01 A Free Man of Color

FIFTEEN

Olympe Corbier opened the door of her small, ochre-stuccoed cottage on Rue Douane and stood looking across at her brother for some moments, her thin face blank beneath the orange-and-black tignon. Behind her the room was filled with light and thick with the smells of incense and drying herbs. A cheap French chromo of the Virgin was tacked to the wall under a wreath of sassafras; on a narrow table of plank and twig before it stood a green candle on one side, a red one on the other, amid a gay tangle of beads. That was all January could see past her shoulder. Somewhere in the house a child was singing.

She said, "Ben."

It was the woman who had been at Congo Square.

"Olympe."

"Marie said you was back." She stepped aside to let him in. When he mounted the tall brick steps he gained over her in height. Tall for a woman, she was nowhere near his own inches. She was dressed much as she had been Sunday, in a bright-colored skirt badly frayed and the white blouse and jacket of a

poor artisan's wife. The fine wrinkles that stitched her eyelids and were beginning to make their appearance around her lips detracted nothing from the vivid life of her face.

"Marie?"

"The Queen. Laveau. But it was all over anyway, that Widow Levesque's big son was back from France and playin' piano like Angel Gabriel. Nana Bichie told me in the market, where I buy my herbs. That you had a lady in France, but she died, and so you returned."

Her French had deteriorated. Even before he had left, it had begun to coarsen, them's shifting into zs and the as to os, the endings and articles of words fading away. Like his, her voice was deep and made music of the sounds. In another room of the cottage-or perhaps in the yard behind-a young girl's voice sounded, and the singing child stilled for a moment. Her eyes changed momentarily as she kept track of what was going on, as mothers do-or as other children's mothers always had. Just a touch, then her attention returned to him.

"You never came."

"I didn't know you'd want me to," he said. "We'd fought..." He hesitated, feeling awkward and stupid but knowing that their quarrel sixteen years ago was something that still needed getting past. "And I felt bad that I hadn't come back, hadn't made the time to look for you, before I left for France. I was stupid then-and I guess I didn't quite have the nerve now. I don't know how long it would have taken me to get the nerve, if I didn't need your advice."

"About Angelique Crozat?"

He looked nonplussed. Her dark face split into a white grin and the tension of her body relaxed. She shook her head, "Brother, for a griffe you sure white inside. You don't think everybody in town don't know about that silly cow Phrasie Dreuze hangin' herself all over you like Spanish moss at the funeral and layin" it on you to 'avenge her daughter's murder'? It true like she sayin' that somebody witched her pillow?"

"Put this in her mattress." He produced the handkerchief from his coat pocket-his slightly-better corduroy coatee, not the rough serge roundabout he'd worn to the Swamp. Bella had shaken her head over the damp and stinking bundle he'd brought down to her upon his return to the house that morning: "Fox go callin' on a pig, gonna get shit on his fur," she'd said.

Olympe led the way to a very old, very scarred settee set beneath the lake-side window, nudged aside an enormous gray cat, and sat beside him, turning the gris-gris carefully in the light. She kept the handkerchief between the dried bat and her palm, touched the dead thing only with her nail, but her face had the businesslike intentness of a physician's during the examination of a stool or a sputum. The cat sniffed at January's knee, then tucked its feet and stared slit-eyed into sleepy distance once more.

"John Bayou made this," Olympe said at last. "It's the kind hangs in the swamp near the lake where he goes, and you can still smell the turpentine on it." She held it out for him to sniff. "He favors snuff and turpentine. Dr. Yah-Yah woulda made a wax ball with chicken feathers, 'stead of huntin' down a bat. It's bad gris-gris, death written all over it." Her dark eyes flickered to him. "You been carryin' this in your pocket?"

He nodded.

"You lucky you get off with just a couple beatin's." January's hand went to the swollen lips of the cut cheek he'd taken Sunday afternoon. The gris-gris had, of course, been in his pocket at the time. Also

today in the Swamp.

