A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [112]
The overseer touched the brim of his soaked slouch hat and departed, the sound of the rain momentarily louder as he opened the door from the wood room outside. As he stepped out into the light Uhrquahr glanced sullenly over his shoulder, disappointed and angry.
January leaned his back against the pillar, his hands at his sides, watching Peralta in silence. The old man stood at a distance, the white hair making wet strings on his collar, his blue eyes cold as glass. There was something in the way he stood that told January he was waiting for him to speak, to hear what the first rush of words would be, explanations and excuses, perhaps pleas. So he kept his silence, as if both men were abiding until the turn of some unknown tide. The sound of the rain was very loud.
It was Peralta who finally broke the silence. “I did not know the police hired free blacks as agents.”
January almost protested that he was sang mêlé, not black, then realized how ridiculous that would sound. Maybe Olympe was right about him being whiter than their mother inside.
“The police didn’t send me,” he said, and shook his head a little as a thread of water trickled from his close-cropped hair down into his eye. His voice was soft in the near dark. “Didn’t you ask Monsieur Tremouille not to send anyone? Not to investigate at all? I’m the man they’ll hang in the place of your son.”
Peralta looked away. In the shadows it was impossible to see his expression, or whether his fair, pinkish skin colored up, but the tension that hardened his shoulders and back was unmistakable, his silence like the scrape of a cotton-press wheel screwed too tight.
Shoot me and walk out, thought January, too angry at this man now to care what he did. He’d seen a lot of death, and at this range, a bullet was going to be less painful and quicker than the rope and the drop. Shoot me and walk out or say something. He would not volunteer another word.
“You were … one of the musicians. The pianist.”
“That’s right,” said January. “And your son can tell you that I was in the room talking to Mademoiselle Crozat when he came in, and that when I walked out she was still alive.”
There was no sound but Peralta’s breathing and January’s own.
“He’s the only witness to that fact,” January went on. “But you probably already know that.”
“No.” The old man moved his shoulders, shifted his weight from one hip to the other, breaking the hard watchfulness. “No, I didn’t. I did not discuss the matter at any great length with the police. My son …” He fell silent a very long time. “My son said nothing about you.”
“And did your friend Captain Tremouille tell you that I was the only witness to the fact that your son came into the room when he did? After everyone saw him storm off down the stairs following his quarrel with Angelique?” January kept his eyes on the white man’s left shoulder, knowing the rage in them showed even so but almost too angry to care.
“I don’t have to listen to this.” Peralta turned away.
“No, you don’t,” said January. “Because you’ve got a gun and I’m chained up. You don’t have to listen to anything.”
It stopped him. January guessed Peralta wouldn’t have stopped if he’d said, Because you’re white and I’m black. Might very well have struck him, in fact. In a sense, it amounted to the same thing, though of course a white man wouldn’t see it that way. But as he’d known in the ballroom on the night of Bouille’s challenge to William Granger, Peralta considered himself a gentleman, a man of old-fashioned honor. He was a man who prided himself on knowing the rules, on not being like the Americans.
“I told my friends where I was coming,” said January. He made a subconscious move to fold his arms, and stopped himself from taking a stance too threatening, too challenging, too “uppity.” His very size, he knew, was threat enough, and he was treading an extremely narrow road here. “If I’m not back, they’ll take what I’ve written to the police. Not that it’ll do me a flyspeck of good if you’ve decided a rich man can kill a poor