A Free Man Of Color Part 11

"Me?" All January could think of was the half-dozen wounded men he'd spoken to after the battle at Chalmette, who said that when first hit by a musket ball, all they felt was a sort of a shock, like being pushed hard. They'd fallen down. Later, the pain came.

"That's right."

Fear. Disbelief, but fear, as if he'd just stepped off a cliff and was only realizing gradually that there wasn't a bottom.

"I didn't even know the woman."

"Well now," said Shaw mildly, "Captain Tremouille asked me to look into that."

"I didn't! Ask anyone! Galen Peralta-"

"n.o.body saw Galen Peralta go into that room," said Shaw, "except you, Maestro."

There was no bottom to the cliff. He was plunging through the dark. He'd die when he struck the bottom.

His mother hadn't come to the jail. Nor had his sister.

Only Shaw.

"Captain Tremouille's problem," said Shaw, judiciously turning the fragments of praline over in sticky fingers, "is that he has a colored gal-a placee-dead, and the man who looks likeliest to have done it is the son of one of the wealthiest planters in the district. Now, Captain Tremouille believes in justice-he does-but he also believes in keepin' his job, and that might not be so easy once the Peraltas and the Bringiers and the half-dozen other big Creole families that are all kissin' kin to each other start sayin' how let's not make a big hoo-rah and start arrestin' white folks over a colored gal who wasn't any better than she should have been.

"So I got to spend about two days chasin' down slaves sleepin' in attics over on Magazine Street."

"Go on," said January grimly.

"Well," Shaw went on, "yesterday-and maybe only gettin' a thousand dollars for two prime wenches had somethin' to do with it-Euphrasie Dreuze figured two could play that friends-an'-family game, and went to see Etienne Crozat, that was her gal's pa. I dunno what she told him, but this mornin' Captain Tremouille called me in first thing and says let's get this murder solved and get it solved quick, and wasn't there any man of her own color who hated her enough to want her dead? He's a powerful man, Crozat. He brokers the crops of half the planters on the river and there's three members of the city council who'll be livin' on beans an' rice if he calls in his paper on them or gives 'em a couple cents less per pound on next year's sugar."

"I didn't know her."

The gray eyes remained steadily on his. "You think that's gonna make any difference?"

He remembered, very suddenly, Shaw handing him his papers in the Cabildo courtyard, taking him out through the postern door. Looking around the courtyard while he, January, washed at the pump, watching like a man in Indian country.

The realization of what Shaw had rescued him from hit him like a wave of ice water.

And the fact that the American had gotten him out of there at all.

"You believe me."

"Well," said Shaw, "I think there's better candidates for the office. At least one who paid them bucks yesterday to rough you up, maybe. Fact remains that gal Clemence Drouet says you was so all-fired eager to see Miss Crozat, you just about shoved her out of the way goin' down that hall, and you was was the last person to see that gal alive." the last person to see that gal alive."

Voices raised, shouting, at a table nearby: Mayerling and his students. Though it was broad daylight they still wore fancy dress from some ball the previous night, those who had worn masks having pushed them up on their foreheads, their hair sticking out all around the sides. Two had half-risen from their places, dark-haired Creole youths with anemic mustaches. One of them was the blue-and-yellow Ivanhoe who'd driven the barouche to the duel.

Mayerling put out one big hand to barely brush the lad's parti-colored sleeve. "I beg of you, Anatole, mon fils," he said in his husky, boyish voice, "settle the question of Gaston's manners with words! Don't deprive me of a pupil. At any rate not until I get my diamond stickpin paid for."

There was laughter and the boy sat down quickly, laughing unwillingly too. "I'm glad you think I'm capable of it," he said, casting a withering glare at the haughty young man who had been the object of his rage.

"If you don't strengthen your redouble the pupil you will deprive me of is yourself. Unless Gaston goes on neglecting his footwork."

The haughty Gaston bristled, then laughed under his instructor's raised brow.

"Way those boys carry on you'd think they didn't have the cholera or the yellow fever waitin' on 'em, to help 'em to an early grave," murmured Shaw. "What kind of good's it gonna do their daddies, spendin' five thousand dollars educatin' 'em and sendin' 'em to Europe and all them places, to have 'em kill each other over the flowers on some gal's sleeve? An' An' pay that German boy to teach 'em how to do it." pay that German boy to teach 'em how to do it."

"I notice Peralta isn't among them," said January. "Was I the last person to see him him alive as well?" alive as well?"

