Benjamin January 1 - A Free Man Of Color (27 page)

January nodded.

“You take that oath they make doctors take, about not runnin' your mouth about your patients who come to you with secrets? Secrets that are the seeds of their illness?”

He looked away, unable to meet her eyes. Then he sighed. “Looks like it's my day to be double stupid. Now you got me talkin' gombo,” he added, realizing he had slipped, not only into the sorter inflections of the Africanized speech, but into its abbreviated forms as well.

“You always did set store on bein' a Frenchman,” smiled Olympe. “You as bad as Mama, and that sister of ours with her fat custard moneybag, pretendin' I'm no kin of theirs because I'm my father's child.” Her mouth quirked, and for a moment the old anger glinted in her eyes.

“I'm sorry.” His hand moved toward the money. She regarded him in surprise.

“You change your mind 'bout Doctor John?”

“I thought you just told me you wouldn't tell.”

“I won't tell on the person who paid me,” she said, as if explaining something to one of her younger children. “Might be some completely different soul went to John Bayou, and that's none of my lookout. I should know in two, three days.”

“I'll be back by then.” He thought he said the words casually, but there was more than just interest in the way she turned her head. “I'm leaving town for a few days. Riding out tonight, as soon as the dancing's through.”

He felt his heart trip quicker as he spoke the words aloud. It was something he didn't want to think about. Since he had returned to Louisiana, he had not been out of New Orleans, had barely left the French town, and then only for certain specific destinations: the Culvers' house, the houses of other private pupils.

In the old French town, the traditions of a free colored caste protected him. His French speech identified him with it, at least to those who knew, and his friends and family guarded him, because should ill befall his mother's son, ill would threaten them all.

Whatever family he might possess in the rest of the state, wherever and whoever they were, they were still picking cotton and cutting cane, without legal names or legal rights. In effect, everything beyond Canal Street was the Swamp.

“Can't that policeman go?” she asked. “Or won't he?”

“I don't know,” said January softly. “I think they're keeping him busy, keeping him quiet. And I think . . .” He hesitated, not exactly sure what to say because he wasn't exactly sure what it was he was going to Chien Mort to seek.

“I think he really wants to find out the truth,” he went on slowly. “But he's an American, and he's a white man. If in his heart he really doesn't want the killer to be Galen Peralta, he'll be ... too willing to look the other way if Peralta Pere says, 'Look over there.' And you know for a fact he's not going to get a thing out of those slaves.”

Olympe nodded.

January swallowed hard, thinking about the world outside the bounds of the city he knew. “I think it's gotta be me.”

Through the open doors to the rear parlor he could see a girl of twelve or so, skinny like Olympe but with the red-mahogany cast of the free colored, with a two-year-old boy on her knee, telling him a long tale about Compair Lapin and Michie Dindon while she shelled peas at the table.

He thought, They can walk twelve blocks downstream or six blocks toward the river and they'll be safe . . . my nephew, my niece. But he knew that wasn't even true anymore.

“I'll be back,” he said. His voice was hoarse.

“Wait.” Olympe rose, crossed to the big etagere in the corner. Like the settle — and all the furniture in the room — it was very plain, with a patina of great age, the red cypress gleaming like satin. Its shelves were lined with borders of fancifully cut paper, and held red clay pots and tin canisters that had once contained coffee, sugar, or cocoa, labels garish in several tongues. She took a blue bead from one canister and a couple of tiny bones from another, tied the bones in a piece of red flannel and laced everything together onto a leather thong, muttering to herself and occasionally clapping her hands or snapping her fingers while she worked. Then she put the entire thong into her mouth, crossed herself three times, and knelt before the chromo of the Virgin, her head bowed in prayer.

January recognized some of the ritual, from his childhood at Bellefleur. The priest who'd catechized him later had taught him to trust in the Virgin and take comfort in the mysteries of the rosary. It had been years since he'd even thought of such spells.

“Here.” She held out the thong to him. “Tie this round your ankle when you go. Papa Legba and Virgin Mary, they look out for you and bring you back here safe and free. It's not safe out there,” she went on, seeing him smile as he put the thong into his pocket. “You had that gris-gris on you for near a week, and there's evil in it, the kind of evil that comes from petty anger and grows big, like a rat stuffin' itself on worms in the dark. Wear it. It's not safe beyond the river. Not for the likes of us. Maybe not ever again.”

