A Free Man of Color

by Barbara Hambly

  Lying on the ground, just beyond the line of weeds where the dug fields began, January could see his pursuer as a blocky shape against what dim illumination filtered through the trees. The shape moved a little. Turning its head? Waiting for eyesight to adjust?

  January lay still.

  The man would have stalked Indians in the Missouri woods and been stalked by them. He would have the patience of the hunter.

  And for a long while, in fact, he stood exactly as he was, only turning his head the slightest bit—January guessed rather than clearly saw the movement—as he listened. Now and then a gunshot cracked out from the direction of the house. Sometimes he could hear a man swear.

  Then, very cautiously, the pursuer began to move. By the way he moved—slowly, cautiously, but straight ahead—January knew that he was himself invisible against the dark earth. And just as slowly, timing his movements with those of his hunter, he crawled.

  The ground sloped down, wet and thick smelling. He was between the bare humped earth of the cane rows, the hunter moving to his right. He heard the wet suck of mud on the man’s boots, saw dimly, dimly, the black shape of him move. He’d seek higher ground and be looking in the direction of his feet.

  January struck.

  He was within a few feet of the Kaintuck, though the smell of the rain-wet earth drowned all the feral sweat-and-tobacco stench of him. It was easy to reach out and grab the man’s legs, jerk them back, drop the man down with a cry into the soft earth. January was ready. The Kaintuck was not. The man flailed with his knife as January rammed his knee below the breastbone, grabbed verminous handfuls of hair and beard, and slammed the head around and sideways. There was a quick crack like an oak stick breaking underfoot, and the smell of voided waste.

  “Lordy, Lordy,” murmured January under his breath. “My massa gwine wear me out for sure.”

  He supposed he’d have to confess this next Friday—not, of course, in any church in the old town, nor would he mention the color of the man he had killed—but he had to admit that he felt not the smallest twinge of remorse.

  He knew enough to stay low as he searched the body, appropriating knife, powder horn, and long rifle. He checked the load with the ramrod, felt the rod’s end jar on patch and ball.

  He’d expected it, but had to be sure.

  More shots, echoing in the night. January turned back, saw figures moving among the trees, around the house. He thought, They’ll have locked up the slaves somewhere, only to realize in the next instant they’d have chained them as well. Probably in the sugar mill, the only brick building large enough to hold even so small a contingent as Les Saules’s. He wondered if Claud Trepagier and McGinty would sell them later or blame the whole business on a slave uprising.

  Not if the bodies were shot, he thought.

  And then, But to cover that, all they’d have to do is … The smell of woodsmoke reached him, sluggish on the warm spring night.

  All they’d have to do is fire the house.

  Flames were licking up over the gallery already, bright on the wooden railings and the heavy strapwork shutters. Wood from the kitchen and the smokehouse had been piled against all the shutters on the bayou side of the house, the flame leaping from it huge and orange and new, the smoke white and fresh, billowing into the black of the sky. Against the brightness of the fire January could see the shapes of men, outlined in red, coarse shirts of plaid or trade goods or rough linsey-woolsey, homespun pants slick with grease, the glitter of cold animal eyes. They stood in a rough semicircle, facing inward toward the house, their guns pointed at the door.

  If he stepped from the shelter of the willows, January thought quite calmly, the firelight would show him up, but a Kentucky long rifle would take the distance easily.

  There were six men on this side. The rest would be around the front. They all had their backs to him, but nevertheless he recognized the Irishman McGinty’s copper-colored hair. The beard had seemed darker in the shadows of the house, the day January had seen him. Recognized also the way he stood, legs apart, hands thrust in the pockets of his sage-green long-tailed coat. The man beside him, dark-haired and medium-size with a look of a panther to his big body, wore a long-tailed coat also, natty but threadbare, and the fire glistened off the pomade in his hair.

  He was the same build as the Turk in green, and like the Turk wore a gold signet on one hand that caught the light of the fire.

  It was to him one of the rivermen spoke. “C’n we have the woman ’fore we kills her?”

