A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [43]
And indeed, he could scarcely imagine Angelique Crozat or her mother or his own mother, who had been a slave herself, speaking to the woman.
The woman was a slave, and black.
He was free, and colored, though his skin was as dark as hers.
He watched the slim figure cross through the garden toward the kitchen, like a crow against the green of the grass, saw her ignore the old man tending to the planting, and noted the haughty tilt of shoulder and hip as she passed some words with the cook. Then she went on toward the laundry, and January saw the cook and another old woman speak quietly. Knowing the opinions his mother’s cook Bella traded with the cook of the woman next door, he could guess exactly what they said.
Not something he’d want said about him.
“I’ve written a note for Madame Dreuze.”
He rose quickly. Madame Trepagier stood in the doorway, a sealed envelope in her hand. “Would you be so good as to give it to her? I’m sorry.” She smiled, her nervousness, her defenses, falling away. For a moment it was the warm smile of the child he had taught, sitting in her white dress at the piano—the sunny, half-apologetic smile of a child whose playing had contained such dreadful passion, such adult ferocity. He still wondered at the source of that glory and rage.
“I always seem to be making you a messenger. I do apologize.”
“Madame Trepagier.” He took the message and tucked it into a pocket, then bowed over her hand. “I’m a little old to be cast as winged Mercury, but I’m honored to serve you nevertheless.”
“After two years of being Apollo,” she said smiling, “it makes a change.”
He recognized the allusion, and smiled. In addition to being the god of music, Apollo was the lord of healing. “Did you keep up with it?” he asked, as he moved toward the steps. “The music?”
She nodded, her smile gentle again, secret and warm. “It was like knowing how to swim,” she said. “I thought of you many times, when the water was deep. You did save my life.”
And turning, she went back into the house, leaving him stunned upon the steps.
SEVEN
A square-featured woman in the faded calico of a servant answered January’s knock at the bright pink cottage on Rue des Ursulines. The jalousies were closed over the tall French windows and a muted babble came from the dimness beyond her shoulder. There was a smell of patchouli and a stronger one of coffee.
“You lookin’ for your ma, Michie Janvier?” she asked. “She in the back with Madame Phrasie.” She curtsied as January regarded her in surprise.
“I’m looking for Madame Euphrasie, mostly,” he said, as the woman stood aside to admit him. She had the smoother skin and unknotted hands of a longtime house servant. At first glance, in the shadows under the abatvent, he would have put her near his own forty years, but as his eyes adjusted to the dim room he realized she couldn’t be more than twenty-five. “How is she?”
The woman hesitated, then said, “She bearin’ up.” There was a world of weighted words and unspoken thought in that short phrase.
“Bearin’ up, huh,” said Agnes Pellicot shortly, from the green brocaded settee she shared with two other beautifully dressed, still-handsome women with fans of painted silk in their hands. The older, Catherine Clisson, had been three years ahead of January in Herr Kovald’s music classes, a slim girl with high cheekbones for whom, at the time, he had nursed a sentimental and hopeless love. The younger, rounded and pretty in an exquisite rose-and-white striped dress, was Odile Gignac, his mother’s dressmaker.
“Bearin’ up enough to collect every earbob and pin, and cut the silver buttons off every one of her daughter’s dresses, is how she’s bearin’ up.”
“A woman can grieve her daughter and still fear for her own future, Agnes,” said Clisson gently. “You know she had nothing beyond what Angelique sent her every month.”
“God knows it was Angelique who paid her bills, more times than not,” added Gignac, crossing herself. The