A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [41]
He had been her teacher when she was a child, and something of that bond still existed. It was that which let him say, “He gave her things belonging to you, didn’t he?”
She averted her face again, and nodded. He could almost feel the heat of her shame. “Jewelry, mostly,” she said in a stifled voice. “Things he’d bought for me when we were first married. Household things, crystal and linens. A horse and chaise, even though it wasn’t legal for her to drive one. Dresses. That white dress she was wearing was mine. I don’t know if men feel this way, but if I make a dress for myself it’s … it’s a part of me. That sounds so foolish to say out loud, and my old Mother Superior at school would tell me it’s tying myself to things of this world, but … When I pick out a silk for myself and a trim, and linen to line it with—when I shape it to my body, wear it, make it mine … And then to have him give it to her …”
She drew a shaky breath. “That sounds so grasping. And so petty.” They had the ring of words she’d taught herself with great effort to say. “I don’t know if you can understand.” She faced him, folded her big hands before those leopard-black skirts.
He had seen the way women dealt with Ayasha when they ordered frocks and gowns, when they came for fittings, and watched what they had asked for as it was called into being. “I understand.”
“I think that dress made me angriest. Even angrier than the jewelry. But some of the things—my things—he gave her were quite valuable. The baroque pearls and emeralds she was wearing were very old, and he had no right to take them.…”
She paused, fighting with another surge of anger, then shook her head. “Except of course that a husband has the right to all his wife’s things.”
“Not legally,” said January. “According to law, in territory that used to be Spanish—”
“Monsieur Janvier,” said Madeleine Trepagier softly, “when it’s only a man and a woman alone in a house miles from town, he has the right to whatever of hers he wishes to take.” The soft eyes burned suddenly strange and old. “Those emeralds were my grandmother’s. They were practically the only thing she brought with her from Haiti. I wore them at our wedding. I never liked them—there was supposed to be a curse on them—but I wanted them back. I needed them back. That’s why I had to speak to her.”
“Your husband died in debt.” Recollections of his mother’s scattergun gossip slipped into place.
She nodded. It was not something she would have spoken of to someone who had not been a teacher and a friend of her childhood.
“It must have been bad,” he said softly, “for you to go to that risk to get your jewels back. Do you have children?”
“None living.” She sighed a little and looked down at her hands where they rested on the cypress railing of the gallery. He saw she hadn’t resumed the wedding band she’d put off last night. “If I lose this place,” she said, “I’m not sure what I’m going to do.”
In a way, January knew, children would have made it easier. No Creole would turn grandchildren out to starve. His mother had written him of the murderous epidemic last summer, and he wondered if that had taken some or all. Louisiana was not a healthy country for whites.
“You have family yourself?” He recalled dimly that the Dubonnets had come up en masse from Santo Domingo a generation ago, but could not remember whether René Dubonnet had had more than the single daughter.
She hesitated infinitesimally, then nodded again.
A governess to nieces and nephews, he thought. Or a companion to an aunt. Or just a widowed cousin, taken into the household and relegated to sharing some daughter’s room and bed in the back of the house, when she had run a plantation and been mistress of a household of a dozen servants.
“There any chance