Benjamin January 1 - A Free Man Of Color (23 page)

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.”

“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'Orl£ans, 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.

“Was it a man?”

She flinched, the revulsion that crossed her face too sudden and too deep to be anything but genuine. “No.” Her voice was small, cold, but perfectly steady. “Not a man.”

He felt ashamed.

“You were in the building, then?”

She drew a deep breath, as if collecting herself from the verge of nausea, and raised her eyes to his face again. There was something opaque in them, a guardedness, choosing her words carefully as she had always chosen them. “The reason I stayed had nothing to do with An-gelique's death. Nothing to do with her at all.”

Every white man of wealth and influence in the city had been there that night. And their wives next door.

But after she'd spoken to him, she'd had reason to hope that Angelique could be met with, pleaded with. . . . Against that hope was the fact that she'd already sent her notes and been snubbed more than once.

Somewhere an ax sounded, distant and clear, men chopping the wood they'd be stowing up all year against grinding time late in fall. The tall chimney of the sugar mill stood high above the willows that surrounded the house, dirty brick and black with soot, like the tower of a dilapidated fortress watching over desolate land. You couldn't get ten dollars an acre for it, his mother had said, and he believed her: run-down, almost worthless, it would take thousands to put it back to what it had been.

Yet she clung to it. It was all she had.

“Yes,” the woman went on after a time. “I saw her when she came upstairs, when the men all clustered around her. The way every man always did, I'm told. I can't ... I can't tell you the humiliation I've suffered, knowing about Arnaud and that woman. Knowing that everyone knew. I was angry enough to tear my grandmother's jewels off her myself and beat her to death with them, but I didn't kill her. I didn't speak to her. To my knowledge I've never spoken to her.”

The muscle in her temple jumped, once, with the tightening of her jaw. Standing closer to her, January could see she had a little scar on her lower lip, just above the chin, the kind a woman gets from her own teeth when a man hits her hard.

“I swear I didn't kill her.” Madeleine Trepagier raised her eyes to his. “Please don't betray that I was there.” January looked aside, unable to meet her gaze. I doctored enough of her bruises . . . washed enough blood out of her shifts and sheets and petticoats. . . .

The house, like most Creole houses, was a small one. He wondered if the children, Philippe and Alexandrine, had heard and knew already that they couldn't not have.

She was estranged from both the Trepagiers and her father's family. No outraged sugar planters were going to go to the city council and demand of them that another culprit—preferably one of the victim's own hue or darker —be found.

Or would they? Was that something the city council would demand of themselves, no matter who the white suspect was? The courts were still sufficiently Creole to take the word of a free man of color against a white in a capital case, but it was something he didn't want to try in the absence of hard evidence.

And there was no evidence. No evidence at all. Except that he was the last person to have seen Angelique Crozat alive.

There was a ball that night at Hermann's, a wealthy wine merchant on Rue St. Philippe. He would, January thought, be able to talk with Hannibal there and ask him to make enquiries among the ladies of the Swamp about whether a new black girl was living somewhere in the maze of cribs, attics, back rooms, and sheds where the slaves who “slept out” had their barren homes. The girl Sally might very well have gone to her much-vaunted “gentleman friend,” but his rounds as Monsieur Gomez's apprentice, and long experience with the underclass of Paris, had taught January that a woman in such a case— runaway slave and absconding servant alike—frequently ended up as a prostitute no matter what kind of life the man promised her when she left the oppressive protection of a master.

Another of those things, he thought, that most frequently merited a shrug and “Que voulez-vous?”

But when he returned to his mother's house after the Culver girls' piano lesson, he found Dominique in the rear parlor with her, both women stitching industriously on a cascade of apricot silk. “It's for my new dress for the Mardi Gras ball at the Salle d'Orleans.” His sister smiled, nodding toward the enormous pile of petticoats that almost hid the room's other chair. “I'll be a shepherdess, and I've talked Henri into going as a sheep.”

“That's the most appropriate thing I've heard all day.” January poured himself a cup of the coffee that Bella had left on the sideboard.

