He heard the soft snort of laughter. "Mozart right by you?"
He made a deprecating gesture, like a housekeeper haggling in the market. "If that's all you got, I guess I'll put up with it." He felt he could have been happy on bare boards, which he suspected would be the case, just so long as he could lie down and sleep.
"They'll be looking for you in town, you know," said Lucius Lacrime's soft, scratchy voice at his elbow.
He'd told the old man a little of what had happened in Chien Mort - that he was a free man who'd lost the proofs of his freedom, and what had passed between him and Galen Peralta. "Even those that don't know what went on know runaways mostly head for town nowadays."
"People know me here," said January.
"And people know old man Peralta. And if you mink you got a chance against him in court of law, you're a fool."
January knew he was right. The diought of going into a courtroom, of trying to persuade a jury that he was innocent on his cloudy assertions that a white woman was involved in some kind of scandal - a jury of white men, possibly Americans - frightened him badly, worse than he had been afraid chained to the pillar in the sugar house. It was like holding a line in combat: stand and fire, knowing that if you ran you were a dead man, but facing some other man's loaded gun.
If he didn't run now, he thought, he might not be able to later.
But the line hadn't broken, he thought. They'd kept firing, and the British had eventually fallen back.
That the Americans hadn't even thanked him for his trouble was beside the point.
"I have to stay," he said. He didn't know what else he could say, besides that.
In the darkness it was impossible to see, but there was a rusde of fabric, a glint of eyes, as the old man shook his head. "That's how I ended up taking a ride in a great big ship, p'tit," said Lucius Lacrime sadly and clapped him softly on the back. "And nobody'll sing that song about your courage."
The thought of starting again elsewhere, of giving up what little he had left without a fight, dragged at him, like the time as a child he'd caught a fishhook in his flesh. The thought of letting Peralta, Tremouille, and Etienne Crozat win. He was at Chalmette again, loading his musket and watching red blurs take shape in the rank brume of powder smoke and fog.
"I still have to stay."
"You lay still, then, until you know what the hyenas are doing, Compair Rabbit. And when you break cover, you watch your back."
January didn't hear him go.
TWENTY
The attic over the store was one of those places Abishag Shaw had been told to shut down, a sleeping place for slaves who preferred to rent their own bodies from their owners for cash money, and find their own food and housing and employment, rather than exist in the enclosed compounds behind the white folks' houses. In a room twenty feet by thirty-blocked off by a wood-and-plaster wall from the attic storeroom of the shop below- ten men slept, as January had guessed, on the bare floor, rolled in blankets with their heads on their spare jackets or shirts. The place stank of unwashed clothes, unbathed flesh, of mice and roaches and of the smoke leaking through the brick of the two chimneys that rose up along the dividing wall. January had to feel his way gingerly down the center of the room so as not to trip over anyone, as he sought the place he'd seen in the little dim moonlight let in when he'd opened the door.
There was a dormer on the other side of the slanted roof-which, like Hannibal's attic in the Swamp, rose to a point a foot and a half short of his own height-and after a few minutes his eyes adjusted to the still denser dark, so that he could guess at the shapes that lay all around him, breathing deeply, heavily, in the vermin-infested dark.
Still, it was less crowded than the jail cell, quieter and far cleaner. By the last threads of blue moonlight he could see the man nearest him, and beyond him the little bundle of clothing, tin cup and plate, and the tin identification medal that showed him to be a slave working rather than a runaway when he walked about the streets.
He was sleeping under a roof he'd chosen for himself.
January closed his eyes.
His hand slid into his pocket, fingering the battered rosary as he told off prayers of thanks.
The illusion of freedom was tiny, he thought- maybe as tiny as his own illusion of justice-but they made do with it. It was better, to them, than the marginally more comfortable accommodations under a master's roof. Better than leaving everything he owned, everything he had worked for, everything he had left in the world, for the convenience of whoever had put that scarf around Angelique Crozat's ivory silk throat.
Save for a few hours snatched along the way, he had been without sleep for two nights and most of a third. Sleeping, he dreamed of the soft wailing voices of the workers in the fields, under the glassy weight of the new sun.
