A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [80]
The old woman sat down, glanced across at her still-older friend: wrinkled faces under frayed white tignons. Too old for work in the fields, even in these short-handed times. An inventory would list them as no value.
“Thirteen years they was married,” said Ursula slowly. “Thirteen years … Michie Philippe, he was ten when he died, in the big yellow fever last summer. Little Mamzelle Alexandrine was six. Madame Madeleine, she took on bad after Mamzelle Alexandrine. But after Michie Arnaud took up with Angelique, there wasn’t no more children.”
“There wasn’t no more children for long before that,” said Claire, her bright small black eyes cold with anger. “I doctored enough of her bruises, and you, Ursula, you washed enough blood out of her shifts and sheets and petticoats, to know that.”
She turned back to January, toothless face like something carved of seamed black oak. “It got worse after he started up with Angelique, and worse after the children died, but you know he always did knock her around after he’d been at the rum. No wonder the poor woman got the look in her eyes of a cat in an alley, ’fraid to so much as take a piece of fish from your hand. No wonder she couldn’t come up with so much as a tear after the cholera squished him like a wrung-out rag. No wonder she turned down those cousins of his, Charles-Louis and Edgar and whoever all else, when they asked her to marry them, wanting to keep the land in the family—asked her at the wake after the funeral, if I know Creole families when there’s land to be had!”
“It didn’t do her any good with the Trepagiers when she turned them down,” added Ursula grimly. “Nor will it do her good with them, or with Madame Alicia Picard, if they learn she’s tryin’ to raise money some other way to keep the place goin’, ’stead of marryin’ into their families like they think she oughta.”
“Raise money how?” asked January curiously. “And I thought Aunt Picard’s son was already married.”
“Raise money I don’t know how,” replied the old laundress, rising to head back to the open brick chamber that shared a chimney with the kitchen. “But I can’t think of any other reason for her to slip out quiet like she done Thursday night, and take the carriage into town and have Albert let her off in the Place des Armes instead of at her Aunt Picard’s. And when she came back, in a hired hack with its lights put out like she didn’t want to wake no one up, and came slippin’ back into the house through the one door where the shutters hadn’t been put up, it was close on to eleven o’clock at night.”
THIRTEEN
“Why did you stay?”
“I …” Her hand flinched and she wet her lips quickly with her tongue. In the shadows of the gallery she looked battered and brittle and he regretted asking her, regretted having to ask her.
But if the police were talking about ropes and Benjamin January in the same breath these days, he didn’t have much choice.
“What makes you think I …?” She collected herself quickly. “Stayed where?”
“Three people in the police notes mention seeing a Mohican Princess in the Salle d’Orléans, upstairs, late, long after you said you’d gone.” No sense getting Claire and Ursula in trouble. In fact two of the people who’d seen her in the upstairs lobby had no idea when they had done so, and the third had mentioned that she’d been present during the first waltz.
“Friday morning you told me you were home by eight-thirty, which would mean you had to have left almost immediately after talking to me. But you mentioned the white dress Angelique was wearing and the necklace of emeralds and pearls. So you stayed long enough to see her.”
Her face did not change, but her breath quickened, and long lashes veiled her eyes. She said nothing, and he wondered if silence were the defense she’d tried to use against her husband.
“Was it a man?”
She flinched, the revulsion that crossed her face too sudden and too deep to be anything but genuine. “No.” Her voice was small, cold, but perfectly steady. “Not a man.”
He felt ashamed.
“You were in the building, then?”