03 Graveyard Dust

ONE

African drums in darkness sullen as tar.

Rossini's "Di tanti palpiti" unspooling like golden ribbon from the ballroom's open windows. Church bells and thunder.

Benjamin January flexed his aching shoulders and thought, Rain coming. Leaning on the corner of Colonel Pritchard's ostentatious house, he could smell the sharp scent in the hot weight of the night, hear the shift in the feverish tempo of the crickets and the frogs. The dim orange glow of an oil lamp fell through the servants' door beside him, tipping the weeds beyond the edge of the yard with fire.

Then the air changed, a cool flash of silkiness on his cheek, and he smelled blood. The drums knocked and tripped, dancing rhythms. Fairly close to the house, he thought. This far above Canal Street the lots in the American suburb of St. Mary were large, and few had been built on yet. Ten feet from kitchen, yard, and carriage house grew the native oaks and cypresses of the Louisiana swamps, as they had grown for time beyond reckoning. January picked out the voices of the drums, as on summer nights like this one in his childhood he'd used to tell frog from frog. That light knocking would be a hand drum no bigger than a vase, played with fast-tripping fingertips. The heavy fast thudding was the bamboula, the log drum-a big one, by the sound. The hourglass-shaped tenor spoke around them, patted sharply on both sides.

One of the men on the plantation where January had been born had had one of those. He'd kept it hidden in a black oak, back in the cipridre, the swamp beyond the cane fields. Forty years ago, when the Spanish had ruled the land, for a slave to own a drum was a whipping offense. "Not meaning to presume, sir." Aeneas, Colonel Pritchard's cook, stepped from the kitchen's gold-lit arch and crossed the small yard to where January stood at the foot of the back gallery stairs. "But I'd be getting back up to the ballroom were I you." A stout man of about January's own forty-one years, the cook executed a diffident little half bow as he spoke. It was a tribute to January's status as a free man, though the cook was far lighter of skin. "Colonel Pritchard's been known to dock a man's pay, be he gone for more than a minute or two. I seen him do it with a fiddle player, only the other week."

January sighed, not surprised. The kitchen's doors and windows stood wide to the sweltering night, and the nervous glances thrown by the cook, the majordomo, and the white-jacketed waiter toward the house every time one of them cracked a joke or consumed a tartlet that should have gone on the yellow-flowered German china told its own story.

"Thank you." January drew his gloves from his coat pocket and put them on again, white kid and thirty cents a pair, and even that movement caused bolts of red-hot lightning to shoot through his shoulder blades, muscles, and spine. He'd been a surgeon for six years at the Hotel-Dieu in Paris and knew exactly how heavy a human arm was, but it seemed to him that he'd never quite appreciated that weight as he did now, after an hour and a half of playing quick-fire waltzes and polkas on the piano with an injury that hadn't healed.

A shift of the night air brought the smell of smoke again, the knocking of the drums, and the hot brief stink of blood. His eyes met the cook's. The cook looked away. Not my business, thought January, and mounted the stairs. He guessed what was going on. The air in the ballroom seemed waxy and thick as ambergris: one could have cut it in slices with a wire. Pomade and wool, spilled wine and the gas lamps over head, and-because at least two-thirds of the guests were Americans-the acrid sweet sourness of spit tobacco. January edged through the servants' door and, behind the screen of potted palmettos and wilting vines that sheltered the musicians, sought to resume his seat at the piano as inconspicuously as it was possible for a man six feet, three inches tall; built like a bull; and black as a raw captive new-dragged down the gangplank of a slave ship from the Guinea coast, and never mind the neat black coat, the linen shirt and white gloves, the spotless cravat.

Hannibal Sefton, who'd been distracting the guests from the fact that there hadn't been a dance for nearly ten minutes, glanced at him inquiringly and segued from "Di tanti" into a Schubert lied; January nodded his thanks. The fiddler was sheet white in the gaslight and perspiration ran down the shivering muscles of his clenched jaw, but the music flowed gracefully, like angels dancing. January didn't know how he did it. Since an injury in April, January had been unable to play at any of the parties that made up his livelihood in America-he should not, he knew, be playing now; but finances were desperate, and it would be a long summer. He, at least, he thought, had the comfort of knowing that he would heal.

