A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [115]
“She scratched you in the room there?”
Galen nodded, wretched. A lock of fair hair fell down over his forehead. “She said to m-me … She said …”
She said the things women with a cruel streak generally say to the men who love them.
“I cuh-cuh- … I c-can’t say this.”
The boy was consumed with guilt. January made his voice gentle, as if he were back in the night clinic of the Hôtel Dieu.
“Were you lovers?”
He nodded again. “It was as if she w-wanted me t-to st-st-strike her, w-wanted me to … to be violent. To hurt her.” The words jammed in his throat, and he forced them out, thin and panting, like watered blood. “She … She used to d-do that. I tuh-try to k-keep my temper, I’ve tuh-talked to Père Eugenius ab-bout it, again and again. I’ve p-prayed about it, t-talked to Augustus—to M-Mâitre M-Mayerling … Then she’d b-bait me and t-taunt me into hurting her, and hold it over me.”
He shook his head, a desperate spasm of a gesture. “It was—It was as if she w-wanted to get me to m-make love to her thuh-there in the room,” he whispered. “God knows I w-wanted to. Suh-suh-seeing her d-dance that w-way.… I d-don’t know if it was fighting or love-making or what, that we did, b-but I pushed her away from me and I left. I felt sick. I went b-back down the service stairs, the way I’d come up. I was afraid I’d meet m-my father downstairs. I went … I d-don’t know where I went. The Verandah Hotel, I think, and the Saint Louis Exchange. I just went in whatever d-doors I saw and got liquor. It wasn’t until I was cuh-cuh-coming back to the ballroom that I met some men, and they said there’d been a muh-murder. The d-dusky damsel in the c-cat mask, they said. I ran back and the police were there.…”
He turned away and covered his face. “The first thing I thuh-thought was that I shouldn’t have left her. If I’d stayed w-with her she w-wouldn’t have been alone. She w-wouldn’t have been k-k-killed. It was only later when I got home that Puh-Puh-Puh- … that Papa looked at me that way.”
His arms wrapped around him, hugging himself with wretchedness, and January struggled to put his own anger at them aside—anger at the boy who would let an innocent man take his punishment, a man who would let an innocent take the punishment of a boy whom he truly believed to be guilty.
Behind his flank he flexed his gouged and bleeding hand.
Stay silent. Stay silent and learn.
But maybe, he thought, part of his own anger was only envy. He didn’t like to think so, but he suspected that if it had been Minou who’d been jailed, their mother would have been at the Cabildo that night raising seven kinds of Cain until her child was freed. Even if she thought Minou had killed a man.
“I never thuh-thuh-thought it was p-possible to love someone like that,” the boy went on, his voice a hoarse whisper now, speaking almost to himself. He might have taken the silence for sympathy, or he might have gone beyond awareness of January’s existence, only needing to confess to someone who was not his father, someone of whom he wasn’t afraid.
“I never thuh-thought I c-could love someone that … that wild. She was n-nothing like I’d ever thought about, or d-dreamed about, but I c-couldn’t get her out of my mind. It was like one of those c-crazy, dirty d-dreams one gets. I n-never thought I’d violate another man’s wuh-woman, or go through all those st-stupid little subterfuges, meeting her at night after he’d left, s-sending her secret letters, everything they do in n-novels. I didn’t know what to do. And now at n-night all I c-c-can think about is her voice, and the times she’d be like a child who needed me. It was m-my fault,” he added softly. He was shivering now, hands clutched together, pressed to his lips. “M-my fault she was alone when … when he came into the room.”
“And you have no idea who he might have been?” asked January in the voice of his own confessor.
The boy raised his head, stared at him blankly, as if such a thought had never crossed his mind. As if Angelique’s death had been like one of Byron’s poems, some catastrophe