A Free Man of Color

by Barbara Hambly

  But if Angelique had told him to take her a warning about it last night, it was clear she hadn’t exercised this spiteful power.

  The woman before him shook her head a little and let the anger pass. “It wasn’t necessary for you to come all the way out here, you know.”

  Something about the way that she sat, about that strained calm, made him say, “You heard she’s dead.”

  The big hands flinched in her lap, but her eyes were wary rather than surprised. She had, he thought, the look of a woman debating how much she can say and be believed; then she crossed herself. “Yes, I heard that.”

  From the woman who brought in her washing water that morning, thought January. Or the cook, when she went out to distribute stores for the day. Whites didn’t understand how news traveled so quickly, being too well-bred to be seen prying. Having set themselves up as gods and loudly established their own importance, they never ceased to be surprised that those whose lives might be affected by their doings kept up on them with the interest they themselves accorded only to characters in Balzac’s novels.

  “You heard what happened?”

  Her hands, resting in her lap again, shivered. “Only that she was … was strangled. At the ballroom.” She glanced quickly across at him. “The police … Did they make any arrest? Or say if they knew who it might be? Or what time it happened?”

  Her voice had the flat, tinny note of assumed casualness, a serious quest for information masquerading as gossip. Time? thought January. But as he studied her face she got quickly to her feet and walked to the gallery railing, watching an old man planting something in the garden among the willows as if the sight of him dipping into his sack of seed, then carefully dibbling with a little water from his gourd, were a matter of deepest importance.

  “Did they say what will happen to her things?” she asked, without turning her head.

  January stood too. “I expect her mother will keep them.”

  She looked around at that, startled, and he saw the brown eyes widen with surprise. Then she shook her head, half laughing at herself, though without much mirth. When she spoke, her voice was a little more normal. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that … All these years I’ve thought of her as some kind of … of a witch, or harpy. I never even thought she might have a mother, though of course she must. It’s just …” She pushed at her hair, as if putting aside tendrils of it that fell onto her forehead, a gesture of habit. He saw there were tears in her eyes.

  He had been her teacher when she was a child, and something of that bond still existed. It was that which let him say, “He gave her things belonging to you, didn’t he?”

  She averted her face again, and nodded. He could almost feel the heat of her shame. “Jewelry, mostly,” she said in a stifled voice. “Things he’d bought for me when we were first married. Household things, crystal and linens. A horse and chaise, even though it wasn’t legal for her to drive one. Dresses. That white dress she was wearing was mine. I don’t know if men feel this way, but if I make a dress for myself it’s … it’s a part of me. That sounds so foolish to say out loud, and my old Mother Superior at school would tell me it’s tying myself to things of this world, but … When I pick out a silk for myself and a trim, and linen to line it with—when I shape it to my body, wear it, make it mine … And then to have him give it to her …”

  She drew a shaky breath. “That sounds so grasping. And so petty.” They had the ring of words she’d taught herself with great effort to say. “I don’t know if you can understand.” She faced him, folded her big hands before those leopard-black skirts.

  He had seen the way women dealt with Ayasha when they ordered frocks and gowns, when they came for fittings, and watched what they had asked for as it was called into being. “I understand.”

  “I think that dress made me angriest. Even angrier than the jewelry. But some of the things—my things—he gave her were quite valuable. The baroque pearls and emeralds she was wearing were very old, and he had no right to take them.…”

  She paused, fighting with another surge of anger, then shook her head. “Except of course that a husband has the right to all his wife’s things.”

  “Not legally,” said January. “According to law, in territory that used to be Spanish—”

  “Monsieur Janvier,” said Madeleine Trepagier softly, “when it’s only a man and a woman alone in a house miles from town, he has the right to whatever of hers he wishes to take.” The soft eyes burned suddenly strange and old. “Those emeralds were my grandmother’s. They were practically the only thing she brought with her from Haiti. I wore them at our wedding. I never liked them—there was supposed to be a curse on them—but I wanted them back. I needed them back. That’s why I had to speak to her.”

