A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [78]
January remembered the narrow, sullen-pretty face of the maid who’d passed him three days ago on the gallery, the whip-slim body and the sulky way she walked. A girl full of resentments, he thought, chief of which was probably the unspoken one that she could be sold or rented or given away, as her predecessor had been.
And of course as butler, Louis would have charge of the maids and be responsible for their work.
“She was the one came after Judith, wasn’t she?”
“Huh,” said the butler. “You coulda had three of that Sally gal and they wouldn’t have done the work Judith did, besides always complaining and carrying on, and like as not I’d have to go back and do it myself.”
The butler spoke French well, but out of the presence of whites his speech slipped back into the looser grammar and colloquial expressions of the gombo patois. “When she was back doing sewing and laundry, you never heard nuthin’ but how the work was too hard and Ursula expected her to do more than her share, but the minute she had to do Judith’s work, all we got was how sewing and laundry was what she was really good at, and how could she do this other work? She was a thief, too. She helped herself to handkerchiefs and stockings and earbobs, just as if Madame Madeleine didn’t have enough stolen from her by that yeller hussy.”
They passed through the brown earth beds and tasseled greenery of the kitchen garden to where the whitewashed brick service buildings stood. Beneath the second-floor gallery the kitchen’s shutters were thrown wide, the heat of its open stove warming the cool, mild afternoon air and the smell of red beans cooking sweetly pervasive even against the rich thickness of damp grass. Sheets, petticoats, stockings, tablecloths, and napkins flapped and billowed on clotheslines stretched among the willows that shaded the building’s rear, and under the gallery two crones were at work at a table, one of them stuffing a chicken, the other slicing a litter of squash, onions, and green apples.
“Claire, get some tea and crullers for a white gentleman up at the house and some lemonade for Michie Janvier here,” said Louis. “You might spare us a cruller or two while you’re at it. It’s that buckra McGinty again,” he added, as the older and more bent of the two women got to her feet and moved into the kitchen with surprising briskness to shift the kettle of hot water more directly onto the big hearth’s fire.
“Well, Albert said they didn’t find him Saturday when they went into town,” remarked the other woman, whose kilted-up skirts were liberally splotched with damp and smelled of soap. “And you know Madame Alicia—that’s Madame Madeleine’s aunt,” she explained in an aside to January, “wouldn’t deal with him for her, since he’s an American; why Michie Arnaud would deal with an American broker in the first place instead of a good Frenchman is more than I can tell.”
“Because they played poker together.” Claire came out of the kitchen with a highly decorated papier-mâché tray in her hands. Two cups, saucers, a teapot, a pot of hot water, and a plate of small cakes were arranged with the neatness of flowers on its gleaming dark red surface. “And because he advanced him more money than the Frenchmen would, when he started selling things off to keep that trollop from looking at other men.”
There was a brightly colored pottery cup of lemonade on the tea tray, too. This the old cook removed and set on the table and handed the tray to Louis, who carried it back along the brick-paved way toward the rear flight of stairs that led up onto the back gallery of the house.
“Can I help you with any of that?” January nodded toward the pile of vegetables heaped on one end of the table. “There’s a word or two I still need to speak with Madame Trepagier after she’s done with this Monsieur McGinty, and I hate to sit idle while you ladies work.”
His mother would have been shocked and dragged him off to sit at a distance under the trees rather than let him gossip with Negroes, but it