“Not that he'll be able to spend much time at the Salle,” she added blithely. “He'll be at the big masquerade in the Theatre with that dreadful mother of his and all his sisters. He said he'd slip out and join me for the waltzes.”

“I wish I could slip out and join you for the waltzes.” He turned, and above the yards of ruffles and lace, above his sister's bent head and dainty tignon of pale pink cambric, he tried to meet his mother's eyes.

But Livia didn't so much as look up. She'd been out when he'd returned from the market after his conversation with Shaw—after his visit to the cathedral, to burn a candle and dedicate twenty hard-earned dollars to a Mass of thanks. She had still been gone by the time he'd bathed and changed his clothes for the ride out to Les Saules. He wondered if she had engineered Minou's presence, had maneuvered things so that when he returned— as return he must, around this time of the day, to have a scratch dinner in the kitchen before leaving for the night's work—she would have a third person present, keeping her first conversation with him at the level of unexceptionable commonplaces.

And when they spoke tomorrow, of course, the easiness of today's conversations would already act as a buffer against his anger.

And what good would it do him anyway? he wondered, suddenly weary with the weariness of last night's long fear and today's exhausting maneuvering in a situation whose rules were one thing for the whites and another for him. If he got angry at her, she would only raise those enormous dark eyes to him, as she was doing now, as if to ask him what he was upset about: Lt. Shaw had gotten him out of the Calabozo, hadn't he? So why should she have come down?

If they'd sent her a message the previous night, she'd deny receiving it. If he quoted Shaw's word for it that she already knew he was a prisoner when Shaw spoke to her, she'd only say, “An American would say anything, p'tit, you know that.”

Whatever happened, she, Livia Levesque, that good free colored widow, was not to blame.

So he topped up his coffee, and moved toward the table: “Don't sit here!” squealed both women, making a protective grab at the silk.

January pulled a chair far enough from the table so that the fabric would be out of any possible danger from spilled coffee, and said “Mama, have you ever in my life known me to spill anything'” It was true that, for all his enormous size, January was a graceful man, something he'd never thought about until Ayasha commented that the sole reason she married him was because he was the only man she'd ever seen she could trust in the same room with white gauze.

“There's always a first time,” responded Livia Levesque, with a dryness so like her that in spite of himself January was hard put not to laugh.

“Minou, did you know Arnaud Trepagier's first placee? Fleur something-or-other?”

“Medard,” replied Livia, without missing a stitch. “Pious mealymouth.”

Grief clouded Dominique's eyes, grief and a glint of anger. “Not well,” she said. “Poor Fleur.”

“Nonsense,” said her mother briskly. “She was delighted when Trepagier released her.”

“Her mother was delighted,” said Minou. “He used to beat Fleur when he was drunk, but she was brokenhearted just the same, that he turned around and took up with another woman that same week. And her mama was fit to kill Angelique. I always thought it served that Trepagier man right, that he had to buy a second house.”

“If I know Angelique, it was more expensive than the one Fleur had, too. Houses on the Rue des Ursulines cost about a thousand more than the ones over on Rue des Ramparts. Put one paw on that lace, Madame,” she added severely to the obese, butter-colored cat, “and you will spend the rest of the day in the kitchen.”

Dominique measured a length of pink silk thread from the reel, snipped it off with gold-handled scissors, neatly threaded her needle again and tied off with a knot no bigger than a grain of salt. “Fleur deeded the house to the Convent of the Ursulines when she entered as a lay sister, and that's where she was living when she died.”

“And from what I understand, Euphrasie Dreuze tried to get her hands on that, too,” put in Livia. “On the grounds that it was still Trepagier's property, of all things. But what do you expect of a woman who'd use her own daughter to keep her lover interested in her, when the girl was only ten?”

“What?”

“Don't be naive.” She raised her head to blink at him, emotionless as a cat. “Why do you think Etienne Crozat suddenly got so interested in finding Angelique's killer? He was having the both of them. Others, too, the whiter the better and not all of them girls. Whomever Euphrasie could find.”