A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [82]
“That’s the most appropriate thing I’ve heard all day.” January poured himself a cup of the coffee that Bella had left on the sideboard.
“Not that he’ll be able to spend much time at the Salle,” she added blithely. “He’ll be at the big masquerade in the Théâtre with that dreadful mother of his and all his sisters. He said he’d slip out and join me for the waltzes.”
“I wish I could slip out and join you for the waltzes.” He turned, and above the yards of ruffles and lace, above his sister’s bent head and dainty tignon of pale pink cambric, he tried to meet his mother’s eyes.
But Livia didn’t so much as look up. She’d been out when he’d returned from the market after his conversation with Shaw—after his visit to the cathedral, to burn a candle and dedicate twenty hard-earned dollars to a Mass of thanks. She had still been gone by the time he’d bathed and changed his clothes for the ride out to Les Saules. He wondered if she had engineered Minou’s presence, had maneuvered things so that when he returned—as return he must, around this time of the day, to have a scratch dinner in the kitchen before leaving for the night’s work—she would have a third person present, keeping her first conversation with him at the level of unexceptionable commonplaces.
And when they spoke tomorrow, of course, the easiness of today’s conversations would already act as a buffer against his anger.
And what good would it do him anyway? he wondered, suddenly weary with the weariness of last night’s long fear and today’s exhausting maneuvering in a situation whose rules were one thing for the whites and another for him. If he got angry at her, she would only raise those enormous dark eyes to him, as she was doing now, as if to ask him what he was upset about: Lt. Shaw had gotten him out of the Calabozo, hadn’t he? So why should she have come down?
If they’d sent her a message the previous night, she’d deny receiving it. If he quoted Shaw’s word for it that she already knew he was a prisoner when Shaw spoke to her, she’d only say, “An American would say anything, p’tit, you know that.”
Whatever happened, she, Livia Levesque, that good free colored widow, was not to blame.
So he topped up his coffee, and moved toward the table: “Don’t sit here!” squealed both women, making a protective grab at the silk.
January pulled a chair far enough from the table so that the fabric would be out of any possible danger from spilled coffee, and said “Mama, have you ever in my life known me to spill anything?” It was true that, for all his enormous size, January was a graceful man, something he’d never thought about until Ayasha commented that the sole reason she married him was because he was the only man she’d ever seen she could trust in the same room with white gauze.
“There’s always a first time,” responded Livia Levesque, with a dryness so like her that in spite of himself January was hard put not to laugh.
“Minou, did you know Arnaud Trepagier’s first plaçée? Fleur something-or-other?”
“Médard,” replied Livia, without missing a stitch. “Pious mealymouth.”
Grief clouded Dominique’s eyes, grief and a glint of anger. “Not well,” she said. “Poor Fleur.”
“Nonsense,” said her mother briskly. “She was delighted when Trepagier released her.”
“Her mother was delighted,” said Minou. “He used to beat Fleur when he was drunk, but she was brokenhearted just the same, that he turned around and took up with another woman that same week. And her mama was fit to kill Angelique. I always thought it served that Trepagier man right, that he had to buy a second house.”
“If I know Angelique, it was more expensive than the one Fleur had, too. Houses on the Rue des Ursulines cost about a thousand more than the ones over on Rue des Ramparts. Put one paw on that lace, Madame,” she added severely to the obese, butter-colored cat, “and you will spend the rest of the day in the kitchen.