A Free Man of Color

by Barbara Hambly

  Leaky gray light showed him the slant of the roof, the bundles of blankets, tin cups, spare shirts that were shoved into corners and around the walls. When he sat up mice went scurrying, but the roaches were less concerned. Possibly, thought January wryly, because some of them were almost as big.

  No one was in sight. The dancing in Congo Square generally didn’t start until well after noon. The door onto the stairway stood open, the noise coming through it clearly. He limped over, stooping under the rafters and stepping through, stood on the little porch just outside, looking across the muddy yards, the wet, dark slate tiling of slanted roofs, and the cypress and palmetto that marked an area only recently and incompletely claimed from woods and swamps.

  A rabble of plane trees and the white spire of the Church of St. Antoine showed him where the square lay. He was, he guessed, within a mile of his mother’s house.

  And that was exactly where the police would look for him, if they were looking.

  Bouki the hyena, he’s out riding the tracks, whispered a rusty voice in his mind. When you break cover, you watch your back.

  Painfully—feet aching, legs aching—he descended the wooden stairs to the yard.

  “It’s two bits to sleep the night.” A man came out of the store that occupied half the downstairs of the building. His face was the color of well-worn saddle leather, and about as expressive. He stood with folded arms in the muddy way that led back from the yard to the street.

  The voice wasn’t the same as the one Lacrîme had spoken to last night. At a guess, the owner of the store collected money from the men who slept in his attic, but asked no questions about who came and went. The man with the cigar had been one of the other slaves.

  “I have no money,” said January. “I can get some. I’ll bring it, later in the day.”

  “You’ll bring it and six white horses too, huh?”

  “I’ll bring it.” January’s head ached, though not nearly as bad as his body or his hand. Fatigue and hunger made him feel scraped-out, as if the marrow had been sold out of his bones. He felt he should argue with this man, or produce some telling reason why he should be trusted, but he couldn’t think of any at the moment. He’d have to pay Desdunes for his horse, too.

  Even anger had gone to ash. He could have struck him, he supposed—from a great distance—but that would mean someone would call the police.

  “I hold on to your boots,” said the storekeeper. “When you come back with my two bits, you get your boots back.”

  So it was that January was barefoot, ragged, his hand wrapped in dirty bandages, and his whole body sweating like a nervous horse with fear that someone would stop him, ask his business, or worse yet recognize him, when he slipped down the narrow walkway and into his sister Dominique’s yard. Becky, standing under the kitchen gallery ironing the intricate cut-lace puffs of a dress sleeve, looked up and called, “What is it? What do you want?” in a hard, cross voice, then looked again and set the iron down quickly.

  “Michie Benjamin!” She ran toward him, stopped, staring, as he held up his hand. “What in the name of heaven?”

  “Is my sister here?” And, as she started for the rear door of the house, “Don’t speak of me if there’s anyone here but her.”

  Becky went inside. January waited under the gallery, hesitant even to go into the kitchen with his scratched feet and muddy clothes. All he could think was, Mama will never let me hear the end of this.

  He wondered what his mother would do, if Xavier Peralta had already used his influence to send the police for his, January’s, arrest.

  He wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to know.

  Minou appeared in the dark of the house, stepped outside, like a blossom of Queen Anne’s lace in lavender-striped muslin sprigged with violets. Another figure flashed in the darkness, emerged into the light. Olympe, her blue skirt and rusty persimmon-red blouse and tignon giving her the look of a market woman against the dull gray of the afternoon light.

  “Dear God!” cried Minou, but for a moment there was only worried watchfulness, swift calculation in Olympe’s dark eyes. Then, “What happened? That policeman was here this morning, to talk to you, he said.”

  A riverboat would have brought Peralta back to town in eight hours, maybe nine, thought January. Enough passed on the lower river that he could have signaled one within a few hours of the disappearance being discovered.

  “I gave him your letter, Ben. Becky, heat some water now, immediately. You said if you hadn’t returned by Sunday, and he said he’d been to Mama’s house already. Ben, you didn’t—?”