Voices around them, rough and nasal in the harsh English tongue January hated: "Oh, hell, it's just a matter of time before the Texians have enough of Santa Anna. Just t'other day I heard there's been talk of them breakin' from Mexico..."

"Paid seven hundred and thirty dollars for her at the downtown Exchange, and turns out not only was she not a cook, but she has scrofula into the bargain! "

Colonel Pritchard was an American, and a fair percentage of New Orleans's American business community had turned out to sample Aeneas's cold sugared ham and cream tarts. But here and there in the corners of the room could be heard the softer purr of Creole French. "Any imbecile can tell you the currency must be made stable, but why this imbecile Jackson believes he can do so by handing the country's money to a parcel of criminals..." And, ominously, "My bank, sir, was one of those to receive the redistributed monies from the Bank of the United States "

"You all right?" Uncle Bichet leaned around his violoncello to whisper, and January nodded. A lie. He felt as if knives were being run into his back with every flourish of the piano keys. In the pause that followed the lie, while January, Hannibal, Uncle Bichet, and nephew Jacques changed their music to the "Lancers Quadrille," the drums could be clearly heard, knocking and tapping not so very far from the house.

You forget us? they asked, and behind them thunder grumbled over the lake. You play Michie Mozart's little tunes, and forget all about us out here drumming in the cipri?re?

All those years in Paris, Michie Couleur Libre in your black wool coat, you forget about us?

About how it felt to know everything could be taken away? Father-mother-sisters all gone?

Nobody to know or care if you cried? You forget what it was, to be a slave?

If you think a man has to be a slave to lose everything he loves at a whim, January said to the drums, pray let me introduce you to Monsieur le Cholira and to her who in her life was my wife.

And with a flirt and a leap, the music sprang forward, like a team of bright-hooved horses, swirling the drums' dark beat away. Walls of shining gold, protecting within them the still center that the world's caprices could not touch.

In the strange white gaslight, alien and angular and so different from the candle glow in which most of the French Creoles still lived, January picked out half a dozen women present in the magpie prettiness of second mourning, calling cards left by Monsieur le Cholera and his local cousin Bronze John, as the yellow fever was called. Technically, Suzanne Marcillac Pritchard's birthday ball was a private party, not a public occasion, suitable even for widows in first mourning to attend-not that there weren't boxes at the Theatre d'Orl?ans closed in with latticework so that the recently bereaved could respectably enjoy the opera.

And in any case, it would take more than the death of their immediate relatives to keep the ladies of New Orleans's prominent French and Spanish families from a party. Marion Desdunes-that very young widow gazing wistfully at the dancers-had lost a brother to the cholera last summer and a husband the summer before. Delicate, white-haired Madame Jumon, talking beside the buffet to Mrs. Pritchard, had only last summer lost her middleaged son.

Always entertained by the vagaries of human conduct, January distracted himself from the pain in his arms and back by picking out exactly where in the ballroom the frontier between American and French ran, an invisible Rubicon curving from the second of the Corinthian pilasters on the north wall, to a point just south of the enormous, carven double doors opening to the upstairs hall. French territory centered around Mrs. Pritchard, plump and plain and sweet faced, and the brilliantly animated Madame Jumon, though now and then a Creole gentleman would pass that invisible line to discuss business with the Colonel's friends: bankers, sugar brokers, importers, and landlords, the planters having long since departed New Orleans for their acres. Every so often one of the younger Americans would solicit the favor of a dance with one of Mrs. Pritchard's younger Marcillac or Jumon cousins and to do them justice, January had to admit that for Americans they were as well behaved as they probably knew how to be. For the most part, the damsel would be rescued by a brother or a cousin or a younger uncle twice-removed who would reply politely that Mademoiselle was desolate, but the dance was already promised to him. When MadamMjumon's surviving son, a craggily saturnine gentleman of forty-five, showed signs of leading Pritchard's middle-aged maiden sister out onto the floor, Madame quickly excused herself from conversation and intercepted the erring gallant; January was hard put to hide a smile. "Don't see what they got to be stuck-up about," grumbled a short, badly pomaded gentleman with a paste ruby the size of an orange pip in his stickpin. "I don't care if their granddaddies were the King of Goddam France, they're citizens of the United States now, just like we are. I got a good mind to go back and take that gal's brother to account..."

