Benjamin January 1 - A Free Man Of Color (14 page)

“And a fair pile of them there were, too. Some of them were French and old—antique gold, not anything a wastrel like Arnaud Trepagier would have the taste to buy for a woman and surely too tasteful for any of Angelique's asking. If that silly heifer Clemence thinks she's going to get a keepsake out of her she's badly mistaken. Every stitch and stone of it's going to be in the shops tomorrow, you mark my words, before Madame Trepagier can claim them back.”

“Can she?”

“I don't suppose Trepagier made a will. Or Angelique either. That girl Clemence kept blundering around underfoot, hinting that Angelique had promised her this and promised her that, but a fat lot of good that'll do her. I never saw anybody who looked so much like a sheep. Acts like one, too.”

A carriage passed in front of them, curtains drawn back to show a pair of porcelain-fair girls and an older woman in a fashionable bonnet and lace cap. Livia remarked, “Hmph. Pauline Mazant has her nerve, setting up as chaperone to her daughters—the whole town knows she's carrying on an affair with Prosper Livaudais. And him young enough to be her son, or her nephew anyway.”

She turned her attention back to January and the matter at hand. “At Trepagier's death, presumably the jewelry would revert to Angelique, and then to her mother—those brothers of hers wouldn't touch it, and small blame to them. But Madame Trepagier may sue her for the more expensive pieces, like that set of pearls and emeralds, if they ever find them, and the two slaves. The cook should fetch a thousand dollars at least, even if she can't make pastry, and the girl nearly that.”

Only his mother, reflected January wryly, would keep track of the relative price of her friends' servants.

“Unless Phrasie decides to keep them for herself. She's only got the one woman now and she can't cook worth sour apples, but she may sell them and keep the cash, to prevent La Trepagier from getting them back. Weeping about the hardship of her lot all the while, of course. And God alone knows what she owes in faro games.”

They walked in silence for a few minutes, threading their way among servants, householders, men and women abroad on the errands of the day. The air was warm without brightness, heavy with the strange sense of expectation that the dampness frequently seemed to bring. Even here, at the back of the old town, the well-dressed servants of the rich came and went from the small shops, the dressmakers and furniture builders, the milliners who copied the latest French styles, the dealers in books and linen, soaps and corsetry. Here and there the tall town houses of the wealthy lifted above the rows of brightly painted stucco cottages or the old Spanish dwellings, built half a story above the ground for coolness —the voices of children sounded like the cries of small birds from courtyards and alleyways. A pair of nuns walked slowly down the opposite banquette, black robes billowing a little in the wind off the river—they stopped to buy pralines from a woman in a gaudy head scarf, then moved on, smiling like girls. From far off a riverboat whistled, a deep alto song like some enormous water beast. Livia made a little detour to avoid the puddles where a man was washing out the stone-paved passageway into a court, and past its shadows January glimpsed banana plants, palmettos, and jasmine.

“You know anything about what kind of terms Madame Dreuze was negotiating with Monsieur Peralta?”

“Euphrasie Dreuze hasn't the wits to negotiate the price of a pineapple in the market,” retorted Livia coolly. “She was trotting back and forth for weeks between her daughter and Monsieur Peralta, pretending she was 'checking' with that harpy and really taking her instructions, and a pretty bargain it was, too. She wanted that piece of downtown property on Bourbon and Barracks, six seventy-five a year and a clothing allowance, household money plus freehold on whatever young Peralta might give her.”

January didn't even bother to ask how his mother had come by those figures.

“Grasping witch. Personally I can't see how Peralta Pere would countenance it, because he'd be just laying his son open for a drain on the capital. And her playing bedroom eyes with Tom Jenkins since last May. Pere et fils, they're well rid of her.”

A cat blinked from an iron-grilled balcony. Two boys ran by, chasing a hoop.

“Tell me about Madeleine Trepagier,” said January.

“You knew her.” Livia angled her parasol though there was no sunlight strong enough to cast shadow. “She was one of your piano students. Madeleine Dubonnet.”

“I know.” January felt that much admission was better than trying to remember a lie. “The one who played Beethoven with such . . . rage.” He was surprised his mother remembered the students he'd had before he left.

