Hagar by Barbara Hambly Page B

wouldn’t have been
entirely prepared to bet that some of the pearls that decorated the
auburn wig’s snailshell curls weren’t genuine. The hairpiece itself
was of a dark enough hue not to contrast unpleasantly with Livia’s
complexion, though as the daughter of a full-blood African, the
older woman was duskier than most white gentlemen liked their
plaçées to be, even in her heyday. It didn’t matter. Embroidered,
bejeweled, farthingaled and corseted to within an inch of her life
and face framed in an explosion of lace, Livia Levesque looked
every inch a queen.
    The spring night was cool. Lanterns had been
hung on the Belle Jour landing-stage, and in the trees on both
sides of the drive that led to the house. Every window of the
downstairs was illuminated, like an American Jack o’ Lantern, and
candles burned on the long gallery that fronted the house as well.
As the Corbier party – and those others, like Livia, who’d taken
the same boat down from town – mounted the levee, Rose could hear
the musicians striking up: Bonaparte’s Retreat , flute and
fiddle embelishing the edges of the tune like ruffles. The
mustiness of wet earth rose from the new-chopped cane-fields, and
the green scent of the half-grown fields further back from the
river, mingled with kitchen-smoke and the murky pong of the woods.
Rose handed off Baby John – in his role as Baby Isaac – to his aged
“mother” Sarah, removed her spectacles, and took her “son”
Ishmael’s arm, with a certain amount of regret. She dearly loved
the beauty of spring evenings and experienced mild annoyance that
she’d have to forego it simply because the Egyptian concubines of
Biblical patriarchs didn’t wear spectacles.
    “Don’t worry about it, Aunt Rose,” Gabriel
consoled her. “You know Granpère’s going to get rid of that beard
in about half an hour and M’am Pellicot—” He named Livia’s
deadliest rival from the two ladies’ mutual glory days, who had
boarded the wood-boat with her daughters just before the craft left
the wharves, “—isn’t going to wear those silly wings much longer
than that.” Agnes Pellicot and three of her daughters had elected
to come as Queen Titania and her Fairy Court, and looked like they
were regretting it. They’d spent the half-hour voyage unsnagging
their diaphanous veils from gunwales, turnbuckles, the swords of
the Three Musketeers (perfumer Crowdie Passebon and his cousins
Laurent and Damien), and each other, and the fragile gauze was
laddered with caught thread-ends.
    And in fact, reflected Rose as they walked up
the drive toward the lights and the music, other than her
mother-in-law and the Pellicot ladies, there were very few of New
Orleans’ libré demimonde in evidence. Though there was no
enmity between the “respectable” world of the city’s free colored
artisans and the plaçées – as there would be in the white world –
most of the plaçées wouldn’t be caught dead attending a ball given
by such dowdy personages as artisans and clerks of color, or even a
free colored planter. It was the whites who had the power and the
money. And –declared most of the plaçées – the style as well.
    No wonder the “uptown” blacks, the
Protestant, American blacks, call us stuck-up.
    Livia Levesque was putting in an appearance
only out of courtesy to her brother- and sister-in-law – who had,
Rose knew, objected strenuously when the late Christophe Levesque
had fallen madly in love with a former plaçée… though probably the
acquisition of a gown that would let her parade as the Virgin Queen
had something to do with her acceptance of the invitation. Agnes
Pellicot – as Livia had informed Rose the moment the Fairy Queen
had stepped on-board the wood-boat with her court – despite having
been left fairly well to pass when her last protector had paid her
off was on the hunt for a husband. “I could have told her not to
invest in that fool steamship company.” (Rose was fairly