A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [85]
Trepagier’s cheeks darkened with anger below the edge of his mask. “Well, begging your pardon, Madame Viellard, but I suspect the women who go on about it are making more of it than it is. Women need to feel a strong hand, same as servants do.”
“I was never conscious of such a need.”
Surveying Madame Viellard, January suppressed the powerful suspicion that the woman had never been married at all and had produced Henri and his five stout, myopic, and nearly identical sisters by spontaneous generation.
“Yet I must agree with Monsieur Trepagier,” said Madame Lalaurie in her deep, beautiful voice. “A woman respects strength, needs it for her happiness.” Her eye lingered dismissively on Henri Viellard, clothed for the occasion in a highly fashionable coat of pale blue and several acres of pink silk waistcoat embroidered with forget-me-nots. “There is no shame in a young man displaying it. Perhaps your young Galen, Monsieur Peralta, took the matter to an extreme, when not so long ago he took a stick to an Irishwoman who was insolent to him in the street, but ferocity can more easily be tamed than spinelessness stiffened to the proper resolution.”
Her husband, pale and small and silent in the shadow of her skirts, folded gloved hands like waxy little flowers and vouchsafed no opinion.
“That incident was long ago,” said Peralta quickly. “He was little more than a child then, and believe me, these rages of his have been chastised out of him.” His blue eyes remained steady on the woman’s face, but January could almost sense the man’s awareness of Tremouille—wholly occupied himself with a cup of tafia punch—at his elbow. “These days he would not harm so much as a fly.”
“It is his loss,” said Madame Lalaurie gravely. “And your error, to rob him of the very quality that will one day make of him a good husbandman for your lands.”
“Still,” began the pinch-lipped Madame Picard the Younger, “I’ve heard that young Galen is an absolute fiend in the salon d’épée. He—”
“Lisette!” Aunt Picard materialized at her elbow, fanning herself and rolling her eyes. “Lisette, I’m suddenly feeling quite faint. I’m sure it’s la grippe … I’ve felt a desperate unbalance of my vitreous humors all evening. Be a good girl and fetch me a glass of negus. Oh, and Dr. Soublet …” She contrived to draw the physician after her as she pursued her hapless daughter-in-law toward the refreshment tables. “Perhaps you could recommend to me …”
“Please do not betray me,” Madeleine Trepagier had begged, on the gallery of that dilapidated, worthless plantation. To betray her, January understood—as he led the musicians into a light Schubert air and the talk in the room drifted to other matters—would be to cut her off entirely from both the Picards and the Trepagiers. She had rejected their help already, help that would reduce her to the status of a chattel once again, and he guessed it would not take much to widen the rift.
Without the families behind her …
What? he asked himself. They’ll hang her instead of me? He didn’t think it likely. And in any case, he knew that whoever it was who’d twisted that scarf or cord or whatever it had been around Angelique Crozat’s neck, it hadn’t been her.
Near the buffet table a woman was saying, “… Well, of course I knew Caroline had actually broken it, but I couldn’t say so in front of the servants, you know. I mean, she is my niece. So I slapped Rose a couple of licks and told her never to let it happen again.”
Cold stirred within him, a dense dread like a lump of stone in his chest.
No matter how many of its younger scions Madeleine Trepagier refused to marry, her family would stand by her if she were accused of a colored woman’s murder. And in the absence of hard evidence of any kind, the city would much prefer a culprit without power, a culprit