A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [33]
It was nearly five in the morning when January was conducted by a guardsman down the rear stairway—out of consideration to those still in the gambling rooms—and into Froissart’s office.
The place smelled overwhelmingly of burnt tallow and expectorated tobacco. “I’d have started with the mothers, myself,” sighed Lt. Shaw, pinching off the long brownish winding sheet from one of the branch of kitchen candles guttering on the desk. In his shirtsleeves the resemblance to a poorly made scarecrow was increased, his leather galluses cutting across the cheap calico of his shirt like wheel ruts, his long arms hanging knobby and cat scratched out of the rolled-up sleeves. Windrows of yellow paper heaped the desk’s surface, and a smaller pile on the side table next to a graceful Empire chair marked where the clerk had sat. January wondered how accurate the notes on the costumes were.
He was a little surprised when Shaw motioned him to a chair. Most Americans—in fact most whites—would have let a man of color stand.
“You’re right about that, sir,” he said. “They’re the ones who would have seen anything worth seeing.”
Coffee cups stood in a neat cluster in one corner of the desk—presumably brought in by the men when they were questioned. Even at this hour, voices clamored drunkenly in the street, though the general tenor had lowered to a masculine bass. The brass band, wherever it was, was still going strong, on its fifth or sixth iteration of the same ten tunes. On the way from the back stairs to the office January had heard the noise from the gambling rooms, as strong now as it had been at seven-thirty the previous evening.
“Now, there’s a fact.” Shaw stretched his long arms, uncricking his back in a series of audible pops. “I sure wouldn’t want to go bargainin’ with one of them old bissoms, and I don’t care what her daughter looked like. I seen warmer Christian charity at Maspero’s Slave Exchange than I seen in the eyes of that harpy in yellow.… Leastwise this way the daughter gets the good of it, and not some rich man who’s got a plantation already. You know Miss Crozat?”
“By reputation,” said January. “I met her once or twice when she was little, but her mama kept her pretty close. She was only seven when I left for Paris in 1817, and she wasn’t a student of mine. I taught piano back then, too,” he explained. “I expect I’d have met her sooner or later, now I’m back. Her mother and mine are friends.”
“But your sister says you say you talked to her tonight.”
January nodded. “I’d been charged by a friend to arrange a meeting with her at my mother’s house, tomorrow afternoon … this afternoon. I haven’t had time to talk to my mother about it yet. I’ve lived with my mother since I came back from Paris in November. It’s on Rue Burgundy.”
Shaw made a note. “Any idea what the meetin’ was about? And could I get the name of your friend?”
“I have no idea about the meeting. If it’s all the same to you … sir,” he remembered to add, “… I’d rather keep my friend’s name out of this. The message was given in confidence.”
It was his experience that white men frequently expected blacks or colored to do things as a matter of course that would have been a dueling matter for a white, but Shaw only nodded. The rain-colored eyes, lazy and set very deep, rested thoughtfully on him for a time, shadowed in the rusty glare