A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [48]
They walked in silence for a few minutes, threading their way among servants, householders, men and women abroad on the errands of the day. The air was warm without brightness, heavy with the strange sense of expectation that the dampness frequently seemed to bring. Even here, at the back of the old town, the well-dressed servants of the rich came and went from the small shops, the dressmakers and furniture builders, the milliners who copied the latest French styles, the dealers in books and linen, soaps and corsetry. Here and there the tall town houses of the wealthy lifted above the rows of brightly painted stucco cottages or the old Spanish dwellings, built half a story above the ground for coolness—the voices of children sounded like the cries of small birds from courtyards and alleyways. A pair of nuns walked slowly down the opposite banquette, black robes billowing a little in the wind off the river—they stopped to buy pralines from a woman in a gaudy head scarf, then moved on, smiling like girls. From far off a riverboat whistled, a deep alto song like some enormous water beast. Livia made a little detour to avoid the puddles where a man was washing out the stone-paved passageway into a court, and past its shadows January glimpsed banana plants, palmettos, and jasmine.
“You know anything about what kind of terms Madame Dreuze was negotiating with Monsieur Peralta?”
“Euphrasie Dreuze hasn’t the wits to negotiate the price of a pineapple in the market,” retorted Livia coolly. “She was trotting back and forth for weeks between her daughter and Monsieur Peralta, pretending she was ‘checking’ with that harpy and really taking her instructions, and a pretty bargain it was, too. She wanted that piece of downtown property on Bourbon and Barracks, six seventy-five a year and a clothing allowance, household money plus freehold on whatever young Peralta might give her.”
January didn’t even bother to ask how his mother had come by those figures.
“Grasping witch. Personally I can’t see how Peralta Père would countenance it, because he’d be just laying his son open for a drain on the capital. And her playing bedroom eyes with Tom Jenkins since last May. Père et fils, they’re well rid of her.”
A cat blinked from an iron-grilled balcony. Two boys ran by, chasing a hoop.
“Tell me about Madeleine Trepagier,” said January.
“You knew her.” Livia angled her parasol though there was no sunlight strong enough to cast shadow. “She was one of your piano students. Madeleine Dubonnet.”
“I know.” January felt that much admission was better than trying to remember a lie. “The one who played Beethoven with such … rage.” He was surprised his mother remembered the students he’d had before he left.
His mother’s dark eyes cut sidelong to him, then away. “If she had rage in her she had a right to it,” she said. “With a drunkard of a father who married her to one of his gambling friends to cancel a debt. Oh, the Trepagiers are a good family, and Arnaud had three plantations, if you want to call that piece of swamp in Metairie a plantation. Good for nothing but possum hunting is what I’ve heard, and wouldn’t fetch more than fifteen dollars an acre even now, and less than that back when he sold it to that American.” The inflection of her voice added that as far as she was concerned, the American was a tobacco-chewing flatboat man with fleas in his crotch.
“I’ve ridden past Les Saules,” he remarked, to keep her on track.
“It’s been going downhill for years.” Livia dismissed it with a wave of her hand. “Cheap Creole cane. It won’t produce more than eight hundred pounds an acre, if the cold doesn’t kill it. And three mortgages, and lucky to get them. Arnaud Trepagier was a fine gentleman but not much of a planter, and they say the woman’s a pinchpenny and works her slaves hard, not that slaves won’t whine like sick puppies if you make them step out any faster than a tortoise on a cold day. God knows what the woman’s going to do now, with all the debts he left. I’d be surprised if she