A Free Man of Color

by Barbara Hambly

  There was no sound but Peralta’s breathing and January’s own.

  “He’s the only witness to that fact,” January went on. “But you probably already know that.”

  “No.” The old man moved his shoulders, shifted his weight from one hip to the other, breaking the hard watchfulness. “No, I didn’t. I did not discuss the matter at any great length with the police. My son …” He fell silent a very long time. “My son said nothing about you.”

  “And did your friend Captain Tremouille tell you that I was the only witness to the fact that your son came into the room when he did? After everyone saw him storm off down the stairs following his quarrel with Angelique?” January kept his eyes on the white man’s left shoulder, knowing the rage in them showed even so but almost too angry to care.

  “I don’t have to listen to this.” Peralta turned away.

  “No, you don’t,” said January. “Because you’ve got a gun and I’m chained up. You don’t have to listen to anything.”

  It stopped him. January guessed Peralta wouldn’t have stopped if he’d said, Because you’re white and I’m black. Might very well have struck him, in fact. In a sense, it amounted to the same thing, though of course a white man wouldn’t see it that way. But as he’d known in the ballroom on the night of Bouille’s challenge to William Granger, Peralta considered himself a gentleman, a man of old-fashioned honor. He was a man who prided himself on knowing the rules, on not being like the Americans.

  “I told my friends where I was coming,” said January. He made a subconscious move to fold his arms, and stopped himself from taking a stance too threatening, too challenging, too “uppity.” His very size, he knew, was threat enough, and he was treading an extremely narrow road here. “If I’m not back, they’ll take what I’ve written to the police. Not that it’ll do me a flyspeck of good if you’ve decided a rich man can kill a poor one who’s in his way, but I respect the truth and want it told.”

  Peralta turned slowly back. The implication of a lie touched him to the quick. He opened his mouth, within the rain-beaded circle of white mustache, but couldn’t refute the words. Still, as a man of honor, a Creole gentleman of the old traditions, he couldn’t let the words go unanswered. And gentlemen told the truth.

  “He’s my son,” he said at last. “And I’m not going to kill you.”

  The cold clutch of panic tightened around January’s heart, knowing what that probably meant. But he said steadily, “My friends will still come looking.”

  Who? he thought bitterly. Livia? Dominique?

  “Unless you plan to sell me out of the state.”

  “No,” said Peralta simply. He drew a deep breath, and met January’s gaze again. “I know it’s … hard. But I don’t see what else I can do. Uhrquahr!”

  The door opened fast. Uhrquahr came in with his gun trained; January reckoned Peralta was lucky his man hadn’t stepped in shooting and killed them both before his eyes adjusted to the shadows.

  “Put him in the jail,” said Peralta quietly. “We’ll be keeping him here for a few days.”

  • • •

  Mambo Susu, the oldest woman on Bellefleur when January was growing up, had always said that it was bad luck to build a house out of brick and stone, things that had no spirit. It had made sense at the time, since all the slave cabins were made of wood and the inhabitants of the big house seemed to be as crazy and alien as living in a house without spirit would make them.

  Later, watching the hard rains and hurricane winds from the windows of his mother’s house on Rue Burgundy, January had remembered those dripping nights and the steady, hacking coughs most of the hands developed in time and revised his opinion.

  In any case the slave jail on Chien Mort was built out of brick.

  The bars of the single high window were wood rather than expensive iron, but the knowledge did January little good, as he was shackled to the rear wall with a short chain around his right wrist. It could have been worse, he reflected. Chronic runaways were frequently chained lying on their backs, butt to the wall with their feet manacled to rings set in about four feet off the floor. The floor was brick. The whole room smelled of mildew and very old piss.

  Examining the bolts that held the chain to the wall, January reflected on the difference in sound between Bayou Chien Mort and Les Saules. Bayou Chien Mort, small and somnolent and out-of-the-way as it was, at least sounded alive: The voices of small children rang shrilly from the direction of the cabins, and from far off came the faint, steady suggestion of the chop of mattocks and hoes, of voices singing.

  “They chased, they hunted him with dogs,

  They fired a rifle at him.