"Mr. Greenaway, please!" Emily Redfern, a stout little widow-who a moment ago had been bargaining like a Levantine trader with the burly Hubert Granville of the Bank of Louisiana-laid a simpering black-mitted hand on the pomaded gentleman's arm. "That was Desiree Lafrenniere! Of course her family..." The Widow Redfern, January knew, had been trying for years to get on the good side of the old Creole families. Little did she know how impossible that task was. Mr. Greenaway's pale blue eyes moved from the widow's square-jawed, cold-eyed countenance to her exceedingly expensive pearls. He smiled ingratiatingly. "Well, if it wouldn't intrude on your grief too much, M'am, perhaps you would favor me by sitting this one out with me..." "I'll lay you it'll be Greenaway and Jonchere, before midnight," said Hannibal Sefton, when an hour and a half later he and January slipped down the back stairs for a breath of air. "Greenaway's been drinking like a fish and he always starts up on the Bank of the United States when he does that. Jonchere's called out the last two men who supported Jackson..."

"I'll put my money on the Colonel himself," said January, and gingerly moved his shoulder again. There had to be some position in which he didn't hurt.

"Call out one of his own guests?" Hannibal took his laudanum bottle from his pocket and took a swig; then offered it hospitably to January, who waved it away. He'd seen, and heard, Hannibal play like the harps of Heaven when he was so lubricated as to be barely coherent, but for himself music was a matter for the mind as well as for the soul. And the thought of being that defenseless terrified him. Being barely able to lift his own arms was fearful enough.

"A Frenchman? I think he'll call out either Bringier or Madame Jumon's son..." For close to a year now January and Hannibal had entertained themselves at every engagement they played by laying wagers on who would challenge whom to an affair of honor before the evening was through. It was fortunate they played for pennies-or picayunes, at this low ebb of the season-for January could have won or lost a fortune at the game.

"Mathurin? With the Jumon money I'd think Pritchard would thank him for showing interest in that poor sister of his."

A sharp rustle sounded in the trees to the side of the house. January held up his hand, listening. The drums were silent.

Aeneas and the original waiter had been joined by a third man, young and barely five feet tall, hastily buttoning a white linen jacket and rinsing something off his hands with water dipped from the rain barrel. With him was a young woman in the first stages of pregnancy, retying the headscarf that all women of color, slave or free, were by law required to wear. They turned immediately to lay out the slices of beef and ham, the tarts and cakes and petits fours, on the yellow-flowered plates. "I'll be back," said January softly. He slipped down the gallery steps and around the corner of the house into the trees.

Given the trouble his curiosity had caused him in the past, January reflected that he should know better. In any case, he had a good idea of what he would find in the darkness where the trees got thick. Though by this time, he told himself, if she'd been there-been part of it-she'd be gone. And what good would it do me to know? He didn't want to admit it, but the brought back memories.

Mats of leaves and pale shaggy curtains of moss quickly obscured the bright cool rectangles of the windows. Light glinted on puddles of standing water, and the ground gave squishily underfoot. Twenty feet from the house, January scented blood again and the heavy grit of drums had quenched smoke still hanging in the air. He listened, but all was still. Even so, he felt their eyes. Not those who'd risked a whipping to sneak out and follow the sound of the drums. Not those who'd sung the keening, eerie, driving rhythms of those songs in a half-forgotten tongue. The eyes he felt on his back were the eyes of those they'd come to see, to touch; to sing to and to give themselves to, flesh and hearts and souls. January knew them well.

Papa Legba, guardian of all gates and doors, warden of the crossroad. Beautiful Ezili, in all her many forms. Zombi-Damballah, the Serpent King. Ogu of the sword and the fire January quickly pushed the thought of that burning-eyed warrior from his mind. And the Baron Samedi, the Baron Cemetery, boneyard god grinning white through the darkness..

A hundred feet from the house, trees had been felled. Here new construction would begin with the first frost of autumn. Embers still glowed where a pit had been dug, quenched now with dirt.

