A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [111]
A white man’s voice said, “Let him up.”
They did, still holding his arms, crowding close around him, the rain not quite washing the rank smell of his own sweat or theirs or the swamp from him.
Three white men stood on the slightly higher ground before him. Evidently none had tried to ride through the swamp, following, like the blacks, on foot. One was a square-built, fair-haired man of thirty or so with a bristling mustache and whiskers, a blacksnake whip hanging coiled at his belt—Uhrquahr the overseer. The second, still in the tweed coat and hunting breeches he’d worn to walk to the cornfield that morning, the rain dripping from the broad brim of his palmetto hat, was Galen Peralta.
The third, white hair bare to the rain and eyes cold and hard as blue glass, was Xavier Peralta.
Peralta turned to one of the field hands holding January’s arms. “Is this the man who came to the cabins last night and asked about Michie Galen?”
“Yes sir, it is.”
He turned back at January. He, too, looked exhausted, as if the nights that had passed in obligatory family revelry had been harrowed by sleeplessness. It wasn’t yet noon, which meant he’d taken the earliest boat he could that morning.
“You told my son that you’d been sent by Madame Dreuze with a keepsake—a gesture I find not in the slightest like the woman, for all her protests of sentimentality—and you told my servants that you were a runaway bound for Grand Isle. I think that you were lying both times. Tell the truth to me now. Who are you?”
“My name is Benjamin January,” said January. “I’m a free man of color.” He reached into his pocket—the field hands never releasing their hold on his arms—and produced the papers.
Uhrquahr took them and tore them up without looking at them. “You a slave now,” he said, and smiled.
“Bring him,” said Peralta and turned away.
EIGHTEEN
The sugar mill was one of the few buildings on the Peralta place constructed of brick. There was a chamber to one side where the wood was stored against the voracious fires of the winter harvests, but with winter barely over the wood room was nearly empty, the brick floor swept clean. The backbreaking work of filling it would be a constant through the coming year, like hoeing up the fast-sprouting weeds before they smothered the cane or keeping the ditches clear.
On the opposite side of the mill, past the silent dark shapes of the rollers and the long line of the empty boiling vats, cones of sugar cured in another chamber on their wooden racks, leaching out the last of the molasses under stretched squares of gauze to keep the roaches away. The thick, raw-sweet smell of it filled the gloom.
“Spancel him to the upright.” Peralta’s voice echoed coldly in the high rafters, beneath the thrumming of the rain. His horse, and Uhrquahr’s, had been waiting at the edge of the trees, the ankle chains in their saddlebags. “Just by the ankle will do,” he added, as the overseer made a move to shove January back against one of the squared cypress pillars that supported the dome of the mill chamber itself. “I’ll call you if there’s trouble.”
They had to pull off January’s boots to lock the chain. It chafed the flesh of his foot and drove deep into the skin the blue bead of Olympe’s charm.
From beneath his coattails Peralta took two pistols, one of which he handed to Uhrquahr. For all his soaked clothing, dripping into a puddle around his feet, the old planter radiated a kind of quiet anger, a deadliness more to be feared than the overseer’s blind, raw exercise of power.
“Mr. Uhrquahr, will you stand outside the door of the wood room? Should I raise a cry you are to come in, but not before. I doubt this will take long. Have Hephastion send the