02 Fever Season

Three

"It isn't true!" January thought that Cora would flee from him entirely, but in fact she only turned her back on him sharply and went a few steps, her arms folded over her breasts, hands clasping her skinny shoulders. In the dense noon shadows under the Pellicot kitchen gallery her face was unreadable, like a statue, always supposing some Greek sculptor would have expended bronze on the pointed, wary features of an urchin and a slave. A wave of trembling passed over her, an ague of dread.

January leaned against the rail of the gallery stairs. What was it, he wondered, that she feared he would read in her face?

"What this policeman tell you?" She flung the words back at him over her shoulder.

"Why don't you tell me?"

Her breath sipped in to spit some counter-accusation, but she let it go. She rubbed one hand along her arm, as if trying to get warm.

"Did this Otis Redfern rape you?" January asked.

Cora sniffed. "What's rape?" she demanded. "My... a girl I knew, a friend of mine, she was raped. She was sick after for a long time. I took care of her..." She shook her head. "She fought him, and he hurt her."

The softness of her mouth hardened again. "So you don't fight, and it's not so bad. But if you don't fight, it's not really rape, is it? And what's the sense of fighting anyway? He'd just have one of the men come in and hold me down. That's what he said. He said he'd have Gervase do it. You think I'd kill him over that?"

"There's women who would."

"If every woman killed every master who had her against her will, there'd be dead men lying like a carpet from here to the Moon. And that M'am Redfern, she wouldn't get after him about it. Just made my work harder for me, like I liked being fingered and poked and pestered by that smelly old man. If it wasn't for Gervase I think I'd have gone crazy."

She made a quick gesture with her small hands and faced back around. Beyond the shade of the gallery the sun smote the yard like a brass hammer. The dead-carts had finished their morning rounds, and the voice of a man or a woman in the street, or the creak of a wagon, fell singly into the hush.

"You know how they do," Cora said. "She tried to get me sent out to the fields, he said I was to work in the house. She said if I worked the house I'd do the chambers and the lamps. He said no, I had to do something genteel, like sewing. Me, I'd rather have cut cane than be under the same roof with her all day.

She puts me hemming sheets and then makes me pick out every stitch 'cos the hem's too wide, she says.

And then he says, to me he says, `Don't rub up against her, don't be always givin' her trouble, can't you see what you do'll come back on me?' What I do comes back on him?"

She drew another breath, anger narrowing her dark eyes. "I never killed him. I ran away. I had to run away. It's her that was out to kill me."

January raised his eyebrows. "If every woman killed every wench her husband had, there'd be dead women lying like a carpet from here to the Moon."

"Yeah." Cora's mouth quirked with a kind of grim humor. "But I heard them fighting. I heard her say, 'You sell that slut of yours if we're so hard up for money from your gambling' -and he was a terrible gambler, Michie Redfern was. And Michie Redfern says, `You're not telling me what to do, woman, and if you take and sell her I swear to you I'll find her again and it'll be the worse for you.' Not that he cared about me, Michie Janvier. But M'am Redfern is an overbearing woman, a Boston Yankee woman, always on about how much money her daddy had had, and Michie Redfern wasn't going to take anything off her. You known men like that."

January had known men like that.

"That's still a long way from her killing you."

"Michie Janvier, I swear what I'm telling you is true." She came back and sat on the end of the bench that was drawn up near the stairs where he stood. She wore a green dress today, though she still had on the red-and-black shoes. The skirt's folds hung limp, for it had been cut to accommodate several more petticoats than she was wearing; cut to accommodate a corset, too, as the red dress had been. No servant wore corsets, and Cora was not wearing one now.

Where had she gotten those? he wondered. And the soap and water to wash her face this morning. Not in the Swamp, the squalid agglomeration of grogshops and brothels that festered a few unpaved streets behind the Charity Hospital: that was the place most runaways went. But hers weren't dresses that could be acquired, or kept in good condition, in that maze of mud-sinks and cribs. He remembered the woman Nanie two nights ago, looking for her Virgil among the sick. Her stained dirty clothes had the stink of sweat ground into them, not because she was a particularly unclean woman but because spare labor and time and the fuel to heat water were luxuries among the poor, and their clothes went a long time between washings. Neatness of appearance was something that could be maintained only with great care and with a certain minimum of money.

