A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [45]
With a shattering sob she brandished what she held. January took it, turned it over in his hands. A dried bat, little bigger than a magnolia leaf.
A gris-gris. A talisman of death.
“Madame Dreuze, Madame Dreuze,” bleated Clemence Drouet, fluttering at her heels the way she had fluttered at Angelique’s, her round face still gray with shock and tears. “Please don’t.…”
“Throw that piece of trash out,” commanded Livia sharply and snatched it from her son’s hands.
Even as she did so, Euphrasie turned with a hysterical cry upon the servant girl Judith, frozen in the act of pouring coffee from a pot at the sideboard.
“You did this!” Euphrasie shrieked, smashing cup and saucer from the girl’s hands. “You black slut! You planted it there, you wanted my child to die!” Her hand lashed out, quick as a cottonmouth striking, and clapped the girl on the ear. Judith gasped and tried to run, but the room was choked with furniture, new and English and thick with carving. Odile and Pellicot clogged the door to the other half of the parlor, Clemence and Euphrasie herself that to the bedroom.
“You did it, you did it, you did it!” Euphrasie struck her again, knocking her white head scarf flying, her gesture almost an identical echo of Angelique’s last night, when she had struck young Peralta. “You cheap, lazy whore! You dirty black tramp!” She caught Judith by the hair, dragging her forward and shaking her by the thick pecan-colored mass until the girl screamed. “You wanted her dead! You wanted to go back to that mealymouthed white bitch! You hated her! You got some voodoo and got her to make gris-gris!”
“Phrasie!” Clisson caught the hysterical woman’s wrist. “How can you, with Angelique dead in her bed there?”
“Phrasie, don’t be a fool.” Livia thrust herself into the fray, slapped Euphrasie loudly on her plump cheek.
Euphrasie fell back, opening her mouth to scream, and Livia picked up the water pitcher from the sideboard. “You scream and I dump this over you.”
Clisson, Odile, and Agnes Pellicot promptly retreated to the doorway, hands pressing their mountains of petticoats back for safety. January reflected that they’d all known his mother for thirty years.
Euphrasie, too, wisely forbore to scream. For a moment the only sound was the girl Judith sobbing in the corner, her hair a tobacco-colored explosion around her swollen face. The smell of coffee soaking into wool carpet hung thick in the air. Outside a woman sang “Callas! Hot callas hot!”
Then Euphrasie burst into fresh tears and flung herself onto the bosom of the only male present. “They murdered my little girl!” she howled. “My God, they witched her, put evil on her, so someone was drawn to kill her!”
Livia rolled her eyes. January’s mother was small and delicate, like her younger daughter but not so tall, almost frail looking, with fine bronze skin and Dominique’s catlike beauty. At fifty-seven she moved with a decisive quickness that January didn’t recall from her languid heyday, as if her widowhood, first from Janvier and then from Christophe Levesque, had freed her of the obligation to be alluring to men.
“She hated her!” Euphrasie moaned into January’s shirt. “She ran away, again and again, going back to that uppity péteuse. She hated my angel, she wanted her dead so she could go back.…”
Livia meanwhile set the pitcher down, picked up Judith’s head scarf and the unbroken saucer and cup, and said to the sobbing servant, “Get a rag and vinegar and get this coffee sopped up before the stain sets.” She thrust the scarf into the girl’s hands. “Put this back on before you come back. And wash your face. You look a sight. And you”—she pointed at Clemence, sagging gray