Queen of Swords
Page 17

She caught movement to her right and turned to see Jean-Benoît coming down the stairs from the small apartment over the kitchen, in a building all its own.
“I didn’t realize you lived here,” she said, and then wished she had not, though he didn’t seem to take offense.
“The garçonnière is here for me when I’m in the city,” he said. He gestured with his chin. “It’s that passageway we want, beside the stable. Clémentine, bonjour.” He inclined his head and shoulders to the cook, who was watching them from the kitchen doorway, and Hannah did the same.
She followed him out of the courtyard through a narrow passageway that ended in a heavy wrought-iron gate. Jean-Benoît lifted the latch and it swung open silently into a smaller courtyard, partially cobbled and surrounded on three sides by low, one-story buildings with overhanging eaves. All of them seemed to be empty.
“When the American troops get here they’ll requisition every square foot of space,” Ben said. “I doubt they’d displace a clinic, though. So there’s no time to lose.”
Many questions came to mind, but she restricted herself to the problem at hand. “What exactly did you have in mind?”
He showed her a long building that had once been a carpenter’s shop. It still smelled faintly of wood sap and grease and of men’s labor. It was solidly built, with whitewashed walls and a sturdy plank floor, light-filled and airy, with a large hearth at one end and a Franklin stove at the other. There was plenty of furniture available, Ben told her, cots and tables and cabinets, and she would have full access to the apothecary where she had spent the morning.
“The space is adequate?”
Hannah raised her shoulders and let them drop. “I have looked after the sick in much worse places.” She thought of the blood-soaked ground at Tippecanoe, of the garrison gaol where her brother Daniel had almost died, of a dozen different battles, and turned her mind away from those images. Then she turned her mind to the people here who needed care, and asked about them.
“We’ll go meet some of them,” Ben said.
Hannah hesitated. She thought of Jennet, hidden away from the Poiterins and waiting for word of her husband. She thought of Rachel, who would be coming soon to tell her daily stories and share the gossip. She felt her fingers twitching with the need to be doing something, anything, and she nodded.
Ben opened the door, and Hannah stepped out into the city.
“I hardly remember any of this,” Hannah said a few minutes later. “Though I think I must have come this way, when I first got here.”
The weather was fine and the breeze was welcome on her face, and Hannah felt truly well for the first time in so many weeks.
She said, “When I was very little I dreamed of adventures, but this morning I was thinking that I’ve had quite enough of them in my lifetime.”
Ben glanced down at her. “The first lie you’ve told me.” He grinned to take the sting out of the truth. “You aren’t the kind to sit quiet by the fire, or you wouldn’t be here in the first place.”
“I could learn to be that kind of woman,” Hannah said, feeling herself flushing a little. “It would be a relief.”
“You want to sit by the fire and sew?” He shook his head. “I can’t see it.”
“Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think you do,” Hannah said, irritated now. “Maybe you don’t know me at all.”
“I know enough,” he said. “Paul told me about that summer. He told me about the riot, and what happened after. What you risked.”
Hannah felt herself flush with embarrassment, though she couldn’t say exactly what bothered her: that Paul Savard had been telling stories, or that he had told them to Ben.
She said, “He exaggerates.”
“My brother?” Ben looked amused. “I know no man less inclined to exaggeration. He is far more likely to err in the other direction.”
Because Hannah could not argue with that very true statement, she remained silent and was relieved when Ben let the subject go.
In a short time they had passed out of the neighborhood of large, well-maintained homes and businesses into an area that was populated by artisans and skilled laborers. Most of the houses were two-room cottages that were of a size with the cabins Hannah was familiar with. A space to sleep, and one for the business of living, a small garden. The spell of warmer weather had brought out washtubs and clotheslines, and women called to each other as they worked. It would be easy to imagine herself in some other country, because Hannah saw not a single white face.
It struck her for the first time how the community of free people of color made New Orleans into a city unlike any other. Nowhere else, not even in the states where slavery had been outlawed, did so many live, if not in perfect freedom, then at least with a good measure of self-government.
A ragman, his skin as wrinkled and dark as roasted hickory nuts, came toward them leading a donkey laden down with sagging panniers. He nodded to Ben and didn’t look at Hannah, but at the faded blue cotton tignon she had taken from her pocket to wrap around her head. She was not any shade of black, but neither was she white, and thus the law applied to her as well. And yet she had the impression—fleeting, unsettling—that the old man would have snatched the cloth from her head, if Ben had not been beside her.
She said, “In Manhattan I only had to be wary of how whites looked at me.”
Ben made a sound in his throat, one that she thought must be meant as acknowledgment.