"They say go north, find us new kin, They say go north, find us new kin,
We try save our folks, We never come back again."
But the dream's light changed, from the early spring sun, harsh on the cane fields, to moonlight heavy as quicksilver, a black ocean strewn with phosphor galaxies, the black shape of a ship riding silent in the dark.
Dark blots on the ivory silk beach, like messy scabs; a tangle of walls and pens, shacks and fences; charred flesh and the smell of human waste and branding fires; the muted whisper of weeping. The glint of eyes that showed twelve young men, watching from the clotted shadows of the mangrove swamp.
"Without my folks, is no land home, He say without my folks, no land be home,
I'll die on that beach, Before I live my life alone."
"I walk on needles, I walk on pins," sang a voice back, whirling through dark and time like the smell of a burning house. "I know well the Grand Zombi..."
The throb of drums swept aside the beat of the surf on the shore. Voices cried, "Calinda! Dance the calinda! Badoum, badoum!"
Rain smell, and the throbbing in his hand as if it had been pounded with a hammer. It was only marginally more painful than the rest of his body: legs, arms, back. Downstairs, two people argued in gombo French over the price of a half-pound of sugar.
Leaky gray light showed him the slant of the roof, the bundles of blankets, tin cups, spare shirts that were shoved into corners and around the walls. When he sat up mice went scurrying, but the roaches were less concerned. Possibly, thought January wryly, because some of them were almost as big.
No one was in sight. The dancing in Congo Square generally didn't start until well after noon. The door onto the stairway stood open, the noise coming through it clearly. He limped over, stooping under the rafters and stepping through, stood on the little porch just outside, looking across the muddy yards, the wet, dark slate tiling of slanted roofs, and the cypress and palmetto that marked an area only recently and incompletely claimed from woods and swamps.
A rabble of plane trees and the white spire of the Church of St. Antoine showed him where the square lay. He was, he guessed, within a mile of his mother's house.
And that was exactly where the police would look for him, if they were looking.
Bouki the hyena, he's out riding the tracks, whispered a rusty voice in his mind. When you break cover, you watch your back.
Painfully-feet aching, legs aching-he descended the wooden stairs to the yard.
"It's two bits to sleep the night." A man came out of the store that occupied half the downstairs of the building. His face was the color of well-worn saddle leather, and about as expressive. He stood with folded arms in the muddy way that led back from the yard to the street.
The voice wasn't the same as the one Lacrime had spoken to last night. At a guess, the owner of the store collected money from the men who slept in his attic, but asked no questions about who came and went. The man with the cigar had been one of the other slaves.
"I have no money," said January. "I can get some. I'll bring it, later in the day."
"You'll bring it and six white horses too, huh?"
"I'll bring it." January's head ac
hed, though not nearly as bad as his body or his hand. Fatigue and hunger made him feel scraped-out, as if the marrow had been sold out of his bones. He felt he should argue with this man, or produce some telling reason why he should be trusted, but he couldn't think of any at the moment. He'd have to pay Desdunes for his horse, too.
Even anger had gone to ash. He could have struck him, he supposed-from a great distance-but that would mean someone would call the police.
"I hold on to your boots," said the storekeeper. "When you come back with my two bits, you get your boots back."
So it was that January was barefoot, ragged, his hand wrapped in dirty bandages, and his whole body sweating like a nervous horse with fear that someone would stop him, ask his business, or worse yet recognize him, when he slipped down the narrow walkway and into his sister Dominique's yard. Becky, standing under the kitchen gallery ironing the intricate cut-lace puffs of a dress sleeve, looked up and called, "What is it? What do you want?" in a hard, cross voice, then looked again and set the iron down quickly.
"Michie Benjamin!" She ran toward him, stopped, staring, as he held up his hand. "What in the name of heaven? Is my sister here?" And, as she started for the rear door of the house, "Don't speak of me if there's anyone here but her."
Becky went inside. January waited under the gallery, hesitant even to go into the kitchen with his scratched feet and muddy clothes. All he could think was, Mama will never let me hear the end of this.