  “Your husband died in debt.” Recollections of his mother’s scattergun gossip slipped into place.

  She nodded. It was not something she would have spoken of to someone who had not been a teacher and a friend of her childhood.

  “It must have been bad,” he said softly, “for you to go to that risk to get your jewels back. Do you have children?”

  “None living.” She sighed a little and looked down at her hands where they rested on the cypress railing of the gallery. He saw she hadn’t resumed the wedding band she’d put off last night. “If I lose this place,” she said, “I’m not sure what I’m going to do.”

  In a way, January knew, children would have made it easier. No Creole would turn grandchildren out to starve. His mother had written him of the murderous epidemic last summer, and he wondered if that had taken some or all. Louisiana was not a healthy country for whites.

  “You have family yourself?” He recalled dimly that the Dubonnets had come up en masse from Santo Domingo a generation ago, but could not remember whether René Dubonnet had had more than the single daughter.

  She hesitated infinitesimally, then nodded again.

  A governess to nieces and nephews, he thought. Or a companion to an aunt. Or just a widowed cousin, taken into the household and relegated to sharing some daughter’s room and bed in the back of the house, when she had run a plantation and been mistress of a household of a dozen servants.

  “There any chance of help from your husband’s family?”

  “No.”

  By the way she spoke the word, between her teeth, January knew that was the end of the topic.

  She drew breath and straightened her back, looking into his face. “You said there are … rules … about that world, customs I don’t know. I know that’s true. We’re all taught not to look, not to think about things. And you’re right. I should have known better than to try to find her at the ball.” Against the pallor of her face her eyebrows were two dark slashes, spots of color burning in her cheeks. What had it cost her, he wondered, to go seeking a woman she hated that much? To take that kind of risk?

  Why was she so concerned about what time Angelique had died?

  “Is there some sort of rule against me going to speak to her mother? Surely there wouldn’t be gossip if I went to pay my respects?”

  “No,” said January, curious and troubled at once. “It isn’t usual, but as long as you go quietly, veiled, there shouldn’t be talk.”

  “Oh, of course.” Her brows drew down with quick sympathy. “I’m sure the last thing the poor woman needs is … is some kind of lady of the manor descending on her. And the less talk there is, the better.” She moved toward the parlor doors in a rustle of starched muslin petticoats, then paused within them. For a woman of her opulent figure she moved lightly, like a fleeing girl.

  “Is she—Madame … Crozat?”

  “Dreuze,” said January. “Euphrasie Dreuze. She went by both. Plaçées sometimes do.” Dominique was still called Janvier, but his mother had been called that, too, for the man who had bought her and freed her.

  “I see. I … didn’t know how that was … dealt with. Would she see me? Would it be better for me to wait a few days? I’m sorry to ask, but y
ou know the family and the custom. I don’t.”

  He remembered the despairing screams from the parlor where Euphrasie Dreuze’s friends had taken her, and Hannibal’s tale about the son who had died. Remembered Xavier Peralta crossing the crowded ballroom full of angrily murmuring men, a cup of coffee carefully balanced in his hand, and how the gaslight had spangled the jewel-covered tignon as the woman had caught the boy Galen’s sleeve, babbling to him in panic of her daughter’s love.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I knew Madame Dreuze when Angelique was a little girl. She worshiped her then, treated her like a porcelain doll. But women sometimes change when their daughters grow.”

  His own mother had. Nothing had been too good for Dominique: Every bump and scratch attended by a doctor, every garment embroidered and tucked and smocked with the most delicate of stitches, every toy and novelty that came into port purchased for the little girl’s delight. Three months ago, just after his return from Paris, he’d come down to breakfast in the kitchen to the news that Minou had contracted bronchitis—“She’s always down with it, since she had it back in ’30” had been his mother’s only comment as she casually turned the pages of the Bee. It had been January, not their mother, who’d gone over to make sure his sister had everything she needed.