  They dragged him from the cypress swamp,

  His arms they tied behind his back,

  They tied his hands in front of him …”

  It was a forbidden song, a secret song, about the rebel slave leader Saint-Malo. Uhrquahr must not be near. January shivered and scratched with a fingernail at the mortar around the screws.

  As he’d suspected, it wasn’t mortar proper but hardened clay, poorly adapted for its job. He gathered the chain in his hand, wrapped the slack around his arm above the elbow, and twisted his whole body, watching for the telltale give in the bolts.

  A little, he thought. A little.

  He canvassed his pockets.

  They’d taken his knife and spoon, the only metal he’d had on him, all his money, and his silver watch. The only thing they’d left him was his rosary.

  Blessed Mary ever-Virgin, he prayed, give me an idea. Show me some way. He folded the beads back up again, put them away. He moved his feet, still bare since they hadn’t given him back his boots, and his anklebone brushed the blue bead on its thong, a rosary to the old gods.

  Papa Legba who guards all the doors, he thought, I could do with some help from you, too.

  He took the rosary beads out of his pocket again, and turned them over in his hand. The beads winked at him, bright blue, like the bead on his ankle. Cheap glass.

  With a cheap steel crucifix.

  Blessed Mary ever-Virgin, he prayed, forgive me for this, but I’ve got to get out of here.

  He began to scrape, cautiously, at the mortar around the bolts with the inch or so of steel at the bottom of the cross.

  He heard the bolt lock on the door rattle and had a moment of horrified panic when he realized there was a little heap of powdered clay and broken fragments of mortar on the floor under the bolt. Falling to his knees, he swept it with his hands along the join of wall and floor and just barely stood up again in time to shield the ragged gouge in the clay with his body. His right hand he shoved in his pocket, rosary and all; six hours of steady work had left palm and fingers a raw mass of blisters and blood.

  The sun had gone over to the other side of the building. The room was in shadow, until the light fell in like a fog of glare from the open door.

  It took him a moment to realize who was standing there.

  It was Galen Peralta.

  “Puh-puh-Papa …” he began, and stopped. “P-Papa s-s-says you’re the one who’s taken the b-blame for … for what happened.”

  January said nothing.

  “And thuh-that y-you c-came here tuh-tuh …” He could barely get the words out, his face contorted with frustration, with the fire of his inarticulate temper. “To see my face. To tuh-tell the police. That’s why you came.”

  “You expect me to just sit there and let them hang me in your place?”

  “But I duh-duh-duh …” He stepped through the door, shaking his head with desperation, fists clenching as if he would strike himself or anything near him in his need. “I duh-didn’t do it!” He dragged in his breath hard, forcing a kind of steadiness. “I really, really d-didn’t hurt her! I was d-drunk … I got duh-drunker … B-but I remember enough of the night to know I d-didn’t hurt her! I wanted—I wanted—she laughed at m-me and I wuh-wanted to kill her, w-wanted to break her neck …”

  “Perhaps your young Galen,
” Mme. Lalaurie had said, “took the matter to an extreme, when not so long ago he took a stick to an Irishwoman who was insolent to him.…” But unlike the Trepagier boys, it was Galen’s cross rather than his crown.

  “I left,” he whispered. “I had t-to leave. Even Puh-Papa doesn’t believe me.”

  He sounded desolate. In other circumstances, watching his struggle even to make himself understood on the simplest possible level, January knew he’d have felt pity for him. But at the moment he had little to spare.

  “Whether I believe you or not isn’t going to matter one bit when I’m chopping cotton in Georgia.”

  “N-no,” said Galen quickly. “P-Papa’s not going to do that! He’s a hard m-man—st-st-stern …” He flinched a little at some thought. “Buh-but he’d n-never … He’d never be unjust like that. You’re a free man.”

  January glanced around him at the jail’s brick walls and said nothing.

  “He’s just g-going to keep you here until … until the m-marks on my f-face heal up. He said it’s … it’s hard to kn-know the right thing to do. Buh-but he’s going to give you some m-money and see that you get on a ship, to Europe or England or M-Mexico or wherever you want, just so long as it’s not N-New Orleans.”

  Exactly as he’d shipped all the house servants out to the farthest of his plantations, regardless of their families, relationships, lives.