  “No,” said the dark-haired man, and held up his rifle to firing position, looking down the barrel at the door. His voice was the voice of the orange-and-green Turk. “I want to be sure this time.”

  By the glaring leap of the fire January recognized Nahum Shagrue.

  “Damn better be sure this time,” growled McGinty. “Damn uppity bitch, I damn near swallowed my tongue when I come out here next mornin’ and saw her.”

  “I told you I hadn’t seen her in years.”

  “What you bet the woman comes out first?” said someone else softly.

  “Which woman? White dress or gold?”

  “White.”

  “Nah. Gonna be the blond jasper with the scar. Twenty-five cents on it.”

  “You got it.”

  “There—the door moved.”

  Still completely unseen, January checked the site, made completely sure of his aim—for he knew he would only have the one shot—and with quiet deliberation, squeezed the trigger and blew off the back of Claud Trepagier’s head.

  Even as the Creole’s body pitched forward January caught up his shotgun, ducked behind the nearest oak and yelled at the top of his voice, “Fire at will, men!”

  At the same moment a shot cracked out from the house and Shagrue flung back his head with a gasp, clutching and grabbing a hole the size of a teacup at the base of his neck. Someone fired in January’s direction but McGinty was already running for the trees.

  The rivermen knew the folly of standing between an enemy and flame. Their chief gone, they fled, melting into the darkness on the heels of their employer without waiting to see who or how many their assailants were. Without a chance of getting paid it no longer mattered.

  Emerging from the smoke-filled lower story of the house, Madeleine and Augustus got off a couple of pistol shots, but—aside from Augustus’s first target on Shagrue—hit nothing.

  Four of the rivermen were picked up later by Lt. Shaw’s guardsmen on the road. McGinty was arrested the following afternoon on the levee, trying to get steamboat passage to St. Louis. He was subsequently hanged.

  Lt. Shaw came walking out of the darkness as January was checking old Albert’s wound, the coachman laid out on the damp grass of the garden border on a quilt fetched from the kitchen. Madeleine, who went to the kitchen to bring whatever bandages she could find, found Claire the cook and Ursula the laundress tied to their bedsteads, bleeding and bruised. Claire returned with her, bearing medicines and a pitcher of tafia. She bound the ripped graze in Augustus’s arm with perfunctory speed, and when Shaw appeared was dividing her solicitude between Dominique—who she assumed to be on the threshold of miscarriage in spite of Minou’s assertions to the contrary—and Hannibal, stretched on another quilt and coughing bits of blood as well as smoke.

  The house blazed like a massive torch, flames rising thirty feet from its roof. By that livid glare Madeleine, in her honey-colored gown, looked like a gold idol burning in sunset. She brought the rifle up at the muted squeak of the policeman’s boots on the grass, and Augustus, scarred face smudged with soot and hair a spiky tangle, called out, “Qui vive?” and slipped into the deeper shadows of the willows, just in case.

  “Lieutenant Abishag Shaw,” called out that high, nasal Kaintuck voice. “You folks all right?”

  “We have two men wounded and one ill.” January rose and went forward to meet him. From the kitchen quarters Madeleine had also brought him a shirt, rather short in the sleeves over his powerful arms.
“Can your men help us carry them to the overseer’s house? There’s nothing that can be done for the house here,” he added.

  Shaw considered the conflagration thoughtfully, cracked his knuckles, and said, “I have to ’low you’re right on that. And those fellas?”

  He nodded toward the two bodies that still lay between the house and the trees, the blood smell almost drowned by the gritty stink of smoke.

  “One of them is my brother-in-law, Claud Trepagier,” said Madeleine, with soft dignity. “The man who was behind this—ambuscade. The man who murdered Angelique Crozat in mistake for me.” Her dark eyes were very calm, looking up at the tall policeman with a kind of defiance. “The other man is one of those he hired, first to ambush me, then to come here ahead of me in the hopes of catching me alone. They locked my servants in the mill house. We …” She passed her hand quickly across her brow, and that steely strength wavered. “They’re probably chained. The keys …”

  “They’ll be on Claud’s body,” said January. Together, he and Shaw walked to the sprawled mess that had been Claud Trepagier.

