A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [124]
Lacrîme led him around the back of a whitewashed cottage whose stucco was chipped and falling and badly in need of repair. Tobacco smoke rode over the stink of the privies in the dark of the yard. There was a gleam of gold, like Polyphemus’s brooding eye, halfway up the outside stair to the attic.
“Hey, Compair Jon,” breathed Lacrîme—though January had no idea how he could have seen or recognized anyone in the density of the shadows.
“Hey, Compair Lacrîme,” replied a soft voice from above. The smell of smoke increased as the man took his cigar from his mouth and blew a cloud.
“There room up there for my friend to sleep?”
“Being he got no objection to featherbeds and lullabies, and beautiful girls bringing him cocoa in bed when he wakes.”
“You got any objection to that, Compair Rabbit?”
January looked up at the glowing coal. “You just tell them girls that cocoa better not have skin on it, and make sure those lullabies are by Schubert and not Rossini—leastwise not anything Rossini’s written lately.”
He heard the soft snort of laughter. “Mozart right by you?”
He made a deprecating gesture, like a housekeeper haggling in the market. “If that’s all you got, I guess I’ll put up with it.” He felt he could have been happy on bare boards, which he suspected would be the case, just so long as he could lie down and sleep.
“They’ll be looking for you in town, you know,” said Lucius Lacrîme’s soft, scratchy voice at his elbow. He’d told the old man a little of what had happened in Chien Mort—that he was a free man who’d lost the proofs of his freedom, and what had passed between him and Galen Peralta. “Even those that don’t know what went on know runaways mostly head for town nowadays.”
“People know me here,” said January.
“And people know old man Peralta. And if you think you got a chance against him in court of law, you’re a fool.”
January knew he was right. The thought of going into a courtroom, of trying to persuade a jury that he was innocent on his cloudy assertions that a white woman was involved in some kind of scandal—a jury of white men, possibly Americans—frightened him badly, worse than he had been afraid chained to the pillar in the sugar house. It was like holding a line in combat: stand and fire, knowing that if you ran you were a dead man, but facing some other man’s loaded gun.
If he didn’t run now, he thought, he might not be able to later.
But the line hadn’t broken, he thought. They’d kept firing, and the British had eventually fallen back.
That the Americans hadn’t even thanked him for his trouble was beside the point.
“I have to stay,” he said. He didn’t know what else he could say, besides that.
In the darkness it was impossible to see, but there was a rustle of fabric, a glint of eyes, as the old man shook his head. “That’s how I ended up taking a ride in a great big ship, p’tit,” said Lucius Lacrîme sadly and clapped him softly on the back. “And nobody’ll sing that song about your courage.”
The thought of starting again elsewhere, of giving up what little he had left without a fight, dragged at him, like the time as a child he’d caught a fishhook in his flesh. The thought of letting Peralta, Tremouille, and Etienne Crozat win. He was at Chalmette again, loading his musket and watching red blurs take shape in the rank brume of powder smoke and fog.
“I still have to stay.”
“You lay still, then, until you know what the hyenas are doing, Compair Rabbit. And when you break cover, you watch your back.”
January didn’t hear him go.
TWENTY
The attic over the store was one of those places Abishag Shaw had been told to shut down, a sleeping place for slaves who preferred to rent their own bodies from their owners for cash money, and find their