle-light.
    Hannibal Sefton’s presence, if unexplained, at least wasn’t sinister. January had known the fiddler for two and a half years now and knew the man didn’t have a violent bone in his opium-laced body. Through the evening’s rehearsal, as he’d sat at the piano, January had heard Hannibal’s stifled coughing behind him, and whenever he turned, it had been to see his friend’s thin face white and set with pain. As usual when his consumption bore hard on him, Hannibal had taken refuge in laudanum to get him through rehearsal, and January guessed, by the creases in his rusty black coat and the way his graying hair straggled loose over his back from its old-fashioned queue, that he’d simply fallen asleep afterward in a corner of the green room. How he managed to play as beautifully as he did under the circumstances was something January had yet to figure out, but that was the only mystery about Hannibal.
    The presence of the others was less easily accounted for.
    Drusilla d’Isola, girlishly slim and