02 Fever Season

Twenty-One

January returned to New Orleans on the twenty-eighth of February, to find that Emil Barnard-Doctor Emil Barnard-had not been idle in his absence. Six other letters had been written to the Bee, mentioning that it was the gracious and charitable Delphine Lalaurie whom January had insulted and further stating that he was known to have assisted in the escape of a number of slaves.

"Really, Ben, this is getting intolerable," pronounced his mother, the day of his return. She'd emerged from the back door of the house only minutes after he slipped from the passageway and crossed the yard, too exhausted and depressed to go in and speak to her first. Lying on his bed, he heard the light sharp tap of her shoe-heels on the steps, and closed his eyes in dread. She'd been saving all the newspapers for the preceding nine days and placed them on the end of the bed. "And don't lie on your bed with your shoes on," Livia continued. "I swear, when Bernadette Metoyer came over to tea the day before yesterday I didn't know what to say. Is it true what Agnes Pellicot tells me, that you were carrying on an affair with that Vitrac, that starved poor Marie-Neige nearly to death?"

"Mama," said January, without opening his eyes, "you need only to look at Marie-Niege to know that no one starved her nearly to death."

"Ben, that is a most unkind and unfeeling thing to say." It was the kind of thing she said all the time. "I'm sorry, Mama."

"You're my son." He imagined he could hear the admission stick in her throat. "And you will always have a home with me, even if you can't pay me the rent you owe me right now. I'll give you another few weeks on that. But I will have to ask you to be quiet when you come and go, and not draw attention to this house."

"Ben, you really have to be more careful," cautioned Dominique, a few nights later, when both were invited to Olympe's house for dinner. "Rumors get around so terribly. You can't insult someone like Delphine Lalaurie! Why, she's seen to it that crazy man Montreuil has nearly been run out of business, for spreading those horrid lies about her keeping slaves chained in her attic."

"Those rumors were around before she lived next to Montreuil." Olympe laid down her spoon and regarded her younger sister with boneyard eyes. "I heard things like that when she still lived over near the bank on Rue Royale."

"That's silly," protested Dominique. "Ben's been in the house, haven't you, Ben? Did you see any slaves chained up?"

"I doubt she'd give her daughters' piano teacher a tour of the dungeon." January ate a forkful of Olympe's excellent grillades. Dominique hadn't invited him to her house, as was her usual wont, since his return from Grand Isle. Coincidence? he wondered. Or an overwhelming dread that news of his unhallowed presence might somehow reach Henri? Or, God forbid, Henri's mother? "The housemaid I saw looked all right."

"So she's not keeping them chained up in an attic, for the Lord's sake!" Dominique gestured impatiently.

Small pendant diamonds flashed in her ears. "Monsieur Montreuil's just insane, and an opium-eater too, I've heard. I mean, Madame Lalaurie did manumit old Davince-"

"Who then had to leave the state," pointed out Olympe. "Mighty convenient for her-as it is for everyone who frees a person who's lived in their house-and knows their affairs. And she does have her favorites."

"Well, so does everyone. Besides, Henri eats over there all the time, and he's seen her servants. Every white person in town knows that's a lie." Dominique shrugged, and picked at her food, clearly uncomfortable. At the far end of the table the children, from Zizi-Marie to the baby, were following this discussion with interest. "You just hate her because Mamzelle Marie hates her. Blacks are always complaining that their white folks don't feed them. Goodness knows Bella always is, about Mama, and she's certainly not about to die of starvation."

January held his peace. He'd seen his mother count and weigh not only leftover meat so that her cook would be accountable for it, but the burnt stumps of household candles. It was true, he knew, that for every servant who was kept to rice and beans, there was another who made a fair living off selling surplus food and pocketing the profit.

But his mind returned to the shadowed figure in the music-room doorway, to the voice cold as struck gold. "Begin again. Begin again. Begin again. "

"What do you think of her?" he asked.

"I think," said Paul Corbier, glancing along the table at the four pairs of voracious eyes consuming the conversation as if it were a rare and ravishing dessert, "that little pitchers have big ears."

Olympe's face softened, like a black Benin sculpture melting into a thousand smiling wrinkles. "So they do." But the seeress, the Pythoness, remained in her eyes as they met January's again. "Truth usually lies somewhere in the middle," she said. "But I think Madame Lalaurie's one to stay away from."

