gaslights falling through the windows and the warmer amber of the oil lamps on their chains above the intersection of the Rue Ste.-Ann and Rue Royale, showed him proud, careful mamas clothed as classical goddesses or Circassian maids, and watchful papas in the incongruous garb of pirates, lions, and clowns, escorting gorgeously costumed little boys and girls to the carriages that awaited them, drawn up just the other side of the gurgling gutters and tying up traffic for streets. With the Theatre's long windows open he could hear the orchestra playing a final country dance-"Catch Fleeting Pleasures"-and he could identify whom they'd got to play: That had to be Alcee Boisseau on the violin and only Philippe Decoudreau could be that hapless on the cornet.
January winced as he picked up his music satchel from beside the wall where he'd dropped it in his excess of knight-errantry, wiped a trace of blood from his lip and thought, Let's not do that again. The Mohican Princess was long gone, and January hoped, as he made his way toward the lights and voices of the courtyard that lay behind the Salle d'Orleans' gambling rooms, that Richelieu had gone into the gambling rooms or upstairs to the Salle as well. The colored glimmer of light from the courtyard, slanting into the dark of the passageway, showed him a couple of green-black cock feathers from the woman's headdress lying on the bricks at his feet
The woman had called his name. She had been scared.
Why scared?
To any woman who would come unaccompanied to the Blue Ribbon Ball at the Salle d'Orleans, being thrown up against the wall and kissed by a white man was presumably the point of the evening.
So why had she cried out to him in fear?
Colored lanterns jeweled the trees in the court, and the gallery that stretched the length of the Salle's rear wall. In the variegated light, Henry VIII and at least four of his wives leaned over the gallery's wooden railings, laughing amongst themselves and calling down in English to friends in the court below. January didn't have to hear the language to know the Tudor monarch was being impersonated by an American. No Creole would have had the poor taste to appear with more than one woman on his arm. A curious piece of hypocrisy, January reflected wryly, considering how many of the men at the Blue Ribbon Ball tonight had left wives at home; considering how many more had escorted those wives, along with sisters, mothers, and the usual Creole regiments of cousins, to the subscription ball in the Theatre, directly next door.
Both the Salle d'Orleans and the Theatre were owned by one man-Monsieur Davis, who also owned a couple of gambling establishments farther along Rue Royale-and were joined by a discreet passageway. Most of those gentlemen at the subscription ball tonight would slip along that corridor at the earliest possible moment to meet their mulatto or quadroon or octoroon mistresses. That was what the Blue Ribbon Balls were all about.
Ayasha, he recalled, had hardly been able to credit it when he'd recounted that aspect of New Orleans life. None of the ladies in Paris had. "You mean they attend balls on the same night, with their wives in one building and another with their mistresses a hundred feet away?quot;
And January, too, had laughed, seeing the absurdity of it from the vantage point of knowing he'd never go back again. There was laughter in most of his memories of Paris. "It's the custom of the country," he'd explained, which of course explained nothing, but he felt an obscure obligation to defend the city of his birth. "It is how it is."
Allowing a white man to strike him without raising a hand in his own defense was the custom of the country as well, but of that, he had never spoken.
Why would she struggle? And who was she, that she'd known his name?
He paused beneath the gallery, his hand on the latch of the inconspicuous service door that led to offices, kitchen, and service stair, scanning the court behind him for sight of that deerskin dress, that silly feathered headdress that more resembled a crow in a fit than anything he'd actually seen on the Choctaws or Natchays who came downriver to peddle file or pots in the market.
Most of the women who came to the quadroon balls came with friends, the young girls chaperoned by their mothers. Women did come alone, and a great deal of outrageous flirting