"What?" she said, seeing his face. "You thought it would only work against the one whose name was spoke at its making?" Her face softened a little, and the old, ready contempt she'd flayed him with at their last meeting was tempered now by years of bearing children and dealing with the helplessness of other people's pain. "Or they teach you in France it was all nigger hoodoo?" Once she would have thrown the words at him like a challenger's gauntlet. Now she smiled, exasperated but kind.

"Where would I find this John Bayou?"

"I wouldn't advise it," said Olympe. "He mean, Doctor John." Her coffee-dark eyes narrowed, like the cat's. "And what was Angelique Crozat to you?"

"A woman they're saying I killed."

"Who's saying?"

"The police. Not saying it right out yet, but they're thinking it louder and louder." And he told her what had happened that night, leaving out only who it was who had given him the message to take to Angelique-"someone who couldn't be at that ball"-and what Shaw had told him later.

"Phrasie Dreuze," said Olympe, as if she'd bitten on a lemon, and her eyes had the look of an angry cat's again. "Yes, her man made it worth her while to keep her mouth shut about him and her daughter. Mamzelle Marie had her cut of that, for showin' Phrasie how to pass off Angelique as a virgin to Trepagier when the time come. But some people knew. Anybody who knew Angelique as a child didn't have far to go to guess. No wonder she didn't have much use for men."

She shook her head. "Phrasie know you were the last person to see her girl alive?"

"I think so. She was there when Clemence Drouet told Shaw about it, but I don't think she's smart enough to put two and two together. Even if she was, I don't think she'd care."

"No. So long as she's got her revenge." She turned her head, to regard the withered bat on the windowsill. "I'll need a dollar, two dollars, to find out from Doctor John."

He took them from his wallet, heavy silver cartwheels, and she placed them on the sill on either side of the bat. The cat jumped up and sniffed the money, but didn't go near the gris-gris. January told himself it was because the thing smelled of snuff and turpentine.

"Anybody ever ask you to witch Angelique?"

Olympe hesitated, but her eyes moved.

"Who?"

She pushed the silver dollars to and fro with a fingertip. "When you talked about goin" to France, brother, you talked about becomin' a doctor. A real doctor, a go-to-school doctor. You do that?"

January nodded.

"You take that oath they make doctors take, about not runnin' your mouth about your patients who come to you with secrets? Secrets that are the seeds of their illness?"

He looked away, unable to meet her eyes. Then he sighed. "Looks like it's my day to be double stupid. Now you got me talkin' gombo," he added, realizing he had slipped, not only into the sorter inflections of

the Africanized speech, but into its abbreviated forms as well.

"You always did set store on bein' a Frenchman," smiled Olympe. "You as bad as Mama, and that sister of ours with her fat custard moneybag, pretendin' I'm no kin of theirs because I'm my father's child." Her mouth quirked, and for a moment the old anger glinted in her eyes.

"I'm sorry." His hand moved toward the money. She regarded him in surprise.

"You change your mind 'bout Doctor John?"

"I thought you just told me you wouldn't tell."

"I won't tell on the person who paid me," she said, as if explaining something to one of her younger children. "Might be some completely different soul went to John Bayou, and that's none of my lookout. I should know in two, three days."

"I'll be back by then." He thought he said the words casually, but there was more than just interest in the way she turned her head. "I'm leaving town for a few days. Riding out tonight, as soon as the dancing's through."

He felt his heart trip quicker as he spoke the words aloud. It was something he didn't want to think about. Since he had returned to Louisiana, he had not been out of New Orleans, had barely left the French town, and then only for certain specific destinations: the Culvers' house, the houses of other private pupils.

In the old French town, the traditions of a free colored caste protected him. His French speech identified him with it, at least to those who knew, and his friends and family guarded him, because should ill befall his mother's son, ill would threaten them all.