Walking back along the Rue Burgundy after depositing Minou at her door-and being asked inside for a placatory cup of coffee January felt again the stirring of weary anger, the bitter irony that while his lies or alleged lies were denounced, hers were overlooked, even by his own family. He felt, too, a backtaste of disappointment in his mouth, a grief-when he analyzed it-that stemmed from realizing that the woman who labored so selflessly among the horrors of the fever season was not, in fact, a good person. He had wanted very much to know that there was good in the world.

But what was good? Those whose lives she saved or whose ends she had made more comfortable didn't care whether Madame Lalaurie kept her slaves chained up or ruled her daughters with an iron hand.

They didn't care that the domineering nature that so completely discounted danger of the plague would also react with single-minded venom against what it perceived as betrayal. Betrayal being, reflected January wryly, anything or anyone that didn't accept Delphine Lalaurie's arrangements of how the world should be.

It came to him then-and with no great feeling of surprise or discovery-that it wasn't beyond the bounds of possibility that Cora had, in fact, not left Madame Lalaurie's house that Friday night. If that formidable Creole lady had been listening to the conversation in the courtyard and had heard Cora urge Gervase to run away-if Gervase had agreed-a quiet word to Bastien would have served to close the carriage gates.

Madame would know that Cora couldn't protest that she belonged to a third party. And Madame would have had no difficulty whatsoever in finding a buyer for the girl within days. If she kept her slaves chained-and January knew of townsfolk who did-the girl might well have had no opportunity to either effect an escape or get a message out before the brokers took her away.

The Lalauries were rich, of course, and didn't need the money. But for a woman who would punish not only her betrayer but all who had assisted her, money was not the object. Cora had accepted her help, then tried to take one of her own slaves-her property-from her. Madame had championed Rose to the bankers, and Rose had repaid that help by harboring Cora. It would not have taken much for Madame to learn that from Cora herself.

If that were indeed what had taken place. He shook his head-he was getting as bad as Monsieur Montreuil. There had to be some way to find out...

Motion caught his eye. Someone had stepped quickly out of one of the passways between the cottages and as quickly stepped back. He thought that whoever it was, had a club.

D?j? vu clutched him for a panic moment: Roarke. No. Brinvilliers.

He canvassed in his mind the other houses on Rue Burgundy, then walked back two or three cottages and crossed the street, and knocked on the door of a modest pink dwelling. "It's Ben January," he called to the muffled query from inside.

It was good, he thought, to have neighbors.

"Ben!" Crowdie Passebon was a perfumer, a rotund and jolly man with a carefully tended mustache and black pomaded ringlets that glistened in the dim candlelight within. His wife had been given the cottage years ago, when her white protector had paid her off. January could see her over Crowdie's shoulder, presiding over the table in the rear parlor, playing cards with an assortment of brothers, sisters, and in-laws. Once a woman mended her ways and married respectably, all but the most repressive were willing to forgive.

"Come in, come in! You're out late-nothing amiss with your mother, I hope?"

"Not with my mother, no," said January. "It's just that there's a crowd of toughs lying in wait for me, by her house. I think they're connected with this stupidity Barnard and Louis Brinvilliers have been putting in the papers."

"T'cha!" The perfumer drew him inside. "People don't care what they print, nor what they believe, either.

Dirty Americans." He looked around the neat, sparsely furnished front parlor, and picked up a log of firewood as big around as January's biceps. Most of the male relatives at the table were putting on their coats and selecting makeshift armament, too.

"Be careful!" warned Helaine Passebon. "You can be-"

"We can always say we didn't see who they were in the dark, my love, can't we? With those kidnappers operating last summer, surely we can be excused for taking precautions when we go strolling? Let's go."

There was, of course, no one in the passageway when January and an escort of eight or ten Passebons, Lamothes, and Savarys reached his mother's cottage. He thanked them all, and invited them in for coffee.

"Now I feel like a fool."

"Better a fool with a whole head than a hero with a broken one," replied Passebon cheerily, and kissed Livia's hand-she had been sewing in her dressing-gown and was not pleased at the sudden intrusion.

The following morning January went to the passway by the cottage and found the tracks of seven or eight men in boots, and the marks where they had leaned canes, clubs, and sword-sticks on the ground.