He wondered what his mother would do, if Xavier Peralta had already used his influence to send the police for his, January's, arrest.
He wasn't entirely sure he wanted to know.
Minou appeared in the dark of the house, stepped outside, like a blossom of Queen Anne's lace in lavender-striped muslin sprigged with violets. Another figure flashed in the darkness, emerged into the light. Olympe, her blue skirt and rusty persimmon-red blouse and tignon giving her the look of a market woman against the dull gray of the afternoon light.
"Dear God!" cried Minou, but for a moment there was only worried watchfulness, swift calculation in Olympe's dark eyes. Then, "What happened? That policeman was here this morning, to talk to you, he said."
A riverboat would have brought Peralta back to town in eight hours, maybe nine, thought January. Enough passed on the lower river that he could have signaled one within a few hours of the disappearance being discovered.
"I gave him your letter, Ben. Becky, heat some water now, immediately. You said if you hadn't returned by Sunday, and he said he'd been to Mama's house already. Ben, you didn't-?"
He shook his head. "Can you send someone to the grocery on the upstream lakeside corner of Rue Conti, a couple of blocks above the turning basin? Give the owner two reales and get my boots back. And send Therese over to Mama's house and get me some clothes."
"I'll send one of my boys," said Olympe, in her Hecate voice of silver-veined iron. "We don't know what the police know, or what they think, but that policeman who came, he's no fool." As she spoke she
slipped past the cook and into the kitchen, coming out with a blue-and-white German-made dish of jambalaya and a pone of bread. "You got your papers?"
Again he shook his head. "They're in the desk in my room. Top left drawer." He resolved, as soon as he had the time, to forge five or six more copies. "What did Shaw say?"
"That he wanted to talk to you." Dominique seated herself on another of the bent-willow kitchen chairs, while January gouged into the jambalaya like a gravedig-ger in a fever summer, alternating the rice and shrimp with gulps of coffee only partly warmed. "I asked him if you were in any trouble. He said you could be, and would be if he couldn't find you. Ben, what happened?"
"Peralta's overseer tore up my papers," said January. "Galen Peralta didn't kill Angelique, but his father thinks he did. He said he'd hold me there until the boy's face healed up-Angelique scratched him pretty badly and a jury might take that amiss-then put me on a boat for Europe or New York or wherever I wanted to go. Some of the slaves told me that night the overseer was planning to take me and sell me himself and claim I'd escaped. They slipped me a mattock head to hack through the window bars."
"Oh, Ben." Her voice was barely a whisper, her hand to her mouth. Fear for me? wondered January. Well, yes -Dominique was a warm-hearted girl, with a ready sympathy, and cared for him with the unthinking happy love she'd shown when she was four and he her great, tall brother twenty years her senior. But was part of the shock he read in her eyes a realization of how little her own freedom meant?
Or didn't she understand that yet?
"What... What do they want you for? You have papers. I mean, you are free, and here in town people know you."
"Peralta may tell the police some story that makes it seem I did the murder, rather than his son." Thin rain had started to fall again, as it had fallen all day, pattering the muddy ground beyond the gallery where they sat. Becky moved silently in the kitchen behind them, grinding fresh coffee and feeding the fire under the big iron boiler.
"He's the guards' captain's cousin, and the guards are under pressure from Etienne Crozat to find someone, anyone, to punish for the crime. I think I can find who really did it, but I'll need proof. And that proof had better be strong enough to stand up against the fact that the killer was almost certainly white, and I'm black."
By the time January had finished bathing and had shaved five days' bristle of graying beard from his face, Olympe had returned with his boots and a bundle of clothes from their mother's house. Both sisters were waiting for him in Dominique's parlor when he crossed the yard through the thin, driving needles of rain; he wondered why he'd never realized how much alike they looked.
Probably because he'd never seen them together as adults. It occurred to him to wonder what Olympe was doing here at all.
"I need to find a runaway, a girl name of Sally," said January, as he came into the rear parlor where both women sat. "So high, thin, as black as me. Full-blood Congo, they say. She ran off from Les Saules Plantation a week ago Friday, probably with a man." At the moment, he reflected, finding her might be safer than another trip out to Les Saules, at least while the sun was up.
