A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [79]
The offer to help worked like a charm. Literally like a charm, thought January, sitting down with the blue china bowl of lady peas Claire set in front of him to shell: If he’d gone to a voodooienne for a zinzin to make the cook talk, he couldn’t have gotten better results.
“She was flirtin’ and carryin’ on, and sayin’ yes and no and maybe about other men, from the minute she met Michie Arnaud.” For hands lumpy and twisted with arthritis, the old cook’s fingers seemed to have lost none of their swiftness, mincing, chopping, sweeping aside small neat piles of finely cut peppers and onions as she spoke. “He never knew where she stood with him, so of course no one in his life ever knew where they stood either. That was how she liked it.”
“How long ago did he meet Angelique?”
“Five years,” said the cook. “He had another gal in town before that, name of Fleur. Pretty gal, real light like Angelique, and a little like her to look at—that height and shapely like her. But when he saw Angelique it was like he was hit by lightning. He followed her for a year, talkin’ with her mother and ignorin’ Madame Madeleine and Mamzelle Fleur both, and that Angelique would draw him on one day and fight with him the next, swearin’ she’d throw herself in the river ’fore she’d let the likes of him touch her … and then turn around all sweet and helpless and funny as a kitten, askin’ for earbobs or a pin, just to prove he cared. She’d dance with other men at the balls, then lure him on into fights with her about it. He slapped her around, but she knew how to use that, too.”
January remembered the mockery in her voice, the way her body had swayed toward young Peralta’s even as she’d reviled him. Inviting a blow, which would then turn into a weapon in her hands. Remembered the way her eyes had gazed into his, daring, challenging, as she’d let another man lead her into the waltz.
“And what happened to this Mademoiselle Fleur?” he asked. Claire looked questioningly up at Ursula the laundress, who had come and gone silently during this conversation, carrying away hot water from the boiler in the kitchen and returning to mix up a batch of biscuits.
“She died, along of the fever in ’twenty-eight,” said the laundress.
“ ’Twenty-eight it was,” affirmed the cook. “But even before that happened, Michie Arnaud had put her aside, paid her something and set Angelique up in a house. He bought her a different house, of course, than Mamzelle Fleur. Mamzelle Fleur’s mama saw to that. And the new house had to be better, more costive. There are those who said poor Mamzelle Fleur died of shame or grief or whatever Creole ladies die of when they go into a decline, but believe me, Michie Janvier, the fever’s always there waitin’.”
With an emphatic nod she swept the vegetables she’d chopped into a porcelain dish.
He removed the gris-gris from his pocket, unwrapped it from the handkerchief. “You know anyone who’d have paid to have this put under Angelique’s mattress?”
The woman crossed herself and turned back to finish stitching up the chicken’s skin. “Anyone on this place would, if they could,” she said simply.
“Sally, maybe?” There was something about the timing of her escape that snagged at the back of his mind.
The cook thought about it, then shook her head. “Too lazy,” she said. “Too took up with her ‘gentleman friend,’ with his earbobs and his trinkets and his calico. I ain’t surprised she took off, me. We’re not so very far from town that she couldn’t have just walked in, leastwise to the new American houses on what used to be the Marigny land, and from there she could take that streetcar. Judith, more like. She hated Angelique even before Michie Arnaud gave her to her.”
“That Angelique, she had the Devil’s temper.” Ursula came back drying her hands. “Judith would come back here with her back all in welts and cry with her head in Madame Madeleine’s lap, out here in the kitchen where Michie Arnaud couldn’t see. He caught