A Free Man of Color

by Barbara Hambly

  “Oh, my God.…” 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 plaçées, but given the circumstances …”

  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 to. Two of the fields are on their fourth cropping of sugar. They 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.”

  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. 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-fashioned 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 passed 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?”

  “Huh,” said the butler. “You coulda had three of that Sally gal and they wouldn’t have done the work Judith did, besides always complaining and carrying on, and like as not I’d have to go back and do it myself.”

  The butler spoke French well, but out of the presence of whites his speech slipped back into the looser grammar and colloquial expressions of the gombo patois. “When she was back doing sewing and laundry, you never heard nuthin’ but how the work was too hard and Ursula expected her to do more than her share, but the minute she had to do Judith’s work, all we got was how sewing and laundry was what she was really good at, and how could she do this other work? She was a thief, too. She helped herself to handkerchiefs and stockings and earbobs, just as if Madame Madeleine didn’t have enough stolen from her by that yeller hussy.”

  They passed through the brown earth beds and tasseled greenery of the kitchen garden to where the whitewashed brick service buildings stood. Beneath the second-floor gallery the kitchen’s shutters were thrown wide, the heat of its open stove warming the cool, mild afternoon air and the smell of red beans cooking sweetly pervasive even against the rich thickness of damp grass. Sheets, petticoats, stockings, tablecloths, and napkins flapped and billowed on clotheslines stret
ched among the willows that shaded the building’s rear, and under the gallery two crones were at work at a table, one of them stuffing a chicken, the other slicing a litter of squash, onions, and green apples.

  “Claire, get some tea and crullers for a white gentleman up at the house and some lemonade for Michie Janvier here,” said Louis. “You might spare us a cruller or two while you’re at it. It’s that buckra McGinty again,” he added, as the older and more bent of the two women got to her feet and moved into the kitchen with surprising briskness to shift the kettle of hot water more directly onto the big hearth’s fire.

  “Well, Albert said they didn’t find him Saturday when they went into town,” remarked the other woman, whose kilted-up skirts were liberally splotched with damp and smelled of soap. “And you know Madame Alicia—that’s Madame Madeleine’s aunt,” she explained in an aside to January, “wouldn’t deal with him for her, since he’s an American; why Michie Arnaud would deal with an American broker in the first place instead of a good Frenchman is more than I can tell.”

  “Because they played poker together.” Claire came out of the kitchen with a highly decorated papier-mâché tray in her hands. Two cups, saucers, a teapot, a pot of hot water, and a plate of small cakes were arranged with the neatness of flowers on its gleaming dark red surface. “And because he advanced him more money than the Frenchmen would, when he started selling things off to keep that trollop from looking at other men.”

  There was a brightly colored pottery cup of lemonade on the tea tray, too. This the old cook removed and set on the table and handed the tray to Louis, who carried it back along the brick-paved way toward the rear flight of stairs that led up onto the back gallery of the house.

  “Can I help you with any of that?” January nodded toward the pile of vegetables heaped on one end of the table. “There’s a word or two I still need to speak with Madame Trepagier after she’s done with this Monsieur McGinty, and I hate to sit idle while you ladies work.”

  His mother would have been shocked and dragged him off to sit at a distance under the trees rather than let him gossip with Negroes, but it crossed January’s mind that these two old women might know a good deal more about Angelique’s other flirtations than Madame Trepagier would.

  The offer to help worked like a charm. Literally like a charm, thought January, sitting down with the blue china bowl of lady peas Claire set in front of him to shell: If he’d gone to a voodooienne for a zinzin to make the cook talk, he couldn’t have gotten better results.

  “She was flirtin’ and carryin’ on, and sayin’ yes and no and maybe about other men, from the minute she met Michie Arnaud.” For hands lumpy and twisted with arthritis, the old cook’s fingers seemed to have lost none of their swiftness, mincing, chopping, sweeping aside small neat piles of finely cut peppers and onions as she spoke. “He never knew where she stood with him, so of course no one in his life ever knew where they stood either. That was how she liked it.”

  “How long ago did he meet Angelique?”

  “Five years,” said the cook. “He had another gal in town before that, name of Fleur. Pretty gal, real light like Angelique, and a little like her to look at—that height and shapely like her. But when he saw Angelique it was like he was hit by lightning. He followed her for a year, talkin’ with her mother and ignorin’ Madame Madeleine and Mamzelle Fleur both, and that Angelique would draw him on one day and fight with him the next, swearin’ she’d throw herself in the river ’fore she’d let the likes of him touch her … and then turn around all sweet and helpless and funny as a kitten, askin’ for earbobs or a pin, just to prove he cared. She’d dance with other men at the balls, then lure him on into fights with her about it. He slapped her around, but she knew how to use that, too.”

  January remembered the mockery in her voice, the way her body had swayed toward young Peralta’s even as she’d reviled him. Inviting a blow, which would then turn into a weapon in her hands. Remembered the way her eyes had gazed into his, daring, challenging, as she’d let another man lead her into the waltz.