From his pocket January took a box of lucifers, and scratched one on the paper. It showed him the rucked earth where the veves had been drawn, the dark spatters of spilt rum and the darker dribblings of blood. Near the pit a headless black chicken lay, feet still twitching, ringed by fragmented silver Spanish bits. Two plates also lay on the ground, each likewise surrounded by silver. One was heaped with rice and chickpeas. The other held a cigar and a glass of rum.

Those whose aid had been sought were known for liking tobacco, rum, and blood.

January lit another match and stepped closer, careful where he put his feet. The plates were white German porcelain, painted with yellow flowers. Around them, inside the ring of silver, dark against the paler dust of the ground, a line had been drawn in sprinkled earth.

If it had been salt, January knew, it would have been bad enough. Salt was the mark of curses and ill. But this wasn't salt.

It was graveyard dust, a cursing to the death.

There was nothing else, no sign to tell him who might have been here, who had done the rite.

She's probably home in bed. Nothing to do with this at all.

January crossed himself and walked swiftly back to the house. Though the drums had ceased, he seemed to hear them, knocking in the growl of the thunder, in the darkness at his back.

Colonel Pritchard was waiting for him on the gallery. "When I pay four men for five hours I don't expect to get only four hours and a half." The American studied January with light tan eyes that seemed too small for his head. As far as January knew, the man had never been a colonel of anything-there was certainly nothing of the military in his bearing-but he knew better than to omit the title in speaking to him.

"No, Colonel," he said, in his best London English. "I am most sorry, sir. I heard a noise, as if of an intruder, around..."

"I have servants to deal with noises if that's what you heard." The dust-colored eyes cut to Hannibal, who smiled sunnily under his graying mustache; Pritchard's mouth writhed with disgust. "And when I pay for four men for five hours I don't expect to get only three men and a half. And you a white man, too." He plucked the flask from the pocket of Hannibal's shabby, long-tailed black coat. Pulling the cork, the Colonel made another face. "Opium! I reckon that's what happens when you spend your days playing music with Negroes." He hurled the flask away, and January heard it smash against the brick of the kitchen wall.

"I suppose that means an end to the champagne as well," Hannibal noted philosophically as they followed the master of the house back up the stairs. He coughed heavily, January reaching out to catch him by the arm as he half-doubled over with the violence of the spasm. Pritchard glanced over his shoulder at them from the top of the stairs, impatience and disdain on his heavyfeatured face. "Just as well. I think we've seen the last of the chamber pot, too."

They remained in the ballroom, under the Colonel's sour eye, until two in the morning. Despite the open windows, the room only grew hotter, and the pain in January's back and shoulders increased until he thought he would prefer to die. Your back carries the music, he was always telling his pupils. Strong back, light hands. It surprised him that he was able to play at all.

At around eleven, after a particularly gay mazurka, Aeneas came to the dais with a tray of lemonade. "What's that?" Pritchard loomed at once from among the potted palms. "Who told you to give these men anything?"

"Mrs. Pritchard did, sir." The cook's English wasn't good, but he took great care with it, as if he feared the consequences of the smallest mistake.

"Mrs. Pritchard-" The Colonel turned to his wife, who, probably anticipating the objection, had positioned herself not far away. "I thought I made it abundantly clear that I'm paying these men in coin, after they have satisfactorily completed their duties, and not by permitting them to make themselves free with my substance."

"It's such a very hot night, Colonel," she said soothingly. Her English was just as awkward-and just as wary-as the cook's. "And, you understand, it is what is done..."

"It is not 'done' in this house..."

During their low-voiced altercation Aeneas stepped back beside the piano where January sat and whispered, "There's a boy back in the kitchen asking after you, Michie January. Says he's got to see you. Says he's your nephew."

"Gabriel?" January looked up, trying to cover the fact that his arms were too weak from the strain of playing to reach for the lemonade. It was far later than his sister Olympe would ever have permitted any child of hers to be on the streets.

Panic touched him at the recollection of the drums, the blood...

"That's what he says his name is, yes, sir. He says he has a message for you, but he wouldn't tell me what." January glanced at his employer. Pritchard was already looking over at him, clearly expecting the next dance to start up. "I don't think I'm going to be able to get over there until the end of this."

