January spoke to him in his jail cell. "Bring 'em in and get 'em out, that was Liam's way, and didn't we just have our hands full keepin' 'em from gettin' sick while they was there. I do recall as we lost two or three." And he shrugged. January wrote, too, over Shaw's signature when Shaw was too taken up with his other duties to have time; and kept writing, to newspapers, to clergy, to anyone who might know anything. It was early established that no New Orleans dealer had purchased slaves from Roarke- "None who'll admit of it, anyways," remarked Shaw sourly. He did not hear from Rose.
It was a bad winter for January. Whether due to loss of income during the fever season or to the general slump in sugar prices, many of his pupils' parents elected not to send their children to piano lessons when they returned to town. "It isn't anything personal, you understand, Monsieur Janvier." Lettice Sarasse fanned herself with a delicate circle of stiffened yellow silk. "Only times are a little difficult now, you understand."
"I understand." The class he held in his mother's parlor shrank to two-Catherine Clisson's eight-year-old daughter, Isabel, and little Narcisse Brize-and he lost every one of his white pupils. "Nothing to do with your teaching, M'sieu," explained Madame Lalaurie, slender and queenly in the hot sunlight of her parlor, Bastien in his jam-colored uniform lingering behind her in the door. "It's just that I've come to the conclusion that the lessons aren't doing the girls any good. But I shall certainly recommend you to those of my friends who seek instruction for their children, and to my good Monsieur Huny at the Opera."
But November turned to December, and Christmas drew on, and there was little money for coffee at the market or to attend the Opera himself. It was Hannibal, who had gone back to his make-and-scrape existence with the return of Livia Levesque and her cook to New Orleans on the fifteenth of October, who first suggested that there might be something more to the matter than simply "hard times." "You haven't actually been going around saying you're going back to medicine, have you?" he asked, perched on Livia's sofa rosining the bow of his violin after January's two pupils had departed one afternoon. "I had the impression you didn't think you'd do well at it, but if Ker or one of the beaux sabreurs of the local medical community decided to become your patron..."
"Ker couldn't do a thing for me." Puzzled, January turned from the piano keys. "He said I was welcome to work at Charity anytime, but I know what that work pays a junior surgeon. The only offer I had," he added wryly, "was from Roarke, as a means of getting me into the clinic to murder. Who said I was going back to medicine?"
"Froissart." Hannibal named the manager of the Orleans Ballroom, and tightened a peg. Beside him on the sofa, Les Mesdames-Livia's two stout, butter-colored cats -slept with their paws over their noses just as if they hadn't finished their daily round of hissing and posturing at one another fifteen minutes ago. The December afternoon was a misty one and the slow chilling of the light made January tired and depressed, a holdover from childhood memories of the grinding season. "I asked him why he'd hired Rich Maissie to play the St. Stephen's Day ball next week, instead of you."
"Maissie?" January had read of the ball in the newspapers, and had been expecting a note from Leon Froissart any day. He'd only thought the fussy little Parisian late with his arrangements.
"Well, he hemmed and hawed and wouldn't look me in the eye and said something about that he'd heard you'd gone back to medicine and weren't playing anymore, and anyway he'd already spoken to Maissie about the rest of the season..."
"The rest of the season?" Nobody contracted, save by the night.
The white man's dark eyes met his, worried and questioning. January had the odd feeling of having been punched beneath the sternum; the sense of seeing the first sores of something incurable on his own skin.
"No," he said slowly. "No, I haven't spoken to him at all." It was childish to feel hurt; to remember the quadroon boys calling him sambo from a safe distance away.
"I thought it was strange, myself." Hannibal angled his fiddle a little toward the glass panes of the door.
January got to his feet, lit a spill from the fireplace,