  “Just so long as I never see my home or my friends or my family again,” said January softly. “For something you know—and your father knows—I didn’t do.”

  A little defiantly, Galen said, “It’s buh-buh-better than hanging! He’s doing the best he c-can for you, when Uhrquahr …” He hesitated.

  “When Uhrquahr wants to sell me,” finished January for him. He deliberately made his shoulders relax and slump a little, and bowed his head, mostly so Galen wouldn’t see his eyes. “I understand. Thank you … and thank him.” You vain little cowardly popinjay. It was cleaner than his humiliation in the Swamp, though it came to exactly the same thing.

  But it relaxed the boy and brought him a step back into the room.

  “It isn’t as if … as if … It isn’t as if I’d d-done it,” argued Galen. He rubbed at the lines of scab on his face. “B-but no one will b-believe me. If my own father doesn’t buh-believe …”

  “She scratched you in the room there?”

  Galen nodded, wretched. A lock of fair hair fell down over his forehead. “She said to m-me … She said …”

  She said the things women with a cruel streak generally say to the men who love them.

  “I cuh-cuh- … I c-can’t say this.”

  The boy was consumed with guilt. January made his voice gentle, as if he were back in the night clinic of the Hôtel Dieu.

  “Were you lovers?”

  He nodded again. “It was as if she w-wanted me t-to st-st-strike her, w-wanted me to … to be violent. To hurt her.” The words jammed in his throat, and he forced them out, thin and panting, like watered blood. “She … She used to d-do that. I tuh-try to k-keep my temper, I’ve tuh-talked to Père Eugenius ab-bout it, again and again. I’ve p-prayed about it, t-talked to Augustus—to M-Mâitre M-Mayerling … Then she’d b-bait me and t-taunt me into hurting her, and hold it over me.”

  He shook his head, a desperate spasm of a gesture. “It was—It was as if she w-wanted to get me to m-make love to her thuh-there in the room,” he whispered. “God knows I w-wanted to. Suh-suh-seeing her d-dance that w-way.… I d-don’t know if it was fighting or love-making or what, that we did, b-but I pushed her away from me and I left. I felt sick. I went b-back down the service stairs, the way I’d come up. I was afraid I’d meet m-my father downstairs. I went … I d-don’t know where I went. The Verandah Hotel, I think, and the Saint Louis Exchange. I just went in whatever d-doors I saw and got liquor. It wasn’t until I was cuh-cuh-coming back to the ballroom that I met some men, and they said there’d been a muh-murder. The d-dusky damsel in the c-cat mask, they said. I ran back and the police were there.…”

  He turned away and covered his face. “The first thing I thuh-thought was that I shouldn’t have left her. If I’d stayed w-with her she w-wouldn’t have been alone. She w-wouldn’t have been k-k-killed. It was only later when I got home that Puh-Puh-Puh- … that Papa looked at me that way.”

  His arms wrapped around him, hugging himself with wretchedness, and January struggled to put his own anger at them aside—anger at the boy who would let an innocent man take his punishment, a man who would let an innocent take the punishment of a boy whom he truly believed to be guilty.

  Behind his flank he flexed his gouged and bleeding hand.

  Stay silent. Stay silent and learn.

  But maybe, he thought, part of his own anger was only envy. He didn’t like to think so, but he suspected that if it had been Minou who’d been jailed, their mother would have been at the Cabildo that night raising seven kinds of Cain until her child was freed. Even if she thought Minou had killed a man.

  “I never thuh-thuh-thought it was p-possible to love someone like that,” the boy went on, his voice a hoarse whisper now, speaking almost to himself. He might have taken the silence for sympathy, or he might have gone beyond awareness of January’s existence, only needing to confess to someone who was not his father, someone of whom he wasn’t afraid.

  “I never thuh-thought I c-could love someone that … that wild. She was n-nothing like I’d ever thought about, or d-dreamed about, but I c-couldn’t get her out of my mind. It was like one of those c-crazy, dirty d-dreams one gets. I n-never thought I’d violate another man’s wuh-woman, or go through all those st-stupid little subterfuges, meeting her at night after he’d left, s-sending her secret letters, everything they do in n-novels. I didn’t know what to do. And now at n-night all I c-c-can think about is her voice, and the times she’d be like a child who needed me. It was m-my fault,” he added softly. He was shivering now, hands clutched together, pressed to his lips. “M-my fault she was alone when … when he came into the room.”