Shaw's mouth twitched under a fungus of stubble. "Now, I did ask after Galen Peralta," he said. His gray eyes remained on the little cl.u.s.ter at the other table: Mayerling was currently demonstrating Italian defenses with a broomstraw. "His daddy tells me he's gone down the country, to their place out Bayou Chien Mort. He'll be back Tuesday next, which Captain Tremouille says is plenty of time to ask him where he went and what he did after his little spat with Miss Crozat."

"Tuesday next?" said January. "He left before said January. "He left before Mardi Gras Mardi Gras?"

"Somethin' of the kind occurred to me." Shaw produced a dirty hank of tobacco from his coat pocket, picked a fragment of lint off it, then glanced at a couple of clerks gossiping in French at the next table over beignets and coffee and put the quid away. "But he was sweet on that gal. Crazy sweet, by all everyone says. May be he just couldn't stay in town."

January looked down at his hands, remembering how the sight of drifted leaves against a curbstone in the rain, the sound of a shutter creaking in the wind, had wrung his heart with pain that he did not think himself capable of bearing. He had packed all Ayasha's dresses, her shoes, her jewelry in her ill-cured leather trunk, and dropped it off the bridge into the Seine, lest even selling the dresses or giving them away to the poor might cause him to encounter some woman wearing one in the market and rip loose all the careful healing of his pain.

"But Bayou Chien Mort? That's forty miles away."

Shaw said nothing. After a moment, January went on, "I came back to this city-where I can't even walk in the streets without a white man's permission to do so-because it was home. Because...because there was nowhere else for me to go. But the place out at Bayou Chien Mort is one of Peralta's lesser plantations. It's run by an overseer."

"How you know this?"

"My mother," said January. "My mother knows everything. The place Galen would call home would be Alhambra, on the lake."

"Would it, now?" Shaw didn't sound particularly surprised, or even terribly interested. But January was beginning to realize that for a man who never sounded interested in anything, the lieutenant had taken considerable pains that morning to make sure he, January, was out of the Cabildo's cells before his superiors realized they didn't even need to gather evidence to take him in.

"He may have his reasons," Shaw went on after a moment. "I don't know how well you got on with your daddy, but personally, if I'd just lost a girl I cared about-and even a kid's stupid puppy love is pretty large to the kid-I'd want to be a lot farther from mine than a couple hours' ride out Bayou Saint John."

And even if he had killed the girl himself, thought January, that might still hold true.

At the same time he recalled the blood under Angelique's nails.

He thought, She marked him. She marked him.

And felt his heart beat quicker.

"And in the meantime," he said slowly, "you're to solve the murder as quick as you can. Before Tuesday next, presumably?"

"I suspect that's the idea. Now, they got no evidence against you 'cept that you was the last person to see Miss Crozat alive. And that you left your job at the piano on purpose right then so's you could see her alone. Half a dozen people saw you go after her."

"I was only away from the ballroom for...what? Five minutes?"

"n.o.body saw you come out. I asked pretty careful about that."

Even during their conversation in the parlor, thought January, he'd been a suspect.

"Of course n.o.body saw me come out. Everyone was watching Granger and Bouille make a.s.ses of themselves. Hannibal Sefton saw me leave and spoke to me when I returned. He's the fiddler."

"White feller with the cough?"

January nodded. "He lives in the attic over Maggie Dix's place on Perdidio Street. He's the best I've ever heard, here or in Paris or anywhere, but he's a consumptive and lives on opium, so he can't teach or make much of a living."

"He surely was lit up like a High Ma.s.s when I talked to him. I'm not sayin' a man can't judge the time of day when he's that jug bit, but they ain't gonna like that in court, if so be it comes to that."

There was a burst of laughter around Mayerling's table, where the sword master had disarmed one of his combative students with a spoon. January remembered that Arnaud Trepagier, too, had been one of Mayerling's pupils.

He turned completely in his chair, fully facing the American for the first time. "I'm glad you're still using that word if. if."

"I mean to go on usin' it as long as I can," said Shaw gently. "Whole thing smells a little high to me, and higher yet now that somebody's been interferin' with you. Fifteen years ago I'd have said, Don't worry, there's no evidence and you didn't know that woman from Eve's hairdresser. Fifteen years from now I might be sayin', Don't worry, they ain't gonna hang n.o.body for a colored gal's death, free or not free. Tell you the truth, Maestro, I don't know what to say now."

"Well," said January, "I know what to say." He held out his hand. "Thank you."

