A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [120]
Not that Uhrquahr would let the chance of $1,500 clear profit slip out of his hands so easily.
He was a surgeon, and there were surgical hospitals in London, Vienna, Rome …
Cities where he knew no one, where there was no one. He wasn’t sure exactly when his feeling had changed, or how. Perhaps it was Catherine Clisson’s smile of welcome, an old friend glad to see him, or the voices of the workers singing in the fields. He understood that he had been lonely in Paris, until he’d met Ayasha. He had been a stranger on the face of the earth, in every place but New Orleans, where his family was and his home.
In New Orleans he was a man of color, an uneasy sojourner in a world increasingly American, hostile, and white. But he was what he was. At twenty-four he’d been strong enough, whole enough, to seek a new life. At forty, he didn’t know.
He’d spoken to Angelique in order to help Mme. Trepagier, Madeleine, his student of other years, trying to play the part of the honorable man. Trying to reestablish his links with that old life. And this was his reward.
The water rolled against him, a wave like a solid wall, his leaden limbs fighting, driving him across the currents toward the shore. His two cold stars watched him, disinterested, as the moon dipped away toward the tangled west.
There was nothing of this in Bach, he thought, his mind striving to throw off the creeping weight of exhaustion, the growing insistence that even on the breast of the river, what was best for him now was sleep. Skirls of music flitted through his mind, Herr Kovald’s light touch on the piano keys, Mozart, Haydn, the Water Music …
Swimming against the river’s might, struggling with exhaustion and the heavy smells of the mud and the night—fleeing injustice and servitude toward a town where those things passed under other names—the only songs that came to his mind were those of his childhood, the dark wailing music of the African lands. Those spoke in his muscles and his bones, as he pulled against the current and kept his eye on his guardian stars.
He reached the far bank aching but knew he dared not stop. Plantations stretched in an almost uniform forty arpents inland—two or three miles—before petering out in a wilderness of bayou, cypress swamp, and pine wood. He climbed the levee on his hands and knees, like an animal, and lay on the top, panting, staring at the dark water, all sparkling with the silver of the sinking moon. It was early spring, the world very silent but for the lap of the river below. Inland all creation breathed one damp cold breath of turned earth, where a new crop of sugar was being prepared for, trenches chopped like bridal beds in the long dirt hills. He knew it wouldn’t be many hours before the slaves would be out again.
He ate some bread, which was wet in his pack, and drank as much of the rum as he dared spare, knowing he’d need it for his hand, and got to his feet again. His legs felt like rubber.
Daddy, wherever you are, he thought, for no particular reason, your son’s thinking of you.
He traveled like this for two days, and a little more.
He struck the chain off his arm as soon as he was far enough from habitation that the hard clang of the mattock head on the shackle wouldn’t be heard—or he hoped it wouldn’t be heard—and carried the iron half of Friday before he decided the drain on his strength wasn’t worth the possibility that he might need it. He buried it under a hollow log.
He kept close enough to the rear of the plantations to follow the line they made, the line of the river that would lead him eventually back to town, but it terrified him. He guessed Peralta would be offering a large reward for his capture—Big black buck, it would say. Runaway. And there were always patrols. In older times there’d always been coming and going between the plantations and little colonies of runaways—marrons—in the woods, but heavier settlement and