His mother's dark eyes cut sidelong to him, then away. “If she had rage in her she had a right to it,” she said. “With a drunkard of a father who married her to one of his gambling friends to cancel a debt. Oh, the Trepagiers are a good family, and Arnaud had three plantations, if you want to call that piece of swamp in Metairie a plantation. Good for nothing but possum hunting is what I've heard, and wouldn't fetch more than fifteen dollars an acre even now, and less than that back when he sold it to that American.” The inflection of her voice added that as far as she was concerned, the American was a tobacco-chewing flatboat man with fleas in his crotch.

“I've ridden past Les Saules,” he remarked, to keep her on track.

“It's been going downhill for years.” Livia dismissed it with a wave of her hand. “Cheap Creole cane. It won't produce more than eight hundred pounds an acre, if the cold doesn't kill it. And three mortgages, and lucky to get them. Arnaud Trepagier was a fine gentleman but not much of a planter, and they say the woman's a pinchpenny and works her slaves hard, not that slaves won't whine like sick puppies if you make them step out any faster than a tortoise on a cold day. God knows what the woman's going to do now, with all the debts he left. I'd be surprised if she could get ten dollars an acre for that land. That worthless brother of Trepagier's left town years ago, when he sold his own plantation, also to an American”—there was that inflection again—“and got cheated out of his eyeteeth on railroad stock. And I'd sooner peddle gumbo in the market than go live with Alicia Picard—that's Dubonnet's sister—and her mealy-mouthed son.”

January almost asked his mother if she wanted to go back over the battlefield and slit the throats of anyone she'd only wounded in the first fusillade, but stopped himself. Behind them, a voice called out, “Madame Le-vesque! Madame Livia!” and January turned, hearing running footsteps. The woman Judith was hurrying down Rue Burgundy toward them, her hand pressed to her side to ease a stitch. She'd put on her head scarf again, and against the soft yellows and rusts and greens of the houses the dull red of her calico dress seemed like a smear of dark blood.

“Madame Livia, it isn't true!” panted Judith, when she had come up with January and his mother. “It isn't true! I never went to a voodoo woman or made any gris-gris against Mamzelle Angelique!”

Livia looked down her nose at the younger woman, in spite of the fact that Judith was some five inches taller than her. “And did you run away?”

The slave woman was, January guessed, exactly of his mother's extraction—half-and-half mulatto—but he could see in his mother's eyes, hear in the tone of her voice, the exact configuration of the white French when they spoke to their slaves. The look, the tone, that said, I am colored. She is black.

Maybe she didn 't remember the cane fields.

And Judith said, “M'am, it was only for a night. It really was only for a night.” As if Livia Levesque had been white, she didn't look her in the face. “She'd whipped me, with a stick of cane. ... I really would have come back. Madame Madeleine, she told me I had to. ... I never would have gone to a voodoo.”

“Did Monsieur Trepagier take you away from Madame Madeleine and give you to Angelique?” asked January.

Judith nodded. “Her daddy bought me for her. Years ago, when first they got married. I'd waited on her, fixed her hair, sewed her clothes. . . . She was always good to me. And it made me mad, when Michie Arnaud give that Angelique her jewelry and her dresses and her horse, that little red mare she always rode. She tried not to show she cared, same as she tried not to show it when he'd taken a cane to her.”

She shook her head, her eyes dark with anger and grief. “There'd be nights when she'd hold on to me and cry until nearly morning, with her back all bleeding or her face marked, then get up and go on about sewing his shirts and doing the accounts and writing to the brokers, until I'd have to go out back and cry myself, for pity. Later when he gave me to that Angelique, sometimes I'd run away and go back, just to see her. I did when Mamzelle Alexandrine died—her daughter—long of the fever. She was my friend, Madame Livia. But I'd never have hurt Angelique. I go to confession, and I know that's a sin. Please believe me. You have to believe. And as for her saying Madame Madeleine put me up to a thing like that ... I never would have! She never would have!”

Livia sniffed.

Gently, January asked, “Would the cook? She was Madame Madeleine's servant too, wasn't she?”

“Kessie?” Judith hesitated a long time. “I—I don't think so, sir,” she answered at last. “I know she left a man and three kids at Les Saules, but I know, too, she's got another man here in town. And she didn't . . . didn't hate Angelique. Not like I did. For one thing,” she added with a wry twist to her lips, “if anything happened to Angelique, Kessie wouldn't be able to steal from the kitchen, like she was doing. She might have put graveyard dust someplace in the bedroom, but she wouldn't have done that kind of a ouanga, a death sign.”