Whatever family he might possess in the rest of the state, wherever and whoever they were, they were still picking cotton and cutting cane, without legal names or legal rights. In effect, everything beyond Canal Street was the Swamp.

"Can't that policeman go?" she asked. "Or won't he?"

"I don't know," said January softly. "I think they're keeping him busy, keeping him quiet. And I think..." He hesitated, not exactly sure what to say because he wasn't exactly sure what it was he was going to Chien Mort to seek.

"I think he really wants to find out the truth," he went on slowly. "But he's an American, and he's a white man. If in his heart he really doesn't want the killer to be Galen Peralta, he'll be... too willing to look the other way if Peralta Pere says, 'Look over there.' And you know for a fact he's not going to get a thing out of those slaves."

Olympe nodded.

January swallowed hard, thinking about the world outside the bounds of the city he knew. "I think it's gotta be me."

Through the open doors to the rear parlor he could see a girl of twelve or so, skinny like Olympe but with the red-mahogany cast of the free colored, with a two-year-old boy on her knee, telling him a long tale about Compair Lapin and Michie Dindon while she shelled peas at the table.

He thought, They can walk twelve blocks downstream or six blocks toward the river and they'll be

safe... my nephew, my niece. But he knew that wasn't even true anymore.

"I'll be back," he said. His voice was hoarse.

"Wait." Olympe rose, crossed to the big etagere in the corner. Like the settle - and all the furniture in the room - it was very plain, with a patina of great age, the red cypress gleaming like satin. Its shelves were lined with borders of fancifully cut paper, and held red clay pots and tin canisters that had once contained coffee, sugar, or cocoa, labels garish in several tongues. She took a blue bead from one canister and a couple of tiny bones from another, tied the bones in a piece of red flannel and laced everything together onto a leather thong, muttering to herself and occasionally clapping her hands or snapping her fingers while she worked. Then she put the entire thong into her mouth, crossed herself three times, and knelt before the chromo of the Virgin, her head bowed in prayer.

January recognized some of the ritual, from his childhood at Bellefleur. The priest who'd catechized him later had taught him to trust in the Virgin and take comfort in the mysteries of the rosary. It had been years since he'd even thought of such spells.

"Here." She held out the thong to him. "Tie this round your ankle when you go. Papa Legba and Virgin Mary, they look out for you and bring you back here safe and free. It's not safe out there," she went on, seeing him smile as he put the thong into his pocket. "You had that gris-gris on you for near a week, and there's evil in it, the kind of evil that comes from petty anger and grows big, like a rat stuffin' itself on worms in the dark. Wear it. It's not safe beyond the river. Not for the likes of us. Maybe not ever again."

The sun was leaning over the wide crescent of the river as January walked back along Rue Burgundy toward his mother's house. In the tall town houses and the low-built cottages both, and in every courtyard and turning, he could sense the movement and excitement of preparations for the final night of festivities, the suppressed flurry of fantastic clothing and the freedom of masks.

He'd already made arrangements with Desdunes's Livery for the best horse obtainable. Food, and a little spare clothing, and bait for the horse lay packed in the saddlebag under the bed in his room. It's not safe beyond the river.

The land that he'd been born in, the land that was his home, was enemy land. American land. The land of men like Nahum Shagrue.

His heart beat hard as he walked along the bricks of the banquette. If he could get evidence, find a reason, learn something to tell Shaw about what was out at Bayou Chien Mort, he thought the man would go. And despite all the Americans could do, the testimony of a free man of color was still good in the courts of New Orleans.

But it had to be a free man's testimony, not that of subpoenaed slaves.

A couple of Creole blades came down the banquette toward him, gesturing excitedly, recounting a duel or a card game, and January stepped down, springing over the noisome gutter and into the mud of the street to let them pass. Neither so much as glanced from their absorption.

