Read Online Die Upon a Kiss by Barbara Hambly - Free Book Online Page A

Paris. Fitzhugh Trulove quite frankly brought in one of the chairs from the orchestra to watch his red-haired inamorata, hands clasped before his pink-flowered waistcoat and a smile of fatuous content on his round pink face. Jed Burton appeared shortly thereafter—January wondered what both of those planters had told their wives about where they were going this morning—and, a little while later, young Harry Fry, the steamboat owner, looking as always as if his collar were buttoned too tightly. It amused January to note how the girls took greater care in the pointing of their pink silk toes, with the men standing in the doorway watching, and how preoccupied they became with perfecting the curves of their arms. Once he caught Marguerite’s sardonic eye and almost laughed.
    Did the girls know, he wondered, that these gentlemen who took them for ices and for rides along the river road, who watched from the wings “with love in their eyes,” all had plaçées? Free women of color for whom they had bought houses along Rue des Ramparts and Rue Burgundy, whom they had established as second wives?
    Would it make a difference if they knew?
    The St. Mary Opera Society,
he thought, and his eyes returned to the little group again as Marguerite explained a complicated ronde-de-jambe. The first ones to know that Belaggio intended to put on an opera of
Othello.
At least a few of them had been at Thursday night’s rehearsal, and had read the libretto. Who felt, or guessed, the power of the music. Which one, he wondered, might have taken it upon himself to “chastise” the Italian “for his presumption”?
    Trulove? The man was reputed to be brainless, and in two and a half years of playing at the parties of the wealthy, January had not seen the smallest evidence to the contrary. But his wife was a cold, clever woman, ruthless and strong. And in any case, it didn’t take brains to desire or plan such a crime. Only hate.
    Was there hate concealed behind Trulove’s bland pink countenance?
    Stubby and brick-faced beside Trulove’s tall, silver-haired amiability, Jed Burton spit into the sandbox just outside the door and leaned down to whisper something to the Englishman, nodding as he did so toward the girls at the barre. Trulove flung back his head with a smile. January tried to remember what his mother, that fount of all gossip and scandal—French or American or free colored—had to say about Jed Burton, and could recall only that the man was a contractor, involved in a lawsuit of some kind about a plantation his first wife had inherited on Bayou des Familles. Burton had been a planter himself, and hadn’t made a go of it—January was well aware that men like Trulove, ostensibly so wealthy, lived in debt from year to year, borrowing money from their factors against crops only barely in the ground, dependent on the frost and the harvest and the resistance of their slaves to disease.
    Burton had a wife now, named Ludmilla—his second—whose father was of the Virginia planter aristocracy, and it was undoubtedly she who actually wanted the box for the opera season. January had the impression Burton himself didn’t know Othello from Punchinello and didn’t care.
    But Americans were full of surprises. He’d learned that much from Shaw.
    Young Harry Fry was quite frankly gazing at a sweet-faced Cuban girl named Felina with his heart in his eyes. January recalled hearing someone—his mother? Uncle Bichet?—mention the young man’s interests in brokering sugar and cotton crops as well as transporting them; in buying furs from the trappers in the mountains of Mexican territory. Anything to turn a dollar. Son of a Boston banker, Fry had been sent here to claim a share of the enormous revenues pouring into the city. With the breakup of the old Spanish Empire, money and precious metals that had previously gone straight to Spain were up for grabs. Legally or illegally, they were coming through New Orleans from Mexico, from Cuba, from