A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [105]
Michie Galen begged his father to speak to Madame Dreuze. They went to the Mardi Gras quadroon ball. “First thing anybody hear about it, Michie Xavier come in when it’s near light, which is late for him. He ain’t one to stay out howlin’ at the mornin’ star. He ask, has Michie Galen come in? We say no, and just then there’s knockin’ at the gate, and Charles, he go open it, Michie Xavier right on his heels and most of the rest of us followin’ after. And in the light of the street lamps we see Michie Galen, drunk as a wheelbarrow and hangin’ on the side of the gate, with his mask hanging off, and his face all scratched up, scratched deep an’ bleedin’.”
January was silent, but he felt exactly as he had when, as a child, he’d gone hunting with a sling and stones and seen a squirrel drop off a branch under a clean and perfect hit.
Angelique’s face returned to him—the enigmatic cat face, surrounded by lace and jewels—and that scornful, razor-edged voice saying How dare you lay a hand on me? Saying it for the second time, with the tones exact as music well rehearsed.
The fire fell in upon itself with a silky rustle. The field hands gathered close, to hear the end of the tale. Someone glanced nervously along the street, in the direction of the overseer’s cottage, but from the dark windows came no sound.
“Michie Xavier and Michie Galen just stand there for a minute, starin’ at each other,” the cook went on. “Then Michie Xavier turn to us and say, real quiet, ‘Shut the gate now, Charles. And don’t you open it tomorrow mornin’. Honey, we got enough food in the kitchen for meals for a day without goin’ out to the market?’ Ain’t nobody said what happened, but I figure it, Michie Galen got drunk and in a to-do with some low-down woman, and his pa didn’t want word of it gettin’ out to Rosalie Delaporte that he’s engaged to.”
“To Thierry Delaporte, you mean,” put in a small, dignified, middle-aged man whose rough clothing and coarse moccasins were alike new and unsettled on his thin frame. There were bandages on two of his fingers. Charles, the Peralta butler, January guessed. Put to some lesser task for the nonce, since Galen Peralta, staying at the big house here alone, would scarcely need the formality of more than a cook and a maid to keep the place clean. “Rosalie Delaporte’s pa,” he added, to January, by way of explanation. “He has a big plantation out in Saint Charles Parish, and they been talkin’ of marryin’ his girl for years.”
“It’ll be years, if Michie Galen takes up with that Angelique gal,” retorted the maid. “I hear she pure poison.”
“Come mornin’,” Honey went on, after a brief digression on the family ties between the Peraltas, the Delaportes, the Tremouilles, and the Bringiers, “Michie Xavier sends Momo over there”—she pointed to a young man who was quite clearly making himself at home with the local girls—“up to Alhambra by the lake with a message, askin’ for Tia Zozo the cook there and people to be butler and maid and coachman and all, to take our places so we could come down here for a couple weeks, so there’d be no blabbin’.”
“Couple weeks, you think?” said the maid bitterly. “Whether word gets out now or later, it’ll still make trouble for him and that Delaporte girl his pa’s so set on him marryin’. You dreamin’, girl. We gonna be here a long time.”
There was smoldering rage in her eyes.
January thought about the miles of swamp and bayou and road he’d ridden over, the utter isolation of this place. This woman—all of the house servants—had been taken from their friends, from husbands or lovers, from the place they knew, literally at a day’s notice and for what appeared to them to be sheer caprice. He saw the grief come