As he crossed back on some householder's plank to the pavement, January cursed Euphrasie Dreuze in his heart. At his mother's house he edged down the narrow passage to the yard and thence climbed to his own room above the kitchen. At the small cypress desk he wrote a quick letter to Abishag Shaw-keeping the wording as simple as possible just to be on the safe side-then took his papers from his pocket and copied them exactly in his best notarial script. He started to fold the copy, then flattened it out again, and for good measure made a second copy on paper he'd bought last week to keep track of his students' payments. The inaccuracy of the official signature didn't trouble him much, given what he

knew about the educational level prevalent in rural Louisiana. He placed the original in the envelope with the letter to Shaw, and closed it with a wafer of pink wax. One copy he folded and put in the desk, another in his pocket.

As a lifeline it wasn't much, but it was all he had.

It was half a block from his mother's house to Minou's. The two houses were nearly identical, replicas of all the small cottages along that portion of Rue Burgundy. He edged down the narrow way between Minou's cottage and the next and into the yard, where his sister's cook was peeling apples for a tart at the table set up outside the kitchen door. The afternoon was a cool one, the heat that poured from the big brick kitchen welcome. Inside, January could see Therese ironing petticoats at a larger table near the stove.

"She inside," said the cook, looking up at him with an encouraging smile, which also told him that Henri Viellard was not on the premises. It would not have done, of course, for his sister's protector to be reminded that Dominique had a brother at all, much less one so dark. She had been her usual sweet, charming self when she'd told him to check whether Henri was present before approaching her door, but after the morning's events, and after Sunday night in the Calabozo, he felt a surge of sympathy for Olympe's rebellion.

"But I warn you, she in God's own dither 'bout that ball."

In a dither over the ball, was she? thought January, standing in the long French doors that let into the double parlor, watching his sister arranging the curls on an enormous white wig of the sort popular fifty years before.

And how much of a dither would she be in if someone told her that she could be murdered with impunity by a white man? Or was that something she already knew and accepted, the way she accepted that she could not be in public with her hair uncovered or own a carriage?

"Ben." She turned in her chair and smiled. "Would you like tea? I'll have Therese-"

He shook his head, and stepped across to kiss her cheek. "I can't stay," he said. "I'm playing tonight, and it seems like all morning I've been up to this and that, and I need to go to church yet before the ball."

"Church?"

"I'm leaving right after the dancing ends," said January quietly. "Riding down to Bayou Chien Mort to have a talk with the Peralta house servants-and to have a look at Michie Galen if I can manage it. The girl you mentioned him being affianced to-is he in love with her?"

"Rosalie Delaporte?" Dominique wrinkled her nose. "If you're planning to deliver a letter, you'd have better luck saying it's from that fencing master of his. That must be who he's missing most."

January shook his head. "His father approves of the fencing master."

"His father approves of Rosalie Delaporte. Skimmed milk, if you ask me." She removed a nosegay from too close attentions by the cat. "You might tell him you have a note from Angelique's mother. But his father approved of that, too."

"Did he?" January settled onto the other chair, straddling it backward. The table was a litter of plumes, lace, and silk flowers, hurtfully reminiscent of Ayasha. The apricot silk gown lay spread over the divan in the front parlor, gleaming softly in the light of the French doors. "I wonder. And what he approved of when Angelique was alive, and what he'll countenance now, are two different things. Do you have

anything of Angelique's? Something that could pass as a souvenir, something she wanted him to have?"

"With her mother selling up everything that would bring in a picayune? Here." Dominique got to her feet and rustled over to the sideboard, returning with a pair of fragile white kid gloves. "She and I wore the same sizes, down to shoes and gloves-I know, because she borrowed a pair of my shoes once when a rainstorm caught her and never returned them, the bitch. These should pass for hers."

"Thank you." He slipped them into his pocket. "What do I owe you for them?"

"Goose." She waved the offer away. "It'll give Henri something to get me on my next birthday. Why is it men never know what to buy a woman? He has me do the shopping when he needs to buy gifts for his mother and sisters. Not that he ever tells them that, of course."

