02 Fever Season

Twelve

I will never in my life, Abishag Shaw had said, understand a gamblin' man.

But at least, thought January, if you did happen to want one you knew where he'd be.

Naturally, no man of color was permitted through the front doors of John Davis's casino on the corner of Rues Bourbon and d'Orleans. From the small service courtyard in the building's rear, January could look through the windows to the salons within. The flickering glow of gas lent a curious cast to the faces of the men grouped so intently around the roulette wheels, to the polished tabletops scattered with the garish reds and golds of the cards.

Maybe it was just the heavy buzzing of sleeplessness in his head, the too-recent memory of that stifling dormitory bedchamber he had just left, but there was something weirdly disjointed about that sight.

Money lay on the tables, too, green or orange or brown banknotes, gold American cartwheels and eagles, silver Spanish dollars. Folded papers-deeds to houses, papers for slaves, letters of credit for crops or cargoes. Men who had only their six-reale daily wage to gamble away didn't come to Davis's.

The croupiers-fair-haired Germans, quick, small Frenchmen or Mexicans, mustachioed Italians-scooped up cards and money impassively, deft and expert. Did they realize that newcomeis to the city were the first to die in the epidemics?

Maybe the management didn't beat up greenhorns or rob winners the minute they cleared the door, as was the procedure in the hells of the Swamp or Gallatin Street, but the net result was usually the same.

As Shaw had asked, did those men around the tables think they were actually going to win money here?

Did they think the fever, or the cholera, would not get them, if they remained long enough in this town?

The rear door to the service wing stood open. A waiter in shirtsleeves was washing glasses in the tiny kitchen, his crimson coat hung on a peg on the wall behind him. An other arranged oysters on a tray. No gaslight burned in these rear purlieux; the gluey heat of the evening curdled with the smells of the tallow candles, with the tang of spicy sauce and the garbage in the gutters outside. The man in shirtsleeves saw January and grinned. "How you keepin' yourself, Maestro?"

One of his mother's greatest objections to January's musical calling was that it put him on the same standing with servants.

"Getting by." January accepted the lemonade that the man poured out for him. In the heat, after the hours spent caring for the sick girls on Rue St. Claude, the liquid was mouth-wringingly sweet. "Yourself?"

"Can't complain. We're stayin' well, is all that counts." Like January, the man was sufficiently dark to stand a fighting chance against the fever. His mother denied there was a difference, of course. But January suspected his mother would cheerfully succumb to the fever if by doing so it would prove her to be more white than her neighbors.

"Would you mind taking this in to Monsieur Davis?" January fished one of his cards from the breast pocket of his black wool coat. On the back he'd already written his request for a few minutes of the entrepreneur's time. Though he couldn't really afford it, he held out, along with the card, a two-reale bit as well. The waiter straightened his sleeves, resumed his coat, and returned a few minutes later to lead January up a narrow flight of service stairs to a smother-box of an office on the upper floor.

"Ben." John Davis rose from his desk, held out his hand.

"M'sieu Davis."

"Get Ben some champagne, would you, Placide? Unless you'd like something a little stronger?"

"Only lemonade, if that's all right, sir," answered January. "I'm going straight on to Charity Hospital tonight. To tell you the truth I've been so short of rest that if I had anything stronger you'd probably have to carry me out of here."

Davis shook his head with a chuckle. "Don't have enough men for that, Ben." With a gesture he invited January to sit, then peered at him closely in the candle light. "You don't look well, and that's a fact."

January reflected that the entrepreneur didn't look any too well himself stouter than when he'd seen him last and with far more white in the grizzle of his hair.

"Well, it can't last-it never does." Davis's French carried an echo of the Caribbean islands, after all these years. "I'll have something for you come November, when people start coming back to town. What can I do for you?"

"I'm not sure how to put this, sir." January turned in his hands the cool glass of lemonade the waiter Placide had brought him. "I know you have the confidence of your clients here, and I wouldn't ask you to violate it. I'm only asking if you feel you can help me."