  “And what happened to this Mademoiselle Fleur?” he asked. Claire looked questioningly up at Ursula the laundress, who had come and gone silently during this conversation, carrying away hot water from the boiler in the kitchen and returning to mix up a batch of biscuits.

  “She died, along of the fever in ’twenty-eight,” said the laundress.

  “ ’Twenty-eight it was,” affirmed the cook. “But even before that happened, Michie Arnaud had put her aside, paid her something and set Angelique up in a house. He bought her a different house, of course, than Mamzelle Fleur. Mamzelle Fleur’s mama saw to that. And the new house had to be better, more costive. There are those who said poor Mamzelle Fleur died of shame or grief or whatever Creole ladies die of when they go into a decline, but believe me, Michie Janvier, the fever’s always there waitin’.”

  With an emphatic nod she swept the vegetables she’d chopped into a porcelain dish.

  He removed the gris-gris from his pocket, unwrapped it from the handkerchief. “You know anyone who’d have paid to have this put under Angelique’s mattress?”

  The woman crossed herself and turned back to finish stitching up the chicken’s skin. “Anyone on this place would, if they could,” she said simply.

  “Sally, maybe?” There was something about the timing of her escape that snagged at the back of his mind.

  The cook thought about it, then shook her head. “Too lazy,” she said. “Too took up with her ‘gentleman friend,’ with his earbobs and his trinkets and his calico. I ain’t surprised she took off, me. We’re not so very far from town that she couldn’t have just walked in, leastwise to the new American houses on what used to be the Marigny land, and from there she could take that streetcar. Judith, more like. She hated Angelique even before Michie Arnaud gave her to her.”

  “That Angelique, she had the Devil’s temper.” Ursula came back drying her hands. “Judith would come back here with her back all in welts and cry with her head in Madame Madeleine’s lap, out here in the kitchen where Michie Arnaud couldn’t see. He caught ’em once and whipped the both on ’em.”

  The old woman sat down, glanced across at her still-older friend: wrinkled faces under frayed white tignons. Too old for work in the fields, even in these short-handed times. An inventory would list them as no value.

  “Thirteen years they was married,” said Ursula slowly. “Thirteen years … Michie Philippe, he was ten when he died, in the big yellow fever last summer. Little Mamzelle Alexandrine was six. Madame Madeleine, she took on bad after Mamzelle Alexandrine. But after Michie Arnaud took up with Angelique, there wasn’t no more children.”

  “There wasn’t no more children for long before that,” said Claire, her bright small black eyes cold with anger. “I doctored enough of her bruises, and you, Ursula, you washed enough blood out of her shifts and sheets and petticoats, to know that.”

  She turned back to January, toothless face like something carved of seamed black oak. “It got worse after he started up with Angelique, and worse after the children died, but you know he always did knock her around after he’d been at the rum. No wonder the poor woman got the look in her eyes of a cat in an alley, ’fraid to so much as take a piece of fish from your hand. No wonder she couldn’t come up with so much as a tear after the cholera squished him like a wrung-out rag. No wonder she turned down those cousins of his, Charles-Louis and Edgar and whoever all else, when they asked her to marry them, wanting to keep the land in the family—asked her at the wake after the funeral, if I know Creole families when there’s land to be had!”

  “It didn’t do her any good with the Trepagiers when she turned them down,” added Ursula grimly. “Nor will it do her good with them, or with Madame Alicia Picard, if they learn she’s tryin’ to raise money some other way to keep the place goin’, ’stead of marryin’ into their families like they think she oughta.”

  “Raise money how?” asked January curiously. “And I
thought Aunt Picard’s son was already married.”

  “Raise money I don’t know how,” replied the old laundress, rising to head back to the open brick chamber that shared a chimney with the kitchen. “But I can’t think of any other reason for her to slip out quiet like she done Thursday night, and take the carriage into town and have Albert let her off in the Place des Armes instead of at her Aunt Picard’s. And when she came back, in a hired hack with its lights put out like she didn’t want to wake no one up, and came slippin’ back into the house through the one door where the shutters hadn’t been put up, it was close on to eleven o’clock at night.”

  THIRTEEN

  “Why did you stay?”

  “I …” Her hand flinched and she wet her lips quickly with her tongue. In the shadows of the gallery she looked battered and brittle and he regretted asking her, regretted having to ask her.

  But if the police were talking about ropes and Benjamin January in the same breath these days, he didn’t have much choice.

  “What makes you think I …?” She collected herself quickly. “Stayed where?”

  “Three people in the police notes mention seeing a Mohican Princess in the Salle d’Orléans, upstairs, late, long after you said you’d gone.” No sense getting Claire and Ursula in trouble. In fact two of the people who’d seen her in the upstairs lobby had no idea when they had done so, and the third had mentioned that she’d been present during the first waltz.

  “Friday morning you told me you were home by eight-thirty, which would mean you had to have left almost immediately after talking to me. But you mentioned the white dress Angelique was wearing and the necklace of emeralds and pearls. So you stayed long enough to see her.”

  Her face did not change, but her breath quickened, and long lashes veiled her eyes. She said nothing, and he wondered if silence were the defense she’d tried to use against her husband.