"You sure he isn't having some other lady buy the presents he gives you?" suggested January mischievously.

Dominique drew herself up. "Benjamin," she said, with great dignity, "no woman, even one who wished me ill, would have suggested that he buy me the collected works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau."

"I abase myself," apologized January humbly. "One more thing." He took from his breast pocket the envelope and handed it to her. "I should be back Sunday. I'll come for this then. If I'm not-if I don't-take this to Lieutenant Shaw at the Calabozo immediately."

And if worse came to worst, he added mentally, hope to hell somebody-your Henri, or Livia, or somebody-would be able to come up with the $1,500 it would take to buy me out of slavery.

If they could find me.

As he had predicted, the crowd at the public masquerade held in the Theatre d'Orleans was far larger than that at the quadroon ball going on next door, and far less well behaved.

The temporary floor had been laid as usual above the seats in the Theatre's pit, stretching from the lip of the stage to the doors. Bunting fluttered from every pillar and curtain swag, and long tables of refreshments had been set out under the eye of waiters to which-both John Davis, the owner of both buildings, and the master of ceremonies had informed the musicians in no uncertain terms-only the attending guests would have access. In the vast route of people bustling and jostling around the edges of the room or performing energetic quadrilles in the center, January recognized again all the now-familiar costumes: Richelieu, the dreadful blue-and-yellow Ivanhoe, Henry VIII-sans wives-the laurel-crowned Roman. The Roman was accompanied by a flaxen, flat-bosomed, and rather extensively covered Cleopatra, and some of the other American planters and businessmen by their wives, but they were far fewer, and the Creole belles evident were of the class referred to by the upper-class Creoles as chacas: shopgirls, artisans, gri-settes.

The young Creole gentlemen were there in force, however, flirting with the chaca girls as they'd never have flirted with the gently bred ladies of their own station. Augustus Mayerling, who for all his expertise with a saber seemed indeed to be a surprisingly peaceable soul, had to step in two or three times to throw water on incipient blazes. Other fencing masters were not so conscientious. There were noticeably more women than men present, at least in part because the Creole gentlemen had a habit of disappearing down the discreetly curtained passageway to the Salle d'Orleans next door, where, January knew, the quadroon ball was in full swing. Occasionally, if there was a lull in the general noise level, he could catch a drift of its music.

Philippe Decoudreau was on the cornet again. January winced.

He didn't hear them often, and less so as the evening progressed. In addition to the din of the crowd, the hollow thudding of feet on the suspended plank floor and the noise of the orchestra-augmented for the evening by a guitar, two flutes, and a badly played clarinette-the clamor in the streets was clearly audible. The heavy curtains of olive-green velvet were hooped back and the windows open. Maskers, Kalmucks, whores, sailors, and citizens out for a spree thronged and paraded through the streets from gambling hall to cabaret to eating house, calling to one another, singing, blowing flour in one an-others' faces, ringing cowbells, and clashing cymbals. There was a feverish quality to the humid air. Fights and scuffles broke out between the dances, sometimes lasting all the way out of the hall to the checkroom where pistols, swords, and sword-canes had been deposited.

"Do you see Peralta?" asked January worriedly at one point, dabbing the sweat from his face and scanning the crowd. The press of people raised the temperature of the room to an ovenlike stifle, a circumstance that didn't seem to affect the dancers in the slightest degree. Almost no breeze stirred from the long windows and the air was heavy with the smells of perfume, pomade, and un-cleaned costumes.

Hannibal, white with fatigue and face running with sweat, swept the room with his gaze, then shook his head. "Doesn't mean he isn't here," he pointed out. His hoarse, boyish voice was barely a thread. "He might be in the lobby-I went out there a few minutes ago, it's like a coaching inn at Christmas. Or he might be next door."

Or in Davis's gambling rooms up the street, thought January. Or at some elegant private ball. Or riding back to Bayou Chien Mart tonight, to make sure no one comes asking awkward questions about his son.