He paused for a moment, as if marshaling his thoughts, though in fact he'd rehearsed his story with Hannibal several times. "A friend of my mother's was robbed of three thousand dollars," he said at last.

"We have no idea who took it-the house was broken into while the woman was visiting her daughter. I know that most of those who gamble here are, of course, not the men who would do such a thing, sir, but if a petty criminal should suddenly find himself possessed of that sum of money-particularly unexpectedly-he might very well come here."

"And paint the town bright red, eh?" Davis chuckled richly. "We get them coming in all the time.

These-what do they call themselves?-these mercenaries, these filibusters, these Kaintucks from the levee, they often `hit it rich,' as they say. Three thousand dollars." His eyes, dark as cafe noir, sharpened, speculative, as he regarded January across the rim of the bourbon glass Placide had brought on the same tray with the lemonade. Under that keen gaze January was very thankful he hadn't named five thousand as the sum. "Lot of money. Why didn't your mother's friend have credit on the bank?"

"She didn't say, sir. She'd just sold her cook and her coachman that afternoon, a private sale. She was leaving town and needed the money pretty badly."

Davis grimaced. "And lost it that same day? What a damn shame. This town just isn't safe. Some people don't trust banks. I don't, myself, but I trust my fellow man even less." He chuckled again, and gestured with his glass. "But fifteen hundred apiece-that's damn good bargaining, even with prices as high as they are now. Who'd she sell to, do you know?"

January appeared to think hard, frowning. Then he shook his head. "I don't... Redfield? Redman?

Redfern? Maybe Qtis Redfern?"

Davis's eyes widened. "Otis Redfern?"

"I might be thinking of someone else."

"I'd say you are, my friend." Davis shook his head. "Otis Redfern, God rest his soul, couldn't raise three thousand dollars to pay his debts here, let alone buy a coach man and a cook. He had a cook, anyway, the best in town; that wife of his saw to that. She asked around for months, and nothing was good enough for her; in the end she paid twice what he was worth for that stuck-up yellow fussbudget who used to cook for Bernard Marigny. And for all that the man ended up sold to that church fellow for six hundred dollars-money he probably took straight out of the profits of that silly Musicale those American ladies held for him out in Milneburgh last week. Now, that's gratitude for you!" he concluded sarcastically. "At least he could have paid her a decent price."

January remembered the Reverend Micajah Dunk bargaining in the Exchange: nine hundred, nine hundred fifty dollars for men who would be sold for over a thousand in Missouri next week. He wondered if one of them had been the Marigny cook.

He said, "Tcha!" and related, with libelous embellishments, the tale of the musicians' contracts for the Musicale, something Davis had heard secondhand or thirdhand already, but listened to avidly again.

"Well, for all her airs she's having the plantation sold out from under her," Davis remarked, after a fairly derogatory discussion of Emily Redfern's pretensions. "It went under seal by the bank today; Granville's going to auction it at Maspero's Monday. I never knew the lady well, but a harder, more grasping woman I have yet to meet. It must have driven her insane, the way that poor man let the ready slide through his fingers-and he was about the most inept gambler I've seen," he added, shaking his head. "Otis Redfern was one of those poor souls who couldn't let it alone, not even against plain common sense.

He'd bet on anything, for the thrill of it. Last week-Wednesday, it would have been-when everyone in town knew he was over his ears in debt, he came in here playing roulette... Roulette, like a fool!"

"Wednesday?" said January, startled.

Davis's gray brows raised politely; January said, "A friend of mine tried to reach him Wednesday and was told he was indisposed."

Davis shook his head. "The small hours of Wednesday morning it was-Redfern came in here around midnight or one, and gambled until just after sunrise. God knows what he said to his wife when he reached home."

He gestured with his glass toward the door and the gambling room beyond. "Liam Roarke, that slick Irishman who runs some dive by the Basin, came in at four with a couple of his bravos, and braced the man over money he'd lost to them, five thousand dollars two days before. Two days before, with Fazende and Calder ready to go to law over what Redfern owed them from last year's crop coming in poorly because of the cholera, and him selling up his slaves to cover the debt. And after they left, what does the poor fool do but go back to the tables."