  He shook his head. “Can you send someone to the grocery on the upstream lakeside corner of Rue Conti, a couple of blocks above the turning basin? Give the owner two reales and get my boots back. And send Thérèse over to Mama’s house and get me some clothes.”

  “I’ll send one of my boys,” said Olympe, in her Hecate voice of silver-veined iron. “We don’t know what the police know, or what they think, but that policeman who came, he’s no fool.” As she spoke she slipped past the cook and into the kitchen, coming out with a blue-and-white German-made dish of jambalaya and a pone of bread. “You got your papers?”

  Again he shook his head. “They’re in the desk in my room. Top left drawer.” He resolved, as soon as he had the time, to forge five or six more copies. “What did Shaw say?”

  “That he wanted to talk to you.” Dominique seated herself on another of the bent-willow kitchen chairs, while January gouged into the jambalaya like a gravedigger in a fever summer, alternating the rice and shrimp with gulps of coffee only partly warmed. “I asked him if you were in any trouble. He said you could be, and would be if he couldn’t find you. Ben, what happened?”

  “Peralta’s overseer tore up my papers,” said January. “Galen Peralta didn’t kill Angelique, but his father thinks he did. He said he’d hold me there until the boy’s face healed up—Angelique scratched him pretty badly and a jury might take that amiss—then put me on a boat for Europe or New York or wherever I wanted to go. Some of the slaves told me that night the overseer was planning to take me and sell me himself and claim I’d escaped. They slipped me a mattock head to hack through the window bars.”

  “Oh, Ben.” Her voice was barely a whisper, her hand to her mouth. Fear for me? wondered January. Well, yes—Dominique was a warm-hearted girl, with a ready sympathy, and cared for him with the unthinking happy love she’d shown when she was four and he her great, tall brother twenty years her senior. But was part of the shock he read in her eyes a realization of how little her own freedom meant?

  Or didn’t she understand that yet?

  “What … What do they want you for? You have papers. I mean, you are free, and here in town people know you.”

  “Peralta may tell the police some story that makes it seem I did the murder, rather than his son.” Thin rain had started to fall again, as it had fallen all day, pattering the muddy ground beyond the gallery where they sat. Becky moved silently in the kitchen behind them, grinding fresh coffee and feeding the fire under the big iron boiler.

  “He’s the guards’ captain’s cousin, and the guards are under pressure from Etienne Crozat to find someone, anyone, to punish for the crime. I think I can find who really did it, but I’ll need proof. And that proof had better be strong enough to stand up against the fact that the killer was almost certainly white, and I’m black.”

  By the time January had finished bathing and had shaved five days’ bristle of graying beard from his face, Olympe had returned with his boots and a bundle of clothes from their mother’s house. Both sisters were waiting for him in Dominique’s parlor when he crossed the yard through the thin, driving needles of rain; he wondered why he’d never realized how much alike they looked.

  Probably because he’d never seen them together as adults. It occurred to him to wonder what Olympe was doing here at all.

  “I need to find a runaway, a girl name of Sally,” said January, as he came into the rear parlor w
here both women sat. “So high, thin, as black as me. Full-blood Congo, they say. She ran off from Les Saules Plantation a week ago Friday, probably with a man.” At the moment, he reflected, finding her might be safer than another trip out to Les Saules, at least while the sun was up.

  “I think she knows something, and I’m pretty sure she talked to someone about something.” He’d examined his hand in the kitchen and had found it still clean. The bandages Becky had pinned over the dressings and salves he’d put on it gleamed starkly white against the dark of his flesh.

  “I’ll ask around,” said Olympe. “She could be anywhere, if she ran off with a man. White man?”

  “I don’t know. I think so, since he was able to give her expensive gifts.”

  “A two-dollar dress length still cheaper than buying a girl at the Exchange,” remarked Olympe cynically. “I found who paid Doctor John for your hoodoo.”

  A carriage passed in the street, the wheels squishing thickly in the mire. Dominique turned her head quickly, toward the two tall French doors that opened onto Rue Burgundy—standing open, for the day, though rainy, was warm. Olympe’s bronze lips twisted. “Don’t worry. We’ll be out of here when he comes.”

