A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [76]
“If it is,” said January, “there’s things going on I never heard about.”
And some of the tension relaxed from her face in a quick laugh. “And now I suppose I’ll have to endure the … the humiliation of seeing my jewelry and things my mother wore, and my grandmother, on cheap little chacas and—” She caught herself just fractionally there, and changed the pairing with low-class Creole shopgirls to “American wives.” As if through his skin, January knew she had originally started to say, on cheap little chacas and colored hussies.…
She went on quickly, “And of course Aunt Picard’s going to think I sold them myself and offer to buy them back for me.”
No, thought January. She wouldn’t have told her family about her husband’s gifts to his mistress. Her pride was too great.
That pride was now in the quick little shake of her head, as if the matter were more one of annoyance than anything else, and the way she put aside her own concerns in a warm smile. “With what can I help you, Monsieur Janvier? Won’t you have a seat?”
She took one of the wickerwork chairs; January took the other. Below them in the kitchen garden, the old slave was back weeding peas, moving more slowly than ever among the pale, velvety green of the leaves.
“Two things,” said January. “First, I’d like your permission to tell the police that the message I was asked to deliver to Mademoiselle Crozat came from you.”
Wariness sprang into her haunted brown eyes. Wariness and fear. She said nothing, but her no was hard and sharp in the way her back tensed, and her hands flinched in her lap.
Slowly, he explained, “I was the last person to see Mademoiselle Crozat alive, Madame. Because I saw her in private, to give her the message from you. Now I’ve been told that there are some people who are trying to prove that I did the murder.”
“Oh, my God.…” Her brown eyes were huge, shaken and shocked and—why that expression of being backed into a corner?—of … calculation? “I’m so sorry.”
“Now, I have no idea what you would have said to her at that meeting, and since Mademoiselle Crozat is dead and the jewelry’s gone, you can tell the police anything you want, if they come and speak with you on this. But I need to tell them something.”
For a long time she said nothing, her pale mouth perfectly still and her eyes the eyes of a card player swiftly arranging suits to see what can be used and how. Then she looked up at him and said, a little breathlessly, “Yes, yes of course.… Thank you for … for asking me.”
For warning me.
Why fear?
“Will your family be so hard on you, if they learn you tried to see her? I know decent women don’t speak to plaçées, but given the circumstances …”
She turned her face away quickly, but not so quickly that he didn’t see the fury and disgust that flared her nostrils and brought spots of color to her cheekbones as if she’d been struck.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That isn’t my business.”
She shook her head. “No, it isn’t that. It’s just that … To have the protection of your family there are certain prices you have to pay, if you’re a woman. And if you don’t pay them …”
A hesitation, in which the silence of the undermanned plantation seemed to ring uncomfortably loud. January realized what he had been missing, what he had been listening for, all this time: The voices of children beyond the trees where the cabins would lie, the clink of the plantation forge.
She turned back to him, with the small, simple gesture of the child he had taught. “I wasn’t exaggerating when I said I had to get my jewelry back from Angelique Crozat. I had to. Two of the fields are on their fourth cropping of sugar. They must be replanted, and I have neither money to rent nor to buy the hands we need. Arnaud sold three of our workers in October. To pay for a Christmas ball, he said, but I think some of it went to buy gifts for that woman and her mother, because he suspected—feared—that Mademoiselle Crozat was looking elsewhere. He pledged three more of our hands to cover the costs of renting enough labor to