He sipped his whisky and shook his head again at the marvel of human conduct. Through the floor January heard voices rise in sudden fury, the stamp of feet and shouting: a fight downstairs, inevitable in gatherings of Creoles and Americans. He heard something that sounded like "species of American!" and "Consarn if I'll take that from any man!" Davis tilted his head a little, ready to rise, but the noises died away.

The entrepreneur sighed, and his stout shoulders eased in their bottle green superfine. "I've been a player all my life, you know, Ben. I've seen enough money won and lost, here and in Paris and in Haiti, probably to buy back all of the Mississippi Valley from the Americans, with this city thrown in for lagniappe. I know these men who gamble everything, who can't stop gaming any more than a drunkard can stop drinking; who ruin themselves at the tables-I understand what they'll do, how they'll react, how they'll lay their bets. I can read these men like books. But I don't understand them. I don't understand why."

The door behind January opened upon a gentle knock. Placide looked in, caught Davis's eye: "I think they need you downstairs, sir."

"Ah." Davis sighed and stood. "My apologies, Ben..."

"None needed, sir. It's your job."

"For my sins." He gave a wry grin.

"Perhaps for your virtues." January picked up his hat.

"About your mother's friend's money." Davis waited until the waiter was gone. "I haven't seen anyone in here... How to say this? Spending money it doesn't appear they should have. It's been quiet. Mostly what you have here these days are the local men, the ones who come in all the time-the ones who stay in town, like fools, to gamble. And here I am like a fool catering to them, but there! In a year or two I'll open that place in Spanish Fort that I've been looking at, and then you'll see something like!"

January nodded. He hadn't noticed any diminution of the establishment's clientele, but then, Davis's was not a place where he performed regularly. Maybe it was quiet.

"You'll have better luck asking in the Swamp, and near the Basin, or down on Tchoupitoulas Street by the levee. But frankly, Ben, I wouldn't advise you to go down there. Slaves are very high this year. I wouldn't want to see you come to harm."

So Otis Redfern had been in town all Tuesday night. January turned the matter over in his mind as he walked to the Hospital, carefully choosing the most populated and best-lit streets.

Redfern would have ridden in Tuesday to post the runaway notice in the Bee-presumably before the loss of his five thousand dollars was discovered. And despite the debts that had forced the sale of Gervase and the others, he'd stayed on, his gambler's logic telling him that this was the way to recoup his loss.

If Emily Redfern hadn't already been planning to include her husband, as well as his mistress, in her plans for murder, thought January, shaking his head, that would have decided her.

Too little remained of his dwindling funds to hire a horse, so when he forced himself to wake next day in the heat of noon, he bathed and dressed and walked the six or seven streets to the levee. The Missourian had left that morning, bound on its usual run to St. Louis; the Bonnets O Blue was just in and off-loading cotton and tobacco. The Philadelphia would leave sometime that afternoon for Natchez-"Or this evenin', more like," said its engineer, with whom January managed to get a quiet word in the arcades of the market, while the small white ship sat idle on its wharf and its crew of stevedores played monte in the shade. "That big mess of brandy that came in on the Caledonia yesterday ain't yet been brought over here, and it'll be four hours loadin' at the least. Mr. Graham-that's our pilot-says we can make as far as Red Church, 'fore we'll have to tie up for the night. You'll be fine."

So January booked deck passage as far as Twelve-Mile Point, all he could afford, and returning home, packed a small grip with a change of linen, a blue-and-red calico shirt, rough trousers, and a corduroy jacket. While he was doing so he heard sounds, first in the little room next door to which Hannibal had moved his books and clothing the previous afternoon, then out on the gallery. He deduced that his friend was at least out of bed, if not precisely awake.

