A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [62]
A valuable piece of downtown property, a substantial sum monthly, and all the jewels, dresses, horses, and slaves she could coax out of a lovestruck seventeen-year-old boy.
The woman who marries him …
A poisonous succubus with a cashbox for a heart.
The meeting in Froissart’s office could have continued with Granger and Bouille, of course, after the seconds were dismissed. And Shaw was the only one who would know that.
January folded the papers together, gazing out sightlessly into the early dark. Euphrasie Dreuze’s ravings about the dead bat aside, it was quite possible that Lt. Shaw had looked over his notes and come to his own conclusions about just who had the most motive in Angelique Crozat’s death: the passionate son, or that powerful, courtly, white-bearded old man.
Maybe he only remembered with the memory of an idealistic young man, but it was his recollection that sixteen years ago, before he left Louisiana, had a white man murdered a free colored woman, the police would have investigated and the murderer been hanged. It had been a French city then, with the French understanding of who, and what, the free colored actually were: a race of not-quite-acknowledged cousins, neither African nor European, but property holders, artisans, citizens.
Shaw had, for a time, appeared to understand. But that was before he’d read these notes.
There was a difference between not quite trusting whites, and this. Being struck in the street had not been as shocking, or as painful, as the realization of what exactly the American regime meant.
“ ‘Put them aside,’ ” he quoted dryly, handing the folded sheets back to Dominique, “ ‘in some safe place where they will not be seen.’ It looks like this isn’t any of our business anymore.”
And so the matter rested, until Euphrasie Dreuze took matters into her own grasping little ring-encrusted hands.
TEN
They were all raised to this world, he had said to Madeleine Trepagier three nights ago, with the bands of greasy light falling through the window of Froissart’s office onto her masked and painted face. To do things a certain way. They mostly know each other, and they all know the little tricks—who they can talk to and who not …
January shook his head ironically at the memory of his words as he lounged up Rue DuMaine, with the lazy, almost conversational tapping of African drums growing louder before him beyond the iron palings of the fence around Congo Square.
You don’t. Go home, he had said. Go home right now.
Even with his papers in his pocket—the pocket of the shabby corduroy roundabout he’d bought for a couple of reales from a backstreet slop shop in the Irish Channel—he felt a twinge of uneasiness as he crossed the Rue des Ramparts.
Last night he had said to Dominique, This isn’t any of our business anymore.
Now who’s being a fool?
He slipped his hand in his pocket, fingering the papers with a kind of angry distaste. Before he’d left for Paris, sixteen years ago, the assumption of his status had been unquestioned. He was a free man—black, white, or tea, as Andrew Jackson had said when he’d recruited him to fight the redcoats at Chalmette. He had been shocked when the official at the docks had looked at him oddly, and said, “Returnin’ resident, eh? You might want to get yourself papers, boy. They’s enough cheats and scum in this city who’d pounce on a likely lookin’ boy, and you’d find yourself pickin’ cotton in Natchez before you kin say Jack Robinson. Till you do, I’d stay out of barrooms.”
He had grown up being called “boy” by white men, even as a grown man. It was something he’d half forgotten, like his wariness of authority. In any case what one accepts as a twenty-four-year-old musician is different from what one expects when one is forty and a member of the Paris College of Surgeons, though he hadn’t practiced in ten years. But that at least was something he’d thought about on the boat