In the cathedral, where he'd gone to make his Lenten confession early and pray desperately for the success of his journey, January had been tormented by the conviction that Peralta would walk in and see him, recognize him, somehow know what his plans were. It irritated him that he should feel like a criminal in his search for the justice that the law should be giving him gratis. Confession and contrition and the ritual of the Mass had calmed his fears for a time, but as the evening progressed and Peralta did not make an appearance, like scurrying rats the fears returned.

The band occupied a dais set on the stage, and with the temporary floor slightly below even that level, January had a good view of the dancers. Dr. Soublet was there, arguing violently with another physician who seemed to think six pints of blood an excessive amount to abstract from a patient in a week.

Though the buffet tables were situated on the opposite side of the room from the windows, Henri Viellard-duly garbed as a sheep-seemed to have chosen gourmandise over fresh air; he patted his forehead repeatedly with a succession of fine linen handkerchiefs but refused to abandon proximity to the oysters, tartlets, meringues, and roulades. In his fluffy costume he bore a more than passing resemblance to a bespectacled meringue himself, with an apricot silk bow about his neck. His sisters, January noticed, were likewise clothed as fanciful animals: a swan, a rabbit, a cat, a mouse (that was the little one who looked like she'd escaped from the convent to attend), and something which after long study he and Hannibal agreed probably had to be a fish.

"Which I suppose makes Madame Viellard a farmer's wife," concluded January doubtfully.

"Or Mrs. Noah," pointed out Hannibal. "All she needs is a little boat under her arm."

He glimpsed both William Granger and Jean Bouille, moving with calculated exactness to remain as far as possible from one another while still occupying the same large room. As Uncle Bichet had remarked, Bouille's wife did seem to disappear up to the screened private theater boxes every time Bouille vanished down the passageway to the Salle next door. When the dance concluded and Granger and Bouille led

their respective partners toward the buffet in courses that threatened to intersect, the master of ceremonies scurried to intercept Bouille before another disaster could occur.

While Monsieur Davis's eye was elsewhere, January rose from the piano and moved discreetly along the wall to the buffet. He didn't like the white look around Hannibal's mouth, or the way he had of leaning inconspicuously against the piano as he played. He looked bled out, the flesh around his eyes deeply marked with pain, and the watered laudanum, January suspected, was not doing him very much good. As he drew close to the buffet Mayerling caught his eye, signaled him to stay where he was, and wandered over himself to collect a glass of champagne and one of the strong molasses tafia, then strolled back up to the stage as January returned to his place at the piano.

"I wanted to thank you again for standing physician the other day," said the fencing master. "You behold your competition."

Soublet and his adversary had reached the shouting stage and were brandishing their canes: It was obviously only a matter of time until they named their friends.

"Maybe not being able to practice in this city is what the preachers call a blessing in disguise," said January.

"And a fairly thin disguise at that. You know Granger is now claiming that he deloped-fired into the air-and Bouille is hinting to everyone he thinks will listen that his opponent flinched aside at the last moment -in other words, dodged out of cowardice, surely one of the most foolish things to do under the circumstances since most pistols will throw one direction or the other, especially at fifty feet."

He nodded toward Bouille, deep in conversation with Monsieur Davis, who was steering him in the direction of a group of Creole businessmen and their wives. "So now we can only hope to keep them apart for the evening. After tomorrow, of course, they will both be sober more of the time."

"Thompsonian dog!" screamed Dr. Soublet, his opponent evidently favoring the do-it-oneself herbalist school of that well-known Yankee doctor.

"Murderer!" shrieked the Thompsonian dog, and the two men fell upon each other in a welter of kicking, flailing canes, and profanity.

"Birds in their little nests agree," sighed Hannibal, draining the tafia, "And 'tis a shameful sight When children of one family Fall out, and chide, and fight."

Monsieur Davis and half a dozen others hustled the combatants from the room.