Rose Vitrac returned to New Orleans a few days after Easter.

January had written her whenever he could find a boat bound for the Barataria, sending her books, and news of the town. No real post existed, so he had not heard from her for nearly ten days, when he got a note telling him that she'd procured lodging in a cheap room on Victory Street, near the wharves. Not the best neighborhood in the city, but certainly just down the street from some of them, and at least none of the riverfront gangs was headquartered there. He and Hannibal borrowed a wheelbarrow from Odile Gignac's brother and trundled her books down to her, load after load of them in the hot bright April sun.

They bought jambalaya from the woman who sold it off a cart for a picayune a plate and ate it sitting on the steps up to the gallery outside Rose's room, drank lemonade, and devoured Mexican mangoes bought on the wharf, like three children with the juice running down their chins. The local streetwalkers called greetings to Hannibal on their way down to the wharves-he knew them all by name-and January played the guitar, and Hannibal the fiddle, by the light of a couple of tallow candles far into the warm spring darkness.

"Monsieur Lyons, who runs the bookshop on the Rue Esplanade, is paying me two dollars a volume to translate Acschylus and Euripides," said Rose, leaning back against the gallery post and setting aside her plate. "This place is fifty cents a week; he says there'll be more. And Monsieur Damas on Rue Marigny said he'd pay me a little to help him read the boys' Greek and Latin-he runs the school at the corner of the Avenue of Good Children. And more will come."

Another boarder came up the outside stairs, a young man in clothing stiff with smeared plaster; he smiled at her as he passed and said, "Good evening, Madame Trevigne."

January raised his eyebrows; Rose averted her face a little, said, "Don't say it. I know. I should have more courage but... I'm still tender, as if I've had a bruising."

"I wasn't going to say anything," said January. "I just wondered how you came by papers in another name."

"You wound me," Hannibal lowered his violin from his chin and coughed heavily. "You cut me to the quick. I'd have had our Glauk-Opis"-Rose slapped at him, laughing, at being called by the goddess Athene's appellation-"in town sooner if those last few trading-boats to Grande Isle had been quicker, her letter to me asking for papers, and my papers, distinguishable only by their superior spelling from the illiterate scrawls turned out by city authorities for respectable free persons of color, going back the other way."

January laughed, too, and leaned back against the other post, his arm looped over the waist of the old guitar. He wondered how long it would be before he'd have to change his name, wondered whether he would be able to work in New Orleans again. Wondered what else might be in store for him, by way of dirty tricks from Madame Lalaurie and her friends...

A week later he saw her, as he walked down Rue de fHopital toward the market: the black-lacquered carriage drawn up before the great door on Rue Royale, the matched black horses tossing their silkily groomed manes. Bastien was helping her to the banquette, her gown of plum-colored taffeta a somber note against the bright heat of the spring afternoon. Beautiful and flawless, like a queen.

On impulse, January leapt over the gutter and crossed the mud of the street. "Madame..."

Bastien, at the top of the steps already, with the door open for her, stopped and opened his mouth to make some haughty dismissal, but Madame Lalaurie's face warmed with a smile. "M'sieu Janvier." She held out her hand, her friendliness as gracious as a bright-lit window seen through rain. "It has been a long time."

"Too long." January bowed, taken aback as the image of her shadow in the corridor, of Mademoiselle Pauline's haunted eyes and the dim shape of men with clubs and swords, melted away, suddenly ridiculous, as fevered as Montreuil's dreams. He found himself saying, "I trust the young ladies are well?" as if Emil Barnard had never written all those letters. As if Cora had never disappeared.

"Quite well, thank you." Behind her, Bastien still stood in the half-open door. Through it January could see a corner of a hall table, cypress wood waxed to a mirror shine, a dark-covered book and a pair of mended gloves. "And all is well with you?"

So caught was he by that generous charm, that January almost said, Yes, perfectly well thank you... In a way, it was as if she would not permit any answer but that. As if no other possible answer existed in the world she created.

Instead he said, his eyes properly cast down, "In fact it isn't, Madame." It cost him an effort to speak the words. "And if you've read the letter columns of the newspapers you would know something of it."