Shaw hesitated a moment before taking it, then did so. His hand was large, still callused from plow and ax. "It's my job," he said. "And it'll be my job to arrest you, too, if 'n I don't find anybody else. The person who asked you to take a message to Miss Crozat-you want to tell me about them?"

January hesitated, then said, "Not just yet."

Madame Trepagier met him on the gallery, and even at a distance of several yards, as she emerged from the blue shadows of the house, he could see the marks of sleepless tension in her pale face.

"I wanted to thank you for your note," she said, holding out her black-mitted hand for the briefest of contacts permitted by politeness. "It was good of you."

"Not that it did you any good," said January bitterly.

"That had nothing to do with you. And at least I had the...the warning of what to expect." Her lips tightened again, pus.h.i.+ng down anger that ladylike Creole girls were taught never to express. "Women so frequently turn out like their mothers I don't know why I was even surprised. But that may be unjust."

"If it is," said January, "there's things going on I never heard about."

And some of the tension relaxed from her face in a quick laugh. "And now I suppose I'll have to endure the...the humiliation of seeing my jewelry and things my mother wore, and my grandmother, on cheap little chacas and-" She caught herself just fractionally there, and changed the pairing with low-cla.s.s Creole shopgirls to "American wives." As if through his skin, January knew she had originally started to say, on cheap little chacas and colored hussies.... on cheap little chacas and colored hussies....

She went on quickly, "And of course Aunt Picard's going to think I sold them myself and offer to buy them back for me."

No, thought January. She wouldn't have told her family about her husband's gifts to his mistress. Her pride was too great.

That pride was now in the quick little shake of her head, as if the matter were more one of annoyance than anything else, and the way she put aside her own concerns in a warm smile. "With what can I help you, Monsieur Janvier? Won't you have a seat?"

She took one of the wickerwork chairs; January took the other. Below them in the kitchen garden, the old slave was back weeding peas, moving more slowly than ever among the pale, velvety green of the leaves.

"Two things," said January. "First, I'd like your permission to tell the police that the message I was asked to deliver to Mademoiselle Crozat came from you."

Wariness sprang into her haunted brown eyes. Wariness and fear. She said nothing, but her no no was hard and sharp in the way her back tensed, and her hands flinched in her lap. was hard and sharp in the way her back tensed, and her hands flinched in her lap.

Slowly, he explained, "I was the last person to see Mademoiselle Crozat alive, Madame. Because I saw her in private, to give her the message from you. Now I've been told that there are some people who are trying to prove that I did the murder."

"Oh, my G.o.d...." Her brown eyes were huge, shaken and shocked and-why that expression of being backed into a corner?-of...calculation? "I'm so sorry."

"Now, I have no idea what you would have said to her at that meeting, and since Mademoiselle Crozat is dead and the jewelry's gone, you can tell the police anything you want, if they come and speak with you on this. But I need to tell them something."

For a long time she said nothing, her pale mouth perfectly still and her eyes the eyes of a card player swiftly arranging suits to see what can be used and how. Then she looked up at him and said, a little breathlessly, "Yes, yes of course.... Thank you for...for asking me."

For warning me.

Why fear?

"Will your family be so hard on you, if they learn you tried to see her? I know decent women don't speak to placees, but given the circ.u.mstances..."

She turned her face away quickly, but not so quickly that he didn't see the fury and disgust that flared her nostrils and brought spots of color to her cheekbones as if she'd been struck.

"I'm sorry," he said. "That isn't my business."

She shook her head. "No, it isn't that. It's just that...To have the protection of your family there are certain prices you have to pay, if you're a woman. And if you don't pay them..."

A hesitation, in which the silence of the undermanned plantation seemed to ring uncomfortably loud. January realized what he had been missing, what he had been listening for, all this time: The voices of children beyond the trees where the cabins would lie, the clink of the plantation forge.

She turned back to him, with the small, simple gesture of the child he had taught. "I wasn't exaggerating when I said I had to get my jewelry back from Angelique Crozat. I had had to. Two of the fields are on their fourth cropping of sugar. They to. Two of the fields are on their fourth cropping of sugar. They must must be replanted, and I have neither money to rent nor to buy the hands we need. Arnaud sold three of our workers in October. To pay for a Christmas ball, he said, but I think some of it went to buy gifts for that woman and her mother, because he suspected-feared-that Mademoiselle Crozat was looking elsewhere. He pledged three more of our hands to cover the costs of renting enough labor to sugar off. I only learned this last Tuesday. I wrote to her-I'd written before-and received no reply." be replanted, and I have neither money to rent nor to buy the hands we need. Arnaud sold three of our workers in October. To pay for a Christmas ball, he said, but I think some of it went to buy gifts for that woman and her mother, because he suspected-feared-that Mademoiselle Crozat was looking elsewhere. He pledged three more of our hands to cover the costs of renting enough labor to sugar off. I only learned this last Tuesday. I wrote to her-I'd written before-and received no reply."

