Wet Grave

ONE The only time Benjamin January ever actually exchanged words with Hesione LeGros was when they were both hiding behind a piano in a New Orleans hotel hoping they wouldn't be massacred by pirates. It wasn't a long conversation. She said, "I'm gonna shoot that fuckin' man of mine for this." And January--who had just turned nineteen and was hoping to make twenty--replied, "What makes you think any of us will live to see you do that?" As it happened, someone else shot her man a number of years later in the Yucatan, but at the time January hoped that the dark-eyed little African Venus beside him would have that honor, and fairly soon. The man certainly deserved it. The whole debacle began, tamely enough, with the arrival in New Orleans of Major-General Jean Robert Marie Humbert, formerly of the Grand Army of Napoleon. Humbert, in that year of 1812, was avoiding Napoleon's various domains because of opinions he'd rashly expressed after the Little Emperor had relieved him of command. Some said this was because Humbert's army had ignominiously failed to re-conquer the island of Saint-Domingue from rebelling slaves. But January's mother--a clearinghouse for gossip concerning both the white and the free colored communities in New Orleans--was of the opinion that Humbert's affair with Napoleon's sister had something to do with it. "Though I don't see why Napoleon should cut up stiff over Humbert," Livia Janvier had added, pinning an aigrette of diamonds to the confection of rose-colored silk and plumes that covered her hair. She studied the result critically in the mirror. "The woman's slept with his entire general staff, most of his marshals, and is now working her way down through the colonels. I can't imagine how she keeps their names straight when she encounters them at military reviews." She propped an elbow on the dressing-table and held up her hand preemptorily for her maid, who'd been gently dusting talcum powder into the fingers of a pair of long white kid gloves. Livia Janvier didn't even glance at the maid as the young woman set to work easing and moulding the soft, close-fitting leather over her mistress' knuckles and palm. When January's mother was dressing to meet her protector--the man who had bought her and her two small children from slavery eleven years previously--she displayed a meticulous patience, a concentration like an artist's that January found fascinating to watch. "Don't you stay out late after you get done playing tonight, p'tit," she added. "And make sure that M'sieu Davis pays you. Promises are cheap." It went without saying that January's mother, slender as a bronze lily at the age of thirty-six, would not give her son so much as a nod when they separately reached the Marine Hotel. January would be present at General Humbert's birthday dinner strictly as a hired musician, a profession he'd worked at since the age of sixteen concurrent with such medical studies as were available to a young free man of color in that time and place. St.-Denis Janvier, his mother's protector, was one of the guests, a select gang of the wealthier businessmen of the town assembled to honor the elderly war-horse. Most of them would be accompanied by their mistresses. It was not the sort of party to which one brought one's wife. And Livia Janvier--she'd taken her protector's name, as many free colored placees did--wasn't the sort of woman who'd admit to being the mother of one of the musicians. This would have been true even if her son hadn't been all of nineteen years old, six feet three inches tall, and very obviously the offspring of an African rather than a white man. As the guests came into the hotel's dining-room that night, to the bright strains of a Mozart overture, it was St.-Denis Janvier, and not Livia, who caught January's eye and smiled. January knew most of the other guesHambly, Barbara is the author of 'Wet Grave', published 2003 under ISBN 9780553581591 and ISBN 0553581597.