His eyes went to her face as he said it, and saw there the frown of puzzlement, the inquiring look in those dark eyes... "Oh, good Lord, don't tell me Dr. Barnard still carries his grudge!" She leaned forward a little, and touched his wrist lightly with one gloved hand. "I was appalled, just appalled, when someone spoke to me of that letter."

"He wrote eight of them, Madame," said January. "Eight that I know of. Please," he went on, as she opened her mouth to speak again. "If I have offended you in any way, if there is the smallest basis for what he says about offering you insult or betrayal-"

She held up her hand. "No, no, Monsieur. It is I who should ask your pardon, for not looking into the matter immediately. My husband's partner is a hot-headed man, a man who nurses the most foolish grievances. And if you must know," she added, dropping her voice, a sudden twinkle in her eye,

"Barnard's a most abominable little pest. I will speak to him of the matter."

Bastien held the door a little wider, as if to remind Madame of her obligations; January saw that the book on the table was Mercer's Conversations in Chemistry More Especially for the Female Sex. Rose had that one, too. It surprised him that Madame Lalaurie would share her interest.

"I am truly sorry to impose, Madame," he said. "But I apologize..."

"No," interrupted Madame firmly. "No, I will hear no apology. It is I who should apologize, for not taking steps to keep that dreadful man in proper bounds. And I will do so, M'sieu, believe me. Yes, Bastien," she added, with her quick, beautiful smile, "I am now done." She caught January's eye, as if to say, What can one do? and ascended the steps into the house.

The carved door closed.

Was it that simple? January resumed his way down Rue de l'Hopital, shaking his head. He had built her into a monster in his mind, he thought, a malevolent ghost of the fever season. And like a ghost, she had melted, when confronted, into something else.

If she was telling the truth, whispered the voice in his mind.

If she had any intention of doing as she said.

Did her desire for perfection run so deep, that she had to be seen as saintly even by her enemies? Or was the wall so high, that divided the gracious queen from... From what? (From the beginning, please...) He stopped at the flash of something black-and-red in the corner of his eye and, turning, saw an old pralinniere go past him with a willow tray of her wares on her head and Genevi?ve's old shoes on her feet.

The shoes that Rose had passed on to Cora.

He felt as if he'd tripped over something in the road; the momentary sensation of not quite knowing how to react. He'd been watching so long for either the shoes or the dress that he doubted for a moment they were the same. But there was no mistaking the scarred leather on the left toe, the fading lampblack dye, the white laces.

"Madame!" He rounded the corner, pushed through the crowd of the Rue du Levee. "Madame!"

She turned, weathered walnut face puckered with annoyance. She was shorter even than Cora, her headscarf frayed and faded but tied into a fantastic arrangement of points that stuck out in all directions under the weight of tray.

"What?"

"Your shoes..."

To his surprise she whipped the tray from her head, it down on the nearest cotton bale, and balancing gamely, pulled off each shoe in turn and slapped them into his hands. "You want the shoes, you take them! I'm tired of all this concern over a simple pair of shoes!"

She turned to go.

"Wait! No!" He stood foolishly, with the frivolous shoes like flat little pressed flowers in his hands.

"Please..."

" 'Where had you those shoes?' And `Did the nuns say where they got them?' They're just shoes! And a hussy's shoes, by the look of them. I should never have taken them. It'll be summer soon, and what good are shoes in summer?"

"What nuns?" asked January, bewildered.

The pralinniere stared at him as if it should be obvious. "The Ursulines, fool! What other nuns are there?"

She snatched up her basket, turned on her naked pink heel, and was gone, muttering to herself, "What nuns, indeed?"

Still holding the shoes in his hands, very like the idiot the old woman had called him, January started along Rue du Levee at a run.

Rose wasn't in her room on Victory Street. "I think she gone out," called the girl who worked at the grocery, coming into the yard while January stood irresolute in front of the crudely latched shutters of Rose's door. "That lock don't work, you can probably go right on in."

And remind me never to put YOU in charge of my belongings, thought January wryly. But he'd seen the girl-her name was Marie-Philom?ne-a number of times in the past week, and she knew him to be Rose's friend.

"Did you see her go?"