  Certainly his mother had never wasted tears over him. The news of Ayasha’s death she greeted with perfunctory sympathy but nothing more. There were days when he barely saw her, save in passing when he had a student in the parlor. But then, he’d never had the impression his mother was terribly interested in him and his doings.

  Because he had three black grandparents instead of three white ones?

  It was with Dominique—who had been only a tiny child when he’d left—that he had wept for the loss of his wife.

  “A moment.” Madame Trepagier vanished into the shadows of the house. January returned to his chair. From the tall doorway of one of the side rooms a girl emerged, rail slim and ferret faced, African dark, wearing the black of home-dyed mourning but walking with a lazy jauntiness that indicated no great sense of loss. She sized up his clothing, his mended kid gloves, the horse tethered beneath the willows in the yard, and the fact that he was sitting there in a chair meant for guests, with a kind of insolent wisdom, then tossed her head a little and passed on down the steps, silent as slaves must be in the presence of their betters.

  And indeed, he could scarcely imagine Angelique Crozat or her mother or his own mother, who had been a slave herself, speaking to the woman.

  The woman was a slave, and black.

  He was free, and colored, though his skin was as dark as hers.

  He watched the slim figure cross through the garden toward the kitchen, like a crow against the green of the grass, saw her ignore the old man tending to the planting, and noted the haughty tilt of shoulder and hip as she passed some words with the cook. Then she went on toward the laundry, and January saw the cook and another old woman speak quietly. Knowing the opinions his mother’s cook Bella traded with the cook of the woman next door, he could guess exactly what they said.

  Not something he’d want said about him.

  “I’ve written a note for Madame Dreuze.”

  He rose quickly. Madame Trepagier stood in the doorway, a sealed envelope in her hand. “Would you be so good as to give it to her? I’m sorry.” She smiled, her nervousness, her defenses, falling away. For a moment it was the warm smile of the child he had taught, sitting in her white dress at the piano—the sunny, half-apologetic smile of a child whose playing had contained such dreadful passion, such adult ferocity. He still wondered at the source of that glory and rage.

  “I always seem to be making you a messenger. I do apologize.”

  “Madame Trepagier.” He took the message and tucked it into a pocket, then bowed over her hand. “I’m a little old to be cast as winged Mercury, but I’m honored to serve you nevertheless.”

  “After two years of being Apollo,” she said smiling, “it makes a change.”

  He recognized the allusion, and smiled. In addition to being the god of music, Apollo was the lord of healing. “Did you keep up with it?” he asked, as he moved toward the steps. “The music?”

  She nodded, her smile gentle again, secret and warm. “It was like knowing how to swim,” she said. “I thought of you many times, when the water was deep. You did save my life.”

  And turning, she went back into the house, leaving him stunned upon the steps.

  SEVEN

  A square-featured woman in the faded calico of a servant answered January’s knock at the bright pink cottage on Rue des Ursulines. The jalousies were closed over the tall French windows and a muted babble came from the dimness beyond her shoulder. There was a smell of patchouli and a stronger one of coffee.

  “You lookin’ for your ma, Michie Janvier?” she asked. “She in the back with Madame Phrasie.” She curtsied as January regarded her in surprise.

  “I’m looking for Madame Euphrasie, mostly,” he said, as the woman stood aside to admit him. She had the smoother skin and unknotted hands of a longtime house servant. At first glance, in the shadows under the abatvent, he would have put her near his own forty years, but as his eyes adjusted to the dim room he realized she couldn’t be more than twenty-five. “How is she?”

  The woman hesitated, then said, “She bearin’ up.” There was a world of weighted words and unspoken thought in that short phrase.

  “Bearin’ up, huh,” said Agnes Pellicot shortly, from the green brocaded settee she shared with two other beautifully dressed, still-handsome women with fans of painted silk in their hands. The older, Catherine Clisson, had been three years ahead of January in Herr Kovald’s music classes, a slim girl with high cheekbones for whom, at the time, he had nursed a sentimental and hopeless love. The younger, rounded and pretty in an exquisite rose-and-white striped dress, was Odile Gignac, his mother’s dressmaker.