He found him being thoroughly sick over the gallery railing. Considering the hour at which the fiddler had come in last night-well after January's predawn return from the Hospital-he suspected this illness was the usual result of Hannibal's drinking, but went to him nevertheless, and while steadying him, unobtrusively checked for fever.

"Won vinum virus moderari," whispered Hannibal at last, draped like a wet rag doll over the railing. "Sed viri vino solent. Have I died of the fever yet?" He was panting as if he had run a long distance.

"No," replied January unfeelingly. Given the present possible fates of free colored who lived alone with no one in the houses on either side, he felt safer knowing there was another person on the premises, and he was genuinely fond of the fiddler, but sharing quarters with Hannibal Sefton did have its disadvantages.

"It isn't Bronze John-just your old friend John Barleycorn. And if you'd moderari your intake of vinum you wouldn't be having this problem."

"Ah, but think of the others that would be caused by worry in its place." He wavered back into the dark little chamber that had from time immemorial been occupied by the Widow Levesque's cook Bella and, unequal to the task of fighting his way back through the mosquito-bar, simply collapsed on the floor with his back against the foot of the bed. "I'll sleep here, thanks."

January went into his own room and brought in the tub of water he'd drawn to sluice his head and arms before getting dressed for the Blanque girls' piano lessons. Hannibal thrust his head into it as if he expected there to be a twenty-dollar gold piece on the bottom that he could pick up only with his teeth.

He came up dripping and gasping, like a drowned elf.

"Thank you," he said.

"Thank you," replied January seriously. "The two young ladies who brought you home this morning told me you'd been making enquiries among their friends about people spending more money than is their wont to have. Did you learn anything?" Anything you can remember? he wanted to add, but didn't.

Hannibal was having enough problems this morning.

"Ah. The lovely Bridgit and the equally lovely Thalia. They did say that nobody's showed up with five thousand all in a lump, but, of course, if Cora were abducted by a group the money would have been split. No one seems to have even been throwing around as much as a thousand. They did say that Roarke, the proprietor of the Jolly Boatman, had been expecting such a sum, that he'd won from one Otis Redfern, but nothing came of it: Roarke's inamorata du jour, one Miss Trudi, abused the other girls for a week on the strength of the disappointment."

"That sounds genuine," murmured January. He thought that one of the girls who'd greeted him in the yard in the small hours-an incapable Hannibal in tow had looked vaguely familiar. She'd been dishing the crawfish and rice yesterday, behind the gotch-eyed bartender's back.

"Are you off to Mademoiselle Vitrac's, when you're feeling better? Then let her know I've gone up to Spanish Bayou, to have a look at the Redfern place. They're auctioning it Monday. The slaves are gone;

Madame Redfern herself is in Milneburgh; this is our last chance to see anything there that is to be seen. I should be back tomorrow, when the Lancaster makes her usual run down from Natchez. Copies of my papers are in my desk."

Hannibal nodded. January scooped aside the mosquito-bar and helped him back into bed, exasperation and pity in his heart. January knew better than to remonstrate with a man whose illness and pain had led him into addiction. The road that led away from opium would lead only back to pain, and both had given Hannibal an uneradicable taste for oblivion. So he said only, "Will you be all right?"

"Eripere vitam nemo non homini potest, at nemo mortem; mille ad hanc aditus patent. I'll look after Athene of the Bright Eyes. You watch yourself, upriver."

There wasn't time to walk to the levee and check on the progress of the Philadelphia's cargo; January could only hope it was delayed. Most steamboats left before noon, and with the waning moon rising late he guessed the captain of the vessel would be pressing the pilot and the engincer to be off as soon as could be. The next upriver boat was the Lancaster, early Sunday morning, and January did not like to count on the house at Spanish Bayou remaining empty for that long. As he walked the length of Rue Burgundy, and down Rue de l'Hopital, he found himself listening for the groan of steamboat whistles that would tell Zob Barbara Hambly Fever Season Zo7 him he was too late and had lost his passage money; within the high walls of the Lalaurie house he strained his ears, and grudged the thick curtains that masked all noise from the streets.