Marie-Philom?ne nodded. "She went out to market this morning, then 'bout three, four hours ago she come runnin' back here, and change into her nice dress, the pretty blue one with the white collar." It was the dress Rose had worn to impress her backers at the school-merino wool, a little worn but neat and businesslike. "Gloves and everything. I think she might have been goin' to that school she works at; she had a book with her, anyway."

Like a Dutch still life, January saw in his mind the mended gloves, the Conversations in Chemistry More Especially for the Female Sex on the corner of the hall table...

She'd gone to Madame Lalaurie's.

Everything they had spoken of concerning that lady rushed back to him in a scalding flood: her vindictiveness, her connections with slave-dealers, her power. Her ability to seem like the kind of person who could not possibly do ill. He'd been a fool to believe her, to accept her graciousness and charm...

Rose had recognized Genevi?ve's shoes, and had learned from the pralinniere that they'd come from the charity bin of the Ursuline Order. And the only way they would have gotten there, he now knew, was through Madame Lalaurie.

Rose had gone to Madame Lalaurie's. And like Cora, she hadn't come back.

Lieutenant Shaw was out. "Captain Tremouille got a bee up his behind again about the blacks sleeping out." Sergeant deMezieres, on duty at the desk, shook his head. "I don't see what business it is of anybody where they sleep, but seems a couple of those Americans whose boys were kidnapped last fall have taken it in their heads to sue the city over it. No, I don't know when he'll be back."

January knew a handful of the Guards from a couple of encounters during the past year, but knew also that none of them would back him if he tried to tell them he thought a colored woman was being held prisoner by one of the town's most prominent society matrons, particularly not in the face of Barnard's newspaper campaign. More than likely Captain Tremouille, who was connected to three-quarters of Creole society himself, would simply ask Madame Lalaurie about it, get a startled and indignant no, and that would be that.

He said, "Thank you, sir," and took his leave.

The sun was sinking over the glittering river, the new moon following it like a lovelorn suitor, pale and thin. The day had been a clear one, spring heat melting already into thc promise of summer. Another fever season on its way. Whatever the Lalauries intended to do to keep Rose quiet-and surely she knew too much English, and too much about her own rights, to sell even to the crookedest broker-they'd do so at night.

Hannibal wasn't at his last known lodging, the shed behind Big Annie's house of assignation near the Basin. The cook there directed January to the establishment of Kentucky Williams, on Perdidio Street.

By the time he reached there the river's long curve was a bed of fire, the mucky gulch of Perdidio Street blue with shadow among its weeds and sheds. Few lamps were lit, and drunken, louse-ridden bravos jostled from tavern to tavern; January nearly trod on a flatboatman who came flying out of the Cairo Saloon and plowed into the mud almost under his feet.

In a two-room shed built of old flatboat planks, January found Kentucky Williams, as tall as some men and with arms like a keelboat's tiller, dispensing something from a barrel with a tin cup. January mused a little that in her five-word inquiry as to the nature of his business, three of those words were obscenities.

She was already dippering up liquor for him, though. A few feet away the woman Railspike was engaged in a screaming quarrel with a prospective customer. How do these girls ever make any money?

"He's gone out," said Williams. When January indicated he wasn't interested in drinking she shifted her cigar to the corner of her mouth, took a swig from the tin cup herself, then dumped the rest of its contents back into the barrel. "You a pal of his?"

"I'm Ben January. He might have spoken of me."

She smiled, her pockmarked face transforming, like a good-natured bulldog. "You're Ben? Pleased to meet you." She held out a dripping hand. "There's some fandango tonight, they're payin' him to play at.

Don't he play a treat, though? Last night, with that little thing he playsda-da-deeee-da"-she made a stab at getting the tune known as "The Beggar Boy"-"he made old Railspike cry."

Railspike kicked her suitor-a bearded Irish bargee-bloody-mouthed into the street. She began picking up teeth from the dirt floor and pitching them after him, screaming curses all the while.

"Hannibal's the best fiddler I've ever heard," said January truthfully. "Paris, Italy, anyplace. You happen to know where he might be playing?"

"Some bunch of rich stinkards." She spit into a corner. "Pigs, all of 'em. Sure you don't want a drink?

You can have one free, 'cause you're his friend."

"Thank you, m'am," said January, "but I need to find him fast, and I got no head for liquor, not even a tiny bit. Another time."

She winked. "Another time, then."

