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Authors: Barbara Hambly
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the new nations of New Grenada, and it was through New Orleans that guns and supplies had gone to Bolívar, Guerrero, Iturbide. January had seen young Fry at a dozen American parties and as many or more of the Blue Ribbon Balls—the quadroon balls—at the Salle d’Orleans, alternating his polite dancing or wholehearted pursuit of the free colored demimonde with serious-faced conversation among the businessmen of the town.
A young man eager to advance, thought January. At any cost, perhaps. He was negotiating with several friends of January’s mother for their daughters’ contracts of plaçage, but as far as January had heard hadn’t settled on a mistress yet.
At the conclusion of the ballet rehearsal, January emerged from the rehearsal-room to find Hannibal Sefton perched halfway up the Count Almaviva’s pink marble garden steps, playing a wistful West Irish planxty on his violin. The music floated gently above the babble of voices, like sun-spangles on water: five different varieties of Italian; slurry, lilting Viennese German; the sloppy Creole Spanish of Havana; and several sorts of French. The green room, dark as a cave and barely twelve feet square, was good only for making coffee in—besides being tacitly off-limits to the little rats and most of the musicians.
“I hear we’re going to need to count the money twice after every performance,” January remarked just loudly enough that Silvio Cavallo, sitting a little lower down the steps with a couple of other Lombard members of the company, turned his head.
Hannibal sighed, and said, “That’ll teach you to ask before you rescue anyone.” In the flickery glow of the gasoliers, he looked a little better than he had Thursday night, but dangerously thin: shabby in his skirted coat and long hair, like something that had wandered out of an old portrait.
“You think that Austrian’s whore hasn’t learned to keep double books?” Cavallo rose, and moved close to speak without being overheard. He’d been speaking Milanese with his compatriots, but switched to the Italian that January knew better. “Look them over if you will, Signor. He’s learned enough from that brother of his, that Viennese
sbirro,
that his books will smell of lilies, like the Book of Judgment in Paradise.” He cast a glare across the dusty brown dimness of backstage at Belaggio, ascending the steps from the prop-vault. A black silk sling supported the impresario’s arm, though January’s wound had improved sufficiently in thirty-six hours that he’d been able to dispense with his. La d’Isola tripped lightly at Belaggio’s side, exquisite in a flutter of black-ribboned white organdy. She tugged the stage-hand Pedro away from bringing up flats to fetch Belaggio a chair, and made Nina abandon her adjustment of Madame Montero’s costume to find a cushion for his arm, and in general fussed as if the impresario had just struggled up from his deathbed.
If young M’sieu Saltearth in
All for Glory
can manage
to drag himself into action,
thought January,
surely Lorenzo
Belaggio can do no less.
“But if you believe I would conceal myself in an alley with a knife because of it . . .”
“I don’t,” January told Cavallo, mildly and not entirely truthfully. “I was just curious as to why Belaggio thought you might have. And who you think would. Did you know Bellaggio’s partner Incantobelli?”
“I thought it is this Señor Davis, this owner of the French Opera, who is supposed to have done this thing.” Consuela Montero flounced furiously over to them, the old antidote Marcellina’s fussy pink gown and enormous panniers fitted awkwardly over her black satin petticoat. “As for Incantobelli, there is a man who truly understands the opera. He would not have put
that”—
her lace-gloved hand flicked scornfully in the direction of d’Isola—“anywhere but in the chorus. And as for that carrot-haired Hibernian slut
. . . Madre de dios!”
At that moment Vincent Marsan came
A young man eager to advance, thought January. At any cost, perhaps. He was negotiating with several friends of January’s mother for their daughters’ contracts of plaçage, but as far as January had heard hadn’t settled on a mistress yet.
At the conclusion of the ballet rehearsal, January emerged from the rehearsal-room to find Hannibal Sefton perched halfway up the Count Almaviva’s pink marble garden steps, playing a wistful West Irish planxty on his violin. The music floated gently above the babble of voices, like sun-spangles on water: five different varieties of Italian; slurry, lilting Viennese German; the sloppy Creole Spanish of Havana; and several sorts of French. The green room, dark as a cave and barely twelve feet square, was good only for making coffee in—besides being tacitly off-limits to the little rats and most of the musicians.
“I hear we’re going to need to count the money twice after every performance,” January remarked just loudly enough that Silvio Cavallo, sitting a little lower down the steps with a couple of other Lombard members of the company, turned his head.
Hannibal sighed, and said, “That’ll teach you to ask before you rescue anyone.” In the flickery glow of the gasoliers, he looked a little better than he had Thursday night, but dangerously thin: shabby in his skirted coat and long hair, like something that had wandered out of an old portrait.
“You think that Austrian’s whore hasn’t learned to keep double books?” Cavallo rose, and moved close to speak without being overheard. He’d been speaking Milanese with his compatriots, but switched to the Italian that January knew better. “Look them over if you will, Signor. He’s learned enough from that brother of his, that Viennese
sbirro,
that his books will smell of lilies, like the Book of Judgment in Paradise.” He cast a glare across the dusty brown dimness of backstage at Belaggio, ascending the steps from the prop-vault. A black silk sling supported the impresario’s arm, though January’s wound had improved sufficiently in thirty-six hours that he’d been able to dispense with his. La d’Isola tripped lightly at Belaggio’s side, exquisite in a flutter of black-ribboned white organdy. She tugged the stage-hand Pedro away from bringing up flats to fetch Belaggio a chair, and made Nina abandon her adjustment of Madame Montero’s costume to find a cushion for his arm, and in general fussed as if the impresario had just struggled up from his deathbed.
If young M’sieu Saltearth in
All for Glory
can manage
to drag himself into action,
thought January,
surely Lorenzo
Belaggio can do no less.
“But if you believe I would conceal myself in an alley with a knife because of it . . .”
“I don’t,” January told Cavallo, mildly and not entirely truthfully. “I was just curious as to why Belaggio thought you might have. And who you think would. Did you know Bellaggio’s partner Incantobelli?”
“I thought it is this Señor Davis, this owner of the French Opera, who is supposed to have done this thing.” Consuela Montero flounced furiously over to them, the old antidote Marcellina’s fussy pink gown and enormous panniers fitted awkwardly over her black satin petticoat. “As for Incantobelli, there is a man who truly understands the opera. He would not have put
that”—
her lace-gloved hand flicked scornfully in the direction of d’Isola—“anywhere but in the chorus. And as for that carrot-haired Hibernian slut
. . . Madre de dios!”
At that moment Vincent Marsan came
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