A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [49]
January almost asked his mother if she wanted to go back over the battlefield and slit the throats of anyone she’d only wounded in the first fusillade, but stopped himself. Behind them, a voice called out, “Madame Levesque! Madame Livia!” and January turned, hearing running footsteps. The woman Judith was hurrying down Rue Burgundy toward them, her hand pressed to her side to ease a stitch. She’d put on her head scarf again, and against the soft yellows and rusts and greens of the houses the dull red of her calico dress seemed like a smear of dark blood.
“Madame Livia, it isn’t true!” panted Judith, when she had come up with January and his mother. “It isn’t true! I never went to a voodoo woman or made any gris-gris against Mamzelle Angelique!”
Livia looked down her nose at the younger woman, in spite of the fact that Judith was some five inches taller than her. “And did you run away?”
The slave woman was, January guessed, exactly of his mother’s extraction—half-and-half mulatto—but he could see in his mother’s eyes, hear in the tone of her voice, the exact configuration of the white French when they spoke to their slaves. The look, the tone, that said, I am colored. She is black.
Maybe she didn’t remember the cane fields.
And Judith said, “M’am, it was only for a night. It really was only for a night.” As if Livia Levesque had been white, she didn’t look her in the face. “She’d whipped me, with a stick of cane.… I really would have come back. Madame Madeleine, she told me I had to.… I never would have gone to a voodoo.”
“Did Monsieur Trepagier take you away from Madame Madeleine and give you to Angelique?” asked January.
Judith nodded. “Her daddy bought me for her. Years ago, when first they got married. I’d waited on her, fixed her hair, sewed her clothes.… She was always good to me. And it made me mad, when Michie Arnaud give that Angelique her jewelry and her dresses and her horse, that little red mare she always rode. She tried not to show she cared, same as she tried not to show it when he’d taken a cane to her.”
She shook her head, her eyes dark with anger and grief. “There’d be nights when she’d hold on to me and cry until nearly morning, with her back all bleeding or her face marked, then get up and go on about sewing his shirts and doing the accounts and writing to the brokers, until I’d have to go out back and cry myself, for pity. Later when he gave me to that Angelique, sometimes I’d run away and go back, just to see her. I did when Mamzelle Alexandrine died—her daughter—long of the fever. She was my friend, Madame Livia. But I’d never have hurt Angelique. I go to confession, and I know that’s a sin. Please believe me. You have to believe. And as for her saying Madame Madeleine put me up to a thing like that … I never would have! She never would have!”
Livia sniffed.
Gently, January asked, “Would the cook? She was Madame Madeleine’s servant too, wasn’t she?”
“Kessie?” Judith hesitated a long time. “I—I don’t think so, sir,” she answered at last. “I know she left a man and three kids at Les Saules, but I know, too, she’s got another man here in town. And she didn’t … didn’t hate Angelique. Not like I did. For one thing,” she added with a wry twist to her lips, “if anything happened to Angelique, Kessie wouldn’t be able to steal from the kitchen, like she was doing. She might have put graveyard dust someplace in the bedroom, but she wouldn’t have done that kind of a ouanga, a death sign.”
She looked from Livia’s cool face to January’s, anxious and frightened, her hazel eyes wide. “I go to church, and I pray to God. I don’t go to the voodoo dances, Sundays. You have to believe me. Please believe me.”
January was silent. He wondered