A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [40]
And yet what struck January about her was her serenity. In spite of her harried weariness, in spite of that secret echo of grimness to her lips, she had the deep calm that arose from some unshakable knowledge rooted in her soul. No matter how many things went wrong, the one essential thing was taken care of.
But she looked pale, and he wondered at what time she had returned to Les Saules last night.
“Thank you for your concern last night,” she said in her low voice. “And thank you for sending me away from there as you did.”
“I take it you reached home safely, Madame?”
She nodded, with a rueful smile. “More safely than I deserved. I walked for a few streets and found a hack and was home before eight-thirty. I … I realize it was foolish of me to think … to think I could speak to her there. I’d sent her messages before, you see. She never answered.”
“So she said.”
Her mouth tightened, remembered anger transforming the smooth full shape of the lips into something bitterly ugly and unforgiving.
January remembered what Angelique had said about “little Creole tricks” and his mother’s stories about wives who’d used the city’s Black Code to harass their husbands’ mistresses. For a moment Mme. Trepagier looked perfectly capable of having another woman arrested and whipped on a trumped-up charge of being “uppity” to her—though God knew Angelique was uppity, to everyone she met, black or colored or white—or jailed for owning a carriage or not covering her hair.
But if Angelique had told him to take her a warning about it last night, it was clear she hadn’t exercised this spiteful power.
The woman before him shook her head a little and let the anger pass. “It wasn’t necessary for you to come all the way out here, you know.”
Something about the way that she sat, about that strained calm, made him say, “You heard she’s dead.”
The big hands flinched in her lap, but her eyes were wary rather than surprised. She had, he thought, the look of a woman debating how much she can say and be believed; then she crossed herself. “Yes, I heard that.”
From the woman who brought in her washing water that morning, thought January. Or the cook, when she went out to distribute stores for the day. Whites didn’t understand how news traveled so quickly, being too well-bred to be seen prying. Having set themselves up as gods and loudly established their own importance, they never ceased to be surprised that those whose lives might be affected by their doings kept up on them with the interest they themselves accorded only to characters in Balzac’s novels.
“You heard what happened?”
Her hands, resting in her lap again, shivered. “Only that she was … was strangled. At the ballroom.” She glanced quickly across at him. “The police … Did they make any arrest? Or say if they knew who it might be? Or what time it happened?”
Her voice had the flat, tinny note of assumed casualness, a serious quest for information masquerading as gossip. Time? thought January. But as he studied her face she got quickly to her feet and walked to the gallery railing, watching an old man planting something in the garden among the willows as if the sight of him dipping into his sack of seed, then carefully dibbling with a little water from his gourd, were a matter of deepest importance.
“Did they say what will happen to her things?” she asked, without turning her head.
January stood too. “I expect her mother will keep them.”
She looked around at that, startled, and he saw the brown eyes widen with surprise. Then she shook her head, half laughing at herself, though without much mirth. When she spoke, her voice was a little more normal. “I’m sorry,” she said.