The Nubian's Curse by Barbara Hambly

Author:Barbara Hambly [Barbara Hambly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn House
Published: 2023-10-09T00:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

Twelfth Night approached. Planters and their families were coming back into town.

The girls in Rose’s school (and the three day-students) chipped together the slender allowances their fathers sent them, to purchase a Sheffield-plated coffee pot as a wedding gift, which they sneaked into January’s custody amid blood-curdling oaths of secrecy. He concealed it in one of the empty oil jars that nearly every New Orleans household had somewhere in their ground-level storerooms – concealed, too, his uneasiness as he observed his niece in the approach to the day.

Dominique took up a collection among her friends to purchase fifteen yards of French silk (At two dollars a yard! she cried in horror), and lace for collar and cuffs, a gift Zizi-Marie received with exclamations of delight which to January’s ear seemed just slightly forced. It was not lost on him that his niece ran quickly from the parlor, and when she came back, beaming, he saw the wet edges of her tignon, the spots of damp on her collar, that told him she’d splashed cold water on her face to hide evidence of tears. His old friend Catherine Clisson came one evening, while January was out playing for a subscription ball at the Theatre d’Orleans, to cut out the dress – an accomplishment beyond either Rose or Olympe – and a dozen of Zizi’s friends descended on the house for the next two evenings, twittering like a tree-full of birds, to help sew under the direction of Madame Clisson. January’s mother, the elegant Widow Levesque, put in an appearance on those occasions as well, to tell them they were all doing it well enough, but not what she was accustomed to.

She herself used the scraps of silk and lace to fashion a diadem of silk blossoms that reduced the girls – and her son – to speechlessness at its frail beauty.

Zizi-Marie wore bridal joy like a pair of too-tight shoes, and January could almost see invisible blood seeping out with every smiling step.

Twice Starke Hagan came to the house – snitching the time while on errands for his master, or bringing Zizi notes from young Michie Picard. He came early in the day, when Rose was instructing the girls, and January preparing for the lessons he himself taught, either to the girls at the school, or in the homes of his piano pupils on Rue Royale or Nyades Street or out in Faubourg St-Mary. The girls – Germaine and Cosette, Aglaëa and Alice and even the elegant Marie-Evaline – all thought Starke Hagan was the handsomest man they’d ever seen and teased Zizi (‘What, are you flirting with Starke?’ ‘We’re gonna tell Ti-Gall!’), as girls do, not knowing that he was more to her than a friend. They had not seen Zizi locked in the young man’s arms beside the kitchen shed of that tiny cottage of Bayou P’tit-Jean. Not seen the desperation of her grip, as if she would not – could never – let him go.

Chou-chou – at ten

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