A Free Man of Color

by Barbara Hambly

  “They’ll want to know how you know this,” said Corbier.

  January shook his head. “It’s not something I can prove. Lieutenant Shaw will know, it’s part of the Crozat murder case. Tell him I think Madeleine Trepagier is going to be ambushed there and we may need help. I’m going out there now.”

  Harness jingled and tires squelched in the mud, and turning, January saw over his shoulder the chaise that had carried them out to the Allard plantation for the duel. Dark-slicked with water, the horse shook its head against the rain. By the oil lamp in the bracket above the door, and the lesser gleam of the carriage lamps, Mayerling’s scarred face was a pale blur in the dark of the leather hood.

  “Dominique’s with Madame Trepagier. Get Olympe to go, or send one of the children, but hurry!”

  January sprang down the high brick step, across the banquette, vaulting the gutter and scrambling into the chaise, crowding its two occupants. His last glimpse of the light showed Paul Corbier turning to give some urgent instruction to the oldest boy as he shut the louvered door.

  Mayerling lashed the reins. The wheels jarred and lurched in ruts and mud and jolted as they passed over the gutters, sprays of water leaping around them with the black glitter of liquid coal.

  “Hannibal tells me your sister Dominique is with her.”

  “I had to take her somewhere. Minou knows enough not to speak of it later.”

  “Trepagier will have hired his men in the Swamp,” said Hannibal, clinging to the two long guns and swaying with the violence of their speed. “For a dollar Nahum Shagrue’s boys would sack the orphanage if they thought they could get away with it. The mutable, rank-scented many … Keelboat pirates … killers.”

  “I’ve met Monsieur Shagrue.” January remembered those pig-cunning eyes, and the stink of sewage dripping off his coat.

  “The green Turk was with Charles-Louis Trepagier at the Théâtre on Mardi Gras night,” said Mayerling in time. “I remember his words concerning Madeleine.” The thin nostrils flared with silent anger. “I’m sorry now I didn’t settle the matter there and then, in the courtyard. Capon. I suppose by then he had decided that he would rather kill than wed her.”

  “McGinty would have told him a proposal wasn’t any use,” said January. “He’d already tried it, as soon as Arnaud was dead—which means he knew there was a chance of the streetcar line going through even then. That must have been when he sent for Claud, and when he started romancing Sally, to keep an eye on Madame Trepagier’s movements. Of course as a broker who’d handled Arnaud’s affairs he’d have met her. It must have been Sally who told him Madame Trepagier was going to the quadroon ball to talk to Angelique.”

  “Told him she was going,” said Hannibal, “but not what she would wear.”

  “And Claud hadn’t seen Madeleine since her wedding to his brother, thirteen years ago. He couldn’t have, if he’d embezzled money and stolen a slave. So when he saw a woman of her height and her build, wearing her jewels.…”

  “It refreshes me to know,” said Mayerling, never taking his eyes from the road, “that upon occasion, some people do get what they deserve. By the way,” he added, “thank you for telling her to get out of there. I had no idea of her intention until I saw her, looking in at the ballroom door.”

  “She was with you until ten, wasn’t she?” January kept his voice steady with an effort, for Mayerling drove like the Wild Hunt, and once beyond the lamps of the Faubourg Marigny the road beneath the overhanging oaks was pitch-dark. An occasional glimmer of soft gaslight through colored curtains flickered through the trees like a fashionable ghost to show where houses stood, but even those grew more sparse as the road got worse.

  “Yes,” said the sword master. “I glimpsed her outside the ballroom and slipped away from that silliness in Froissart’s office as quickly as I could. I suppose I should have simply put her in a fiacre at once and sent her home, but instead we went through the passageway to the Théâtre and found our way up to one of the private boxes. We have, you understand, little chance to be together. Foolish, I admit, and dangerous. I beg you make allowances for a man in love.”

  January glanced sharply sidelong at him, suddenly conscious of the thinness of those shoulder bones pressed so tightly into his arm. Mayerling met his gaze with frosty challenge, then returned his attention to the road as the chaise crashed through a minor lake across their way, water spraying around them in muddy wings.

