A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [71]
“Sunday’s the worse,” Shaw remarked, sipping his coffee standing, as if he had only paused between tables to speak to a friend. January, seated at the same table he’d occupied with Hannibal the morning of the duel with a coffee and a fritter before him, was ironically aware, not for the first time, of the unspoken agreement that appearances had to be kept up.
And indeed, his mother would never let him hear the end of it were she to happen down Rue du Levée and see him eating with so squalid a specimen of the human race as Lieutenant Abishag Shaw.
“And Sunday in Carnival is the worst of the lot,” the policeman added. “They was a cockfight round the back of the cemetery, not to speak of the dancin’—not that I saw that, mind. What was you up to there, anyway?” He’d discarded his tobacco, at least. January wondered how he could possibly taste anything. “Seems to me your ma’d like to have wore you out, did she know where you was.”
“I noticed she wasn’t tripping on her petticoats to get me out of jail.”
“Well …” Shaw balanced his cup in one big hand and scratched at the stubble on his jaw. “Some folks is like that, not wantin’ to admit they got a son ended up in the Calaboose.”
“She hasn’t wanted to admit she had a son at all,” returned January, his voice surprisingly level. “Not a black one, anyway. Nor a black daughter.” He sipped his coffee and gazed straight ahead of him, out across the street at the stucco walls of pink and orange and pale blue, the shutters just opening as servants came out onto the galleries to air bedding and shake cleaning rags. He didn’t look back at Shaw, but he could almost sense the man’s surprise.
“I got th’ impression yore ma was right proud of Miss Janvier.”
“She is,” said January. “Dominique has fair skin and is kept by a white man. It’s Olympe Janvier she’s not proud of. My full sister. The one I was looking for in Congo Square.”
“Ah.”
A woman passed, selling callas from a basket on her head, and stopped, smiling, to hand one of those hot fried rice balls to old Romulus Valle, neatly dressed with a rush basket on his arm, out doing the morning shopping as if he’d never spent last night dancing under the spell of Mamzelle Marie.
After a moment Shaw asked, “Find her?”
“I followed her out of the square and down Rue Saint Louis. The men who beat me followed me. I still can’t imagine why. Maybe they just thought I looked like I had money on me, or they recognized me as a stranger.”
He turned his face away for a moment, not looking at the tall white man who stood over him. The movement pulled at a fold on his trouser leg and he swatted at it, filled again with the morbid conviction that some of the Cabildo’s medium-sized fauna were still with him. Then the fact that he was here, beneath the brick arcades of the market, and not still listening to the profanity of his cellmates and the screaming of the insane, brought it home to him, belatedly, that there was something he needed to say.
“Thank you for getting me out of there.” He had to force back the childish impulse to mumble the words, force himself to meet the man’s eyes. “It was … good of you. Sir.”
Shaw shook his head, dismissing the thanks, and signaled a pralinière who was making her way between the tables. “I never can get enough of these things,” he admitted, selecting a white praline and waving away the offer of change from his half-reale. January bought a brown praline, and the woman gave him a little bunch of the straw-flowers that lined the edge of her basket, for lagniappe.