Benjamin January 1 - A Free Man Of Color by Hambly Barbara

Author:Hambly, Barbara
Language: eng
Format: epub

THIRTEEN

“Why did you stay?”

“I . . .” Her hand flinched and she wet her lips quickly with her tongue. In the shadows of the gallery she looked battered and brittle and he regretted asking her, regretted having to ask her.

But if the police were talking about ropes and Benjamin January in the same breath these days, he didn't have much choice.

“What makes you think I . . . ?” She collected herself quickly. “Stayed where?”

“Three people in the police notes mention seeing a Mohican Princess in the Salle d'Orl£ans, upstairs, late, long after you said you'd gone.” No sense getting Claire and Ursula in trouble. In fact two of the people who'd seen her in the upstairs lobby had no idea when they had done so, and the third had mentioned that she'd been present during the first waltz.

“Friday morning you told me you were home by eight-thirty, which would mean you had to have left almost immediately after talking to me. But you mentioned the white dress Angelique was wearing and the necklace of emeralds and pearls. So you stayed long enough to see her.”

Her face did not change, but her breath quickened, and long lashes veiled her eyes. She said nothing, and he wondered if silence were the defense she'd tried to use against her husband.

“Was it a man?”

She flinched, the revulsion that crossed her face too sudden and too deep to be anything but genuine. “No.” Her voice was small, cold, but perfectly steady. “Not a man.”

He felt ashamed.

“You were in the building, then?”

She drew a deep breath, as if collecting herself from the verge of nausea, and raised her eyes to his face again. There was something opaque in them, a guardedness, choosing her words carefully as she had always chosen them. “The reason I stayed had nothing to do with An-gelique's death. Nothing to do with her at all.”

Every white man of wealth and influence in the city had been there that night. And their wives next door.

But after she'd spoken to him, she'd had reason to hope that Angelique could be met with, pleaded with. . . . Against that hope was the fact that she'd already sent her notes and been snubbed more than once.

Somewhere an ax sounded, distant and clear, men chopping the wood they'd be stowing up all year against grinding time late in fall. The tall chimney of the sugar mill stood high above the willows that surrounded the house, dirty brick and black with soot, like the tower of a dilapidated fortress watching over desolate land. You couldn't get ten dollars an acre for it, his mother had said, and he believed her: run-down, almost worthless, it would take thousands to put it back to what it had been.

Yet she clung to it. It was all she had.

“Yes,” the woman went on after a time. “I saw her when she came upstairs, when the men all clustered around her. The way every man always did, I'm told. I can't .

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