  “It is a long time,” said the Prussian quietly, “since I have thought of myself as anything else. I suppose in France you ceased after a time to think of every white man as someone to beware of. To look down when one spoke to you?”

  “In France I didn’t have to lie every day about what I am.”

  “Every day I tell the truth about what I am,” replied Mayerling calmly. “I merely leave out the one fact—the one facet of my entirety—which would, in everyone’s eyes, obliterate all the rest. Two facets, now. I used to lie awake nights, worrying about what would happen if I fell in love.”

  The thin face split into a sudden grin, like an impish boy’s, save for the saber scars. “I never thought it would be a woman I fell in love with, you see. Not until I met her. And then it was like coming out of a dark room into sunlight.”

  He shrugged. “But, I have the advantage of being physically mannish enough to—as the octoroons say—pass, something I have done since the age of seventeen. Pass for a gentleman, I believe Monsieur Bouille put it.… There!”

  Through the metallic glint of carriage lamps on rain the slow-moving brougham appeared, a dark loom in the road ahead. Mayerling slashed with the reins again, and the horse leaped forward heavily, the chaise rocking like a drunken thing in the flooded ruts. Beyond the narrow zone of the lamps’ illumination, nothing could be seen, the evergreen roof of live oak shutting out the black sky above, the Spanish moss dripping in wet curtains of cobweb around about. The coachman, rigid with disapproval of Madame Madeleine’s choice of companions, half-turned on his box, trying to maneuver the carriage out of the narrow way to let the swifter vehicle pass. Mayerling pulled his horse to a walk, leaned from the chaise to cry, “Albert! It’s me, Mayerling!”

  “Monsieur Mayerling, sir!” The coachman saluted with his whip. “What you doin’ out on a night like this? And that horse of yours look in a regular lather.”

  The door of the carriage opened abruptly, Madeleine’s face framed suddenly in its darkness, and she had to stop herself visibly from speaking her lover’s Christian name in front of her servant. “What is it?” Her voice sounded perfectly composed, but her face was haggard with exhaustion and strain.

  January shook himself forcibly free of the sensation of foolishness that overwhelmed him at the sight of the carriage, unmolested, unambushed, untouched. There was danger—if not tonight, then tomorrow, or the next time she went out.

  Augustus bowed, sweeping off his hat in the rain. “A complete false alarm, I hope. I’ll explain when we reach the house, but Monsieur Janvier has a theory—and I think he’s right—about the Crozat woman’s murder. And if he’s right, the attack on you this evening was no accident, and you may need escort back to Les Saules.”

  “Ben?” came Dominique’s voice from the carriage. “Ben, what theory? And what does it have to do with Madeleine? She wasn’t even there that night, in spite of what that horrid Charles-Louis Trepagier has been saying all over town.”

  “I’ll explain at the house,” called January from the chaise. He tossed the long rifle, which Augustus caught with an expert hand. “Put out the carriage lamps. Can you see well enough without them to walk at the horse’s head?”

  “I think so. It’s not far from here.”

  “Put out the carriage lamps?” protested Albert. “Now why on earth …”

  “Just stay on the box, if you would,” ordered Augustus, flipping open the glass to blow out the candles within. “And keep silence. There may be men waiting along the road. They’ll hear us coming, even over the rain, bu
t at least we can keep from making targets of ourselves. Here.” He walked around to the door again, and passed one of the pistols through it.

  “I didn’t know you could shoot a pistol.” January heard Minou’s voice, a sweet thread, as the black ghost that was all he could see of Mayerling drifted back to the coach horse’s head, took the bridle, and began to walk forward, boots crunching on the crushed shells of the roadbed.

  “My uncle Gustave taught me. He said …” Her voice lowered, drowned in the clatter of rain on the chaise roof, and January settled into the slow, cautious business of following the carriage in almost total darkness among the trees. Evidently any constraint Madame Trepagier felt about being in a carriage with a courtesan had been dealt with between the two women already.

