straight colorless lashes, not speculative now, but only waiting.
Waiting for what he would say.
He didn't know what he was going to say until the words came out. "I can't."
Shaw neither replied nor moved.
The words stuck in his throat, as if he were trying to dislodge individual lumps of broken stone with every syllable.
"I may make my living as a piano player, but I did take an oath. And that oath says, `Do no harm.' I can't..." He paused, oddly aware of his own breath in his lungs: Gabriel and Zizi-Marie going to help the Perrets pack; the woman Nanie searching through the charity ward, night after night. Someone saying, They just bought their freedom.
Cora walking away into the darkness of Rue de l'Hopital.
The weather was cooling; by the feel of the evening air there would be frost that night. Fever season was done. People would be coming back to town.
And there would be holes, in the fabric of people's lives.
There were men and women, confused, terrified, somewhere in the frontier territories of Missouri or the west of Georgia, begging and insisting they were free to men who did not speak their language, whose reply to their clumsy pleas would be a laugh and a blow. Men and women who were going to spend the rest of their lives at backbreaking agricultural work. The second man who kidnapped me was the local magistrate... I don't go up there no more. Men and women who were going to die of pneumonia and malnutrition and exhaustion in thin-walled shacks like the one in which he'd slept at Spanish Bayou less than a week ago.
He closed his eyes. Do no harm.
The anger pounded in his head like the hammer of a migraine. "I can't."
"Just thought I'd ask."
Get Soublet.
He closed his mouth hard on the words. If you won't do it, don't tell him who will. "Is Roarke really poorly?"
Shaw nodded. "Happens, in jail. Likely it's the food. I'll find someone."
For some reason January remembered Mamzelle Marie, passing through the big downstairs room of the Cabildo, cloak flickering like a conjure of invisibility around her. Her eyes touching his.
She'd set the man up for this. Without knowing how he knew, he knew.
He rested his forehead on his fist, and listened to Shaw's footfalls, barely audible, retreat across the yard and blend with the waking noises of the street.
Chapter Seventeen
Only one case of the cholera was brought into Charity Hospital that night. Soublet did not appear at all, and neither Emil Barnard nor Mamzelle Marie came in, nor were they needed. There was frost on the ground in the morning. At six, January made his way to St. Anthony's Chapel, to make his confession and hear early Mass. He prayed for guidance, and for Rose Vitrac's safety, wherever she was. When he came out the air was crisp, stinking of the usual city stink of sewage but unfouled by the smudges of the plague fires. Carriages jingled by, coachmen saluting with their whips to friends on the banquette, men and women within nodding or touching their hats. A child dodged around him, clutching her doll. Street-vendors cried gingerbread and umbrellas and chairs to mend.
The following Sunday, after Mass, he met Shaw by chance in the Place d'Armes. The policeman informed him laconically that Dr. Soublet had been called to the Cabildo. After being bled eight times in two days and dosed with "heroic" quantities of salts of mercury and turpentine, Liam Roarke had died in his cell.
Of those men and women who had been stolen from their homes, or dragged off the banquettes on their way to their friends' houses or to doctors' late in the night, nothing further was ever heard. Through October and November, and on into the fogs and bonfires of Christmastime, Abishag Shaw made inquiries, patiently writing to slave dealers in Natchez, in St. Louis, in Jackson, none of whom, of course, knew anything about the Perrets, Robois Roque, or any of the other dozen or half-dozen or score or however many it had been. Hog-Nose Billy, when he confessed to kidnapping people off the street as a sideline during H?lier's illness, didn't know how many it was, as he'd been more or less drunk half the time. (It serves me right, H?lier had said, giggling, gesturing around him at the opium-dazed patients of Soublet's clinic-and indeed, thought January, it did.) Nor had the drunken Dr. Furness any better idea. "Hell, we didn't keep track or nuthin'," he said, when Shaw and