Equally impossible, of course, that the Colonel would consent to write out permission for any of his servants to escort the boy home.

"He's no trouble," Aeneas assured January. "I'll tell him he has to wait. He's already asked if he can help with the tarts and the negus."

That certainly sounded like Gabriel. But as he maneuvered his arms back to where the edge of the piano would take the weight of them and struck up the country dance "Mutual Promises," January felt his heart chill with dread. Something had happened. He felt sick inside.

Let me introduce you to Monsieur le Cholera, he had said to the drums that had mocked him for the hard-won security of his freedom, for the complex beauties of the music that was his life. January could still remember the first time he'd met St.-Denis Janvier, the sugar broker who had purchased his mother, himself, and his sister Olympe. Could still see in his mind the man's close-fitting coat of bottle-green satin and the fancy-knit patterns of his stockings, the eight gold fobs and seals that hung on his watch chain. Could still feel the rush of relief that went through him when that paunchy little man had told him, I have purchased your beautiful mother in order to set her free, and you, too, and your sister. Relief unspeakable. I'll be safe now.

No more nightmares about his mother going away, as others on the plantation had gone so abruptly away. No more fear that someone would one day say to him, You are going to go live someplace else now-someplace where he knew no one.

All his life, it seemed to him, he had wanted a home, wanted a place where he knew he was safe. He'd been eight. It had taken him a little time to learn to be a free man, to learn the ins and outs of a different station, what was and was not permitted. To learn to speak proper French and not say tote for "carry," or aw when he meant "bien stir. " But throughout the boyhood spent in the gar?onni?re behind the house on Rue Burgundy that St.-Denis Janvier gave his new mistress, throughout the years of schooling in one of the small private academies that catered to the children of white men and their colored plac?es, January had never lost that sense of being, in his heart of hearts, on firm footing. At least the worst wasn't going to happen. At least he wasn't going to be taken away from those he loved.

From "Mutual Promises" they whirled into "A Trip to Paris." The ladies laughed and skipped in their bellshaped skirts, their enormous lace-draped sleeves that stood out ten inches from their arms; gentlemen flirted decorously as they held out white-gloved hands to white-gloved hands. Mr. Greenaway of the pomaded curls hovered protectively around the wealthy Widow Redfern, fetching her crepes and tarts and lemonade and presumably soothing her not-very-evident grief while she talked business with Granville the banker. Granville himself showed surprising lightness of step in dancing with his drab little pear-shaped wife and with every pretty maid and matron on the American side of the room. From the sideline, Mrs. Pritchard watched with resigned envy.

The American ladies all seemed plainer than their French counterparts, duller, an effect January knew wasn't entirely owing to having less sense of dress. No American lady would be seen in public, even at a ball, in the rice powder and rouge that no Creole lady would be seen without. It seemed to him, too, that they laughed less. He supposed if he were a woman married to an American he wouldn't laugh much, either.

St.-Denis Janvier had sent him to study with an Austrian music master, a martinet who had introduced to him the complex and disciplined joys of technique. Music had always been the safe place to which his soul had gone as a child: joining in the work-hollers, picking out harmonies, inventing songs about big storms or his aunt Jemma's red beans or the time Danro from the next plantation had fallen in love with Henriette up at the big house. All of this, Herr Kovald had said, was what savages did, who knew no better. Kovald had played for him that first time the Canon of Pachelbel-and January's soul had entered onto that magic road, that quest for beauty that had no end.

He had studied healing also, and in much the same fashion: first with old Mambo Jeanne at Bellefleur Plantation, who'd showed him and Olympe both where to gather slippery elm, mullein, lady's slipper, and sassafras in the woods. Later he'd been apprenticed to Jose Gomez, a free man of color who had a little surgery down on Rue Chartres. Reading the books Gbmez had of the English surgeons John and William Hunter and watching dissections of sheep and pigs from the slaughterhouses, January had seen no difference between the music that was the life of his soul and the harmonies of blood and organs and bones. And when, finally, the long wars between France and England and the United States were done and it was safe to cross the seas, January had gone to Paris, to study surgery at the Hotel-Dieu.