  Knowing the rain would hide any sound of ambush, he strained all his senses, trying to listen to the forest of oak and sycamore on either side, trying to hear something besides the patter of falling water and the soggy crunch of the wheels in oak leaves, shells, and mud. In time the darkness before them seemed to grow lighter, and the rain fell more heavily on his face. They came out from the trees, turned the corner, with the water of Bayou Gentilly on their left, and to their right, a dim white shape showed behind the oak trunks, like a smudge of chalk on black velvet.

  Lights burned in the upstairs parlor of Les Saules, a welcoming glow of saffron through the murk. A lamp had been kindled likewise in the stairway that led from the paved loggia beneath the rear gallery. Augustus, visibly relieved, walked around from the horse’s head to the carriage door, while Albert, on the box, raised his voice. “You, Louis! Get your lazy bones out here with an umbrella for Madame Madeleine!”

  There was no light in the kitchen.

  January was already standing to shout a warning when he saw the second giveaway—the muddy tracks caked thick on the flagstones of the lower gallery, the stairs leading up. He shouted, “No! They’re in the house!” and Mayerling froze, his hand on the carriage door, startled face a blur in the shadows as he turned toward the chaise where January was already gathering the reins. “Drive for it, Albert, they’re—”

  From the upper gallery of the house a rifle cracked. Mayerling flung himself down as the ball hit the side of the coach with a leathery thump; a second shot boomed hollowly, and the carriage horse reared, screaming, then fell in the traces. January grabbed the shotgun and sprang out on the far side of the chaise, dodged and sprinted toward the house, and reached it in time to catch the first of the rivermen as he bounded like a tiger down the stair with a knife in his hand.

  January fired into his chest with the shotgun from a distance of four feet or so. The man went slamming back against the steps, blood spouting from his chest, mouth, and nose; someone on the stair above said “Fuck me!” and there was a clomping of unwilling feet, then the flat, splintering shot of another rifle as Mayerling fired into the lighted openwork of the stair.

  A dozen things seemed to happen then, Mayerling’s horse rearing, then foundering in the shafts, which January had expected, amid the flat snaps of more rifles. Mayerling, Albert, and the two women raced in erratic zigzags across the two or three yards of open lawn to the shelter of the house gallery; a hoarse, boyish voice gasped, “Give it,” in January’s ear and Hannibal pulled the shotgun from his hand to load. January wondered obliquely where Hannibal had learned that in a close-quarters fight the loader had better identify himself before touching a man who was likely to turn around and knock him flying in mistake for another assailant.

  Sobbing, Madeleine clawed open her black mourning reticule and pulled out keys, opened the shutters of the dining room door. Footsteps thundered and bumbled on the gallery overhead but Mayerling fired his pistol at the man who tried to come down to fetch the casualty lying in the stairwell, and the muddy boots retreated upward again. The wounded man screamed, “Get me out’n here! Get me out’n here!” The smell of blood was like burned metal. It dripped in sheets down his shirt, down his chest.

  At the same moment January heard a groan behind him, and by the banked ember glow of the dining room fireplace within saw Dominique supporting the coachman Albert, his blood mixing with rainwater to dye the whole side of her pale dress. The elderly servant was gasping, his hand clutching at his side, eyes tight shut with agony and face already ashen with shock.

  “Ben, what on earth—?” sobbed Minou.

  “Not now. Can you load?” He ducked through the door, stripped away the old man’s coat as he spoke. Madeleine jerked the doors shut behind them, barred them as January ripped the white shirt, wadded it into a pressure bandage—he looked swiftly around for something to tie it with and without a word Augustus pulled Dominique’s tignon from her head, releasing a torrent of black curls around her shoulders. The bullet had gone clean through, shattering the lowest rib. Albert cried out with pain at the pressure but seemed to have no trouble breathing.

