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!"
EIGHT
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.
The houses glittered with windows, the farthest dwellings imaginable from the sordid cabins of the Irish Channel just upriver from the French town, or the filth of the Girod Street Swamp. Not that his mother-or any of the old French planters-would admit that there was any difference in the quality of the inhabitants. "They are Americans," Livia-or Xavier Peralta, for that matter -would say, with the tone Bouille had used of his opponent Granger, with the look in her eyes like the eyes behind those velvet masks regarding Shaw from the doorway of the Orleans ballroom last night.
He suspected that because they could afford such houses-because they owned so many steamship companies and banks, so much of the money that kept the old French planters going from sugar crop to sugar crop- only made the situation worse.
"Ma! The nigger music teacher's here!"
The small boy's bell-clear voice carried even through the shut back door of the house, and January felt his jaw muscles clench even as he schooled his face to a pleasant smile when the housemaid, wiping flour-covered hands on her apron, opened the kitchen door. The knowledge that the girls' white drawing master also had to come to the back door was of little comfort.
Franklin Culver was vice-president of a small bank on the American side of Canal Street. He owned four slaves: the housemaid Ruth, the yardman Jim, and two other men whose services he rented out to a lumberyard. January suspected that if any of the three daughters of the household knew that his given name was Benjamin, they'd call him by it instead of Mr. January. He could see that the matter still profoundly puzzled Charis, the youngest. "But slaves don't have last names," she'd argued during the first lesson.
"Well, they do, Miss Charis," pointed out January. "But anyway, I'm not a slave."
Upon a later occasion she'd remarked that slaves didn't speak French-French evidently being something small girls learned with great labor and frustration from their governesses-so he could tell she was still unclear about the entire concept of a black man being free. He suspected that her father shared this deficiency. He didn't even try to explain that he wasn't black, but colored, a different matter entirely.