Mayerling remained where he was, shaking his head in a kind of amazement. Hannibal picked up his violin again, playing to cover the chatter of the crowd; the music was frail as honey candy, but with an edge to it like glass.

"I never saw the point of dueling, myself." January turned back to the keyboard. His hands followed the trail the violin set, a kind of automatic embellishment that could be done without thinking. "It might be different were I allowed to give challenges, or accept them, but I don't think so."

"Of course not," said the Prussian in surprise. "You have your music. You are an intelligent man, and an educated one. You are seldom bored. It is all from boredom, you know," he went on, looking out into the room again. "It is like the Kaintucks in the Swamp or the Irish on Tchoupitoulas Street. They have nothing to do, so they get into fights or look for reasons to get into fights. They are not so very different from the Creoles."

He shook his head wonderingly.

"... It's not like she's got room to be so damn choosy," said a man's voice, beside one of the boxes on the stage. "If Arnaud sinned he must have had his reasons. No man whose wife is making him happy goes straying like that."

There was a murmur of agreement. January turned his head sharply, saw that it was the Jack of Diamonds, Charles-Louis Trepagier, and another man, shorter than he but with the same sturdy, powerful build. The shorter man wore the gaudy costume of what Lord Byron probably had conceived a Turkish pasha to look like, ballooning pistachio-colored trousers, a short vest of orange and green, an orange-and-green turban with a purple glass jewel on it the size of an American dollar. An orange mask hid his face, orange slippers his feet, a long purple silk sash that had clearly started its life as a lady's scarf wrapped two or three times around his waist.

"It isn't like she hasn't had offers," added another of the Trepagier clan resentfully. "Good ones, too-I don't mean trash like McGinty. She thinks she's too good..."

"Too good! That's a laugh!" The stranger threw back his head with a bitter bark. He leaned closer, lowering his voice but not nearly enough. "If the woman's turned you down it's because she's got a lover hidden somewhere. Has had, since she shut Arnaud out of her bed. I've even heard she's put on a mask and come dancing."

"At public balls?"

"Public balls, certainly," said the pasha. He nodded back over his shoulder toward the discreet doorway of the passage to the Salle. "And other places, maybe not so public."

"Sir..."

January hadn't even seen Mayerling move. The young fencing master slipped through the crowd like a bronze fish, a dangerous glitter of blue-and-black jewels like dragon scales, his big, pale hands resting folded on the gems of his belt buckle. Behind the modeled leather of his mask, his hazel eyes were suddenly deadly chill.

"I assume," said Mayerling, "that you are speaking third-hand gossip about someone whom none of you knows. Certainly no gentleman would bandy any woman's name so in a public place."

The Trepagier boys regarded him in alarmed silence. In his five years in New Orleans the Prussian had only fought three duels, but in each he had killed with such scientifically vicious dispatch, and such utter lack of mercy, as to discourage any further challenges. The wolf-pale eyes traveled from their clothing to their faces, clearly recognizing, clearly identifying.

"This is fortunate, since I only duel with gentlemen," Mayerling went on quietly. He turned to regard the pasha in green. "Should I happen to find," he said, as if he could see the face behind the garish satin of the mask, "that a woman's name is being spoken by those whose blood would not dishonor my sword, then of course, as a gentleman, I should have no choice but to avenge that lady's honor and put a halt to that gossip in whatever way seemed best to me."

The yellow gaze swept them like a backhand cut. There was no cruelty in it, only a chill and terrifying strength. January could almost see the line of blood it left.

"I trust that I make myself clear?"

The pasha opened his mouth to speak. The Jack of Diamonds reached out, put a hand on his pink silk

arm. To Mayerling, he said, "It was, of course, a woman of the lower classes of whom we spoke, a chaca shopkeeper who betrayed her husband, nothing more."

"Even so," said Mayerling softly. "Such talk disturbs me. Perhaps you should study to ape gentlemen a little more closely-whoever you are."