  “No! I—”

  “Don’t they teach you girls anything besides Italian and cross-stitch?” demanded Hannibal, pulling her away to where Madeleine stood in the shelter of the study door and the light fell through from the lantern in the stairwell outside. “Ball—just enough powder to cover the ball—first the powder, then the ball—wad—in she goes—ram, and I mean hard—pinch in the pan.” He handed the pistol to Madeleine, took Augustus’s rifle, repeated the procedure, his teeth clenched against a sudden spasm of coughing. “There. Now you know something Henri doesn’t know.”

  “You shut up about Henri.” It was her flirt voice. She was over the first shock.

  “With me.” Madeleine strode across the darkness of the dining room, pausing only long enough to shove the table out of the way, then opened the French doors that looked toward the bayou and parted the heavy shutters a crack. She said, “Bleu,” a ladylike little oath, and fired the pistol. A man’s voice bellowed, “Shit-eatin’ nigger!” and there was the sound of something falling, and the confusion of footsteps on the front gallery as well. Dominique rammed home the next charge before the smoke had completely cleared and returned the pistol to her, and Madeleine called across to Augustus, “Thank God you brought the good pistols, dear.”

  “I think that’s the one that throws to the right.”

  “My leg’s broke! Shit-fuck, my leg’s broke!” howled a voice outside.

  January tied the final knot in the pressure dressing, strode across the dining room to the door of the small study beyond.

  There was one window, set high in the wall and shuttered fast. He listened a moment to the ceiling above his head, then ducked through the door again. “Madame! Is there a gallery on that side of the house?” He tried to remember, but he’d only ridden up to it from the back.

  “No.”

  “Out this way, fast. With any luck they won’t see us.”

  “There’s an oak a hundred yards straight out,” said Madeleine. She snapped off a final shot, slammed the shutter, and bolted it again. “I know the fields in that direction. They don’t.”

  “Night fights for he who knows the land.” Mayerling was bending already, lifting the coachman as gently as he could to lean on his shoulder. “Can you make it, Albert? Hannibal?”

  The fiddler nodded, though his face was scarcely less taut than the slave’s and he leaned on the dining table.

  “Fast, then, before they realize we’re making an escape.”

  The room was pitch-dark and nearly empty save for the table at which Mme. Trepagier did her accounts. Dominique and January lifted it to move it under the window, lest the scrape of its legs on the tile floor alert anyone above; January sprang up, flipped the latch, and squeezed through. As he dropped the five feet to the grass beneath he heard a man shout, “There’s one of ’em!” and a shot splintered stucco from the wall near his head, from the corner of the front gallery.

  He looked fast—two flatboat men were standing at the end of the front gallery, looking around the corner of the house, one reloading already and the second bringing his rifle to bear. It
could only have been chance that they’d been standing where they could see the window. With only the shotgun in his hand there was no way he could return fire. All this he saw and thought in a split second; then he heard Mayerling yell, “Run!” and the flat hard roar of a Baker rifle, and what might have been a cry of pain.

  He heard the crunch of feet in the grass as a man dropped off the gallery and saw the glint of a knife; heard, also, Madeleine Trepagier sob out Mayerling’s name, as he turned and plunged away alone into the darkness of the night.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Another rifle cracked out, the thud of the ball striking not far to January’s left as he raced into the darkness. Feet trip-hammered the ground behind. It wouldn’t take Napoleon to figure out that if Madeleine had an armed escort, reinforcements weren’t far behind. The attackers couldn’t afford to let anyone get away. January shucked his coat as he ran, ripped free his shirt, legs pumping, dodging and weaving but running with all the speed in his long legs. The lights from the house barely touched the trunks of the willows around the main buildings, glimmered on the trailing leaves and the beards of moss on the oaks.

  Beyond them it was lightless, Erebus under a sky of pitch.

  January leaped six or seven feet sideways and fell to his face on the earth.

  The soft crunch-crunch-crunch of pursuing feet stopped.

  Loading? Aiming? Taking his time to site on a sitting target?

  Or baffled by the sudden silence, the utter dark into which his skin blended like glass into water, one with the damp velvet obscurity of the night.