"I think she knows something, and I'm pretty sure she talked to someone about something." He'd examined his hand in the kitchen and had found it still clean. The bandages Becky had pinned over the dressings and salves he'd put on it gleamed starkly white against the dark of his flesh.
"I'll ask around," said Olympe. "She could be anywhere, if she ran off with a man. White man?"
"I don't know. I think so, since he was able to give her expensive gifts."
"A two-dollar dress length still cheaper than buying a girl at the Exchange," remarked Olympe cynically. "I found who paid Doctor John for your hoodoo."
A carriage passed in the street, the wheels squishing thickly in the mire. Dominique turned her head quickly, toward the two tall French doors that opened onto Rue Burgundy-standing open, for the day, though rainy, was warm. Olympe's bronze lips twisted. "Don't worry. We'll be out of here when he comes."
Dominique sniffed. "That isn't going to be until ten at least. I swear, on Sunday afternoons you could wipe out the entire French population of the city with five cannonballs if you knew where to aim them."
"Maybe that's why the Americans don't have aunts and in-laws and cousins-thrice-removed to Sunday dinner," remarked Olympe, lazily stroking the fat white cat. "Like rabbits in a field, they don't all graze in a herd."
"Darling, you know it's for reasons of domestic economy." Minou flashed back at her the identical smile. "The LeBretons must spend a hundred dollars on those Sunday dinners, once you pack in all the Lafrenieres, Bores, Macartys, Chauvins, Viellards, Boisciaires, Bois-blancs, and Lebedoyere connections, even if they don't have dancing afterward-which they will, Lent or no Lent. No American would stand for it, isn't that so, Ben? That awful Culver woman had the nerve to haggle with Ben over teaching her repulsive little girls to play piano!"
January smiled i
n spite of himself. "They aren't repulsive," he said. It was like looking back on something that had happened years ago. "And I think one reason the Americans don't have everyone in the world for Sunday dinner is because most of them are new to this city. They come in from New York or Philadelphia or Virginia; they bring their wives and children, but they haven't had time to get grandmamas and sisters' husbands and the brother's wife's widowed aunt and her four children yet. Give them time."
Dominique made a little noise of disbelief in her throat, and crossed to the secretaire. "From everything I hear, they're going to take that time whether anyone gives it to them or not. Could the person who bought the gris-gris have been at the ball?"
"Could have?" said Olympe. "She was there, cherie, and right in Angelique's pocket the whole time."
January's eyes met hers, and he knew with a sinking sense of shock of whom she spoke. "Clemence Drouet" And then, "That's ridiculous. She worshiped Angelique."
The eyes of both sisters rested on him, older and younger, with the same exasperated patience, the same slight wonderment at his blindness. It was Dominique who spoke.
"Oh, Ben, you don't think the plain girls, the fat girls, the ones who fetch and carry and follow around after the pretty ones, don't know exactly how they get talked about behind their backs?" There was pity and a little grief in her voice. "You think Clemence couldn't have hated Angelique at the same time she loved her?"
"Doctor John, he say he made Clemence a couple fine gris-gris," said Olympe. "The one you gave me and another that may still be under the back step, and it can stay there, for all of me, if Phrasie Dreuze is going to live in that house. Mamzelle Marie tell me," she added, as Dominique went to pull a bundle of yellow notepaper from the drawer of the secretaire, "the men who beat you up was Clemence's brother
Marquis and his friend, tryin' to get that gris-gris back before you could find out who laid it and tell on her."
January remembered how the men's hands had torn at his coat. For money, he'd thought at the time. Remembered too the young woman's round, tear-streaked face in the shadows of Angelique's house, the look of terror in her eyes as Euphrasie Dreuze had wailed of murder. She's been underfoot all morning, his mother had said. "Mostly they do stop at gris-gris, you know," added Olympe quietly, leaning back on the divan like a slim black serpent and stroking the cat's white feet. "Women who have hate in them. They'll put a pasteboard coffin on somebody's back step, or a cross of salt, as a way of doing murder and not doing murder. Some of them, it makes them stop and think."
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