Part 17 (1/2)

He came through trees and found himself facing water he'd never seen before, jewel green with duckweed and scaled over with the expanding rings of water drops in the rain. Cypress like old gray G.o.ds in rags crowded along its edge, pale against the bright green of the pines behind them. In the water itself their k.n.o.bby knees rose up like wading children sent ahead to scout the shallows. A turtle blinked at him from a log.

Thank G.o.d the alligators are still sleeping this time of year, he thought, turning back on his own tracks, casting around for the blaze he'd left-he thought he'd left-hereabouts. The water in front of him might be the bayou along which Ti Margaux had his broken-down house, or might be a tributary of it, or might lead somewhere else altogether. The rain came harder, rustling in the leaves of the live oaks, the needles of the pines. By the water the air was cool, but in the trees again, even the rain didn't seem to affect the damp heat, only keep him from hearing the sounds of pursuit. He stumbled in a tangle of wild azalea, and very suddenly, found himself face-to-face with a young black man in the coa.r.s.e trousers of a field hand, a club in his hand.

”Here he is!” shouted the man. ”Here he-”

January covered the distance between them in two long strides, wrested the club from the hunter-who was too surprised at being attacked, instead of fled, to use it-and cracked him a hard blow across the side of the head. The young man went sprawling, stunned, and January sprinted in the direction he thought he'd been going immediately before the encounter. The rain pelted harder around him, blurring the green-on-green-on-green of water and vegetation into a confusing monochrome.

He turned toward the thicker growth along the water, but voices were calling out from the high ground, so he knew he couldn't go to earth. Instead he veered for the high ground himself, where the water ash and cypress and palmetto gave place to loblolly pine that killed most undergrowth with its needles. His long legs pumped, his body settling into its stride. He was tall, but he hadn't run in years, and his boots were heavy on his feet. Too many years, he thought, as his breath burned suddenly in his lungs. Those boys back there would be young, and fit.

He skidded, wove, plunged back toward the water again. Something gray caught his eye, and he saw that it was the old house of the deceased Ti Margaux, impossibly on the other side of the water. He had no idea how he'd gotten himself turned around, but the place was unmistakable. For a moment he considered lying low and letting them run past, but they'd see the house as well, know he'd head there. The snakes would be sleeping in winter, like the gators-Please G.o.d, let the snakes be still sleeping! Then he pulled off his coat and plunged into the bayou. Then he pulled off his coat and plunged into the bayou.

It wasn't wide-twelve or fifteen feet-nor particularly deep. He only had to strike out and swim for a stroke or two, holding the coat and his papers aloft, then his boots were slus.h.i.+ng thickly in unspeakable mud and a tangle of alligator weed that dragged at him like steel nets. Underwater leaves slit at his thighs and sides as he dragged himself ash.o.r.e, stumbled up the slope, dragged open the door of the old barn and caught up the bridle, remembering to work evenly and without haste as he coaxed the bit into the horse's mouth, buckled chin strap and band. He flung himself, dripping, onto the horse's back without benefit of saddle and kicked the animal forward out the barn door at a gallop.

Outside there was only a tangle of cypress and red oak, buckler fern and b.u.t.terweed and creeper slowing the horse's stride. January ducked, keeping his head down under the low-hanging branches, wet moss trailing over his back as he tried to find the narrow trace that had led him here.

Then men were on him, springing out of the jungles of verdure, black, half-naked, armed with clubs and yelling with the hunt. January drove his heels into his mount's sides but hands were already dragging at the bridle, at his legs, pulling the panicking horse down and dragging him off. He swung with his club and felt it connect, but blows rained on his shoulders, stunning him. He felt his own makes.h.i.+ft weapon ripped from his hands, then he was pinned, still struggling, to the ground.

A white man's voice said, ”Let him up.”

They did, still holding his arms, crowding close around him, the rain not quite was.h.i.+ng the rank smell of his own sweat or theirs or the swamp from him.

