A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [86]
January’s head ached, fear that it was hard to banish coming back over him in the music’s gentle flow. What made it all worse was that he liked Madeleine and respected her: the child he had taught, with her eerie passion for music and her grave acceptance of him as he was; the woman who was fighting to keep her freedom, who trusted him.
He did not really want the decision to come down to a choice between her or him.
He suspected he knew what the choice of those in power would be.
FOURTEEN
The Peralta town house stood on Rue Chartres, not far from the Place des Armes. A stately building of lettuce-green stucco, it stood three stories high and three bays broad, ironwork galleries decorating the second and third floors and a shop that dealt in fine French furniture occupying the ground floor. At this hour the pink shutters over the shop’s French windows had just been opened. A sprightly-looking white woman with her black curls wrapped against the dust swept the banquette outside her doors, while an elderly black man set out planks over the gutter in front of the flagstone carriageway that ran from the street back into the courtyard.
January watched from the corner of Rue St. Philippe until the shopkeeper had gone inside, then walked casually along the banquette, looking about as if he had never seen these pink and yellow buildings, these dark tunnels and the stained-glass brightness of the courts at their ends, until he reached the carriage entrance.
It was not quite eight in the morning. Only servants, or market women in bright head scarfs, were abroad, and few of those. By the smoke-yellowed daylight the street seemed half asleep, shutters closed, gutters floating with sodden Carnival trash.
In his most Parisian French, January said, “Excuse me, good sir. Will this street take me to the market?” He pointed upriver along Rue Chartres.
The slave bowed, frowned, and replied, “I’m not rightly sure, sir.” The sir was a tribute to the accent: January was not well dressed. “I’m new here in town. Yetta!” He called back over his shoulder. “Yetta, gentleman here wants to know where the market is. You know that?”
A harassed-looking woman appeared, drying her hands on her apron, from the courtyard. “Should be down that ways, I think.…” She pointed vaguely in the direction of the river. Her French was the kind called “mo kuri mo vini,” heavily mixed with African idiom. “I’m sorry, sir,” she added. “We’re all of us new here in town, just this week, we’re still findin’ our way around our ownselves. You from outa town too?” She gave him a sunny gap-toothed smile.
“Paris.” January shook his head. “I was born here, but that was some while ago. I haven’t been in Louisiana since I was no higher than your knee. I thought I’d remember more, but I confess I feel I’ve been set down in Moscow.”
“Try askin’ by the shop,” suggested Yetta. “Helga—Mamzelle Richter, what owns the place—she knows this city like a mouse knows the barn. She can tell you the best place to buy what you’re after, too.”
“Thank you.” He smiled and slipped them each a couple of reales, then went into Mademoiselle Richter’s shop and asked, just to make sure, commenting that Carnival seemed an odd time to entirely change one’s household staff.
“So I thought,” said the German girl frankly. She spoke French with an accent indistinguishable from the Creole ladies of Monsieur Hermann’s ball last night. “Myself, I think there was a contagion of some sort among the servants. Monsieur Peralta kept the lot of them closed up behind doors for all of one day, until his new lot arrived in two wagons from his plantation on the lake. Then all piled into the wagons, all the old servants—stablemen, cook, laundress, maids, everyone—and left, early on Saturday morning. Did I not live along the street here I would not have seen it at all—I only did because I was coming early to do the accounts. Later in the morning the last few left with a carriage, I think containing Monsieur Galen, for I have not seen him either.”
She shrugged. “Me, I lived through the cholera