The heavily decorated, ostentatious parlor was nearly dark, as usual; oven-hot, as usual; and neither Pauline nor Louise Marie had practiced, as usual. Pauline was peevish, caustic, and spiteful; Louise Marie sniveling with an exquisitely calculated appearance of martyrdom: "It's only that my silly pain has made it so difficult for me to practice. The pain, and the heat, and one of my dizzy spells." She raised a wraithlike hand to her forehead. "I have told you of my spells, have I not, M'sieu Janvier?"

January thought of Hannibal, weaving exquisite beauty through pain to earn enough to sleep under a roof. , Of Rose Vitrac, sponging off the bodies of the dying in the heat. ,,The heat?" Pauline laughed with a sound like breaking glass. "We're like to die in the heat. It isn't as if we; didn't have a house at the lake." "

"Oh, but you can't expect Dr. Lalaurie to give up his work with Dr. Soublet, just for us." Louise Marie lifted sunken eyes to meet her sister's. January recalled what the market-women had said, when he'd asked them about Madame Lalaurie: "She's had enough to bear, with that poor girl of hers in and out of that clinic, but she never would have no truck with laudanum... "

Soubiet's? Was that where Madame had met the suavely dandified Lalaurie? `No more than she deserved, "had grumbled another. `I,.1 heard how she throwed a little pickaninny of hers off'n the, roof... " i "I heard it was down a flight of stairs, " had said some- i one else, and the discussion dissolved into an exchange of ~ rumor that would, January reflected angrily, have made Monsieur Montreuil proud.

"And with a doctor in the house, and Mama, you know we must be perfectly safe." Louise Marie's plaintive. tones tugged back his thoughts. "We can survive the heat." She sighed as she said it, to let everyone know she did not expect to. "I'm just so sorry, Monsieur Janvier, that I haven't been able to learn my pieces better. I did try."

Pauline's mouth twisted, her sharp nostrils flaring with an unmade comment. Was this, January wondered, one of those girls of whom Mademoiselle Vitrac had spo ken? The. ones who were too. bright, too sharp, for their own good? Delphine Lalaurie was the pinnacle of Creole womanhood: hostess, businesswoman, mother, manager of a household of twenty or more persons. What recourse had a daughter of this house, if that daughter's goals and needs did not include a husband and children, Creole tradition, and Creole society?

Halfway through Pauline's careful but unpracticed recital of a Haydn contredanse the door opened. He saw the thin back of the girl at the piano grow rigid. The sticklike hands fumbled on the keys. Louise Marie, in the midst of a complaint about her ankles, fell silent and seemed to shrink into the hard golden upholstery of the divan.

A gleam of silk, dark peacock blue veiled with the shadows of the lightless hall, flickered in the doorway.

A pale face crowned by a glory of dark hair.

"Pauline," chided that lovely contralto in a tone like level steel, "after all Monsieur Janvier's work, that is as well as you can do? From the beginning again, please."

They'd be finishing the loading of the brandy onto the boat at the wharf, but something in the tone of her voice stilled January's protest in his throat. It was the voice of a woman who has never been contradicted, a woman who will tolerate no less than the perfect.

Pauline played as if a gun were pressed to her back. "Pauline," said her mother, still unseen within the rectangle of gloom, "from the beginning again, please. You know that no one appreciates mistakes in a piece of music, any more than they appreciate food spots on a silk dress."

"Yes, Mama." Sweat stood out in a crystalline wash on Pauline's forehead; January thought he had never seen such rage, such hatred, in a girl's downcast eyes. The spindly fingers trembled as they lurched through the first three bars.

"From the beginning again, please." The voice was a whalebone lash.

"From the beginning again, please."

"From the beginning again, please."

Pauline was crying without a sound. Her body was a wooden doll's in her overlacy pink gown; and her hands fumbled, groped, struck note after note awry. In the door way, her mother's face remained in shadow, the strong, white, black-laced hands moveless where they rested among the folds of her dress.