  “Nahum Shagrue,” remarked Shaw and spat into the glittering grass. “As I do live and breathe. I wondered where he came by that money he was gamblin’ yesterday. Mighty pretty shootin’,” he added. “What was it, a long rifle?”

  January hesitated, then said, “It looks that way.” He bent to empty the man’s pockets. There was a black iron key there on a ring—simple, a pattern he recognized of old. Looking at it in his bandaged palm brought back the wave of anger he had felt in Peralta’s sugar house, the rage that had carried him across the river, that had burned in him when he’d come, barefoot and in rags, to his sister’s yard.

  He closed his eyes and turned away, unable, for the moment, to keep his eyes either on the key or on the white man kneeling on the other side of the American’s body.

  He wanted to throw the thing away, drop it in the bayou, after freeing the prisoners in the sugar mill, but he knew the feeling was ridiculous.

  They’d only forge more.

  Shaw took it from his hand. “I’ll tell off Boechter to go let ’em out.”

  January nodded. For a time he couldn’t speak; didn’t know what he could say. Only that he did not want to go near the mill house, see those black faces packed in the darkness, hear the chink and rattle of chains.

  In silence he walked back toward the group by the willows, Shaw pacing quietly at his side.

  Before they reached them—Madeleine speaking softly to her coachman as two of the constables lifted the old man between them—Shaw extended a bony hand to touch January’s sleeve. He stopped, and they looked back at the bodies on the grass.

  “Nice shooting, in this light from over in the trees.” Shaw considered January for a moment, the ragged osnaburg shirt hanging open over his chest and his trousers, boots, flesh smudged thick with the damp earth of the fields and the wet grass and leaves from beneath the trees around the house. “My men tell me they found another of these fellers with his neck broke six or ten rods yonder from the house. You happen to see how either of them events happened? As a free man of color, of course your testimony’ll be wanted before the coroner’s court.”

  “Oh, eh bien!” said Dominique hotly. “And what if my brother had killed them? Those American salauds try to murder us, and because Benjamin has black skin he would not be allowed to—”

  “He’s allowed to testify,” Shaw cut her off, and fixed her with his mild gray eye. The constables moved away, bearing Albert toward the overseer’s empty cottage. “Courts do frown on it, Miss Janvier, should a colored man kill a white.”

  “Bah! And I suppose defending oneself and one’s loved ones becomes more acceptable the lighter a man’s skin is?”

  The deep-set gaze moved back to January again. “Well,” said Shaw gently, “I guess in some parts it do.”

  “I shot him,” said Augustus, Hannibal, and Madeleine, almost in chorus. Then they looked at each other in some embarrassment, while Shaw contemplated their almost completely unmuddied boots and seemed to consider at length the fact that Hannibal at this point was not even capable of sitting up.

  “I shot Trepagier,” said Augustus again. “Or maybe it was one of his own men. I forget.” His white shirt hung open at the throat and soot and blood striped his gaudy waistcoat, the yellow firelight in his eyes gave him the feral look of something out of a play by Euripides.

  “One of his own men, looks like,” remarked Shaw, and scratched his jaw. “Seein’ as how he were shot from behind. Ain’t likely we’d catch ’em all. And that feller in the field, looks like he just fell and broke his neck. You better get them boots of your’n clean, Maestro,” he added to January. “Seems to me like …”

  A small man in the blue uniform of the city guards appeared from the shadows of the trees. “Carriage comin’, sir. We cotched two, the boys is out lookin’ still.”

  From the rough shell drive came the crunching rattle of wheels, and a very stylish landau appeared from the darkness, the flames of the burning house burnishing the sleek sides of its team to coppery red. The coachman drew rein at the sight of the fire. The door flew open and an enormously fat, fair, bespectacled man scrambled down, his round moon face stricken with horror at the sight.

  “Henri!” Dominique sprang to her feet from Hannibal’s side, flew toward him with arms outstretched. Her hair lay around her shoulders like Egyptian darkness, blood and powder smoke matted the fragile muslin of her dress, and her face was scratched and bruised.