Three white men stood on the slightly higher ground before him. Evidently none had tried to ride through the swamp, following, like the blacks, on foot. One was a square-built, fair-haired man of thirty or so with a bristling mustache and whiskers, a blacksnake whip hanging coiled at his belt-Uhrquahr the overseer. The second, still in the tweed coat and hunting breeches he'd worn to walk to the cornfield that morning, the rain dripping from the broad brim of his palmetto hat, was Galen Peralta.

The third, white hair bare to the rain and eyes cold and hard as blue gla.s.s, was Xavier Peralta.

Peralta turned to one of the field hands holding January's arms. ”Is this the man who came to the cabins last night and asked about Michie Galen?”

”Yes sir, it is.”

He turned back at January. He, too, looked exhausted, as if the nights that had pa.s.sed in obligatory family revelry had been harrowed by sleeplessness. It wasn't yet noon, which meant he'd taken the earliest boat he could that morning.

”You told my son that you'd been sent by Madame Dreuze with a keepsake-a gesture I find not in the slightest like the woman, for all her protests of sentimentality-and you told my servants that you were a runaway bound for Grand Isle. I think that you were lying both times. Tell the truth to me now. Who are you?”

”My name is Benjamin January,” said January. ”I'm a free man of color.” He reached into his pocket-the field hands never releasing their hold on his arms-and produced the papers.

Uhrquahr took them and tore them up without looking at them. ”You a slave now,” he said, and smiled.

”Bring him,” said Peralta and turned away.

EIGHTEEN.

The sugar mill was one of the few buildings on the Peralta place constructed of brick. There was a chamber to one side where the wood was stored against the voracious fires of the winter harvests, but with winter barely over the wood room was nearly empty, the brick floor swept clean. The backbreaking work of filling it would be a constant through the coming year, like hoeing up the fast-sprouting weeds before they smothered the cane or keeping the ditches clear.

On the opposite side of the mill, past the silent dark shapes of the rollers and the long line of the empty boiling vats, cones of sugar cured in another chamber on their wooden racks, leaching out the last of the mola.s.ses under stretched squares of gauze to keep the roaches away. The thick, raw-sweet smell of it filled the gloom.

”Spancel him to the upright.” Peralta's voice echoed coldly in the high rafters, beneath the thrumming of the rain. His horse, and Uhrquahr's, had been waiting at the edge of the trees, the ankle chains in their saddlebags. ”Just by the ankle will do,” he added, as the overseer made a move to shove January back against one of the squared cypress pillars that supported the dome of the mill chamber itself. ”I'll call you if there's trouble.”

They had to pull off January's boots to lock the chain. It chafed the flesh of his foot and drove deep into the skin the blue bead of Olympe's charm.

From beneath his coattails Peralta took two pistols, one of which he handed to Uhrquahr. For all his soaked clothing, dripping into a puddle around his feet, the old planter radiated a kind of quiet anger, a deadliness more to be feared than the overseer's blind, raw exercise of power.

”Mr. Uhrquahr, will you stand outside the door of the wood room? Should I raise a cry you are to come in, but not before. I doubt this will take long. Have Hephastion send the men back into the fields as soon as the rain clears.”

The overseer touched the brim of his soaked slouch hat and departed, the sound of the rain momentarily louder as he opened the door from the wood room outside. As he stepped out into the light Uhrquahr glanced sullenly over his shoulder, disappointed and angry.

January leaned his back against the pillar, his hands at his sides, watching Peralta in silence. The old man stood at a distance, the white hair making wet strings on his collar, his blue eyes cold as gla.s.s. There was something in the way he stood that told January he was waiting for him to speak, to hear what the first rush of words would be, explanations and excuses, perhaps pleas. So he kept his silence, as if both men were abiding until the turn of some unknown tide. The sound of the rain was very loud.

It was Peralta who finally broke the silence. ”I did not know the police hired free blacks as agents.”

