A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [107]
“Misery led this black to the woods,
Tell my master I died in the woods.”
The gibbous moon stood high above the trees. As he lay in his blanket under the sycamores, telling over his rosary and watching the drift of clouds come and go by the wan light of muzzy stars, Paris seemed infinities distant. In Paris, he wondered if Ayasha had ever felt that way about Algiers.
SEVENTEEN
From the sycamores, he could see Galen Peralta coming across the cane fields in the clear gray-pink of first light.
The rise of the unplowed ground, slight though it was, gave him a clear view in all directions, thankfully unimpeded by the cane that by autumn would be tall enough to conceal an army. Smoke drifted from the kitchen buildings between the big house and the overseer’s cottage, though the morning was warming and there was none from cottage, cabins, or house. Far on the river, the whistle of a steamboat floated in the thick stillness of morning. Conceivably Peralta Père could have left the city as late as midnight last night, in which case he would be arriving any minute.
January tried his best to recall if he’d heard a boat last night. He didn’t think so, but so taken up had he been with what the servants had to tell, he had forgotten to listen. The currents below the city were swift, and a downriver boat wouldn’t need to make speed by sticking to the tortuous channels near the shore. The moon was waxing. He’d heard there were pilots who’d travel on moonless nights. He supposed that in sufficiently desperate circumstances he’d even pay to ride with one.
Narrowing his eyes, he squinted into the dove-colored light. At least he hoped that was Galen.
The boy came nearer. On foot, of course, to avoid questions about taking a horse out so early. The reedy, rather delicate frame was the one he recognized from the Salle d’Orléans, worlds different from the stocky, straight-backed form of Peralta Père. Under a wide-brimmed hat, the face was shadowed, but the man did not move with the confident stride of an overseer.
January tried to calm the pounding of his heart. The steamboat wouldn’t come in for some time yet. He had time to get out, to get clear.
He didn’t have to say much to this boy, but he had to see him face-to-face, to verify—and to be able to testify—about what he had been told.
After a week, the scratches were still livid, though fading. In another week they’d be gone. The marks were clearly the rakes of a woman’s nails, cheekbone to chin, both sides; scabbed in places, and in others clear pink lines across the delicate, pale brown skin that still retained the porcelain quality of a child’s. Galen squinted up at him from under the brim of his wide hat, the first time January had seen him up close.
Large, clear blue eyes, and an almost invisible blond mustache clinging ridiculously to the short upper lip. Fair hair bleached fairer by the sun at its tips. Blue smudges marked his eyes, and strain and grief and sleepless nights had put lines around his mouth.
January had worked the night shift at the Hôtel Dieu too long to think it impossible, or even unlikely, that a man who would strangle a woman he loved in a fit of rage would afterward lie awake weeping for her at night. He had seen men howling with tears and attempting to cut their own wrists over the bodies of wives or lovers they had themselves disemboweled with broken bottles. And for all that she had the skin of a white woman, Angelique was colored, lesser in the eyes of the law and perhaps in her lover’s eyes as well.
Perhaps that was what hurt him so much.
“Yuh-yuh-you have s-something for me?”
“Yes, sir.” January removed his soft cap and deliberately made his accent as backstreet as possible. “M’am Dreuze sent this.” He produced the clean bandanna from his jacket pocket, in which were wrapped Dominique’s gloves.
The boy unwrapped them, stood looking down at them, and January could see the muscles of his jaw harden with the effort to command himself.
Unlike Charles-Louis Trepagier, this was not a young man who accepted