His own coat and waistcoat, folded tidily over the rail of the stairs behind him with the cravat tucked into a pocket, were one badge of his freedom. Even more than the papers the law demanded he carry-and as much as the well-bred French his tutors and his mother had hammered into him as a child-they said, This is a free man of color, not somebody's property to be bought and sold.

A woman dressed like a slave on the streets would be noticed, especially by someone looking for a runaway. The dress was a disguise.

The cleanliness was a disguise.

Both depended on money and a place to stay.

After a long time of silence, Cora said, "Me and Gervase, we used to meet over by Black Oak. That's the place next up the river from Spanish Bayou-Michie Redfern's plantation just south of Twelve-Mile Point. Black Oak isn't hardly a plantation, just a little bit of land, but M'am Redfern's pa bought it for her when she came down from Boston to marry Michie Redfern. At least that's what Leonide told me, Michie Redfern's cook. They was gonna go to business together, M'am Redfern's pa and Michie Redfern, only he died. Michie Kendal, I mean."

She took a deep breath, not meeting his eyes, folding carefitlly the pleats of her green cotton sleeve where they ran into the wristband. There was a thin line of tatted cotton lace there, pale ecru, the kind schoolgirls produced by the yard while their governesses read to them from edifying books.

"That's where Gervase and I went, after Michie Redfern told him and the others-Laurent, and Randall, and Marcel, and Hermes, and Sally-that he was selling them on account of what he owed Michie Calder and Michie Fazende. Michie Redfern, he found us there. He sent Gervase back to the house and he hit me a couple times, then he had me, like your policeman said; though what that was supposed to prove I don't know. That a big man can stick it into a little girl my size when he can have her whipped if she don't let him? We both of us knew that."

Contempt blazed in her eyes.

"A couple days later he takes Gervase and the others on into town. Gervase told me he'd been sold to Warn Lalaurie, on Rue Royale-the others was gonna go to the Bank of Louisiana, and be sold up north in Missouri and Arkansas Territories, where they need cotton hands something bad. M'am Redfern, she doesn't say much to me, but she looks at me like the Devil looks at a little child out lost in the swamp. I slip out of the house and walk over by Black Oak again in the afternoon. I'm feeling bad, missing Gervase and wondering if I can get away long enough to come down to New Orleans and see him now and then, or he can come back maybe and see me.

"It's hot, and I start lookin' around the house for a cup or something to get me some water."

The look of calculation had disappeared from her face; replaced by a pucker in her brow as she called back the events to her mind. She was no longer thinking, January thought, about her story, no longer tailoring it for what she thought he wanted to hear.

"Black Oak's a little house," she went on after a time. "All the furniture and dishes and that been cleaned out a long time ago, but I thought there might be something. Mostly Gervase and I just layed in the bedroom, where it's cool, and didn't go in the other two rooms. But there's this cupboard in the parlor by the fireplace, that's always locked with a key. Only this time when I went in it wasn't locked, and inside I found this tin jar, like they sell candy in. It was new-it wasn't rusty nor chipped nor nothingbut when I opened it, there was a little sort of bag inside, made out of black flannel, full of crushed-up dry leaves and some seeds. I knowed the smell of it, 'cos one of the women on Grand Isle where I grew up was a conjure, and she told all us children what to stay away from in the woods. It was monkshood, and poison, and I knew then it had to be M'am Redfern that hid it there, in the little house where she had the key to, to keep it away from her husband finding it. I remembered how M'am Redfern had looked at me, all day, when her husband was gone."

She looked down again, tugging the ruffle of her sleeve.

"And what did you do?"