The sun was leaning over the wide crescent of the river as January walked back along Rue Burgundy toward his mother's house. In the tall town houses and the low-built cottages both, and in every courtyard and turning, he could sense the movement and excitement of preparations for the final night of festivities, the suppressed flurry of fantastic clothing and the freedom of masks.

He'd already made arrangements with Desdunes's Livery for the best horse obtainable. Food, and a little spare clothing, and bait for the horse lay packed in the saddlebag under the bed in his room. It's not safe beyond the river.

The land that he'd been born in, the land that was his home, was enemy land. American land. The land of men like Nahum Shagrue.

His heart beat hard as he walked along the bricks of the banquette. If he could get evidence, find a reason, learn something to tell Shaw about what was out at Bayou Chien Mort, he thought the man would go. And despite all the Americans could do, the testimony of a free man of color was still good in the courts of New Orleans.

But it had to be a free man's testimony, not that of subpoenaed slaves.

A couple of Creole blades came down the banquette toward him, gesturing excitedly, recounting a duel or a card game, and January stepped down, springing over the noisome gutter and into the mud of the street to let them pass. Neither so much as glanced from their absorption.

As he crossed back on some householder's plank to the pavement, January cursed Euphrasie Dreuze in his heart. At his mother's house he edged down the narrow passage to the yard and thence climbed to his own room above the kitchen. At the small cypress desk he wrote a quick letter to Abishag Shaw—keeping the wording as simple as possible just to be on the safe side—then took his papers from his pocket and copied them exactly in his best notarial script. He started to fold the copy, then flattened it out again, and for good measure made a second copy on paper he'd bought last week to keep track of his students' payments. The inaccuracy of the official signature didn't trouble him much, given what he knew about the educational level prevalent in rural Louisiana. He placed the original in the envelope with the letter to Shaw, and closed it with a wafer of pink wax. One copy he folded and put in the desk, another in his pocket.

As a lifeline it wasn't much, but it was all he had.

It was half a block from his mother's house to Minou's. The two houses were nearly identical, replicas of all the small cottages along that portion of Rue Burgundy. He edged down the narrow way between Minou's cottage and the next and into the yard, where his sister's cook was peeling apples for a tart at the table set up outside the kitchen door. The afternoon was a cool one, the heat that poured from the big brick kitchen welcome. Inside, January could see Therese ironing petticoats at a larger table near the stove.

“She inside,” said the cook, looking up at him with an encouraging smile, which also told him that Henri Viellard was not on the premises. It would not have done, of course, for his sister's protector to be reminded that Dominique had a brother at all, much less one so dark. She had been her usual sweet, charming self when she'd told him to check whether Henri was present before approaching her door, but after the morning's events, and after Sunday night in the Calabozo, he felt a surge of sympathy for Olympe's rebellion.

“But I warn you, she in God's own dither 'bout that ball.”

In a dither over the ball, was she?
thought January, standing in the long French doors that let into the double parlor, watching his sister arranging the curls on an enormous white wig of the sort popular fifty years before.

And how much of a dither would she be in if someone told her that she could be murdered with impunity by a white man? Or was that something she already knew and accepted, the way she accepted that she could not be in public with her hair uncovered or own a carriage?

“Ben.” She turned in her chair and smiled. “Would you like tea? I'll have Therese—”

He shook his head, and stepped across to kiss her cheek. “I can't stay,” he said. “I'm playing tonight, and it seems like all morning I've been up to this and that, and I need to go to church yet before the ball.”

“Church?”

“I'm leaving right after the dancing ends,” said January quietly. “Riding down to Bayou Chien Mort to have a talk with the Peralta house servants—and to have a look at Michie Galen if I can manage it. The girl you mentioned him being affianced to—is he in love with her?”

“Rosalie Delaporte?” Dominique wrinkled her nose. “If you're planning to deliver a letter, you'd have better luck saying it's from that fencing master of his. That must be who he's missing most.”

January shook his head. “His father approves of the fencing master.”

“His father approves of Rosalie Delaporte. Skimmed milk, if you ask me.” She removed a nosegay from too close attentions by the cat. “You might tell him you have a note from Angelique's mother. But his father approved of that, too.”

