Read Online Dead and Buried by Barbara Hambly - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Barbara Hambly
Ads: Link
Mazzini’s bordello were what passed in New Orleans as gentlemen. Men who owned the hotels, cotton presses, construction companies, and shipping lines that centered the state’s wealth in the town.
Would they slap their thighs with the humor of it, he wondered, his fingers skipping through the chorus of ‘Zip Coon’, if it was a new-bereaved white family that was wondering where the body of husband, brother, son lay that night?
Do they really think we’re THAT different from them?
Fed with the same food, hurt by the same weapons, subject to the same diseases? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
Or would the joke have tickled equally for a white man, provided he wasn’t known to them personally – or known but not liked?
Probably , thought January with an inner sigh. Probably .
And most of his friends at the back of town would have laughed as hard, had the funeral been a white man’s.
One thing about playing the piano at other people’s entertainments for nearly two-thirds of one’s life, it didn’t do much for one’s opinion of human nature.
The Countess Mazzini glided from one parlor to the other of the big, American-style house on Prytania Street, a beautiful Italian woman in her mid-thirties, like a full-blown rose in her tight-corseted crimson gown. She flirted with a steamboat owner here, a cotton broker there; twitted an American planter on his avuncular duties and winked at the youth he’d brought with him, a sixteen-year-old nephew from Virginia: ‘What is it you fancy, amore mio ? Pretty lambs, or a lioness with thighs of gold?’ The Countess’s house was one of the few brothels in town entirely staffed by white girls: pink-cheeked English belles, dreamy French brunettes. A raven-tressed Irish colleen with tourmaline eyes and a complexion like a lily of the valley, and a couple of handsome Germans, one fragile and one buxom, who worked as a team and were supposed to be sisters. January was watching the fragile one, Trinchen.
Trinchen, when not required to be shyly smiling at masculine jokes, was watching the parlor archway that led in from the hall.
It was not entirely need for money at the tail end of a very bad season that had brought January to the Countess’s back door on the day after her German piano-player had broken three fingers in a street brawl. The other members of the Board of Directors of the Faubourg Tremé Free Colored Militia and Burial Society had asked January to apply for the position because word had reached them that young Martin Quennell – who, when he was not keeping the undertaker’s books, was a clerk at the Mississippi and Balize Merchants’ Bank – had been seen at the establishment of the French Town milliner Geneviève Jumon, buying the extremely lovely Trinchen an extremely costly hat.
A hat that no bank clerk should have been able to afford.
Ordinarily, this wouldn’t have troubled anyone who didn’t have their money at the Mississippi and Balize Merchants’ Bank. But recently Beauvais Quennell, who for the past seven years had been the treasurer for the FTFCMBS, had, in fact, transferred the Society’s funds to that bank – on the grounds that the Mississippi and Balize was more fiscally sound than the bank that had previously held them. With the Presidential election coming up, and the Bank of the United States closing its doors, even rumor of financial unsteadiness in an institution was enough to warrant a transfer. Young Quennell had spoken with authority, and the other Directors had found no reason for alarm.
But as Mohammed LePas the blacksmith said, ‘There’s no dead cat out layin’ in the middle of the floor, but I sure don’t like the smell of the room.’
‘He come in here, didn’t he?’ January asked the Countess softly, when uncle and nephew had retired upstairs with their choices and the cotton broker departed. In the short time he’d been employed there, he’d discovered that at this season there were frequent stretches of
Would they slap their thighs with the humor of it, he wondered, his fingers skipping through the chorus of ‘Zip Coon’, if it was a new-bereaved white family that was wondering where the body of husband, brother, son lay that night?
Do they really think we’re THAT different from them?
Fed with the same food, hurt by the same weapons, subject to the same diseases? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
Or would the joke have tickled equally for a white man, provided he wasn’t known to them personally – or known but not liked?
Probably , thought January with an inner sigh. Probably .
And most of his friends at the back of town would have laughed as hard, had the funeral been a white man’s.
One thing about playing the piano at other people’s entertainments for nearly two-thirds of one’s life, it didn’t do much for one’s opinion of human nature.
The Countess Mazzini glided from one parlor to the other of the big, American-style house on Prytania Street, a beautiful Italian woman in her mid-thirties, like a full-blown rose in her tight-corseted crimson gown. She flirted with a steamboat owner here, a cotton broker there; twitted an American planter on his avuncular duties and winked at the youth he’d brought with him, a sixteen-year-old nephew from Virginia: ‘What is it you fancy, amore mio ? Pretty lambs, or a lioness with thighs of gold?’ The Countess’s house was one of the few brothels in town entirely staffed by white girls: pink-cheeked English belles, dreamy French brunettes. A raven-tressed Irish colleen with tourmaline eyes and a complexion like a lily of the valley, and a couple of handsome Germans, one fragile and one buxom, who worked as a team and were supposed to be sisters. January was watching the fragile one, Trinchen.
Trinchen, when not required to be shyly smiling at masculine jokes, was watching the parlor archway that led in from the hall.
It was not entirely need for money at the tail end of a very bad season that had brought January to the Countess’s back door on the day after her German piano-player had broken three fingers in a street brawl. The other members of the Board of Directors of the Faubourg Tremé Free Colored Militia and Burial Society had asked January to apply for the position because word had reached them that young Martin Quennell – who, when he was not keeping the undertaker’s books, was a clerk at the Mississippi and Balize Merchants’ Bank – had been seen at the establishment of the French Town milliner Geneviève Jumon, buying the extremely lovely Trinchen an extremely costly hat.
A hat that no bank clerk should have been able to afford.
Ordinarily, this wouldn’t have troubled anyone who didn’t have their money at the Mississippi and Balize Merchants’ Bank. But recently Beauvais Quennell, who for the past seven years had been the treasurer for the FTFCMBS, had, in fact, transferred the Society’s funds to that bank – on the grounds that the Mississippi and Balize was more fiscally sound than the bank that had previously held them. With the Presidential election coming up, and the Bank of the United States closing its doors, even rumor of financial unsteadiness in an institution was enough to warrant a transfer. Young Quennell had spoken with authority, and the other Directors had found no reason for alarm.
But as Mohammed LePas the blacksmith said, ‘There’s no dead cat out layin’ in the middle of the floor, but I sure don’t like the smell of the room.’
‘He come in here, didn’t he?’ January asked the Countess softly, when uncle and nephew had retired upstairs with their choices and the cotton broker departed. In the short time he’d been employed there, he’d discovered that at this season there were frequent stretches of
Similar Books