"I was scared." Cora raised those great dark eyes, under a fringe of thick-curled lashes. "I slept out in the swamp that night, and in the morning I hid in the trees near the steamboat landing by Spanish Bayou.

They'd said there was a boat coming in that day-Michie Bailey had said, that rode over the day before because he was bringin' down these horses of his to sell in town. When the boat came in, I slipped in the water and swam around the far side of it. The men down on the engine deck pulled me up and hid me in the hay bales, for Michie Bailey's white horses. And, Lordy, you'd have thought they'd give those horses feather beds, the fuss they made over 'em."

January studied that guarded face. Wondering how much of what she told him was truth.

"And you didn't go back to the house for anything before you went down to the boat?"

She shook her head vehemently. "I didn't steal no money. Nor no pearls. Michie Redfern, he probably took them pearls himself and sold them for gambling money or to pay off some more money he owed.

He owed everybody in the Parish. That's what probably happened. And I sure didn't kill anybody. But I had to run away, Michie Janvier. She'd have killed me. I know she would have. I had to find Gervase.. ."

"And what?" asked January softly. "Get him to run away, too?"

Her eyes remained on her sleeve ruffle, which she stroked and smoothed, stroked and smoothed with her tiny, work-roughened fingers. "I don't know. Maybe we can-can find some way to make us some money. To buy him free. Sometimes white folks lets their servants work out-sleep out, too, long as they come back and pays 'em. But I just want to see him. To talk to him."

For a time January said nothing. Madame Lalaurie was an astute businesswoman, and it wasn't outside the realm of possibility that she'd let a slave operate independently, though not, probably, a trained houseman. But looking at that down-turned little face, the careful deliberation of those little fingers tracing the folds of the cloth, he knew those were not Cora's thoughts.

He'd seen monkshood poisoning, in Paris, at the Hotel Dieu; a woman named Montalban had poisoned the brother with whom she lived. He thought about the agonies of vomiting and blindness, the sweating, convulsions, pain. Thought about Shaw sitting on the steps of his mother's gallery, spitting tobacco and recounting the facts of the case without ever asking why or if January had made inquiries about the purported murderess's lover scant days after the woman herself had been seen at the Lalaurie house.

Bastien the coachman would have reported her to Shaw, he thought. Would have reported, too, January's request to speak to the young man.

It didn't mean Shaw didn't have other information, held back as a speculator holds sugar or cotton, against a rise in prices.

"Cora," said January slowly, "whether or not you put poison into Otis Redfern's supper, Madame Redfern thinks you did. The police think so, too. Now, I told them I hadn't met you, hadn't ever heard of you, and I implied I hadn't ever been asked to take any kind of message from you to Gervase. At least when Lieutenant Shaw asked me to notify him if you did ask me, I said I would. All this is illegal. I could get into serious trouble for it."

Cora licked her lips and folded her arms again, as if chilled despite the day's burning heat. "You mean you can't help me anymore." It was not phrased as a question. That's what he meant.

And that, he thought later, should have been the end of it. For everyone's good.

That's when he should have walked away. Last night he had dreamed about his father.

He didn't often. His memories of his father-or the man he believed to have been his father-existed only in flashes, isolated incidents of time: being picked up, up and up and up at the end of those powerful arms, and the coal black face with the gray shellwork of tribal scars grinning joyfully below him, or walking along the edge of the bayou, listening to the deep bass voice hum-sing songs he barely recalled. He didn't even know where his father had been when he was told that his mother was being sold to St. Denis Janvier, whether his father had still been on Bellefleur Plantation then or not.

But he did remember, hot summer nights, creeping out of his room to sit on the gallery of the gar?onni?re, waiting for his father to come for him.

That had to have been shortly after they'd moved into the pink cottage on Rue Burgundy. January was eight. His father wouldn't let them leave him, he had told himself. He'd come slipping through the passway into the yard, to tap on his wife's shutters, to stand below the gallery of the gar?onni?re, white teeth gleaming in the moonlight, waiting for his son to come running down to him and be lifted up in those powerful arms.