“Did he?” January settled onto the other chair, straddling it backward. The table was a litter of plumes, lace, and silk flowers, hurtfully reminiscent of Ayasha. The apricot silk gown lay spread over the divan in the front parlor, gleaming softly in the light of the French doors. “I wonder. And what he approved of when Angelique was alive, and what he'll countenance now, are two different things. Do you have anything of Angelique's? Something that could pass as a souvenir, something she wanted him to have?”

“With her mother selling up everything that would bring in a picayune? Here.” Dominique got to her feet and rustled over to the sideboard, returning with a pair of fragile white kid gloves. “She and I wore the same sizes, down to shoes and gloves—I know, because she borrowed a pair of my shoes once when a rainstorm caught her and never returned them, the bitch. These should pass for hers.”

“Thank you.” He slipped them into his pocket. “What do I owe you for them?”

“Goose.” She waved the offer away. “It'll give Henri something to get me on my next birthday. Why is it men never know what to buy a woman? He has me do the shopping when he needs to buy gifts for his mother and sisters. Not that he ever tells them that, of course.”

“You sure he isn't having some other lady buy the presents he gives you?” suggested January mischievously.

Dominique drew herself up. “Benjamin,” she said, with great dignity, “no woman, even one who wished me ill, would have suggested that he buy me the collected works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”

“I abase myself,” apologized January humbly. “One more thing.” He took from his breast pocket the envelope and handed it to her. “I should be back Sunday. I'll come for this then. If I'm not—if I don't—take this to Lieutenant Shaw at the Calabozo immediately.”

And if worse came to worst,
he added mentally, hope to hell somebody—-your Henri, or Livia, or somebody—would be able to come up with the $1,500 it would take to buy me out of slavery.

If they could find me.

As he had predicted, the crowd at the public masquerade held in the Theatre d'Orleans was far larger than that at the quadroon ball going on next door, and far less well behaved.

The temporary floor had been laid as usual above the seats in the Theatre's pit, stretching from the lip of the stage to the doors. Bunting fluttered from every pillar and curtain swag, and long tables of refreshments had been set out under the eye of waiters to which—both John Davis, the owner of both buildings, and the master of ceremonies had informed the musicians in no uncertain terms—only the attending guests would have access. In the vast route of people bustling and jostling around the edges of the room or performing energetic quadrilles in the center, January recognized again all the now-familiar costumes: Richelieu, the dreadful blue-and-yellow Ivanhoe, Henry VIII—sans wives—the laurel-crowned Roman. The Roman was accompanied by a flaxen, flat-bosomed, and rather extensively covered Cleopatra, and some of the other American planters and businessmen by their wives, but they were far fewer, and the Creole belles evident were of the class referred to by the upper-class Creoles as chacas: shopgirls, artisans, gri-settes.

The young Creole gentlemen were there in force, however, flirting with the chaca girls as they'd never have flirted with the gently bred ladies of their own station. Augustus Mayerling, who for all his expertise with a saber seemed indeed to be a surprisingly peaceable soul, had to step in two or three times to throw water on incipient blazes. Other fencing masters were not so conscientious. There were noticeably more women than men present, at least in part because the Creole gentlemen had a habit of disappearing down the discreetly curtained passageway to the Salle d'Orleans next door, where, January knew, the quadroon ball was in full swing. Occasionally, if there was a lull in the general noise level, he could catch a drift of its music.

Philippe Decoudreau was on the cornet again. January winced.

He didn't hear them often, and less so as the evening progressed. In addition to the din of the crowd, the hollow thudding of feet on the suspended plank floor and the noise of the orchestra—augmented for the evening by a guitar, two flutes, and a badly played clarinette—the clamor in the streets was clearly audible. The heavy curtains of olive-green velvet were hooped back and the windows open. Maskers, Kalmucks, whores, sailors, and citizens out for a spree thronged and paraded through the streets from gambling hall to cabaret to eating house, calling to one another, singing, blowing flour in one an-others' faces, ringing cowbells, and clashing cymbals. There was a feverish quality to the humid air. Fights and scuffles broke out between the dances, sometimes lasting all the way out of the hall to the checkroom where pistols, swords, and sword-canes had been deposited.