"From the beginning again, please."

It was nothing January would have put anyone through, even in private, much less before a music-master and a colored man to boot. For a white girl the humiliation would have been excruciating. In her chair Louise Marie made neither sound nor movement, her hands locked around the lemonade she had sent for, as if she believed that by keeping very still she could avoid some terrible fate. Somewhere outside January thought he heard a steamboat whistle. But he would no more have spoken than he would have spoken to a madman with a knife.

At last Pauline broke down completely. She sat at the keyboard, fighting the dry, racking sobs with all that was in her and shuddering like a beaten racehorse. From the doorway that exquisite golden contralto said, "I see we're only wasting Monsieur Janvier's time, Pauline. You may go to your room."

Pauline flinched and caught her breath as if struck, then fought herself to stillness again. She rose like an automaton, not even daring to wipe the tears from her face and the snot trickling from her nose, and made her way to the door. Petticoats rustled as her mother stepped aside to let her pass, a thin harsh sound like flakes of steel. A good Creole daughter, Pauline curtsied to her mother, then vanished into the bake-oven shadows of the hall.

Louise Marie's eyes flickered, showing white all around the rim. Does she think after thirty minutes of that, her mother's going to put her through it, too?

"You may go to your room as well, Louise Marie."

"Yes, Mother." The words came out like paper scraping as it is crushed. She rose quickly and without the ostentatious demonstrations of pain and bravery-the bitten lower lip, the tiny gasps, the hand on the hip-so characteristic of her every move. She still limped, and badly, but not nearly to the usual extent; she had almost reached the door when her mother said in that same whipcut voice,

"Is this a sty or a garbage bin, Louise Marie, that you leave your dirty crockery all over the house?"

The young woman turned quickly back and collected her lemonade glass.

"I'm very sorry, Monsieur Janvier," said Madame Lalaurie, as Louise Marie's halting rustle of petticoats retreated down the hall. No anger inflected her voice, and no contrition. Only pleasant calm, as if reducing her children to tears of terror and exhaustion were a daily commonplace. It occurred to him suddenly to wonder what being "sent to one's room" entailed. "I assure you, both girls will be able to demonstrate the proper proficiency at Tuesday's lesson. Of course, Bastien will compensate you for the extra time today."

She melted into the gloom of the hallway with barely a whisper of silk. At no time during the previous forty minutes had January seen her face.

"M'sieu Janvier?"

He turned to find Bastien at his elbow, urbanely gesturing him out.

On the docks there were still two wagonloads of brandy to unload. Passengers loitered grumpily along the railing of the upper decks; on the lower, uneven gaggles of slaves and poor and keelboat Kaintucks jockeyed for places in the shade.

At the steamboat offices January sent in his card and asked for the lading lists for Wednesday, September 18: the Missourian and the Vermillion had docked in the morning, if the clerk recalled aright, the New Brunswick had been in by afternoon for certain, the Walter Scott and the Silver Moon sometime between four and eight o'clock, he thought. But, he said, he might be wrong.

During the lesson, January had left his grip in the charge of a woman at a silk shop a few houses down Rue Royale from the Lalauries, and now he changed clothes in a sheltered corner of the Philadelphia's deck. Once out of the formal disguise of black coat and linen shirt, he wandered over to the engine room, watching a mixed crew of black and Irish stevedores carrying barrels and packages aboard and stowing them on deck.

"You made it," remarked the engineer, coming out beside him in time.

"And I feel like a prize fool for hurrying." January grinned, and the stout, heavily muscled little man grinned back up at him.

"Oh, I seen 'em do this a thousand times." He spoke rough English, like an American; January guessed him a freedman from one of the American enterprises in the town. "Rushing around like somebody took and lit they tails on fire, and then we end up waitin' all the same." He wiped his hands on a rag.

"Think we'll make Twelve-Mile Point by dark?" "Oh, sure. Once the old Philly get goin', she goes, and Mr. Graham, he can work her up the banks close enough you can pick daisies off the levee. We'll make Red Church by dark, easy, never mind Twelve-Mile Point."