  The fat man cried, “Minou!” in a desperate voice, and they fell into one another’s arms, her slender hands not quite meeting around his broad back while his chubby, white, unworked sausage fingers clutched in handfuls at the sable hair. “Oh, Henri,” she whispered, and fainted in his arms.

  Madeleine, pistol still in hand, put her fists on her hips and glanced up at January. “Well, I’ve seen that better done.”

  Augustus nudged her with his elbow. “Don’t spoil it for him.”

  Lt. Shaw came back to them, watching over his shoulder as Henri tenderly bore his beloved in a welter of muddy and grass-stained white petticoats to the carriage. “It does appear,” he said, “that you’re right, Madame Trepagier, about that bein’ your brother-in-law. I will say Monsieur Tremouille, not to speak of Monsieur Crozat, is gonna be glad to have the whole thing solved so convenient. But I’m purely sorry about your house.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Madeleine quietly. “I was never happy there, and I would have sold it within a few weeks in any case.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  At the end of March, Madeleine Trepagier sold the plantation of Les Saules to an American developer for $103,000 and four parcels of the subdivided land, to be disposed of later at her discretion. The first house of the new subdivision—a very large and very Grecian mansion for a Philadelphia banker and his family—began construction before Ascension Day. The main street, paralleling the route of the Gentilly and Pontchartrain Streetcar Lines, was called Madeleine Street. Jean Bouille also included in the development plans side streets called Alexandrine and Philippe, after the two children who had died. There was no Arnaud Street.

  The Trepagier family—both its Pontchartrain and New Orleans branches—was outraged. Livia, getting her information through the Rampart Street or octoroon side of the clan, said it was because they were getting none of the resulting money, an opinion with which January could find no fault, though Charles-Louis Trepagier fulminated to Aunt Alicia Picard in terms of letting family land be lived upon by sales américaines. Madeleine sold a number of the field hands to neighbors and members of the family, but kept about twelve, whose services she hired out to the lumber mills upriver at a handsome profit. Louis, Claire, Albert, and Ursula she retained for her own household, purchasing a tall town house of shrimp-colored stucco on Rue Conti and investing the remainder in warehouse property at the foot of Rue LaFayette. One of the first things she did, while still living with her Aunt Pic
ard, was to contact Maspero’s Exchange and learn the name of the Cane River cotton planter who had purchased Judith and buy her back. It was, of course, never mentioned by anyone that she had been in Dominique Janvier’s house, nor Dominique in hers. When the two women passed on the street, they did not speak.

  “Funny,” said Shaw, leaning against the brick pillar of the market arcade, next to the table where he’d located January with his coffee and beignet. “She wins her own freedom from that family of her’n, and the kindest, the most humane thing she can think to do is go to all that trouble to find that gal Judith and buy her back as a slave.” He shook his head.

  “She’s a Creole lady.” There was ironic bitterness in January’s voice. “It’s the custom of the country. Expecting her to see any connection is like thinking my mother’s going to stop acting like my mother. Or that you’re going to sit down at this table with me. Sir.”

  A slow smile spread across the Kaintuck’s unshaven face, the gray eyes twinkling with amusement. “I suppose you’re right about that.” He stepped away from the brick arcade for a moment and spat in the general direction of the gutter. January hoped for the sake of peace in the town that the man’s aim was better with firearms.

  “We found the boardin’ house on the Esplanade where Claud Trepagier stayed for the week before he showed up at the Trepagier town house claimin’ to have just stepped off a steamboat. Everythin’ was there: that necklace and letters from McGinty dating back about three weeks after Arnaud’s death.”

  “I suppose it took about three weeks for McGinty to realize that he couldn’t pressure or badger Madame Trepagier into marrying him.”

  “That’d be my guess, though of course McGinty wouldn’t say so. He did say there was some hurry-up about it, on account of them cousins of her’n offerin’ marriage theirselves. The woman who runs the boardin’ house says she remembers Claud goin’ out that Thursday night in that green Turk costume, and she remembers McGinty comin’ by to see him a couple times. The girl who works in the kitchen found this, stuffed in the garbage-bin one day that week. She don’t recollect what day.”