He'd been admitted to the College of Surgeons there and had continued to work at the clinic, unable to go into private practice either in Paris or in New Orleans. To be sure, free surgeons of color practiced in both cities, but they were invariably of a polite walnut snuff, or hue. January had long accepted the fact that no American, and few Frenchmen, were ready to trust their lives to someone who so much resembled a pantomime-show Sultan's Ethiopian door guard.

"At least here in Paris one is free," Ayasha had said to him, Ayasha who had fled her father's harim in Algiers rather than be wed against her will. "And no one can take that from you."

Ayasha had worked in Paris as a seamstress since the age of fourteen. By the time January met her, she owned her own shop.

No one can take that from you.

Except, of course, January had discovered, Monsieur le Cholera.

It would be two years in August since he had returned home and found Ayasha dead.

Since then he had discovered that he had progressed not one step farther than that terrified slave boy on BelleAeur Plantation, in terms of what life could and could not take away.

It was June. A deadly time in New Orleans.

"That's absolute nonsense," blustered a railway speculator in a dark gray coat. "Tom Jenkins says he's been down the river almost to the Belize and there hasn't been a sign of yellow jack, much less the cholera, anywhere in the countryside."

"Not in the countryside, no." Dr. Ker of the Charity Hospital took a glass of champagne from the little waiter's tray with a polite nod of thanks. "On the whole the cholera isn't a disease of the countryside. We've had two cases of yellow fever here in the city."

"Two?" Granville snorted. "Well, there's a reason to turn tail and run, by gosh! Are you sure they were yellow fever, Doctor? Dr. Connaud-he's my physician, and a splendid fellow with a knife, just splendid!-says it isn't possible that there should be epidemics three summers in a row."

"It's the newspapers," declared Colonel Pritchard. "Damned journalists'll print anything that'll sell their filthy rags. They don't care about the local businesses, or what it does to a city's property values if word gets around there's fever. All they think about is getting a few more copies sold.

As for you, Dr. Ker, I'm sure you'll find if you open those two so-called fever victims up that there's some kind of reason for the same symptoms..."

Was that what young Gabriel had walked from Rue Douane in the old French town to tell him?

January wondered. What he wouldn't tell the servants of this stranger's house? That Olympe was sick? Or her husband, Paul? One of the other children?

Yellow fever? Cholera?

Not cholera, he prayed desperately. Blessed Virgin, please, not that.

And while his arms trembled with fatigue, and his heart squeezed with dread, and he felt as if someone were trying to pry his shoulder blades loose with crowbars, he skipped through moulinets, bris?s, cross-passes, and olivettes, as lightly as a happy child running in a meadow of flowers. A wave of faintness passed over him; he concentrated on ballottes and glissades, on the glittering protection of the music's beauty that could almost carry his mind away from the pain.

Hannibal swung into a lilting solo air, embroidering effortlessly as January lowered his throbbing arms to his thighs to rest. Like a bird answering a slightly drunk muse, Jacques took up the thread of music on his cornet. Uncle Bichet came in third on the cello, the round lenses of his spectacles flashing in the gaslight, an odd contrast to the tribal scarring on his thin old face. At intervals in his harangue against those who conspired to ruin the local real estate market with rumors of plague, Pritchard watched them dourly; watched, too, the unobtrusive door to the back stairs.

January wished the Colonel buried alive in graveyard dust.

"Lemonade only, you understand?" January heard him say to Aeneas, when after a purgatorial eternity of heat and tobacco stench and aching muscles the clock at last sounded two. "Mrs.

Pritchard will be over in the kitchen to weigh up the leftover chicken and pastries. I don't want the lot of you gorging on them or passing them out to those musicians. And I won't have them wasted. Mrs. Pritchard..."

His voice lifted in a preemptory yap. His wife-who might have been presumed to have earned a little privilege on the night of her own birthday ball-turned with a sigh from the farewell embraces of her friends.

"He's quite right," said the Widow Redfern, who had wormed her way-Mr. Greenaway doglike in tow-into the Creole group of ladies. "I find one always has to count the champagne bottles after a party, and measure the sugar. It's really quite prudent of your husband..."