  Dominique sniffed. “That isn’t going to be until ten at least. I swear, on Sunday afternoons you could wipe out the entire French population of the city with five cannonballs if you knew where to aim them.”

  “Maybe that’s why the Americans don’t have aunts and in-laws and cousins-thrice-removed to Sunday dinner,” remarked Olympe, lazily stroking the fat white cat. “Like rabbits in a field, they don’t all graze in a herd.”

  “Darling, you know it’s for reasons of domestic economy.” Minou flashed back at her the identical smile. “The LeBretons must spend a hundred dollars on those Sunday dinners, once you pack in all the Lafrenières, Borés, Macartys, Chauvins, Viellards, Boisclaires, Boisblancs, and Lebedoyere connections, even if they don’t have dancing afterward—which they will, Lent or no Lent. No American would stand for it, isn’t that so, Ben? That awful Culver woman had the nerve to haggle with Ben over teaching her repulsive little girls to play piano!”

  January smiled in spite of himself. “They aren’t repulsive,” he said. It was like looking back on something that had happened years ago. “And I think one reason the Americans don’t have everyone in the world for Sunday dinner is because most of them are new to this city. They come in from New York or Philadelphia or Virginia; they bring their wives and children, but they haven’t had time to get grandmamas and sisters’ husbands and the brother’s wife’s widowed aunt and her four children yet. Give them time.”

  Dominique made a little noise of disbelief in her throat, and crossed to the secrétaire. “From everything I hear, they’re going to take that time whether anyone gives it to them or not. Could the person who bought the gris-gris have been at the ball?”

  “Could have?” said Olympe. “She was there, chérie, and right in Angelique’s pocket the whole time.”

  January’s eyes met hers, and he knew with a sinking sense of shock of whom she spoke. “Clemence Drouet?” And then, “That’s ridiculous. She worshiped Angelique.”

  The eyes of both sisters rested on him, older and younger, with the same exasperated patience, the same slight wonderment at his blindness. It was Dominique who spoke.

  “Oh, Ben, you don’t think the plain girls, the fat girls, the ones who fetch and carry and follow around after the pretty ones, don’t know exactly how they get talked about behind their backs?” There was pity and a little grief in her voice. “You think Clemence couldn’t have hated Angelique at the same time she loved her?”

  “Doctor John, he say he made Clemence a couple fine gris-gris,” said Olympe. “The one you gave me and another that may still be under the back step, and it can stay there, for all of me, if Phrasie Dreuze is going to live in that house. Mamzelle Marie tell me,” she added, as Dominique went to pull a bundle of yellow notepaper from the drawer of the secrétaire, “the men who beat you up was Clemence’s brother Marquis and his friend, tryin’ to get that gris-gris back before you could find out who laid it and tell on her.”

  January remembered how the men’s hands had torn at his coat. For money, he’d thought at the time. Remembered too the young woman’s round, tear-streaked face in the shadows of Angelique’s house, the look of terror in her eyes as Euphrasie Dreuze had wailed of murder. She’s been underfoot all morning, his mother had said.

  “Mostly they do stop at gris-gris, you know,” added Olympe quietly, leaning back on the divan like a slim black serpent and stroking the cat’s white feet. “Women who have hate in them. They’ll put a pasteboard coffin on somebody’s back step, or a cross of salt, as a way of doing murder and not doing murder. Some of them, it makes them stop and think.”

  “I know last fall that American Jenkins came over and talked to Clemence, at just about every Blue Ribbon Ball,” said Dominique. She lowered the papers, her dark eyes sad. “But of course Angelique never could stand to see men paying attention to anyone but her. Still, I’d never have thought Clemence would harm a hair of Angelique’s head.”

  “Nor would she,” said January softly. “If she went to Doctor John for a gris-gris, she could have gone for something else. Poison, to slip in her glass—and she’d have had every opportunity in the world. Even an emetic on the night of the ball, if she wasn’t up to doing murder. Strangling her with a scarf at a public ball …” He shook his head.

