She was a woman, he thought, backed into a corner, and the way out of that corner was money enough to hang on to her property. Money that could have come dirough those jewels that had been her grandmother's, and then hers. Jewels she would still regard as hers by right, and the woman who took them a whore and a thief.
Mist moved between him and the bank. He kicked hard at the moving water beneath and around him, stroked hard with his left arm, and kept his eye on the clearer of the two guiding stars. The sheer size of the river, like a monstrous serpent, was terrifying, the power of it pulling at his body, as if he were no more than a flea on a dog. The willow trunk he held on to, bigger than his own waist, was a matchstick on the flood, and he wondered what he'd do if a riverboat, or a flatboat, came down at him from the north, without lights, emerging from the fog.
There was nothing he could do about that, he thought. Just keep swimming.
The problem was, in spite of all of the information he had he knew she hadn't done the murder.
He could probably have made a case against her- possibly one that would even stick, given that her family had half disowned her and her husband's relatives wanted clear title to Arnaud Trepagier's land and she was refusing to marry any of them.
But it might not save him, even at that.
And he knew she hadn't done it.
In all the trash on the parlor floor, there hadn't been a single black cock feather.
Yet she was lying and had been lying from the start. She knew something. Had she seen something, staying on as she did? Spoken to someone?
Sally. Hannibal could find out from the girls in the Swamp, if he asked enough of them. Possibly even Shaw would be able to track her down, once January had told him.
Told him what? he thought bitterly. That a white Creole lady might know something, when Angelique's father can see a perfectly good man of color to convict of the crime to satisfy Euphrasies vengeance on the world?
He supposed the gentlemanly thing to do was to keep silent about whatever his suspicions were, to help Madeleine Trepagier cover whatever her guilty secret was. But he knew he'd have to find it and twist her with it; he'd have to threaten to tell to force her to give him whatever answers she could.
He felt like a swine, a swine running squealing from the hammer and the rope.
He kicked hard against the drag of the water around him, struggling with waning human might against the King of Rivers. Weariness already burned in his muscles, weighted his bones.
He could flee he supposed. Ironic, that Xavier Peralta had offered him exactly what he'd been planning to save his money for. Pere Eugenius always xlid say, Be careful what you pray for.
Not that Uhrquahr would let the chance of $1,500 clear profit slip out of his hands so easily.
He was a surgeon, and there were surgical hospitals in London, Vienna, Rome...
Cities where he knew no one, where there was no one. He wasn't sure exactly when his feeling had changed, or how. Perhaps it was Catherine Clisson's smile of welcome, an old friend glad to see him, or the voices of the workers singing in the fields. He understood that he had been lonely in Paris, until he'd met Ayasha. He had been a stranger on the face of the earth, in every place but New Orleans, where his family was and his home.
In New Orleans he was a man of color, an uneasy sojourner in a world increasingly American, hostile, and white. But he was what he was. At twenty-four he'd been strong enough, whole enough, to seek a new life. At forty, he didn't know.
He'd spoken to Angelique in order to help Mme. Trepagier, Madeleine, his student of other years, trying to play the part of the honorable man. Trying to reestablish his links with that old life. And this was his reward.
The water rolled against him, a wave like a solid wall, his leaden limbs fighting, driving him across the currents toward the shore. His two cold stars watched him, disinterested, as the moon dipped away toward the tangled west.
There was nothing of this in Bach, he thought, his mind striving to throw off the creeping weight of exhaustion, the growing insistence that even on the breast of the river, what was best for him now was sleep. Skirls of music flitted through his mind, Herr Kovald's light touch on the piano keys, Mozart, Haydn, the Water Music...
Swimming against the river's might, struggling with exhaustion and the heavy smells of the mud and the night-fleeing injustice and servitude toward a town where those things passed under other names-the only songs that came to his mind were those of his childhood, the dark wailing music of the African lands. Those spoke in his muscles and his bones, as he pulled against the current and kept his eye on his guardian stars.
He reached the far bank aching but knew he dared not stop. Plantations stretched in an almost uniform forty arpents inland-two or three miles-before petering out in a wilderness of bayou, cypress swamp, and pine wood. He climbed the levee on his hands and knees, like an animal, and lay on the top, panting, staring at the dark water, all sparkling with the silver of the sinking moon. It was early spring, the world very silent but for the lap of the river below. Inland all creation breathed one damp cold breath of turned earth, where a new crop of sugar was being prepared for, trenches chopped like bridal beds in the long dirt hills. He knew it wouldn't be many hours before the slaves would be out again.
He ate some bread, which was wet in his pack, and drank as much of the rum as he dared spare, knowing he'd need it for his hand, and got to his feet again. His legs felt like rubber.
Daddy, wherever you are, he thought, for no particular reason, your son s thinking of you.
He traveled like this for two days, and a little more.
He struck the chain off his arm as soon as he was far enough from habitation that the hard clang of the mattock head on the shackle wouldn't be heard-or he hoped it wouldn't be heard-and carried the iron half of Friday before he decided the drain on his strength wasn't worth the possibility that he might need it. He buried it under a hollow log.
He kept close enough to the rear of the plantations to follow the line they made, the line of the river that would lead him eventually back to town, but it terrified him. He guessed Peralta would be offering a large reward for his capture-Big black buck, it would say. Runaway. And there were always patrols. In older times there'd always been coming and going between the plantations and little colonies of runaways-marrons-in the woods, but heavier settlement and the death of the rebel leader Saint-Malo had put a stop to that. Sometimes he heard riders in the woods and hid himself in the thickets of hackberry and elder, wondering if he'd been sufficiently careful about keeping to hard ground, wondering if he'd left some sign. He was surprised how much of his childhood woodcraft came back to him, but he knew himself incapable of navigating, once he got out of sight of the thinning in the trees that marked the fields to his left.
In the afternoons the singing of the work-gangs in the fields came to him, and as it had on the breast of the river the music took him by the bones. Lying in the thickets with the gnats dense around his head, drawn by the scent of the rum on his hand as he bandaged it, and of his sweat, he listened to those voices and thought, This is the music of my home.
"Ana-qut, an'o'bia,
Bia'tail-la, Que-re-qut,
Nal-le oua, Au-Monctt,
Au-tap-o-tf, Au-tap-o-tt,
Au-qut-rt-que, Bo."
African words, not even understandable by those who sang them anymore, but the rhythm of them warmed his tired blood. He wondered if Madeleine Trepagier's girl Sally had felt anything like this, running from her mistress-running to New Orleans.