Blue shadows, and the day's heat dense and stinking around the makeshift buildings. Another corpse-or maybe it was only a drunk-had materialized on the ground outside the Tom and Jerry. January stopped back by the Cabildo, but Shaw was still gone.

Did he really, he wondered as he walked up Rue St. Peter, think that Delphine Lalaurie had Rose locked in an attic someplace, waiting for dark to turn her over to the slave brokers? For a moment he felt as he had back in September, when he'd realized he was ready to bolt for the swamp at the shadow of Henri Viellard's groom. Rose on the Lalaurie doorstep saying, I know you sold Cora Chouteau into slavery.

And then what? "Oh, Bastien, could you please come in here and knock this girl over the head and lock her in the attic?"

Ridiculous. The woman who held the dying against her breast with that look of holy ecstasy in her face?

The woman who'd reacted with such embarrassed horror at what Dr. Barnard had written? Who'd held out her hand with a twinkling smile?

And yet, January thought, wasn't that her entire detcnse? That "a woman like her wouldn't do such a thing"? A woman like her wouldn't force her daughters to go dh rough that scene at the piano, either-and he remembcred, again, the look of terror in Pauline's eye.

Why terror?

Jean Montalban came back to his mind, professor of law and pillar of his Paris neighborhood. Hannibal's voice saying, One's always hearing about domestic tyrants... No one in the family dares speak of it... . And Rose: I don't want a woman I've looked up to, as I've looked up to her, to be vindictive. But I don't know.

And he could not help remembering that Delphine Lalaurie's house was closed in, a walled enclave-a fortress, he remembered thinking. No word of anything that happened there would ever get out.

Absurd, he thought. Absurd. But it was the memory of Pauline's fear, as well as of the book on the table, that turned his steps back to his mother's house.

Once there, January carried a pottery jar from the kitchen up to his room, and from beneath the mattress took the powder-bottle he'd acquired from the late Mr. Gotch. He emptied its contents in the bottom of the jar, ran a fuse into it, packed the rest tight with hair and feathers from Bella's store of fever smudges, then added as much sawdust as he could gather-Rose had mentioned it made for a more impressive explosion-from the bottom of the kindling bin. With this under his arm, he made his way down Rue St.

Peter again, and along the levee to the market.

"You men want to earn half a dollar?"

It was nearly the last of his meager savings. The two carters sitting by their mule conferred, and accepted.

January spent another five cents on an empty packing crate labeled TREVELYAN BROTHERS-ST.

LOUIS, scooped it full of dockside garbage to give it weight, and pounded shut the nails on it again.

"When the man comes to the gate, you keep him talking," instructed January. "Ask for money. Tell him this was ordered for that address, but say you don't know who at that address."

The men exchanged a glance, and one of them bit the fifty-cent piece he'd given them. If they had any concern about the possible legal repercussions of what they were being asked to perform, the silver content of the coin allayed them. "You got yourself a argument, brother," said one, "But if the Guards shows up, we gone."

"Go with my blessings," said January. Two minutes later, walking up Rue de l'Hopital in the thick hot twilight. he thought, Idiot. You shouldn't have paid them in advance.

The tract of land on which the Lalaurie house was built had only been sold off by the Ursuline nuns a few years ago, and though fewer than five streets separated it from the noise and taverns of the levee, it was an area attractive to the wealthy in quest of lots on which to build houses larger than those close to the center of the old town. Several houses were in various stages of construction on the opposite side of the street in the direction of the levee heaps of bricks and timber lying between the half-erected walls.

The builders' men had gone for the day. January picked his way through the tangle of beams and potholes to the rear wall of the next-door quarters, moved forward until the high wall of the Lalaurie compound was in view, and waited, the pottery jug at his feet.

A little to his surprise, the two carters did exactly as he had asked them. The shorter and darker man pounded on the gate while his gangly, saddle-colored partner held the mule's head. Below the bed of the wagon January could see the bottom of the carriage gate, the gate through which he had been admitted dozens of times last spring and sumtnrr, to give lessons to Louise Marie and Pauline. As he sat waiting a thought crossed his mind, detached and abstract. He had never seen pets in the Lalaurie house. None at all.