  “And you have no idea who he might have been?” asked January in the voice of his own confessor.

  The boy raised his head, stared at him blankly, as if such a thought had never crossed his mind. As if Angelique’s death had been like one of Byron’s poems, some catastrophe engineered by malevolent gods to harm the bereaved, not attached to other matters in the victim’s life.

  As if, January realized, in Galen Peralta’s mind, Angelique had no other life than as the center of his consciousness.

  “Do you know who might have hated her?” he asked. “Who might have wished her dead?”

  Of course you don’t, he thought, as the boy simply gazed with those tear-filled blue eyes. You never spoke to her about a single one of her other concerns, did you?

  “I … n-no,” he stammered. “Who w-would have w-wanted to harm her?”

  The blind naïveté—the complete ignorance—of the remark made him want to hoot with laughter, but that, he knew, would be his death.

  “An ex-lover?” January suggested gently. “A rival? Someone she had wronged? If she had a crazy temper, she’d have taken it out on someone other than you.”

  The boy shook his head and looked away, face darkening in the gloom as he realized, perhaps for the first time, that he had not known very well the woman he had professed to so madly love.

  “Was there someone you saw on the stairway?” asked January. “Someone you passed in the courtyard on the way out?”

  “I d-don’t … I d-don’t remember anything. Look, my p-papa says we should let this all blow over.…”

  “But then the man who did this will get away.” January made his voice low, both grave and sympathetic, as if he were speaking to one of his students or to some poor soul at the night clinic. “Listen, Michie Peralta.” He carefully used the idiom of the slaves, like a dog lowering itself down before another dog so as not to get killed. “I’m grateful to your father for sending me away rather than doing some worse th
ing, because I know it’s in his power to do so.” The arrogant bastard. “But one day I want to clear my own name, and to do that I have to find who really did it. If you can tell me everything you remember about that night, I can write to my family from France or Mexico or wherever I end up, and they can talk to the police, investigate this thing. Clear your name as well, not just with the police but with your father.”

  The boy licked his lips with a pale, hesitant tongue, but his watery eyes brightened a little. “I … I underst-stand. But I d-don’t … I really d-don’t remember.”

  Just as his love for Angelique had been a matter of concern to him alone, thought January, so in his mind he saw only himself at their parting and not anyone around him.

  “How did you leave the building?” asked January in a coaxing voice, trying to ignore the agonizing pain in his hand. “Down the service stairs?”

  Galen nodded. “I d-didn’t … Everybody was in the upstairs lobby. But I heard … voices … in the office when I came out the b-bottom, so I w-went through the lobby and out into the c-court that way.”

  His father’s voice, thought January. In Froissart’s office, talking to Granger and Bouille.

  “Did you see anyone in the lobby? Anyone you know? Or would know again?”

  “I d-don’t … I d-don’t know.” Galen shrugged helplessly and looked around, casting about for a reason to leave. “They were all w-wearing masks.”

  “What kind of masks? Anything really pretty? Really vulgar? Really ugly?” If the killer had ascended the service stair sometime during the progressive waltz, he—or just possibly she—would have almost certainly passed this distraught boy in the lobby or the courtyard.

  “There was that vulgar p-purple p-pirate,” said Galen promptly, his brow unfurrowing with relief at being able to recall something or someone. “M-Mayerling was d-down there, I … I hurried p-past because I didn’t want him to see me. I didn’t—I c-couldn’t—do with speaking to anyone. There was a w-woman dressed like an Indian in b-b-buckskin.…”

  He frowned again, struggling with the mental effort as much as with his stutter. A very perfect young Creole gentleman, thought January dourly: competent with a sword or a horse and slowly being inculcated to the endless, careful work of running a sugar plantation, but utterly without imagination. Or perhaps with just enough imagination to sense that he was being pressed and molded against his will, the will he was not allowed to have, into something he was not. Enough fire in him to rebel against his father’s demands by seeking out a creature of fire like Angelique Crozat.