Read Online Dead and Buried by Barbara Hambly - Free Book Online Page B

the evening when the parlor was empty and the unwritten rule that the piano player be blind, deaf, and oblivious to all that took place around him relaxed. He spoke in the rough English of the flatboat crews, which he found would often win the confidence of those who wouldn’t trust an educated black. The Countess, who had paused beside the piano to take a quick puff on a Mexican cigarette, looked inquiring, and January elaborated. ‘That English feller that was stuck in the coffin at that funeral. Mr Derryhick.’
    ‘Mon Dieu!’ Her eyes widened. ‘That was Signor Derryhick? The Irishman?’
    The other girls gathered around at once:
    ‘Are ye sure?’
    ‘How is it you know?’
    ‘Gott in Himmel . . .’
    ‘It wasn’t Blessinghurst what kilt ’im, was it?’ demanded gilt-haired Fanny. ‘E ’ad the most awful row with Lord Blessinghurst—’
    ‘Who’s Lord Blessinghurst?’ January’s big hands vamped chords, trills, fragments of melody, so that there would never be a time when music was not audible from the street.‘’Andsome bloke what always asks for Vennie?’
    ‘Oh, him!’ He mentally placed the tall Englishman as one who had been to the Countess’s twice in the preceding ten days.
    ‘He is a lord, with eight thousand a year,’ Marie-Venise assured him. ‘Look, he gave me these.’ A toothpick finger tapped one of her earrings: paste, but quite good paste.
    ‘’E called Mr Derryhick bastard bog-lander an’ Mr Derryhick drew a gun on ’im—’
    ‘I hope His Lordship has not come to harm!’
    ‘Where was this?’ asked January, well aware that Derryhick had only been in New Orleans since Monday.
    The girls looked at each other, and then at Trinchen, who shook her head. ‘Martin did not say. Davis’s, I think, or perhaps Herr Lafrènniére’s . . . He was in two places or three last night.’
    ‘Last night?’ January’s hands checked on the keys, then instantly resumed. ‘This happened last night?’
    The Countess stubbed her cigarette and the girls broke and scattered with a deceptively speedy languidness back to their red-plush couches and chairs, the flurry all but simultaneous with the sound of the door opening and the dusky little parlormaid’s happy greeting: ‘Why, if it isn’t Mr Granville!’ January’s fingers elided into ‘Come Brothers, Sons of Jove’, and he meditated, as he played, upon the person of Lord Blessinghurst . . . whom he was almost certain had been the man whom young Lord Foxford had come so close to calling out at Trulove’s birthday ball.
    If he hadn’t seen the other Englishman’s face on that occasion, he had a clear recollection of the color of his coat. That bottle-green velvet, now that he thought of it, would suit Lord Blessinghurst’s complexion admirably – the man he knew from other evenings at the Countess’s had hair the color of polished mahogany and emerald eyes – and he hadn’t seen His Lordship wear the same coat or waistcoat, twice. The man at Trulove’s party on Monday had had a deep voice, like Blessinghurst’s . . .
    Last night . Whether or not Derryhick had drawn a gun on Lord Blessinghurst – and he was sufficiently familiar with human nature not to trust anyone’s account of so dramatic an event – it was clear that there had been a quarrel of some kind. Was Derryhick the kind of man who would get himself into TWO violent altercations in a night?
    Alcohol would do it.
    So would rage, and or the stress of sudden emotion.
    I will kill the bastard  . . .
    And if Martin Quennell – who had evidently seen the confrontation – had had the opportunity to tell the lovely Trinchen about it already, it must have taken place relatively early in the evening.
    January was still turning over in his mind how he would ask Martin about the confrontation – it being almost literally unthinkable for a parlor-house musician to speak to a customer, even if January hadn’t been trying to remain unnoticed by that