"Am?ricaines," murmured Madame Jumon, flashing a humorous grimace as she kissed Mrs.

Pritchard warmly on her unpowdered cheeks and took her departure on her son's black-banded arm. "What can one do?"

Gabriel was waiting in the kitchen. He was a tall boy, slim like his mother, January's sister Olympe, and handsome as his father, who was an upholsterer with a shop on Rue Douane. He had, too, his father Paul's sunny goodness of heart. As January crossed from the back gallery to the kitchen he could see his nephew, through the wideflung windows, helping Aeneas and the kitchen maid clean up endless regiments of crystal wineglasses, champagne glasses, water glasses; dessert forks, coffee spoons, teaspoons, dessert spoons; platters, salvers, pitchers, creamers, tureens; a hundred or more small plates of white German china painted with yellow roses, half again that many napkins of yellow linen.

Above the foulness of the privies on the hot night air, the dense stink of Camp Street's uncleaned gutters, from around the corner of the stables January could still catch the whiff of drying blood.

"Uncle Ben!"

"You look like you been pulled through the mangle and no mistake." Aeneas set aside the mixing bowl he was drying and unstoppered a pottery jar of ginger water.

"Danny, bring Michie Janvier a cup." The little waiter fetched it; Gabriel discreetly supported January's elbow while January raised it to his lips. "You ever want to hire this boy out as a cook, you come speak to me about it, hear?"

"I'll do that." January returned the cook's grin, then studied the inside of the empty cup with mock gravity and measured with the fingers of his other hand the distance from the rim to the damp line the liquid had left. "Looks like a gill and a half I drank. You want to mark that down for the Colonel's records, in case he gets after you for where it went?"

Aeneas laughed. "Me, I'm just thanking God there's no way for him to measure the air in here, or he'd sure be after us about what your nephew breathed since eleven o'clock. Kitta, you got all the saucers in?"

They had to know, thought January, looking at the kitchen maid Kitta, the watchful-eyed little Dan bringing still more champagne glasses and yellow-flowered plates back from the house. He saw how they smiled at one another and how the little man relaxed when the woman touched his hand.

Which of them, he wondered, had sent for the voodoo-man?

Or woman.

January glanced down at Gabriel and saw the shaky relief in the boy's smile. Of course he wouldn't have told these people about sickness, if it was the cholera. That was a good way to get a thrashing from a man like the Colonel, freeborn or not. How dare you go around scaring my servants with your lies? Most Americans didn't understand the difference between free coloreds and black slaves.

"Thank you for looking after him," January said. "We'll be bidding you good night." He put a hand on Gabriel's shoulder and guided him from the kitchen and into the shadows of the yard.

Behind them Aeneas called out, "You mind how you go.

That'll be all we need, thought January. Some officious member of the City Guard demanding to see our papers. 'Are you aware that it's two in the morning? That the cannon in the Place d'Armes fired off at ten to warn people like you"-meaning both blacks and colored-"to be off the street?"

He glanced back at the kitchen. The other musicians had already gone. By the grubby topaz glow of a dozen smoky tallow candles, the cook, the menservants, and the kitchen maid Kitta had recommenced the Augean task of washing every dish, fork, and sparkling bit of hollowware.

Little Dan carried a yoke of pails to the cistern; firelight leapt over Aeneas's sweaty face as he fanned up the flames under the boiler to heat it. In the ballroom's four long windows the white beauty of the gaslight dimmed and disappeared. Carriage wheels creaked and slopped in the muddy street, and voices called a final good-bye: French. The Americans had left a full thirty minutes ago. A moment later Mrs. Pritchard emerged from the rear door of the house, carrying a candlestick; she murmured, "Soir" to January and Gabriel as they passed from the kitchen's lights into the dark side yard that led around to the stilldeeper darkness of the street.

There was no sound around them now save the gulping of the frogs, the incessant whine of mosquitoes, the drum of the cicadas in the trees. He asked softly, "What is it?"

Not the cholera. Please, Blessed Mary Ever-Virgin, not the cholera.

"It's Mama." Gabriel's bright smile, the cheerfulness he'd shown in the presence of the servants, dissolved, showing the fear in his eyes. "The City Guards came and got her. They say she done murder-killed a man."