A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [81]
She drew a deep breath, as if collecting herself from the verge of nausea, and raised her eyes to his face again. There was something opaque in them, a guardedness, choosing her words carefully as she had always chosen them. “The reason I stayed had nothing to do with Angelique’s death. Nothing to do with her at all.”
Every white man of wealth and influence in the city had been there that night. And their wives next door.
But after she’d spoken to him, she’d had reason to hope that Angelique could be met with, pleaded with.… Against that hope was the fact that she’d already sent her notes and been snubbed more than once.
Somewhere an ax sounded, distant and clear, men chopping the wood they’d be stowing up all year against grinding time late in fall. The tall chimney of the sugar mill stood high above the willows that surrounded the house, dirty brick and black with soot, like the tower of a dilapidated fortress watching over desolate land. You couldn’t get ten dollars an acre for it, his mother had said, and he believed her: run-down, almost worthless, it would take thousands to put it back to what it had been.
Yet she clung to it. It was all she had.
“Yes,” the woman went on after a time. “I saw her when she came upstairs, when the men all clustered around her. The way every man always did, I’m told. I can’t … I can’t tell you the humiliation I’ve suffered, knowing about Arnaud and that woman. Knowing that everyone knew. I was angry enough to tear my grandmother’s jewels off her myself and beat her to death with them, but I didn’t kill her. I didn’t speak to her. To my knowledge I’ve never spoken to her.”
The muscle in her temple jumped, once, with the tightening of her jaw. Standing closer to her, January could see she had a little scar on her lower lip, just above the chin, the kind a woman gets from her own teeth when a man hits her hard.
“I swear I didn’t kill her.” Madeleine Trepagier raised her eyes to his. “Please don’t betray that I was there.” January looked aside, unable to meet her gaze. I doctored enough of her bruises … washed enough blood out of her shifts and sheets and petticoats.…
The house, like most Creole houses, was a small one. He wondered if the children, Philippe and Alexandrine, had heard and knew already that they couldn’t not have.
She was estranged from both the Trepagiers and her father’s family. No outraged sugar planters were going to go to the city council and demand of them that another culprit—preferably one of the victim’s own hue or darker—be found.
Or would they? Was that something the city council would demand of themselves, no matter who the white suspect was? The courts were still sufficiently Creole to take the word of a free man of color against a white in a capital case, but it was something he didn’t want to try in the absence of hard evidence.
And there was no evidence. No evidence at all. Except that he was the last person to have seen Angelique Crozat alive.
There was a ball that night at Hermann’s, a wealthy wine merchant on Rue St. Philippe. He would, January thought, be able to talk with Hannibal there and ask him to make enquiries among the ladies of the Swamp about whether a new black girl was living somewhere in the maze of cribs, attics, back rooms, and sheds where the slaves who “slept out” had their barren homes. The girl Sally might very well have gone to her much-vaunted “gentleman friend,” but his rounds as Monsieur Gomez’s apprentice, and long experience with the underclass of Paris, had taught January that a woman in such a case—runaway slave and absconding servant alike—frequently ended up as a prostitute no matter what kind of life the man promised her when she left the oppressive protection of a master.
Another of those things, he thought, that most frequently merited a shrug and “Que voulez-vous?”
But when he returned to his mother’s house after the Culver girls’ piano lesson, he found Dominique in the rear parlor with her, both women stitching industriously on a cascade of apricot silk. “It’s for my new dress for the Mardi Gras ball at the