The moment he saw the gate open, and saw the polished pumps that had to be Bastien's, he scratched a lucifer match on the brick wall beside him, lit the fuse, left the makeshift bomb (Thank you, Rose-Thank you, Genevi?ve) where it lay, and walked quickly up the downstream side of the street, counting off seconds in his mind.

The carters could have played in Shakespeare at Caldwell's Theatre. Bastien tried to shut the gates; the shorter man held it, arguing volubly. January crossed the street, came down along the wall on the upstream side, inconspicuous in the near-darkness in his rough clothing, seeing now Bastien's sleek black curls, his plump, muscular back in that neat violet livery.

"Now I been told to get the money for this here lime from you, 'cause I paid for it at the dock," the carter was saying, throwing just the slightest hint of inebriated drawl in his voice.

"I'm terribly sorry you were such a fool as to do so illjudged a thing," retorted Bastien, "but this is not my affair and Madame has placed no such order."

"Oh, Madame tells you all about every order she place, does she?" put in the taller carter sarcastically.

"In fact, Madame does." Bastien drew himself up, stung. "I realize it's inconceivable to someone of your sort that-"

At that point, January's homemade bomb went off. There was a crack like a cannon-shot, and a great gout of stinking smoke and burning sawdust bellied forth from behind the wall. To his credit, Bastien jerked the gate shut behind him before running toward the place, only steps behind the shorter carter and any number of idlers from Gallatin Street and the wharves who came pouring up the street at a run. The taller carter was hanging on to the mule's head for dear life as the animal reared and snorted, and as January slipped through the gate and closed it behind him, the man winked and signed him good luck.

The house was tall. Both the main block and the kitchen wing towered three floors, the galleries impenetrable shadow. Lights on the ground floor of the main house, glowing slits through shutters already bolted; none above. If there was a fandango somewhere tonight it was a good guess Madame and her husband were in attendance. Either that or they were out looking up some of Jean Blanque's old slave-trade contacts to dispose of Rose.

Over the wall he could hear men's voices, rough nasal American. Of course at the slightest promise of trouble every drunk filibuster and out-of-work roustabout on Gallatin Street would materialize in minutes, eager for loot or diversion or whatever the confusion might bring. Keeping under the shelter of the kitchen gallery, January headed for the stairs.

The kitchen, as usual, was shut and locked, but the dimmest suggestion of redness outlined the louvers; and as he passed its door he felt the glow of the stove's heat within. As warm as the day had been it must have been like an Indian sweat-bath in there. Foolish to keep it closed up, even if no supper were being cooked tonight. The rooms above it would be ovens...

He heard the soft clink of chain on bricks within. No supper, if they were at this fandango tonight. No one in the kitchen. Not the attic, the kitchen...

He pushed open the door, and, conscious of Bastien's immininent return, stepped through and closed it swiftly behind him.

"I'm not doin' nothing," whispered a voice, a broken plea out of the darkness. The smell of urine struck him, pungent and vile in the heat, half-buried under the slurry of other kitchen smells. "Not doin' nothing, just getting myself a little water. Please, Mr. Bastien, don't tell her I was bad. Don't tell her. Please."

A woman crouched on the other side of the big pine table, near the shelves and cupboards of the far wall. The open hearth, banked though it was, threw enormous heat but almost no light. Still, January could see that the woman was far smaller than Rose. An emaciated face, cheekbones stabbing through stretched skin, haunted eyes pits of shadow under a white headscarf, and a dark dress hanging baggy over bony limbs.

The dress was sweat soaked, the smell of it stinging, but it was buttoned down to the wrists and up to the woman's collarbone.

There was an iron collar around her neck. She was chained to the stove.

"Don't tell her, Mr. Bastien." Her voice was barely louder than the scrape of a hinge. She pressed her cheek to the wooden doors of the cupboards against which she crouched, trying to hide behind one blistered hand. "Don't let her know I was bad."

January's heart locked in his chest. All he could seem to see was the way the soft brick of the floor was worn in a shallow groove between the stove, the table, the cupboards, and the chamber pot in the corner-the only places where this woman was allowed to walk-and all he could smell was the stink of the dress she didn't dare to unbutton for the sake of coolness, and the piss she wasn't even allowed to pass outside. All he could think was, She has Rose here somewhere. She has Rose here.

Then as if a door opened somewhere inside him he saw Montreuil again, and Olympe's bleak eyes.

