A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [127]
“I’ll send one of my boys,” said Olympe, in her Hecate voice of silver-veined iron. “We don’t know what the police know, or what they think, but that policeman who came, he’s no fool.” As she spoke she slipped past the cook and into the kitchen, coming out with a blue-and-white German-made dish of jambalaya and a pone of bread. “You got your papers?”
Again he shook his head. “They’re in the desk in my room. Top left drawer.” He resolved, as soon as he had the time, to forge five or six more copies. “What did Shaw say?”
“That he wanted to talk to you.” Dominique seated herself on another of the bent-willow kitchen chairs, while January gouged into the jambalaya like a gravedigger in a fever summer, alternating the rice and shrimp with gulps of coffee only partly warmed. “I asked him if you were in any trouble. He said you could be, and would be if he couldn’t find you. Ben, what happened?”
“Peralta’s overseer tore up my papers,” said January. “Galen Peralta didn’t kill Angelique, but his father thinks he did. He said he’d hold me there until the boy’s face healed up—Angelique scratched him pretty badly and a jury might take that amiss—then put me on a boat for Europe or New York or wherever I wanted to go. Some of the slaves told me that night the overseer was planning to take me and sell me himself and claim I’d escaped. They slipped me a mattock head to hack through the window bars.”
“Oh, Ben.” Her voice was barely a whisper, her hand to her mouth. Fear for me? wondered January. Well, yes—Dominique was a warm-hearted girl, with a ready sympathy, and cared for him with the unthinking happy love she’d shown when she was four and he her great, tall brother twenty years her senior. But was part of the shock he read in her eyes a realization of how little her own freedom meant?
Or didn’t she understand that yet?
“What … What do they want you for? You have papers. I mean, you are free, and here in town people know you.”
“Peralta may tell the police some story that makes it seem I did the murder, rather than his son.” Thin rain had started to fall again, as it had fallen all day, pattering the muddy ground beyond the gallery where they sat. Becky moved silently in the kitchen behind them, grinding fresh coffee and feeding the fire under the big iron boiler.
“He’s the guards’ captain’s cousin, and the guards are under pressure from Etienne Crozat to find someone, anyone, to punish for the crime. I think I can find who really did it, but I’ll need proof. And that proof had better be strong enough to stand up against the fact that the killer was almost certainly white, and I’m black.”
By the time January had finished bathing and had shaved five days’ bristle of graying beard from his face, Olympe had returned with his boots and a bundle of clothes from their mother’s house. Both sisters were waiting for him in Dominique’s parlor when he crossed the yard through the thin, driving needles of rain; he wondered why he’d never realized how much alike they looked.
Probably because he’d never seen them together as adults. It occurred to him to wonder what Olympe was doing here at all.
“I need to find a runaway, a girl name of Sally,” said January, as he came into the rear parlor where both women sat. “So high, thin, as black as me. Full-blood Congo, they say. She ran off from Les Saules Plantation a week ago Friday, probably with a man.” At the moment, he reflected, finding her might be safer than another trip out to Les Saules, at least while the sun was up.
“I think she knows something, and I’m pretty sure she talked to someone about something.” He’d examined his hand in the kitchen and had found it still clean. The bandages Becky had pinned over the dressings and salves he’d put on it gleamed starkly white against the dark of his flesh.
“I’ll ask around,” said Olympe. “She could be anywhere, if