January remembered the autumn when three of the men on Bellefleur had died of pneumonia, when the owner hadn't had the money to buy more before sugaring time. The labor had fallen hard on everyone. Though only seven, he'd been sent out to the fields with the men, and he bore far in the back of his dreams the recollection of what it was like to be too exhausted physically to walk back from the fields. One of the men had carried him in. He'd come down sick-very sick-after the sugaring himself.

"There's no way you can get your creditor to defer until after you replant?"

"I'm seeing what I can do about that." Her voice had the unnatural steadiness of one concentrating on balancing an impossibly unwieldy load. "But of course everyone else is planting at this time of year. And to make matters worse the girl Sally, the housemaid, has disappeared. She probably feared I'd send her out to the fields as well, which in fact I might have to do.

"I'm sorry," she added. "This isn't any of your concern. Of course you may tell the police the message came from me, though I...Would it be too much to ask if you would not tell them where and when I charged you with that message? Could you for instance tell them that since I...since you had been my...my teacher, and I knew you would be at the Blue Ribbon Ball ...?"

"Of course," said January.

"It isn't as if I was there long or went into the ballroom or saw anyone or spoke to anyone," she went on quickly. "It...It was foolish of me to try what I did, and I will always be grateful to you for saving me from...from the consequences of that. Thank you. Thank you so much."

She did not meet his eyes. "You said there were two things you wanted to ask?"

"Madame Madeleine?" The door to the house opened, and the old butler, Louis, stood framed in the high opening. Behind him, January could see the central parlor, a medium-size room, beautiful in its simplicity, daffodil-yellow walls and a fireplace mantel of plain bleached pine. The doors onto the front gallery stood open, and a man stood just within them. Though he was attired as a gentleman in a sage-green long-tailed coat and dove-colored trousers, something about him shouted American. American. The square face, with red hair and thick lips framed by a beard the color of rust, was not a Creole face. The eyes-or more properly the way he looked out of those eyes, the set of his head as he sized up the price of the simple curtains and old-fas.h.i.+oned six-octave pianoforte-were not Creole eyes. The square face, with red hair and thick lips framed by a beard the color of rust, was not a Creole face. The eyes-or more properly the way he looked out of those eyes, the set of his head as he sized up the price of the simple curtains and old-fas.h.i.+oned six-octave pianoforte-were not Creole eyes.

Certainly the way he leaned back through the front doors to spit tobacco on the gallery was nothing that any Creole, from the highest aristocrat to the lowest chacalata or catchoupine, would have done.

"Monsieur McGinty's here about the hands."

Madame Trepagier hesitated, torn between anxiety and good manners. January picked up his tall beaver hat from the gallery rail and said, "I'll just walk on over to the kitchen, if it's all right with you, Madame. There is another thing I wanted to ask, if you're still willing to spare me the time."

"Thank you." Had he laid a hand on her arm, he thought, he would have felt her tremble. But when she turned to face the house, to meet the man McGinty's eyes through the doorway, he saw nothing but the same bitter steeliness in her face that she had had the night of the quadroon ball.

"That McGinty might at least have the decency to let her alone about Michie Arnaud's debts till after planting time," grumbled Louis, leading the way down the square-turn steps and across the brick pavement that lay beneath the gallery at the rear of the house. Even in wintertime, the bricks down here were green with moss. It would be the only place bearable for work in the summer heat.

The dining room behind them was shuttered. With the master of the house newly dead and its mistress in the first deeps of mourning, there would be little entertaining.

"Specially now. Seems like troubles don't come one at a time anymore. That Sally gal runnin' off just makes more work for everybody, not that she was any use as a maid to begin with."

January remembered the narrow, sullen-pretty face of the maid who'd pa.s.sed him three days ago on the gallery, the whip-slim body and the sulky way she walked. A girl full of resentments, he thought, chief of which was probably the unspoken one that she could be sold or rented or given away, as her predecessor had been.

And of course as butler, Louis would have charge of the maids and be responsible for their work.

"She was the one came after Judith, wasn't she?"