January had crept out of his room most nights for a year, he remembered-except those nights when St.

Denis Janvier would come to visit his mother-to sit on the gallery in the darkness and wait. The town had been smaller then, with vacant land between the cottages on Rue Dauphine and Rue Burgundy, and between Rue Burgundy and the old town wall, rank marsh where moonsilvered water gleamed between forests of weeds. January had given names to the voices of the frogs crying in the darkness and made up words to the heavy, harsh drumming of the cicadas and the skreek of crickets; the drone of mosquitoes in the blackness. His sister Olympe jeered at him, but he'd waited nonetheless.

His father had never come.

"You have to lie low," he said slowly. Cora looked up, startled, at the sound of his voice. "You have to stay quiet. You can't even think about 'making money somehow' to help Gervase." Even as the words came out of his mouth he couldn't believe he was saying them.

"Slaves are just too expensive these days for them to let him go-or you either. They're watching for you, Cora. You have to get out of New Orleans if you possibly can, and remember that even with the fever on they'll be watching the steamboats on the river and on the lake. You think you can do that?"

She made no reply, neither nodded nor shook her head. But trembling passed over her again, a long silvery shiver, like a horse at the starting line of a race, before they whip the flags down to let them run.

"You send me a note under another name," said January. "Post it after you get to some other city. Set up some way for me to send a letter to you. Can you write?"

"A little," Cora whispered. "My friend taught me." The girl who'd been raped?

"My next lesson with the Lalaurie girls is Friday. Can, you be here Friday evening about sunset?" It meant going to the Hospital again without sleep, but these days that was common enough.

She nodded. Her lips formed the words thank you, without sound. She waited in the dark of the gallery while he slipped away up the pass-through between houses, still as a mouse waiting for the cat to go by.

Idle to suppose that a slave girl accused of murdering her master could turn the accusation on her master's wife. He thought again about poor Anne Montalban, trying to convince her neighbors, and later the police and the press, that Brother Jean, professor of law and pillar of the community, had raped both her and her daughter (and possibly three other local girls who could not be brought to testify) and was in the habit of keeping his niece locked in her room for weeks on end "for the good of her soul." Lying naked on his bed in the heat, hearing the roaring of afternoon rain on the slates, he tried to sleep, and his mind returned to the small, taut face, the wary eyes, of Cora Chouteau.

If you don't fight it's not really rape.

According to Shaw, the Redfern cook had seen Cora slip back into the house, some time after she was supposed to have run away. How long after? In the twilight, Shaw had said.

I slept out in the swamp.

Then after supper Wednesday night Otis Redfern had stumbled against the wall, trying to get outside to the outhouse, gasping and crying with a mouth half-paralyzed, pleading in the heat that there was ice water in his veins. Madame Redfern was found sick in her room only half an hour later, having collapsed from dizziness, too weak to call for help.

Had Cora returned only to steal five thousand dollars and her mistress's pearls? What the hell was five thousand dollars doing lying around the house? Money and credit were impossibly tight this year (his mother had investments, and he'd been hearing about the tightness of money at great length for months).

Most plantations dealt in letters of credit. In the best of times it was rare that even the richest of the planters, the Destrehans or the McCartys, had a thousand dollars cash money readily available.

Or had she gone back to slip powdered monkshood into whatever was being prepared for that evening's meal? Shaw had made no mention of the candy tin. January wondered if he knew about it. He could not imagine a Boston-raised merchant's daughter knowing how to identify monkshood in the woods, much less how to cull and dry it. If Cora didn't prepare the stuff herself, Emily Redfern would have to have acquired it somewhere.

And after all that, were Cora to testify that Emily Ftedfern kept powdered monkshood in the locked cupboard on her own property, and her case failed, she would be in serious trouble indeed.

He closed his eyes. The rain eased off, and a breeze walked across his bare belly and thighs. Why Cora Chouteau concerned him he didn't know. It was madness, insanely risky. He'd learn what he could, but there were things he simply could not do.

