A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [132]
The cab moved away from the banquette. Fair head bowed in the rain, Mayerling turned and vanished into the pitch-dark carriageway from which he and Madame Trepagier had come.
She’ll change from the fiacre to her own carriage somewhere, thought January. Probably the Place des Armes.
He stepped out of hiding and moved through the rainy, lamp-blotched darkness after the fiacre, the mud and water washing over the street’s uneven paving-blocks slowing its progress and making it easy for him to keep it in sight.
Augustus was a foreigner. White, but a Prussian. A jury might just rule on the evidence and not the color of the defendant’s skin.
But everything in him was saying, No, no as he followed the dark bulk of the carriage through the streets toward the cathedral.
Not a man, Madeleine had said, with a loathing in her eyes that had told its own tale of Arnaud Trepagier as surely as had the old cook and laundress of Les Saules. Working at the Hôtel Dieu, January had met women who had been raped and abused, had seen what it did to them ever after. That any man would have been gentle enough, caring enough, to lead her out of that prison of terror and rage was a miracle and a gift.
Looking back at that Thursday night at the Salle d’Orléans, January could see everything with blinding clarity.
Everything except what he should do.
In a novel the answer would be obvious. “Missy, ain’t been no joy in this old world for me since my woman done died.” Followed by a quaintly ill-spelt confession and the rope—or maybe a ticket to France if the novelist was in a good humor.
But New Orleans was his home. And Uhrquahr and Peralta weren’t the only enemies advancing through the mist.
By the rustling darkness of the cathedral garden, literally a stone’s throw from the Orleans ballroom, the fiacre came to a halt. It was raining more heavily now, but Madame Trepagier, her face hidden by the long veils of a widow, stepped down and paid the driver, then turned and hurried into the alley that ran between the church and the Cabildo, a black form swiftly swallowed by the dark.
Dominique ran that way, the night of the murder, thought January, following her into the dark. But during the bright Carnival season there had been lamps in every one of the shop fronts along the alley that were now closed up and dark, revelers staggering back and forth in a steady stream between Rue Royale and the Place des Armes. With the cathedral clock striking eight, and the leaden ceiling of cloud mixing with the eternal pall of steamboat smoke, the alley was pitch-black, with only a window or two throwing gold sprinkles on the falling rain.
Creole Sunday in New Orleans, thought January. Of course Madeleine Trepagier would have dinner with Aunt Picard, with all the Trepagier cousins in attendance, pressing their suits. Why not? Why not? A woman can’t run a plantation alone. It would be the easiest thing in the world to claim a headache and retreat to the arms of the one man whose touch she could endure without nausea. Her own coachman would have instructions ahead of time to pick her up in the Place des Armes. There was no one at Les Saules now to mark the time she returned, except her servants.
A chill went through him as he thought, And one of them’s gone. For the first time he wondered what exactly it was that Sally might have seen, and whether she had left Les Saules at all.
That far from other houses, as Madame Trepagier herself had pointed out, a woman was at the mercy of her husband, but so a slave girl would be at the mercy of a mistress who had something to hide.
He saw her shape, reflected ahead of him against the few lamps burning in the Place des Armes, and quickened his step. Then there was a blurred scuffle of movement, and her scream echoed in the brick strait of the alley like the sudden sound of ripping cloth.
There was a scuffle, a splash, a glimpse of struggling forms in the dark, and a man’s curse in river-rat English. Madeleine screamed again and there was another splash, but by this time January was on top of them, grabbing handfuls