January personally didn't think so-Red Church landing was a good twenty-five miles upriver-but nodded and looked impressed. He lowered his voice, and leaned down a little to the engineer. "Look, sir, this's my first time out of New Orleans. I got all my papers just fine, and notarized at the Cabildo, but I been hearing rumors and talk. How safe is it, going up to Twelve-Mile Point? I'm going to see my sister, that still works for Mr. Bailey up there, and I'm... well, I'm a little worried. About river pirates and slave stealers and such."

All humor vanished from the engineer's eyes. "Where you staying, brother?"

January hefted his grip. "I thought I'd sleep out in the woods."

"You should be safe. But watch your back, you know? You don't have to sleep in the woods, neither.

The big house up at Spanish Bayou, 'bout two miles down from the Point, is empty now, they're sellin' it up. You can probably sleep on the gallery or in one of the cabins. There'll be water in the well and everything. Just be a little careful who you talk to, and don't get yourself anywhere where you can't run.

How you gettin' home?"

"I thought if nobody's around the plantation I'd put out a flag on the landing when the Lancaster comes by tomorrow."

"Just what I was going to tell you. Bailey's a good man-county magistrate in St. Charles Parish, as you probably know. Go to him if you can, if you get in any kind of trouble. His place is about three miles above the point. Skylark Hill, he calls it, but most people still call it the Old Marmillon Place."

"I know I sound like a timid old maid," said January deprecatingly. "I hear most people can travel pretty safe-I hear even Marie Laveau went upriver for a bit, last month."

The engineer chuckled. "That she did. Took a cabin on the Lancaster, bold as paint, is what Guidry on the Lancaster told me, and put a gris-gris on his engine room into the bargain, for them lettin' her off at the old Black Oak landing like she asked, and tellin' off the Jefferson to pick her up there again on their way down. I'd sure like to see some slave stealer try to mess with that lady." He threw back his head and laughed richly, relishing the picture of the slave stealers' discomfiture. "Now that I truly would."

It was five thirty, and close to sunset, when the Philadelphia finally backed out of the wharf. From among a group of black freedmen and free colored laborers on the bottom deck, January nervously watched the banks slide by, wondering how from the height of the texas deck Mr. Graham could possibly navigate among the slanting shadows, the hot, hard glare of brazen sun on the water and then the fast-falling twilight that changed every snag, every bar, every line of ripples from moment to moment as he watched.

The engineer hadn't lied about the pilot's skill. Once clear of what had been the Hurst plantation, now divided up into house lots, the river's banks deteriorated. Hugging them close, out of the heavy strength of the main channel that swept the downstream-bound boats so quickly by, was a matter of avoiding fallen trees; submerged mud spits; hidden obstacles; and, January reflected uneasily, 'the corpses of other boats that had come to grief on similar debris.

How the pilots did it January didn't know, but in a very short time he saw the lights of the Carrollton wharf twinkling primrose through just-gathering dusk. They stopped there and went through what seemed to him to be an endless, fiddling rigmarole of off-loading cargo, taking on passengers, holding the boat while the passengers went hunting for the youngest member of their family who had wandered away; no, wait, Mr. Slow-Toad and his worthless wife and family want to get off here after all. Luggage? Good heavens, sir, we did have luggage! Let's send the slowest waiter onboard to look for it while we all stand here and talk.

Between Carrollton and Twelve-Mile Point lay about three miles of fickle shadows and dark water inhabited by every snag, bar, and submerged tree in Louisiana-sea serpents, too, belike, thought January gloomily, watching the matte, dark cutouts of the trees glide by.

Alligators, anyway.

Sixteen years ago, when he'd left Louisiana for France, nothing but cane and cipriere lay between Girod Street and Baton Rouge. Even then, the plantation of Bellefleur where he had been born had been sold and subdivided. He knew the names of the streets between which it had lain, but was not able to pick out where they were, behind the levee. In time Bellefleur and all who had dwelt there would be forgotten.

