A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [74]
And the fact that the American had gotten him out of there at all.
“You believe me.”
“Well,” said Shaw, “I think there’s better candidates for the office. At least one who paid them bucks yesterday to rough you up, maybe. Fact remains that gal Clemence Drouet says you was so all-fired eager to see Miss Crozat, you just about shoved her out of the way goin’ down that hall, and you was the last person to see that gal alive.”
Voices raised, shouting, at a table nearby: Mayerling and his students. Though it was broad daylight they still wore fancy dress from some ball the previous night, those who had worn masks having pushed them up on their foreheads, their hair sticking out all around the sides. Two had half-risen from their places, dark-haired Creole youths with anemic mustaches. One of them was the blue-and-yellow Ivanhoe who’d driven the barouche to the duel.
Mayerling put out one big hand to barely brush the lad’s parti-colored sleeve. “I beg of you, Anatole, mon fils,” he said in his husky, boyish voice, “settle the question of Gaston’s manners with words! Don’t deprive me of a pupil. At any rate not until I get my diamond stickpin paid for.”
There was laughter and the boy sat down quickly, laughing unwillingly too. “I’m glad you think I’m capable of it,” he said, casting a withering glare at the haughty young man who had been the object of his rage.
“If you don’t strengthen your redouble the pupil you will deprive me of is yourself. Unless Gaston goes on neglecting his footwork.”
The haughty Gaston bristled, then laughed under his instructor’s raised brow.
“Way those boys carry on you’d think they didn’t have the cholera or the yellow fever waitin’ on ’em, to help ’em to an early grave,” murmured Shaw. “What kind of good’s it gonna do their daddies, spendin’ five thousand dollars educatin’ ’em and sendin’ ’em to Europe and all them places, to have ’em kill each other over the flowers on some gal’s sleeve? An’ pay that German boy to teach ’em how to do it.”
“I notice Peralta isn’t among them,” said January. “Was I the last person to see him alive as well?”
Shaw’s mouth twitched under a fungus of stubble. “Now, I did ask after Galen Peralta,” he said. His gray eyes remained on the little cluster at the other table: Mayerling was currently demonstrating Italian defenses with a broomstraw. “His daddy tells me he’s gone down the country, to their place out Bayou Chien Mort. He’ll be back Tuesday next, which Captain Tremouille says is plenty of time to ask him where he went and what he did after his little spat with Miss Crozat.”
“Tuesday next?” said January. “He left before Mardi Gras?”
“Somethin’ of the kind occurred to me.” Shaw produced a dirty hank of tobacco from his coat pocket, picked a fragment of lint off it, then glanced at a couple of clerks gossiping in French at the next table over beignets and coffee and put the quid away. “But he was sweet on that gal. Crazy sweet, by all everyone says. May be he just couldn’t stay in town.”
January looked down at his hands, remembering how the sight of drifted leaves against a curbstone in the rain, the sound of a shutter creaking in the wind, had wrung his heart with pain that he did not think himself capable of bearing. He had packed all Ayasha’s dresses, her shoes, her jewelry in her ill-cured leather trunk, and dropped it off the bridge into the Seine, lest even selling the dresses or giving them away to the poor might cause him to encounter some woman wearing one in the market and rip loose all the careful healing of his pain.
“But Bayou Chien Mort? That’s forty miles away.”
Shaw said nothing. After a moment, January went on, “I came back to this city—where I can’t even walk in the streets without a white man’s permission to do so—because it was home. Because … because there was nowhere else for me to go. But the place out at Bayou Chien Mort is one of Peralta’s lesser plantations. It’s run by an overseer.”
“How you know this?”
“My mother,” said January. “My mother knows everything. The place Galen would call home would