She looked from Livia's cool face to January's, anxious and frightened, her hazel eyes wide. “I go to church, and I pray to God. I don't go to the voodoo dances, Sundays. You have to believe me. Please believe me.”

January was silent. He wondered if his mother was right, if Euphrasie Dreuze would sell off her daughter's two slaves quickly, for whatever she could get, to avoid Madeleine Trepagier's bringing suit to get them back. He wondered if Judith knew, or guessed, what would happen to her.

But Livia only cocked her sunshade a little further over her shoulder and asked, “And why are you so fired up all of a sudden that I have to believe you?”

“She'll tell that policeman that I had something to do with Angelique's death,” whispered Judith. “She'll tell him Madame Madeleine and I did it.”

“Policeman?”

“That tall American one, as tall as you, Michie Janvier. He's at the house now. He's askin' questions about you.”

“About me!”

Madame Madeleine Trepagier

Les Saules

Orleans
Parish

Friday afternoon

15 Fev. 1833

Madame Trepagier
—

My attempt to deliver your note to Madame Dreuze met with no success. She has conceived the opinion that at your instigation, the slave woman Judith obtained a death talisman from a voodoo and placed it in Angelique Crozat's house, and that this was what drew Mile. Crozat's murderer to her She has expressed this opinion not only to five of her—Catherine Clisson, Odile Gignac, Agnes Pellicot, Clemence Drouet, and Livia Levesque, all free women of color of this city—but I believe to the police as well. Though I doubt that the police will take any action based on what is quite clearly a hysterical accusation, that she made this accusation told me it would do no good for me to plead your cause.

It appears that Madame Dreuze is in the process of gathering together all jewelry in her late daughter's house preparatory to selling it as quickly as possible. Moreover, I have reason to suspect that she intends to sell both slave women—Judith and the cook Kessie—as soon as she can, to forestall any claim you may make upon them. I strongly suggest that you get in touch with Lt. Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans police and take whatever steps you can to prevent Madame Dreuze's liquidation of her daughter's valuables until it can be ascertained which of these items are, in fact, yours by right.

Please believe that I remain your humble servant,

Benj. January, f.m.c.

It was, January reflected, rubbing a hand over his eyes, the best he could do. Dappled shade passed over the sleeve of his brown second-best coat like a coquette's trailing scarf, and on the bench beside him, two young laundresses with heaped willow baskets on their laps compared notes about their respective lovers amid gales of giggles. By the sound of it, the Irish and German girls in the front of the omnibus—maids-of-all-work or shop assistants, grisettes they'd have been called in Paris—were doing the same. A carriage passed them, the fast trot of its two copper-colored hackneys easily outpacing the steady clop of the omnibus's hairy-footed nag.

It was perhaps intelligence that would have been more kindly conveyed by a friend in person rather than by note, but even had he gone back to Desdunes's Livery and rented another horse to ride out again to Les Saules the moment Judith had told him about Lt. Shaw's visit to the Crozat household, January doubted he could have returned to town before two. And two o'clock, murder and wrongdoing aside, was the hour at which, three times a week, the daughters of Franklin Culver had their music lesson, at fifty cents per daughter per hour, or a grand total of four dollars and fifty cents each Friday. If he thought Shaw would place the slightest weight on Euphrasie's accusations it would have been a different matter, but his warning was one that could as easily be conveyed by note, and he had not the smallest doubt that Madeleine Trepagier would act upon it with all speed.

He sighed, and rubbed his eyes again. On either side of Nyades Street cleared lots showed where cane fields had once rattled, dark green, hot, and mysterious. A double line of massive oaks shaded the road, draped in trailing beards of gray-green moss, and far off to his left he could glimpse the green rise of the levee, and the gliding, silent smokestacks of the riverboats beyond. Past the oaks stood new American-style houses, built of wood or imported New England brick, brave with scrollwork and bright with new paint, gardens spread about them like the multicolored petticoats of market women sitting on the grass. After the enclosing walls and crowding balconies of the French town, the American town seemed both airy and a little raw, its unfinished streets petering out into rows of oaks and sycamores or ending in the raw mounds of the cane fields, bare looking or just beginning to bristle with the first stubble of second or third crops. A black man was scything the grass in one yard behind a white-painted picket fence; a woman with a servant's plain dark dress and an Irishwoman's fair complexion walked a baby in a wicker perambulator down the footpath by the roadside, trailed by a small boy in a sailor suit and a smaller girl in frilly white with a doll.