A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [113]
Peralta turned slowly back. The implication of a lie touched him to the quick. He opened his mouth, within the rain-beaded circle of white mustache, but couldn’t refute the words. Still, as a man of honor, a Creole gentleman of the old traditions, he couldn’t let the words go unanswered. And gentlemen told the truth.
“He’s my son,” he said at last. “And I’m not going to kill you.”
The cold clutch of panic tightened around January’s heart, knowing what that probably meant. But he said steadily, “My friends will still come looking.”
Who? he thought bitterly. Livia? Dominique?
“Unless you plan to sell me out of the state.”
“No,” said Peralta simply. He drew a deep breath, and met January’s gaze again. “I know it’s … hard. But I don’t see what else I can do. Uhrquahr!”
The door opened fast. Uhrquahr came in with his gun trained; January reckoned Peralta was lucky his man hadn’t stepped in shooting and killed them both before his eyes adjusted to the shadows.
“Put him in the jail,” said Peralta quietly. “We’ll be keeping him here for a few days.”
• • •
Mambo Susu, the oldest woman on Bellefleur when January was growing up, had always said that it was bad luck to build a house out of brick and stone, things that had no spirit. It had made sense at the time, since all the slave cabins were made of wood and the inhabitants of the big house seemed to be as crazy and alien as living in a house without spirit would make them.
Later, watching the hard rains and hurricane winds from the windows of his mother’s house on Rue Burgundy, January had remembered those dripping nights and the steady, hacking coughs most of the hands developed in time and revised his opinion.
In any case the slave jail on Chien Mort was built out of brick.
The bars of the single high window were wood rather than expensive iron, but the knowledge did January little good, as he was shackled to the rear wall with a short chain around his right wrist. It could have been worse, he reflected. Chronic runaways were frequently chained lying on their backs, butt to the wall with their feet manacled to rings set in about four feet off the floor. The floor was brick. The whole room smelled of mildew and very old piss.
Examining the bolts that held the chain to the wall, January reflected on the difference in sound between Bayou Chien Mort and Les Saules. Bayou Chien Mort, small and somnolent and out-of-the-way as it was, at least sounded alive: The voices of small children rang shrilly from the direction of the cabins, and from far off came the faint, steady suggestion of the chop of mattocks and hoes, of voices singing.
“They chased, they hunted him with dogs,
They fired a rifle at him.
They dragged him from the cypress swamp,
His arms they tied behind his back,
They tied his hands in front of him …”
It was a forbidden song, a secret song, about the rebel slave leader Saint-Malo. Uhrquahr must not be near. January shivered and scratched with a fingernail at the mortar around the screws.
As he’d suspected, it wasn’t mortar proper but hardened clay, poorly adapted for its job. He gathered the chain in his hand, wrapped the slack around his arm above the elbow, and twisted his whole body, watching for the telltale give in the bolts.
A little, he thought. A little.
He canvassed his pockets.
They’d taken his knife and spoon, the only metal he’d had on him, all his money, and his silver watch. The only thing they’d left him was his rosary.
Blessed Mary ever-Virgin, he prayed, give me an idea. Show me some way. He folded the beads back up again, put them away. He moved his feet, still bare since they hadn’t given him back his boots, and his anklebone brushed the blue bead on its thong, a rosary to the old gods.
Papa Legba who guards all the doors, he thought, I could do with some help from you, too.
He took the rosary beads out of his pocket again, and turned them over in his hand. The beads winked at him, bright blue, like the bead on his ankle. Cheap glass.
With a cheap steel crucifix.