At least it was better than lying here obsessively inventorying his own body: did his head ache? (That's just lack of sleep.) Was he thirsty? (That's nothing. It's hot. No worse than yesterday.) Were his joints sore? Nausea? Belly cramps? Was he hot with fever or was it just hotter today? There had been a time when he'd wanted to die, wanted some shining angel from his childhood catechism to appear and tell him he didn't have to be in pain anymore, didn't have to deal with loss and grief and wondering why. But the only psychopomp in town these days was old Bronze John. At the memory of those bloated orange faces, the protruding tongues, the horrible feeble picking of the hands on the coverlets, he'd grope his cheap blue glass rosary from beneath the pillow and whisper, "Be mindful, Oh Lord, of Thy covenant, and say to the destroying Angel, Now hold thy hand..."

Like the choir at Mass the dreary voice of the deadcart man replied from the street, "Bring out yo' dead!"

January rose, and washed, and made his way through streets stinking of summer heat to the Charity Hospital as it was growing dark. The ward was like the waiting room in hell. By lamp glare the color of the fever itself, Dr. Sanchez, another of the physicians volunteering his services, mopped down a withered shop-woman with cold vinegar and niter, the smell of it acrid in the murky dark. There were slices of onion placed under every bed. Dark forms fidgeted like ghosts, conferring in a corner; and coming close January saw it was Dr. Soublet and Dr. Ker, the former British Army surgeon who over the protests of the Creole community had been given the post of Director of the Hospital. "I don't see that,"

Soublet was saying, voice rising with anger. "I don't see that at all." He spoke French, being one of those Creoles who not only had refused to learn English with the advent of the Americans but had deliberately expunged from his memory any English he had ever known.

His servant stood beside him, holding open a box the size of a child's coffin. In it January could see an apparatus of braces and straps, ratcheted wheels and metal splints. Equipment from Soublet's clinic. He'd seen the like in every medical journal for the past dozen years, accompanied by long articles about scientific advances in realigning the bones.

"This man came to this Hospital because he wished to be treated gratis, with the skills we have worked to acquire and the medicaments purchased by the city. He owes us something." On the bed between them, H?lier the water seller moved his head vaguely. His eyes glimmered horribly bright between bloated lids. January guessed that the sick man had only the dimmest notion of what was going on.

"Moreover, such an experiment can only be beneficial to him! I have had nearly miraculous results from the use of scientifically applied force in the realignment of the skeleton and limbs."

"This is a hospital, man," retorted Ker, in excellent French, "not the headquarters of the Spanish Inquisition! Iike that thing away! Charity means `out of love,' not `for the sake of finding some poor soul to test your theories on."

"Theories, sir!" Soublet drew himself up, a tall man with a sort of coarse sturdiness to him and skin like a very bad road surface in the jumpy light. "I do not deal in theories! My work is soundly based on observation, facts, and the latest findings of the medical fraternity-"

He stopped, his attention arrested by someone at the door of the ward. Turning, January saw Madame Delphine Lalaurie.

The first thing that anyone ever said of her-the thing that most of Marie Delphine de McCarry Blanque Lalaurie's admirers always mentioned-was that she glowed. With energy, with intelligence, with strength.

There were other beautiful women in the city, possibly others more beautiful by conventional standards, but had she been plain, Delphine Lalaurie would still have drawn all eyes. January had never figured out how some people could do that.

She was a tall woman, imperially straight; and though nearly every Creole woman of her age had surrendered to rich food and embonpoint, she retained the slim figure of a girl. She was clothed in a plain gown of black merino, such as wealthy women wore to nurse in, spotlessly clean even to its hem, as far as he could tell in this light, and unobtrusively on the leading edge of Paris fashion. The linen apron pinned over it, and the linen veil that covered her lustrous dark hair, gave her a nunlike air, as if a queen had taken vows.

