Good Man Friday by Barbara Hambly Read Free Book Online Page A

tears flood to his eyes, his throat close on the thanks he knew he should utter. Grief swallowed him, like a minor chord of the music that he had not yet heard.
    Olympe ran up, spat on Michie Janvier’s shoes, and ran from the room as if the devil were in pursuit.
    In the cramped dark of the cabin on the
Anne Marie
, January listened to the hellish roundelay of creaking ropes and squealing timbers, the muffled crash of tons of water against the frail wooden wall beside his cheek, and thought about St-Denis Janvier.
    Dominique’s father.
    His mother’s lover for nearly twenty years.
    Among the several properties Janvier had owned in New Orleans was a cottage on Rue Burgundy, at the sparsely-settled rear of the walled town. This he sold to a free colored labor-contractor named Trouvet, who in turn presented it to Livia, it being against the law for a white man to give property to a person of color. It was also against the law for a white person to marry any person of color, so all over the city, transactions like these went on between wealthy white gentlemen and the
librée
women who ‘placed’ themselves under their protection. Through similar channels, Janvier arranged for Livia to be paid an annuity and had her two children put in school, Olympe in the Ursuline Convent and Ben in the Acadèmie St Louis for Boys, meaning, Boys of Color.
    Ben – though wearing shoes and speaking proper French came difficult for him at first – understood and deeply appreciated these gifts. For her part, Livia Janvier – as she soon came to be called – regarded her new position as a job, and did it thoroughly. She took advice at once on proper dress and deportment, and spent thousands of dollars, over the years, on skin creams, hairdressers, a jaw-dropping wardrobe of gowns and shoes, and the finest in food, wines, and cigars for her lover when he came to visit. For the first few years he lived with her as husband and wife. When January was twelve, Janvier married the widow of a wealthy wine-merchant whose stock and business connections could be of use to the white Janvier family business, but continued to keep Livia as his mistress. This was the custom of the country. In that year of 1807 most of Livia’s neighbors on Rue Burgundy were also plaçées.
    When January was sixteen – in 1811 – Livia bore St-Denis Janvier a daughter, who from the moment she drew breath was the joy of his existence, the princess of his world: petted, indulged, beloved.
    It still astonished January that Dominique wasn’t spoiled as well. She easily could have been: she was the only one of Livia Janvier’s children upon whom Livia lavished attention and care. In the cabin’s pitchy blackness, January could have reached up and touched the ropes of her bunk a few feet above his face; once he heard Charmian wake with a soft cry of ‘
Maman
…’ and, a moment later, Minou’s voice, crooning a lullaby January remembered their mother singing to her, one evening when he’d been crossing the cottage yard in the dusk from his own room in the
garçonnière
above the kitchen.
    Had he put out his hand to the side of his bunk, here in the blind stuffiness that smelled of lamp oil and badly-cured hides in the cargo hold and twenty voyages’ worth of spilled chamber-pots, he would have touched the wall of trunks that filled most of the rest of the tiny chamber: petticoats, laces, pomades, ribbons, shawls.
    As far as he knew, his pretty sister had never once expressed a wish that hadn’t been granted.
    He wondered if she’d ever had any that she hadn’t dared to speak.
    For it had been understood by all, from her birth, that she was expected to become a white man’s mistress in her turn.
    They landed in Baltimore on Tuesday, the twentieth of March, and on Thursday took the steam-train to Washington City. As in Louisiana, the colored cars were a higgledy-piggledy selection