A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [77]
January remembered the autumn when three of the men on Bellefleur had died of pneumonia, when the owner hadn’t had the money to buy more before sugaring time. The labor had fallen hard on everyone. Though only seven, he’d been sent out to the fields with the men, and he bore far in the back of his dreams the recollection of what it was like to be too exhausted physically to walk back from the fields. One of the men had carried him in. He’d come down sick—very sick—after the sugaring himself.
“There’s no way you can get your creditor to defer until after you replant?”
“I’m seeing what I can do about that.” Her voice had the unnatural steadiness of one concentrating on balancing an impossibly unwieldy load. “But of course everyone else is planting at this time of year. And to make matters worse the girl Sally, the housemaid, has disappeared. She probably feared I’d send her out to the fields as well, which in fact I might have to do.
“I’m sorry,” she added. “This isn’t any of your concern. Of course you may tell the police the message came from me, though I … Would it be too much to ask if you would not tell them where and when I charged you with that message? Could you for instance tell them that since I … since you had been my … my teacher, and I knew you would be at the Blue Ribbon Ball …?”
“Of course,” said January.
“It isn’t as if I was there long or went into the ballroom or saw anyone or spoke to anyone,” she went on quickly. “It … It was foolish of me to try what I did, and I will always be grateful to you for saving me from … from the consequences of that. Thank you. Thank you so much.”
She did not meet his eyes. “You said there were two things you wanted to ask?”
“Madame Madeleine?” The door to the house opened, and the old butler, Louis, stood framed in the high opening. Behind him, January could see the central parlor, a medium-size room, beautiful in its simplicity, daffodil-yellow walls and a fireplace mantel of plain bleached pine. The doors onto the front gallery stood open, and a man stood just within them. Though he was attired as a gentleman in a sage-green long-tailed coat and dove-colored trousers, something about him shouted American. The square face, with red hair and thick lips framed by a beard the color of rust, was not a Creole face. The eyes—or more properly the way he looked out of those eyes, the set of his head as he sized up the price of the simple curtains and old-fashioned six-octave pianoforte—were not Creole eyes.
Certainly the way he leaned back through the front doors to spit tobacco on the gallery was nothing that any Creole, from the highest aristocrat to the lowest chacalata or catchoupine, would have done.
“Monsieur McGinty’s here about the hands.”
Madame Trepagier hesitated, torn between anxiety and good manners. January picked up his tall beaver hat from the gallery rail and said, “I’ll just walk on over to the kitchen, if it’s all right with you, Madame. There is another thing I wanted to ask, if you’re still willing to spare me the time.”
“Thank you.” Had he laid a hand on her arm, he thought, he would have felt her tremble. But when she turned to face the house, to meet the man McGinty’s eyes through the doorway, he saw nothing but the same bitter steeliness in her face that she had had the night of the quadroon ball.
“That McGinty might at least have the decency to let her alone about Michie Arnaud’s debts till after planting time,” grumbled Louis, leading the way down the square-turn steps and across the brick pavement that lay beneath the gallery at the rear of the house. Even in wintertime, the bricks down here were green with moss. It would be the only place bearable for work in the summer heat.
The dining room behind them was shuttered. With the master of the house newly dead and its mistress in the first deeps of mourning, there would be little entertaining.
“Specially now. Seems like troubles don’t come one at a time anymore. That Sally gal runnin’ off