January almost protested that he was sang mele, not black, then realized how ridiculous that would sound. Maybe Olympe was right about him being whiter than their mother inside.

”The police didn't send me,” he said, and shook his head a little as a thread of water trickled from his close-cropped hair down into his eye. His voice was soft in the near dark. ”Didn't you ask Monsieur Tremouille not to send anyone? Not to investigate at all? I'm the man they'll hang in the place of your son.”

Peralta looked away. In the shadows it was impossible to see his expression, or whether his fair, pinkish skin colored up, but the tension that hardened his shoulders and back was unmistakable, his silence like the sc.r.a.pe of a cotton-press wheel screwed too tight.

Shoot me and walk out, thought January, too angry at this man now to care what he did. He'd seen a lot of death, and at this range, a bullet was going to be less painful and quicker than the rope and the drop. Shoot me and walk out or say something. Shoot me and walk out or say something. He would not volunteer another word. He would not volunteer another word.

”You were...one of the musicians. The pianist.”

”That's right,” said January. ”And your son can tell you that I was in the room talking to Mademoiselle Crozat when he came in, and that when I walked out she was still alive.”

There was no sound but Peralta's breathing and January's own.

”He's the only witness to that fact,” January went on. ”But you probably already know that.”

”No.” The old man moved his shoulders, s.h.i.+fted his weight from one hip to the other, breaking the hard watchfulness. ”No, I didn't. I did not discuss the matter at any great length with the police. My son...” He fell silent a very long time. ”My son said nothing about you.”

”And did your friend Captain Tremouille tell you that I was the only witness to the fact that your son came into the room when he did? After everyone saw him storm off down the stairs following his quarrel with Angelique?” January kept his eyes on the white man's left shoulder, knowing the rage in them showed even so but almost too angry to care.

”I don't have to listen to this.” Peralta turned away.

”No, you don't,” said January. ”Because you've got a gun and I'm chained up. You don't have to listen to anything.”

It stopped him. January guessed Peralta wouldn't have stopped if he'd said, Because you're white and I'm black. Because you're white and I'm black. Might very well have struck him, in fact. In a sense, it amounted to the same thing, though of course a white man wouldn't see it that way. But as he'd known in the ballroom on the night of Bouille's challenge to William Granger, Peralta considered himself a gentleman, a man of old-fas.h.i.+oned honor. He was a man who prided himself on knowing the rules, on not being like the Americans. Might very well have struck him, in fact. In a sense, it amounted to the same thing, though of course a white man wouldn't see it that way. But as he'd known in the ballroom on the night of Bouille's challenge to William Granger, Peralta considered himself a gentleman, a man of old-fas.h.i.+oned honor. He was a man who prided himself on knowing the rules, on not being like the Americans.

”I told my friends where I was coming,” said January. He made a subconscious move to fold his arms, and stopped himself from taking a stance too threatening, too challenging, too ”uppity.” His very size, he knew, was threat enough, and he was treading an extremely narrow road here. ”If I'm not back, they'll take what I've written to the police. Not that it'll do me a flyspeck of good if you've decided a rich man can kill a poor one who's in his way, but I respect the truth and want it told.”

Peralta turned slowly back. The implication of a lie touched him to the quick. He opened his mouth, within the rain-beaded circle of white mustache, but couldn't refute the words. Still, as a man of honor, a Creole gentleman of the old traditions, he couldn't let the words go unanswered. And gentlemen told the truth.

”He's my son,” he said at last. ”And I'm not going to kill you.”

The cold clutch of panic tightened around January's heart, knowing what that probably meant. But he said steadily, ”My friends will still come looking.”

Who? he thought bitterly. he thought bitterly. Livia? Dominique? Livia? Dominique?

”Unless you plan to sell me out of the state.”

”No,” said Peralta simply. He drew a deep breath, and met January's gaze again. ”I know it's...hard. But I don't see what else I can do. Uhrquahr!”