A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [143]
“Out this way, fast. With any luck they won’t see us.”
“There’s an oak a hundred yards straight out,” said Madeleine. She snapped off a final shot, slammed the shutter, and bolted it again. “I know the fields in that direction. They don’t.”
“Night fights for he who knows the land.” Mayerling was bending already, lifting the coachman as gently as he could to lean on his shoulder. “Can you make it, Albert? Hannibal?”
The fiddler nodded, though his face was scarcely less taut than the slave’s and he leaned on the dining table.
“Fast, then, before they realize we’re making an escape.”
The room was pitch-dark and nearly empty save for the table at which Mme. Trepagier did her accounts. Dominique and January lifted it to move it under the window, lest the scrape of its legs on the tile floor alert anyone above; January sprang up, flipped the latch, and squeezed through. As he dropped the five feet to the grass beneath he heard a man shout, “There’s one of ’em!” and a shot splintered stucco from the wall near his head, from the corner of the front gallery.
He looked fast—two flatboat men were standing at the end of the front gallery, looking around the corner of the house, one reloading already and the second bringing his rifle to bear. It could only have been chance that they’d been standing where they could see the window. With only the shotgun in his hand there was no way he could return fire. All this he saw and thought in a split second; then he heard Mayerling yell, “Run!” and the flat hard roar of a Baker rifle, and what might have been a cry of pain.
He heard the crunch of feet in the grass as a man dropped off the gallery and saw the glint of a knife; heard, also, Madeleine Trepagier sob out Mayerling’s name, as he turned and plunged away alone into the darkness of the night.
TWENTY-THREE
Another rifle cracked out, the thud of the ball striking not far to January’s left as he raced into the darkness. Feet trip-hammered the ground behind. It wouldn’t take Napoleon to figure out that if Madeleine had an armed escort, reinforcements weren’t far behind. The attackers couldn’t afford to let anyone get away. January shucked his coat as he ran, ripped free his shirt, legs pumping, dodging and weaving but running with all the speed in his long legs. The lights from the house barely touched the trunks of the willows around the main buildings, glimmered on the trailing leaves and the beards of moss on the oaks.
Beyond them it was lightless, Erebus under a sky of pitch.
January leaped six or seven feet sideways and fell to his face on the earth.
The soft crunch-crunch-crunch of pursuing feet stopped.
Loading? Aiming? Taking his time to site on a sitting target?
Or baffled by the sudden silence, the utter dark into which his skin blended like glass into water, one with the damp velvet obscurity of the night.
Lying on the ground, just beyond the line of weeds where the dug fields began, January could see his pursuer as a blocky shape against what dim illumination filtered through the trees. The shape moved a little. Turning its head? Waiting for eyesight to adjust?
January lay still.
The man would have stalked Indians in the Missouri woods and been stalked by them. He would have the patience of the hunter.
And for a long while, in fact, he stood exactly as he was, only turning his head the slightest bit—January guessed rather than clearly saw the movement—as he listened. Now and then a gunshot cracked out from the direction of the house. Sometimes he could hear a man swear.
Then, very cautiously, the pursuer began to move. By the way he moved—slowly, cautiously, but straight ahead—January knew that he was himself invisible against the dark earth. And just as slowly, timing his movements with those of his hunter, he crawled.
The ground sloped down, wet and thick smelling. He was between the bare humped earth of the cane rows, the hunter moving to his right. He heard the wet suck of mud on the man’s boots, saw dimly, dimly, the black shape of him move. He’d seek higher ground and be looking in the direction