Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down The River Read Online Free PDF Page B

had been stolen by the same louts who'd cut his coat to ribbons and torn up his music.
    Along with his other few valuables, the watch was safe at Olympe's house now. A slave would not possess such a thing.
    “Yore pal Sefton'll be along,” said Shaw reassuringly. “What do you know about Fourchet's son?”
    “Not much.” January drew a deep breath, tried to convince his muscles to relax. “He's a few years older than I. Esteban, his name is. I think his mother was the daughter of a Spanish wine-merchant here in town.”
    “Juana Villardiga, accordin' to the records.” Shaw folded his hands over the papers, rumpling them as if they were yesterday's newspaper instead of the proofs that January would need, should his freedom be in jeopardy. The morning was chill, and through the arched doors at the inner side of the watchroom the Cabildo courtyard was dusky still. Two prisoners swabbed the flagstones under the watchful eye of a blue-uniformed City Guard.
    January's eyes felt gritty. After spending most of the evening getting the documents drawn up and finding musician friends to replace him in his engagements to play at this or that party until after the sugar harvest-not an easy matter, given the perennial paucity of good musicians in the town-he'd gone late to bed, and in the few hours that he had slept, had dreamed of being a child again, and a slave.
    “In 1802 Fourchet married, again, a woman name of Camille Bassancourt who came here with her aunt from Paris. They had three sons and two daughters-”
    “After my time.”
    
     January shook his head. “We left Bellefleur in 1801. I only remember Esteban.”
    Shaw used the corner of the top document to pick his teeth, brown with tobacco like a row of discolored tombstones. He was a lanky man who looked as if he'd been put together from random lengths of cane, close to January's height and homely as a mongrel dog. “The girls an' one boy are still livin' . . .” He grubbed in a pocket and consulted a much-scribbled fragment of paper. “Solange is at school with the Ursulines here in town. Robert-that's the boy-an' his wife just got back on the sixth from takin' Elvire, the older girl, to a boardin' school in Poitiers.”
    Given the man's raspy, flatboat drawl, it always surprised January that Shaw pronounced the names of French cities and individuals correctly.
    “Accordin' to Fourchet's lawyer, Camille died in '28.” Shaw extracted a plug of tobacco from his trouser pocket, picked a knot of lint off it, and bit off a hunk the size of a Spanish dollar. “Fourchet remarried this past April to a girl name of Marie-Noel Daubray-”
    “Daubray?” interrupted January. “Isn't that the name-”
    “Of the fellas he thinks might be behind the mill fire an' all? It is.” He gestured with the fragment of paper-a bill from Berylmann, a gunsmith on Canal Street, January saw-and concentrated for a moment on reducing the brown chunk in the corner of his jaws to a manageable consistency. “Their first cousin once removed, in fact. Granddaughter of their oldest brother, which is what the lawsuit's about. What's our boy Esteban like?”
    “Stiff,” said January, the first description that came to his mind. “I haven't seen him since he was twelve, remember, and I was only eight.” He leaned back in the chair beside Shaw's cluttered desk with half-closed eyes, summoning back the silent boy who'd stare with such repelled fascination at the naked breasts of the women in the fields. “But he was stiff. He walked around with his shoulders up-” He demonstrated, bracing his whole body in imitation of that tight, silent, awkward boy, and was aware of Shaw's cool eyes flickering over him, reading what that imitation had to say.
    "He didn't speak much to anyone. He was clumsy.
    You expected him to fall over any minute. You know how there are people that it makes you uncomfortable to talk to? They stand wrong, or they stand too close; it takes them forever to say anything and