In his mind it still stood, and presumably in Olympe's, and his mother's: the whitewashed brick house, and the quarters; the cypress swamp through which his father was pursued, endlessly, by red-eyed hounds in dreams.

His elbows on the railing, January closed his eyes. The heavy churning of the water only a few feet below him, the throb of the engine, shuddered in his bones, but not enough to shake out those memories of innocence and love and pain.

You were born in the country, in thick hot rain and the smell of burnt sugar, the silence and the cicadas and the fiogs. You waited on the gallery in the dark for your father to come, and he never did. Where do you go now?

Ayasha. Rose. She'd flinched from his touch... Don't...

Did he think if he found Cora for her-rescued her friend from the men who'd taken her, cleared her name so that xhe could come back without being hanged for the muruer of the man who'd raped her every day for the past who knew how many years-always supposing that she was innocent-that Rose would fall into his arms?

But he didn't want her to fall into his arms.

We all need friends, he thought. Although it was not wholly friendship in his mind when he saw again the cocoa brown tendrils of Rose's hair lying soft over her cheeks, the thin angular shape of her shoulders in her blueand-yellow dress.

Ayasha rose to his mind, the way her hot black eyes flamed when he admired another woman, the desert-witch smile. Oh, a friend is what you want, is it, malik?

Yes, he whispered. Yes. I am lonely, and I want a friend. Under his feet he felt the engines change their note. From somewhere above a man yelled, "Back her! Back her! Bring her around!"

The twilight was still luminously clear, delicate as the heart of a blue topaz, like water through which all things seemed perfect, without shadow or light. He saw the clus ter of cypress on the batture, the floating wooden platform of the landing at Twelve-Mile Point.

When he climbed the levee, his grip in his hand, the world was an identical patchwork, long thin strips of newgrowing cane, rustling corn black in the twilight, trees like clouds sleeping on the ground where they guarded the houses of the whites.

The lacy ghost of the Philadelphia floated away into the gloom around Twelve-Mile Point, but he could see its lights twinkle for some time. Lights burned, too, in the houses among the trees, until from the top of the levee he saw a big white house in the circle of its gallery and its trees that showed no lights, and whose fields, when he walked down through them, were already rank with the quick-growing weeds of these tropical lands.

There was no smell of human habitation; not around the privies of the big house or around the cabins of the slaves. No cattle in the barns or horses in the stables. Janu ary wondered if the Reverend Dunk had convinced Madame Redfern to sell these, too, to him for half what they were worth. The woman seemed clever, sharp, and hard as a horseshoe nail. But January had seen her simper like a girl as the man of God kissed her hands.

People would be here Monday, to look over the house bcfore buying it. Maybe sooner.

Among the slave cabins he took candle and lucifers from his grip and made enough of a light to look into one or two, to make sure they weren't inhabited by anything or anyone else. The sight of them jabbed something inside him, as if he'd closed his hand on cloth with a needle still in it: the single big pine-pole bed each family shared-two beds if it was a large cabin and two families shared it. Pegs where clothing had hung, where pots had been removed. In one cabin someone had left a banjo, a five-stringed instrument of a skin stretched over a gourd.

January went back up to the big house, and drew himself water from the well. Returning to the cabin where the banjo was, he shook up the straw tick and tightened the bed-ropes, then for the first time since childhood lay down under a slave-cabin roof. He thought the place would trouble-him, or the fear of discovery, of being kidnapped as Cora had been kidnapped. At least the ghosts who'd died there, of pneumonia or overwork, would whisper in the corners.

But he prayed for them, those nameless ones, with his battered blue rosary, asking God's rest for their souls: The deep silence of the country, the whirring of the cicadas and the peeping of the frogs in the swamp, was a sound of comfort to him, a song from his childhood. He realized that this was the first night since July that he had not worked among the sick, the dying, and the dead.

He slept, and no one visited him in his dreams.