Those rumors were around before she lived next to Montreuil. Dear God, he thought. Dear God.

He opened the kitchen door a crack. Outside, Bastien shut and double-barred the gates-they would have done for a medieval city-and walked over to the stable, to check the carriage-team. Satisfied-by his step he was Satisfied-the coachman crossed back to the main house. January gave him a few moments to get away from the rear windows, then slipped out. Moving with the utmost caution to the outside stairway, he climbed warily, listening it seemed with the whole of his body and trembling with shock.

Lights came up in what had to be the rear parlor downstairs, muzzy patterns of gold on the herringbone bricks. Minutes later one of the second-floor windows bloomed with candle glow. A shadow briefly darkened the slitted louver lines.

Servants wouldn't be active in the main house at this hour. One of the family, then. Did the crippled Louise Marie attend balls? Or was she at home?

Barely breathing, he ascended the second flight. The smell that lingered on the third-floor gallery, even with the doors of the chambers shut and locked, told him he had found the place he sought.

There was a candle in his pocket, and a screwdriver. Though it froze his heart to make a light he did so, shielding it with his body, to examine the lock. It was of a simple latch kind, yielding to the removal of the the metal plate on the doorjamb. He slipped the latch free, eased the door open, then stepped through and shut it. The smell here was a thousand times worse in the thick trapped heat of spring: feces, urine, moldering blood. The strange, slightly metallic smell of maggots. Ants made trails along the walls, up the studs, across the rafters. Flies attacked the light in swarms.

The room was empty, but beyond the shut door at its far side, someone groaned.

I don't want to do this. I don't want to do this. The words gyred stupidly through his mind as he crossed the tiny room, hoping weirdly that the door on the other side would be locked. Hoping like a child in a nightmare that he wouldn't have to see what he knew he was going to see. At first they didn't look human, or anyway not like living men who had once walked the levee, sang to ladies, maybe eaten mangoes with the juice running down their chins. The way their arms were chained-elbows together above and behind the head, wrists together in a travesty of an upside-down L, ankles locked to the bands around their waists-it took January a few moments to understand that they were men at all, and not misshapen fetishes carved out of knobbed brown-black oak. Unable to move, they knelt in their own waste, on the other side of a table where a whalebone riding whip and a cat-o'-nine-tails lay with items only barely guessed at. Starvation had rendered them almost unrecognizable as men. It was only when the thing hanging on the wall moved and tried to make noise that he realized that it, too, was alive.

It was Cora.

He didn't know why he recognized her. Maybe by her size, rendered still more childlike by advanced emaciation. Her tiny feet, hanging ten or twelve inches above the floor in their heavy leg irons, looked no bigger than a turkey's claws. There was an iron gag in her mouth, the kind he'd seen in old museums labeled a Scold's Bridle, locked behind her head and forcing her mouth open. Flies crawled in and out, over a thin, constant stream of drool.

January's mind stalled, blocked by what he was seeing. He realized he hadn't the faintest idea what he should do. These people obviously couldn't walk, couldn't make it down two flights of stairs. He had heard the phrase, ran screaming-he hadn't known what it had meant, he realized. All he wanted to do was flee, shrieking, down Rue de levee, blotting this sight from his mind forever... His hand shaking so badly he could barely manipulate the latches, he unfastened the iron cage around Cora's head, pulled it off as gently as he could. The girl made a horrible noise in her throat, then spat out maggots. "Gervase."

She nodded to the room's inner door.

It was locked. January set his candle on the table, looked among the horrors there for a piece of thin wire that he could use to work the pawls-theoretically, at least. He'd never picked a lock in his life, though Hannibal had assured him it wasn't difficult. In the watery uncertainty of the single flame the tools were terrible, each a silent word of pain: levered clamps, intricate mechanisms of screw and strap, something like a half-unfurled speculum mounted on a screw. Ants and roaches crept over the laked blood. From among them he picked a vicious little hook, turned back to the door. There was a dim scraping behind him, one of the chained men trying to wriggle across the floor. January brought the candle close to the lock, bent to work the hook.

He heard Cora scream and started to straighten up, his head moving straight into the numbing blow from behind. His body hit the wall. He had a brief glimpse of Bastien raising an iron crowbar for another blow, and remembered nothing more.