Soublet and Ker immediately went to greet her, but before they could reach her she turned, hastening to the bedside of a delirious, bewhiskered young sailor who had begun to struggle and shout. A harassed nurse was trying to calm him, but he flung her back, eyes staring in horror and agony. Madame Lalaurie caught his shoulders, pressed him back to the bed with surprising strength, whispering to him, gentle words, soothing words. After a moment's desperate thrashing the man settled back, gasping, then turned and began to vomit. Madame Lalaurie and the nurse held him, and in the livid lamp glare January saw the expression of Madame's face: a deep intense pity, mingled with something else. An inward look, yearning, longing, ecstasy, as if she knelt in meditation at the Stations of the Cross.

The man collapsed, sobbing, exhausted. Madame and the nurse wrung rags in a basin of grimy water, sponged his fouled and tear-streaked face. `Ko'so'no'm," the man whispered, or something like it, a language January did not know. "Ko'so'no'm."

"It's all right," she breathed, and stroked the crawling hair, "you'll be all right."

Then in a whisper of petticoats she rose, greeted Soublet with a warm smile and turned her back on Ker without a word. But she did not stop to speak with her husband's partner, crossing instead to where January stood.

"M'sieu Janvier?" Her voice was a lovely mezzosoprano. He had heard that she sang like an angel. Like her daughter Pauline, her eyes were large, coffee dark, and brilliant. Like Pauline she seemed to burn with energy; but instead of the girl's restless, dissipated resentment, hers was a focused vigor that seemed to fill the room. "I realize it's an imposition, with as much as you have to do here," she said, "but might we speak?" Without seeming to, she glanced back at Dr. Soublet and Emil Barnard, hovering just out of earshot, and lowered her voice. "It concerns my houseman, Gervase."

There was little space in the Hospital that wasn't chockablock with the dying. January unlatched the long windows that led to the gallery. "Shut those!" roared Soublet. "Do you wish to kill all these people?"

You should talk of killing all those people, thought January dourly. Nevertheless, he closed the shutters behind them quickly as he and Madame stepped into the steamy rankness of the night.

"I'm sorry to have to bring you out here, Madame."

She chuckled softly. "We walk back and forth through the night miasma coming here, M'sieu. If it's the night air that causes the fever at all, a little more can scarcely harm us." She coughed with the smoke of the smudges burning in the courtyard below them and waved her hand. Her gloves were French kid at fifty cents the pair, as immaculate as her apron when she had come in. Having seen the promptness with which she attended the delirious sailor, January couldn't imagine this woman going through a shift at wherever she nursed without getting as fouled as he was-apron, dress, and gloves were now spotted with water and filth. She must have changed the entire outfit before coming here.

"Sometimes I don't think doctors know anything. One can only care for the sick, and pray for their poor disobedient souls." She crossed herself; January did, too. Her one ornament was a gold crucifix on a slender chain around her neck. "I take it the girl Cora came to ask your help?"

"I know no one by that name, Madame." So that sleek bastard Bastien had told her. "It was on another matter that I wished to speak with Gervase. He's a friend of my sister Olympe. And it wasn't important.

I'm sorry that you were troubled."

"M'sieu..." The twinkle in her dark eyes mocked him gently. "The boy's never been in this city in his life before I purchased him. And I happen to know that spiteful harpy Emily Redfern is looking all over the Parish for someone to blame for her husband's death besides her own parsimony in keeping her meat hanging too long in the summer. I gather she's talked her Yankee compatriots in the City Guard into wasting their time and citizens' money in pursuit of some poor child who had no more to do with Otis Redfern's death than you did-and paying off old scores onto her."

Regarding her, January guessed there wasn't a great deal about the personal lives of anyone in New Orleans society that Delphine Lalaurie didn't know. Related to everyone of wealth and breeding, she was in a position to hear everything. Still he said nothing. In the courtyard below them, Emil Barnard emerged from the Hospital, made his way toward the piled bodies near the gate, then stopped and glanced up to see January standing on the gallery. Barnard coughed self-consciously, shoved the empty flour sack he carried into his pocket, and strolled casually away.

