A Free Man of Color

by Barbara Hambly

  “I didn’t speak to anyone. Maybe I should have.”

  “Don’t see why. You lookin’ for Miss Olympe for some reason?”

  January hesitated, conscious of the old wariness about showing things to white men, any white men. Then he nodded and felt in his coat pocket—not the pocket in which he kept his rosary. The gris-gris was still there, wrapped in his handkerchief. He brought it out carefully and unwrapped it behind his hand, lest the waiters see.

  “Madame Dreuze asked me at Angelique’s funeral Saturday to prove Madame Trepagier had her servant Judith plant this in Angelique’s mattress. A theory,” he added dryly, “with which I’m sure you’re already familiar.”

  Shaw rolled his eyes.

  “Not that it matters to you anymore,” added January, looking down as he made a business folding the handkerchief back around the little scrap of parchment and bones, so that the anger wouldn’t show in his eyes. With some effort he kept his voice level. “I don’t believe Madame Trepagier had a thing to do with either the charm or Angelique’s death, but considering the police have decided to drop the investigation, I thought I’d at least see who did want Angelique dead. Do you know if Madame Trepagier managed to keep Madame Dreuze from selling off the two slaves, by the way? Judith and Kessie? They were both Madame Trepagier’s to begin with.”

  It was something he knew he’d have to find out, and the thought of walking down to the brokers along Baronne Street turned him suddenly cold.

  He hoped the sick dread of it didn’t show in his face, under Shaw’s cool scrutiny, but he was afraid it did.

  “Morally they were,” said the policeman slowly. “But a woman’s property is her husband’s to dispose of, pretty much. Neither Arnaud Trepagier nor Angelique Crozat made a will, and he did deed both the cook and the maid to his light o’ love. Yes, Madame Trepagier swore out a writ to sue and get ’em back, but both of ’em was sold at the French Exchange yesterday mornin’. Madame Dreuze took maybe half what they was worth, to get ’em turned around quick.”

  January cursed, in Arabic, very quietly. For a time he watched as a gang of blacks passed by under guard toward the levee, chained neck to neck, men and women alike.

  Matthew Priest, for impudence … He couldn’t get the guard’s voice out of his head, or the slap of the leather on skin.

  Any man in the city could have his slave whipped in the Calabozo’s courtyard by the town hangman for twenty-five cents a stroke.

  On the far side of the Place des Armes, he could see the tall wooden platform of the town pillory. A man—colored, but still lighter than him—sat in it, wrists and ankles clamped between the dirty boards, while a gang of river rats spat tobacco and threw horse turds at him, their voices a dim demonic whooping through the noise of the wharves and the hoots of the steamboats. Sixteen years ago, the pillory was still a punishment that could be meted out to whites as well.

  A hundred and fifty dollars would get him to Paris. With his current small savings he could probably do it in three months.

  That thought helped him. He drew a deep breath and explained, “Not long before I left for Paris I learned that my sister—Olympe, Minou was only four—had entered the house of a woman called Marie Laveau, a voodooienne, and was learning her trade.” He slipped the gris-gris back into his pocket and looked at Shaw again.

  “I thought I might still be able to find her at the slave dances, and that she might be able to tell me something about who actually made the charm. A dried bat’s a death charm. Someone who wanted to scare her would have put brick dust, or a cross made of salt, on the back step, where she’d be sure to see it. Hiding a conjag like that where she’d sleep next to it every night without knowing it was there—that’s the act of someone who really wanted to do her harm.”

  The lanky Kentuckian slowly licked the remains of the praline from his bony fingers, along with a certain amount of clerical ink, before he replied.

  “Someone who sure wanted to do you harm, anyway. Given they was sicced on you by whoever planted that charm.… How’d they have known it was you?”

  January sniffed. “Everybody in New Orleans heard Madame Dreuze beg me to find her daughter’s killer,” he said. “And since no one else seems to be taking any further interest in the case …” he added pointedly.

  “Well, now, that’s changed again,” said Shaw. “As of this morning. That’s why I was over at your ma’s.”

  “So they changed their minds?” said January, anger prickling through him once again. “Decided that a woman doesn’t have to be white to merit the protection of the law?”

  “Let’s just say several folks on the city council have come to see the matter in a different light.” Shaw finished his coffee and set the cup on a nearby table, pale eyes thoughtful, watchful, under the overhang of brow. “Captain Tremouille spoke to me this mornin’ on the subject, and that’s why I’s at your ma’s—that’s why I came hotfoot down to the Calaboose, too, when I heard you was there. Seems they’re lookin’ for evidence to put the killin’ on you.”

  TWELVE

  “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—”

  “Nobody 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 plaçée—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 h
im 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 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’ 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 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 cluster 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 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.

  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?”

  “Nobody 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 nobody saw me come out. Everyone was watching Granger and Bouille make asses 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 Mass 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.”

  “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 nobody 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.

  “T
hat had nothing to do with you. And at least I had the … the warning of what to expect.” Her lips tightened again, pushing 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-class 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.…

  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 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.”