  “Bearin’ up enough to collect every earbob and pin, and cut the silver buttons off every one of her daughter’s dresses, is how she’s bearin’ up.”

  “A woman can grieve her daughter and still fear for her own future, Agnes,” said Clisson gently. “You know she had nothing beyond what Angelique sent her every month.”

  “God knows it was Angelique who paid her bills, more times than not,” added Gignac, crossing herself. The daughter of respectable free colored parents, she was one of the small minority of sang melés who accepted the plaçées on their own terms as friends as well as customers, though it was understood they did not speak on the public streets. “And her gambling debts, from what I hear. It’s that poor child Clemence that fainted dead away when she came here this morning and heard.”

  Agnes only sniffed. January deduced the matter of young Peralta still rankled.

  “Judith,” Clisson went on in her soft voice, “please be so good as to fetch Monsieur Janvier some coffee. Or should I say Ben?” she added, her dark eyes sparkling with a friendship she’d never shown him when they were young. “I’ve missed you twice by your mama’s. It’s good to catch up with you at last.”

  January smiled, too. He’d been fourteen when she, far too proud of her own position to take the slightest notice of a gawky coal-black lout such as he had been, had become the mistress of a middle-aged Creole with a plantation on Lake Pontchartrain. January’s adoration had lasted for years. On the nights when Monsieur Motet came into town he had been drawn to loiter on the opposite banquette of her cottage on Rue des Ramparts in an agony of jealous speculation, though they had not spoken since she had left Herr Kovald’s class.

  Funny, what time did.

  The memory brought back all those other memories. He’d played with Odile and her brother as children, though her parents had looked askance at a plaçée’s son, and had sent her to a Select Academy for Colored Females at an early age. A queer sense of pain touched him, which he recognized as a kind of pins-and-needles of the heart: feeling coming back into memories long buried and numb.
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  This city had been his home. These people had been his home.

  In turning his back on Froissart and Richelieu, and on the thick heat of the fever summers, he had turned his back on them as well.

  “I’d forgotten how beautifully you played.” Clisson laid down her fan, French lace on sandalwood sticks, costly and new. “I didn’t even think about it during the dancing, but afterward, when you were playing to keep everyone amused … The Rossini almost made me cry. I was sorry to hear about your wife.”

  He smiled down at her from his height. “I didn’t think you even noticed how I played when we had class together,” he said, with the rancorless amusement of shared old times. “You’re still with Monsieur Motet?”

  Her smile was no more than the tucking back of the corners of her lips, the velvet warming of her eyes. It told him everything even before she nodded, and he felt for her a rush of gladness. “Are you taking students, now you’re back?” she asked. She spoke almost as if it had been a given, a foregone conclusion for all those years, that he would eventually return. He wanted to tell her he hadn’t intended to return at all.

  “I think your mama said you were. My daughter Isabel’s eight. I’ve taught her a little, but it’s time she had a good teacher.”

  January was opening his mouth to reply when a woman’s voice cried out in the rear of the house, a sharp gasp, rising to a shriek. “There it is! There! I told you! Oh God—”

  A break, a murmur, January and Clisson and Gignac all on their feet in the sliding doorway that separated the darkened parlor from the still-darker bedchamber. “Oh, my child! Oh, my poor little one! Murder! Oh God, murder—”

  “What the—” began January.

  “Of course it was murder,” said Clisson, puzzled. “Nobody ever said it wasn’t.”

  The door to the bedroom sliced open and Euphrasie Dreuze stumbled through, clutching something in her fat jeweled hand. “My God, my God, look!” she sobbed at the top of her lungs. “My poor little girl was hexed to death! Someone hid this in her mattress; she was sleeping next to this all along! It drew death down on her! It drew death!”