A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [114]
Blessed Mary ever-Virgin, he prayed, forgive me for this, but I’ve got to get out of here.
He began to scrape, cautiously, at the mortar around the bolts with the inch or so of steel at the bottom of the cross.
He heard the bolt lock on the door rattle and had a moment of horrified panic when he realized there was a little heap of powdered clay and broken fragments of mortar on the floor under the bolt. Falling to his knees, he swept it with his hands along the join of wall and floor and just barely stood up again in time to shield the ragged gouge in the clay with his body. His right hand he shoved in his pocket, rosary and all; six hours of steady work had left palm and fingers a raw mass of blisters and blood.
The sun had gone over to the other side of the building. The room was in shadow, until the light fell in like a fog of glare from the open door.
It took him a moment to realize who was standing there.
It was Galen Peralta.
“Puh-puh-Papa …” he began, and stopped. “P-Papa s-s-says you’re the one who’s taken the b-blame for … for what happened.”
January said nothing.
“And thuh-that y-you c-came here tuh-tuh …” He could barely get the words out, his face contorted with frustration, with the fire of his inarticulate temper. “To see my face. To tuh-tell the police. That’s why you came.”
“You expect me to just sit there and let them hang me in your place?”
“But I duh-duh-duh …” He stepped through the door, shaking his head with desperation, fists clenching as if he would strike himself or anything near him in his need. “I duh-didn’t do it!” He dragged in his breath hard, forcing a kind of steadiness. “I really, really d-didn’t hurt her! I was d-drunk … I got duh-drunker … B-but I remember enough of the night to know I d-didn’t hurt her! I wanted—I wanted—she laughed at m-me and I wuh-wanted to kill her, w-wanted to break her neck …”
“Perhaps your young Galen,” Mme. Lalaurie had said, “took the matter to an extreme, when not so long ago he took a stick to an Irishwoman who was insolent to him.…” But unlike the Trepagier boys, it was Galen’s cross rather than his crown.
“I left,” he whispered. “I had t-to leave. Even Puh-Papa doesn’t believe me.”
He sounded desolate. In other circumstances, watching his struggle even to make himself understood on the simplest possible level, January knew he’d have felt pity for him. But at the moment he had little to spare.
“Whether I believe you or not isn’t going to matter one bit when I’m chopping cotton in Georgia.”
“N-no,” said Galen quickly. “P-Papa’s not going to do that! He’s a hard m-man—st-st-stern …” He flinched a little at some thought. “Buh-but he’d n-never … He’d never be unjust like that. You’re a free man.”
January glanced around him at the jail’s brick walls and said nothing.
“He’s just g-going to keep you here until … until the m-marks on my f-face heal up. He said it’s … it’s hard to kn-know the right thing to do. Buh-but he’s going to give you some m-money and see that you get on a ship, to Europe or England or M-Mexico or wherever you want, just so long as it’s not N-New Orleans.”
Exactly as he’d shipped all the house servants out to the farthest of his plantations, regardless of their families, relationships, lives.
“Just so long as I never see my home or my friends or my family again,” said January softly. “For something you know—and your father knows—I didn’t do.”
A little defiantly, Galen said, “It’s buh-buh-better than hanging! He’s doing the best he c-can for you, when Uhrquahr …” He hesitated.
“When Uhrquahr wants to sell me,” finished January for him. He deliberately made his shoulders relax and slump a little, and bowed his head, mostly so Galen wouldn’t see his eyes. “I understand. Thank you … and thank him.” You vain little cowardly popinjay. It was cleaner than his humiliation in the Swamp, though it came to exactly the same thing.
But it relaxed the boy and brought him a step back into the room.
“It isn’t as if … as if … It isn’t as if I’d d-done it,” argued Galen. He rubbed at the lines of scab on his face. “B-but no one will b-believe