A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [119]
He tied his food, clothing, blanket, and boots to the tree trunk he’d freed, took two deep swigs of the rum, which was worse than anything he’d ever tasted in his life, laid his chained arm over the trunk to carry the weight of his body, and set out swimming.
I didn’t kill her, Galen Peralta had said.
And January believed him.
He didn’t want to, because the alternative it left would be even harder to prove … and hurt him with the anger of betrayal.
The Indian Princess at the foot of the stairs. The flash of buckskin, half-glimpsed through the crowd around the ballroom doors. I must see her … I MUST.
He’d offered to take the message. Had she assented only to be rid of him, to make him think that she’d left? The desperation in her eyes came back to him, when she’d spoken of her grandmother’s jewels, cold desperation and anger. The way she’d set her shoulders, going in to talk to the broker who held her husband’s debts. That trash McGinty, her husband’s relatives had said … A man who undoubtedly was using the debts to urge marriage on a widow. For an upriver American on the make, even a run-down plantation was better than nothing.
She was a woman, he thought, backed into a corner, and the way out of that corner was money enough to hang on to her property. Money that could have come through those jewels that had been her grandmother’s, and then hers. Jewels she would still regard as hers by right, and the woman who took them a whore and a thief.
Mist moved between him and the bank. He kicked hard at the moving water beneath and around him, stroked hard with his left arm, and kept his eye on the clearer of the two guiding stars. The sheer size of the river, like a monstrous serpent, was terrifying, the power of it pulling at his body, as if he were no more than a flea on a dog. The willow trunk he held on to, bigger than his own waist, was a matchstick on the flood, and he wondered what he’d do if a riverboat, or a flatboat, came down at him from the north, without lights, emerging from the fog.
There was nothing he could do about that, he thought. Just keep swimming.
The problem was, in spite of all of the information he had he knew she hadn’t done the murder.
He could probably have made a case against her—possibly one that would even stick, given that her family had half disowned her and her husband’s relatives wanted clear title to Arnaud Trepagier’s land and she was refusing to marry any of them.
But it might not save him, even at that.
And he knew she hadn’t done it.
In all the trash on the parlor floor, there hadn’t been a single black cock feather.
Yet she was lying and had been lying from the start. She knew something. Had she seen something, staying on as she did? Spoken to someone?
Sally. Hannibal could find out from the girls in the Swamp, if he asked enough of them. Possibly even Shaw would be able to track her down, once January had told him.
Told him what? he thought bitterly. That a white Creole lady might know something, when Angelique’s father can see a perfectly good man of color to convict of the crime to satisfy Euphrasie’s vengeance on the world?
He supposed the gentlemanly thing to do was to keep silent about whatever his suspicions were, to help Madeleine Trepagier cover whatever her guilty secret was. But he knew he’d have to find it and twist her with it; he’d have to threaten to tell to force her to give him whatever answers she could.
He felt like a swine, a swine running squealing from the hammer and the rope.
He kicked hard against the drag of the water around him, struggling with waning human might against the King of Rivers. Weariness already burned in his muscles, weighted his bones.
He could