None of them replied. Mayerling waited for a moment, giving them time to declare themselves gentlemen and offended, then turned his back and vanished into the crowd.

January leaned over, and touched Uncle Bichet on the shoulder. "Who was that?" he asked, the old man looked at him in some surprise.

"Just a couple of the Trepagier boys."

"No-with them."

The cellist turned his head to look, but the pasha was even then vanishing through the curtained doorway that led to the Salle d'Orleans, deep in conversation with the purple pirate.

The Trepagier brothers-there were at least four of them, two of whom were married and none of whom were boys at all-were bullying and insulting a much younger man who had dared flirt with a flustered and feathered damsel garbed as a gypsy, evidently secure in the knowledge that he would not dare challenge them, and they were correct.

Uncle Bichet shook his head, and glanced at the program card. "Those lazy folks been standing long enough," he said, and January turned, unwillingly, back to his music.

Sally, he thought. Whoever the green pasha was, he had to have spoken with the runaway servant girl Sally. Or he recognized Madame Trepagier at the ball Thursday night, either by her movement, stance, and voice-as he himself had done-or because she'd worn that silly Indian costume somewhere before.

And if that were the case, thought January with sudden bitterness, for a man attending a quadroon ball he had a lot of nerve criticizing a woman he recognized there.

The dancing lasted until nearly dawn. Technically Lent began at midnight, but there was no diminution of champagne, tafia, gumbo or pate, though having made his confession that afternoon January abstained all evening even when the opportunity presented itself. Eventually Xavier Peralta made his appearance, clothed in the red robe and scepter of a king with his cousin the chief of police still at his side. The waltzes and quadrilles grew wilder as the more respectable ladies took their departure, the fights and jostling more frequent. Everyone seemed determined to extract the final drops of pleasure from the Carnival season, to dance the soles off their shoes, to dally on the balconies above the torchlit river of noise surging along Rue Orleans.

Also, as the night wore on, more and more of the wealthier men disappeared for longer and longer periods of time. The Creole belles, though perhaps not of the highest society, stood abandoned along the wall, whispering among themselves and pretending not to care. Most of them, January suspected, would stop at home only long enough to wash off their rouge before attending early services in the cathedral. The American women whose husbands were still in attendance whispered about the half dozen or so whose men had "stepped out for a bit of air." Most of them appeared and disappeared a number of times, but the Roman soldier stayed gone. The deserted Cleopatra involved herself in an animated discussion with several other ladies but kept an eye on the door, and when the errant Roman at last returned, there was promise of bitter acrimony in her greeting.

They bring it on themselves, January thought, but he knew it wasn't that easy. Like everything else about New Orleans, it was a bittersweet tangle, and you could not run from it without leaving pieces of your torn-out heart behind.

No wonder everyone tried to dance and be gay, he thought, as he walked toward the livery stable in the tepid mists of predawn. Costumed maskers still reeled along the banquettes of Rue Orleans, and from every tavern music could be heard, brassy street bands and thumping drums. Under the flicker of the street lamps whooping Kalmucks pursued masked and laughing prostitutes. The air, thick with the smell of the river, was also weighed with wine and whisky and tobacco and cheap perfume.

He collected his rented horse from a sleepy stable-hand and rode down to the levee, where the flatboat captain he'd contracted yesterday waited for him in the white ocean of mist that rose from the river. The river itself was very still, the levees on either side rising like ridges of mountains from the thinning vapors. Behind them in the last starlight the town dozed, exhausted at last.

There was only so much-deception financial and romantic, the monstrosity of slavery, and the waiting horrors of yellow fever-that could be masked behind the bright scrim of music, the taste of coffee and gumbo, the shimmer of the moonlight.

Mardi Gras was done. The greedy consumption of the last good food, the draining of the last of the wine, a final, wild coupling in the darkness before the penitential death of Lent.

He watched the dark shore of the west bank approaching with terror in his heart.