January was aware of the woman's eyes on his face. Under the rouge and powder that all Creole women wore, the torchlight showed up lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes, fine lines gouged deep, more than simple weariness could account for. Juxtaposed with that slender figure, those brilliant eyes, they were almost shocking. Was it so hard, then, to carry the burden of a crippled daughter, to deal with whatever illness made Pauline so wasted and thin? Did it tell on one so terribly, to rule the household with such exactness and splendor? To be so perfect oneself, beyond weeping or fear or regret?

"I know that you can't admit to having spoken to the girl." Her voice was soft but brisk, matter-of-fact, and the lines in her face were suddenly only the marks of fatigue again. "Bastien tells me he turned you away. Very properly, of course. One can't have one's people interrupted in their work. That kind of thing upsets the other servants, as I'm sure you know; and any little disruption in the routine spreads like a mildew, until it's nearly impossible to bring everyone back up to their best. But as I'm sure you've also guessed, my Bastien is officious. He wants only the good of the household, but there! What can one do?

I've spoken to him about telling that lout of a Guard that Cora came asking after poor Gervase. He will mind his tongue hereafter."

Still January made no reply.

"One cannot approve, of course, under most circumstances, of runaways," Madame Lalaurie went on. A mosquito hummed in the torchlight, close to her face, but such was her breeding that she didn't flinch, let alone swipe at it with her gloved hand. "But sheerly as a human being one cannot but feel for anyone who lives under the heel of a woman like Emily Redfern."

"I know nothing of her, Madame."

"Pray God you never have the occasion to learn, M'sieu." She sighed, as if about to add something else, then changed her mind and put the remark aside. "Be that as it may, M'sieu, Friday night I will order Bastien to leave the carriage gate open-though he will naturally be watching for thieves-from eleven o'clock until midnight. Gervase will be in the yard. I don't wish to know anything further."

January inclined his head. "Of course, it's your own business whether the gate is open or closed, Madame."

Wry amusement pulled at the corner of her lips. "I like a man who's discreet. Monsieur Blanque was like that. I don't believe, in all the years we were married, that he ever said, `I am going to play cards with so-and-so.' Only, `I am going out.'"

Jean Blanque, January recalled, in addition to running one of the largest banks in the city, had had connections with half the smugglers who brought illegal slaves and other goods into the city. It was to Blanque that Jean Laffite had come to begin negotiations with the Americans in the face of the British invasion. Discreet indeed!

"I trust I shall be able to rely upon your discretion in the future?" She made as if to go, then hesitated, her hand going to the reticule on her belt. After a pause she opened it and withdrew a smaller purse that clinked heavily in her hand. "Please give her this."

"I don't know who you mean, Madame."

Her smile widened, the twinkle brightening in her dark eyes. "Ah. Very well, then." She opened her hand and let the purse fall to the planks of the gallery and, with the toe of her slipper, nudged it into the shadows next to the door.

January saw her to the street. Bastien waited with the black-lacquered carriage and the four-in-hand of black English geldings that were the admiration and envy of Creole and American society alike. A long cardboard dress box lay on the driver's seat-Madame had changed her clothes before coming, then. The coachman sprang from the box to help her inside, with a combination of obsequiousness and tenderness; and as he shut the door, Madame Lalaurie smiled her thanks.

The grimy lantern light of the Hospital's porch glinted on harness brasses, polished like gold, and they were gone.

Emil Barnard straightened up quickly from the corpses by the gate as January came back through and yanked the sheets into place before hurrying away. Flies roared up in a cloud. Sickened, January didn't even look this time. When he climbed the stairs and passed through the ward he saw that Soublet, his servant, and their apparatus for the straightening of the skeleton and the limbs were all gone: H?lier the water seller, with his crooked spine and uneven shoulders, was gone, too.

He stepped out onto the. gallery again and retrieved the purse from the shadows. It contained ten Mexican silver dollars and assorted cut bits.