  “Chéri, I was ready to strangle her with a scarf at that ball,” retorted Dominique, returning to shuffling her papers. “And I hadn’t just seen her walk off with the first man who’d paid me any attention in my life. There,” she said, poking her finger down. “I thought I saw her go running downstairs just after Galen did. She could have come back up the service stairs.”

  “What is that?” January craned his head to see what was written. “I thought Shaw came and got his notes when they opened the case again.”

  “Silly.” She crossed to him, handed them over—neat, small, perfect French handwriting on creamy gilt-edged notepaper. “I copied them. If there’s going to be a nine days wonder in this town, of course I’m going to make sure I’m the one who has all the facts.”

  Minou had rearranged the notes in chronological order. At quarter of nine, Clemence Drouet was listed as “downstairs—court? lobby?” Also listed in the court at the time was the orange-and-green Turk, and Indian with a question mark, which could have been anyone.

  Shortly thereafter, Xavier Peralta had been seen going into Froissart’s office with the dueling party—Granger, Mayerling, the purple pirate, Bouille, Jenkins—but when one Doucette Labayadere (costumed as a mulberry tree—a mulberry tree?) saw them emerge, the party had consisted solely of Froissart, Granger, and Bouille. The others, presumably, had left at some earlier time.

  No one had seen Galen Peralta in the downstairs lobby after the progressive waltz, but at least one other person had seen Augustus Mayerling.

  He sat for a time, turning the notes over and over in his hand.

  Mayerling was an outsider. A white man, true, but a man raised outside of slave-holding society. A man who would pick a surgeon on the grounds of experience rather than color.

  If nothing else, it was worth asking what he knew.

  “May I take these?”

  “You may not!” retorted his sister indignantly. Then, relenting, “I’ll make you out a copy; you can get it tomorrow.”

  “You’re a peach.” He kissed her hand, then looked out the open French doors, where the light was fading to final, rainy dusk. “Something tells me we may need an extra copy where we can get at it.”

  “I have the original notes, too,” she said. “I mean the ones the officer made that night. Monsieur Shaw left them here when he had his fair copy and I just put them in a drawer. Will you be speaking to Monsieur Shaw?”

  January set down the notes. “I don’t know,” he said. “If I can do it without being arre
sted on the spot, yes. You say you gave him my letter. Did he read it?”

  She nodded.

  “Did he say anything?”

  “Nothing. Just put it in his pocket. But he can read,” she added quickly. “I saw him read these notes when he took them.”

  Olympe sniffed, sounding extremely like their mother. “There’s miracles every day. Will you need a place to stay, brother? This Shaw will know Mama’s house—this house, too,” she added, and January noted, a little cynically, that for one tiny unguarded second Dominique looked relieved. “If worse comes to worst there are other places you can stay as well, until we can get you out of town.”

  “Good,” said January bitterly. “So I can be a fugitive, because witnesses don’t want to testify anything that’ll make a jury think a white killed that woman.”

  “Better than bein’ a corpse for the same reason.” She shifted the cat off her lap and fetched an oiled-silk umbrella from behind the door. “I’ll find somebody who can get a letter to this Shaw, set up a meetin’.” She went to the French doors, looked out at the street, where the oil lamps suspended high on the walls cast flashing coins of light in the dark water of the gutters. “Darn few on the streets now, so you should be safe enough.”

  January put on the jacket she’d brought him, kissed Minou, and stepped down from the French doors, helping his sister—who needed it no more than a gazelle—down to the brick banquette, and from there across the plank to the street. Only a few spits of rain flecked them now, but the darkening sky was heavily pregnant with more.

  “I’ll still want to find this Sally girl and speak to Clemence Drouet if I can.”

  “You really think that poor spaniel of a girl was clever enough to know if she killed Angelique in public that way, people’d go lookin’ in all directions but at her?” Olympe shook her head. “Unless she was clever all these years—deep clever—I’d say if she killed her friend in anger over her walkin’ off with Jenkins, she’d just have sat down beside the body and howled.”