Die Upon a Kiss by Barbara Hambly

for a quarter the price!
    Descriptive words meant little. You
didn’t
understand, unless and until you’d actually walked through the green magic of the Versailles gardens in morning fog, or come out from between those crowding soot-stained buildings to see Notre Dame’s square towers soaring up and up above you for that first time. Until you’d heard real opera sung by professionals in a good hall with a full orchestra, or rambled from bookshop to bookshop to bookshop along a cobbled street delirious with the knowledge that you could find anything you wanted
—
anything—
somewhere along the way.
    “One
should
know, Mr. Knight,” declared Madame Viellard. “That is precisely my point.” One side of the huge double parlor faced out onto a formal garden, and with the heat of the hundreds of candles—Trulove would never subject his guests to the smuts and stink of gas— long windows had been opened, admitting the green scent of wet foliage and the occasional rattle-winged palmetto-bug. The matron glared at her son as if demanding support, but Henri, consuming pâté in wretched silence, would not meet her eye.
    “It’s a dreadfully ill-regulated place anyway, Europe,” laughed Trulove, and he cast a fond glance toward Oona Flaherty, done up in lilac tulle and an astonishing three-lobed topknot bedecked with artificial grapes, clinging dutifully to the arm of one of Mr. Knight’s clerks. January smiled at the burly young man’s expression of grim concentration: it was one of the duties of a planter’s business agent to purchase and send upriver whatever the family might require in the way of tools or supplies: chinaware, spices, salt, coffee, or wine. Presumably a screen for an employer’s
amours—
Knight also handled the Truloves’ business—came under the same heading.
    “Nonsense,” retorted Mr. Knight. “You have been away from it for too long, sir. Since the Congress, Europe has been one of the most peaceful and best-ruled places on earth.”
    “If one equates good rule with oppression,” returned another voice, and January, eliding smoothly from schottische to waltz, broke off for a moment, turning his head, seeking the owner of the voice—
    Knowing absolutely that it had to be Belaggio’s former partner, Incantobelli.
    He could think of no other reason for a castrato—as the lead in
Giulio Cesare
had to be—to be in New Orleans.
    “True enough, one does not see the blood of kings washed down the gutters much anymore, nor hear the tocsins ringing through the night,” that soft, sweet alto continued. All January could glimpse was a flash of white hair, something he’d already deduced the man must have: even during the early days of his stay in Paris the fashion for those heartstopping, magical voices had been a thing of the past. For Incantobelli to have had enough of a career to make him an impresario now, he would have to be sixty at least.
    “Yet as the price for that peace was to hand the states of Italy and Germany around to the victors like petitsfours, to rule and tax as they choose and to infest with their secret police, one cannot but reflect that there must have been some middle ground.”
    A frilled ruffle of violin music at his back reminded January what he was there for: Hannibal covering up for the fact that the piano had fallen out of the waltz in mid-bar. He fumbled, pulling his mind back to the piece, annoyed and embarrassed, and when next he tried to listen for that curious combination of child’s voice and man’s, all he could hear was Jed Burton complaining to the banker Hubert Granville about a horse someone had tried to sell him.
    “What happened?” asked Hannibal quietly when the waltz curtsied to its end. “I thought your piano had broken a string.”
    January shook his head. “Incantobelli’s here.”
    “Half a reale says Belaggio calls him out,” replied Hannibal with barely a pause for breath.
    “Who’s Incantobelli?” demanded Jacques Bichet, shaking