Страница 62 из 78
It was the alternative to a bleakness of despair he hadn't known since his childhood.
And in his childhood, he recalled-waist-deep in water, his boots hung around his neck as he struggled to clear a floating tree trunk from half-unseen obstructions, the chain weighing heavier and heavier on his right arm -he had been as avid a student of the rituals of luck and aversion as any on Bellefleur. If he'd thought it would do him any good in reaching the east bank in safety he wasn't sure he wouldn't have taken the time to snap his fingers, hop on one foot, and spit.
Thin mist veiled the water in patches, but he could discern the dark line of trees that was the far bank. Above him the sky was clear, and the moon far enough to the west that the stars over the east bank were bright. From the tail of the Dipper he sited a line down the sky to two brilliant stars, identifying their positions and hoping he could do so again when in midriver and fighting the current's drag.
He tied his food, clothing, blanket, and boots to the tree trunk he'd freed, took two deep swigs of the rum, which was worse than anything he'd ever tasted in his life, laid his chained arm over the trunk to carry the weight of his body, and set out swimming.
I didn 't kill her, Galen Peralta had said.
And January believed him.
He didn't want to, because the alternative it left would be even harder to prove... and hurt him with the
anger of betrayal.
The Indian Princess at the foot of the stairs. The flash of buckskin, half-glimpsed through the crowd around the ballroom doors. I must see her... I MUST.
He'd offered to take the message. Had she assented only to be rid of him, to make him think that she'd left? The desperation in her eyes came back to him, when she'd spoken of her grandmother's jewels, cold desperation and anger. The way she'd set her shoulders, going in to talk to the broker who held her husband's debts. That trash McGinty, her husband's relatives had said... A man who undoubtedly was using the debts to urge marriage on a widow. For an upriver American on the make, even a run-down plantation was better than nothing.
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. Ha
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 ru
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 pla
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, Vie
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.