A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [70]
And the smack of leather opening flesh, punctuated by a man’s hoarse screams.
“I am most sorry, Maestro,” said Shaw, leading the way swiftly along the gallery and down the wooden steps to the court. As usual he looked like something that had been raised by wolves. As they came to the flagstone court he glanced around him warily, as if expecting an Indian attack. “I been on another detail these two days, chasin’ after complaints about rented-out slaves roomin’ away ’stead of stayin’ with their masters. ’Course everyone does it—that whole area round about the Swamp’s nuthin’ but boardinghouses and tenements—but the captain got a flea up his nose about it all of a sudden, and I been talkin’ to lodgin’ house keepers who look like they’d sell their mothers’ coffins out from under ’em. I wouldn’t even be back here now, iff’n I hadn’t gone by your ma’s lookin’ for you.…”
“Looking for me?” They stopped by the brass pump in the courtyard that allegedly provided for the hygienic impulses of the Cabildo’s prisoners. January scooped water onto the stiffened filth on his trouser leg, and sponged at it with a handful of weeds pulled from between the flagstones. His whole body was one vast ache and his head felt as if it was half-filled with dirty water that sloshed agonizingly every time he turned it. Every muscle of his arms and torso seemed to have turned to wood in the night. He’d checked his clothing before leaving the cell but couldn’t rid himself of the conviction that it still crawled with roaches.
“Yore ma said she’d got word you was in some kind o’ trouble with the law,” said the lieutenant, keeping a wary eye on the door of the duty room. “She was some horripilated.… No, don’t worry ’bout goin’ in there, I got ’em.” He took January’s papers from his coat pocket and held them up, then steered January toward a small postern door that let out onto Rue St. Pierre. “She was some horripilated and said there had to be some kind o’ mistake.”
“But she wouldn’t come down here to see.” Bitterly, January took the papers, checked them to make sure they were actually his, then shoved them into his coat.
“Well, she did say she was gonna make sure your sister came down, soon as that man of hers got his breakfast and tied his cravat and got hisself out the door, though God knows how long that’d take him. He looks like he does powerful damage to a breakfast table.” Shaw spat into the gutter. “But I said I’d take care of it for her, seein’ as how I needed words with you anyway.”
January looked away, forcing back a wave of rage worse than anything he had experienced in the darkness of the cell at night.
Of course Minou wouldn’t come, as long as that fat flan of a protector of hers needed coddling and kissing. Maybe it was understandable. God forbid she should associate with blacks or with a brother who associated with blacks.
But Livia had no excuse.
After this long, it shouldn’t hurt.
Passage to Le Havre was seventy-five dollars. Cheaper, if he’d be willing to forgo the comfort of a cabin and bring his own food. Add in another five dollars or so for a rail ticket to Paris, and fifty to live on there until he could find work. But not in Montmartre. Not anywhere near those quiet northern suburbs. And it would be many years before he trusted himself to return to Notre Dame. Still …
The coffee-stand in the market near the river catered to everyone, without distinction: Creole sugar brokers, colored market women, stevedores black and shiny as obsidian; riverboat pilots and exiled Haitian sang mêlé aristocrats; white-bearded sugar planters and their wide-eyed grandsons, gazing at the green-brown river with its forest of masts, hulls, and chimneys belching