Dominique was in hard labor all night. Weakening, exhausted, propped in the birthing-chair by her friends and her mother, she clung when she could to her brother's big hands. Only once, when she was laid back on her bed half-unconscious to rest between contractions, did she whisper Henri Viellard's name.
Shortly after dawn she gave birth to a son.
"I expect Henri will be along soon," remarked Hannibal. He had walked over from the Hotel St. Clair with a napkin full of crayfish patties left over from the buffet and a bottle and a half of champagne.
"Having gotten at least some musicians back, the company was determined to make the most of them.
The dancing broke up only a half hour ago."
"Throw those out." January regarded the patties with a dour eye. "They've been out all night and they're probably bad. It would serve Madame Viellard right if half her precious guests died of food poisoning.
And drink to Charles-Henri." He uncorked one of the champagne bottles, drank from it, and handed it to his friend. "Poor little boy."
"With a father as wealthy as Henri Viellard he's a not so-poor little boy." Hannibal followed January into the house, leaving the crayfish patties, napkin and all, on a corner of the porch for the cats. "He'll have an education-not that three years at Trinity ever did me noticeable good-and with luck a start in business.
My beautiful Madame Levesque... my exquisite Phlosine... Catherine, I kiss your hands and feet..:"
He made his way around the ladies in the room, pouring out champagne. "To Charles-Henri."
January crossed through the little dining room to his sister's bedroom, cleaned now of the smells of blood and childbirth. Sandalwood burned in a china brazier, to sweeten the air. Olympe had never come. There were a thousand plausible reasons, most probable of which being that others simply needed her care, but he felt the clutch of fear in his heart that he would return, and open her door, and find what he had found in Paris.
He pushed the thought away. Iph?g?nie and Madame Clisson had tidied the room, bathed Charles-Henri, made Dominique as comfortable as they could. She slept now, haloed in white lace and morning light, her son nestled against her side.
Poor little boy.
She had done by him the best she could, January reflected. She had borne him to a white man, and a wealthy one. Her son would, as Hannibal said, have an education, probably a good one. He would be fair-skinned-octoroon, according to the usage of the country, and with any luck featured more like his seven white great-grandparents than the single African woman who had been brought across the Atlantic in chains to be raped by her captors. That helped.
It helped, too, to be a boy, especially if one's father took care to see his son apprenticed to a trade or profession and not raised as a "gentleman" in the expectation of an inheritance that might never come.
H?lier the water seller was a pla??e's child, whose father had married a white lady and lost all interest in his Rampart Street mistress and her crippled son.
For girls it was another matter.
Too many among the respectable free colored looked askance at the daughters of the pla??es, assuming automatically they would be what their mothers had been. Rose Vitrac had told him about the pressure put on her pupil Genevi?ve by the girl's mother, for Genevi?ve-before the fever had wasted her-was a beautiful girl, seventeen and with the fair-skinned beauty so valued by the whites. Even for those girls who had the strength to battle their mothers' expectations, it was sometimes hard to marry among the free colored.
And if you wanted something different, something besides being a mistress or a wife?
An education is almost a guarantee of a solitary road, Rose Vitrac had said, propping her spectacles on her nose in the stifling dark of the attic room above the school she had fought so hard to establish. Yet there had been that bright triumph in her eye as she'd added, I've made it thus far.
On his way to the little railway station later that morning-accompanied by Hannibal, who was declaiming The Rape of the Lock to egrets, cattle, and passing market-women for reasons best known to himself-January turned his steps to the modest cottage on Music Street where Uncle Louis Corbier rented rooms to colored professionals for the season. The old man himself was still asleep, but January ascertained from a servant girl sweeping the porch of the boardinghouse next door