Die Upon a Kiss by Barbara Hambly Page B

alley-way, January had intended to dine Friday night with his dear friend Rose Vitrac, a young, former schoolmistress at the moment earning her living by correcting Greek, Latin, and science papers for several of the young gentlemen’s academies in town. By the time he’d returned from his talk with Davis, however, and had taught his day’s piano lessons, January’s injured arm ached as if hacked with a sword and he’d felt feverish and weak. “I’m ashamed of you, Benjamin,” Rose had said, peering at him severely through the thick lenses of her spectacles. “A mere cut on the arm sends you to ground? A brief pummeling by villains drives you to seek your bed? I’ll have you know that young Mr. Saltearth, the friend of the hero in
All for
Glory, or, A Patriot’s Triumph,
currently being presented at the American Theater, managed to drag himself fifty miles through the snow in the dead of winter despite being shot through both lungs by Tories, in order to warn General Washington of a prospective attack on Valley Forge.”
    “You know a lot about it”—January shaded his eyes to squint up at her from the chair where he’d been resting on the gallery outside his tiny room—“for someone who considers even Dumas’s plays too silly to watch.” The patchy clouds had broken by then, sweeping the low pastel houses of this part of the French town with pale sheets of light, and Rose, perched on the gallery rail, had looked more than ever like a very young wading-bird, gawky-graceful and ready to fly away.
    “I was given a complete account of this—er—epic by Marie-Philomène, who has the room next to mine behind Vroche’s Grocery,” she had retorted. In the end they’d compromised by going downstairs to Madame Bontemps’s kitchen and making sausage and rice under the landlady’s silently disapproving eye. Upon leaving, Rose had promised to make inquiries at the Fatted Calf and various other cafés in the vicinity of the American Theater about whether two young men answering the descriptions of Signori Cavallo and Ponte had been seen.
    It was, January had reasoned, a starting-point. “They can’t have spent the entire time from the end of rehearsal at—what was it, eleven? eleven-thirty?—until past three cramped in that doorway,” Rose had said. “I can do a very passable imitation of a lady’s maid, searching for information on where Young Michie might have been at that hour and who he might have been with. It isn’t,” she’d added with grim wisdom, “like the waiters at the cafés have not heard such inquiries before.”
    “I can’t see errors in bookkeeping being grounds for murder,” January said now, mentally comparing Rose’s slim, scholarly awkwardness with Marguerite Scie’s knife-blade poise. He had told the older woman of his love for Rose, and his hopes that she would one day marry him: one day when he made enough money to live somewhere other than in a rented room in Marie-Claire Bontemps’s garçonnière. One day when past wounds in Rose’s soul had sufficiently healed.
    “It depends upon the size of the error,” returned the ballet mistress. “And the circumstances of the murder.” She pointed her toes in a couple of swift tendus, bowed forward again, arm precisely curved. “Paying bravos to slaughter a man in an alley, no. For one thing, I should imagine bravos come rather expensive, even in New Orleans.”
    Past the rehearsal-room door, footfalls creaked the floor of the backstage—the scrape of something heavy being moved, the squeak of a pulley, suddenly brightening light, and a stink of burning gas. Caldwell’s American Theater was the largest in the city, and if rude by European standards was far more modern than the rival Théâtre d’Orleans. “A few days before everyone took ship from Havana, Signor Belaggio surprised Cavallo searching his office, and accused him of trying to rob the cash-box. Cavallo in turn accused Belaggio of keeping duplicate books. High