and touched it to the branches of tallow work-candles on the piano, the table, the sconces on the wall. His mother would fuss-it was barely four-but the room was genuinely dark. "And I thought he was lying, but I couldn't imagine why. Still can't."
"Could you ask around?" said January worriedly, shaking out the spill. "Find out?" He'd been back in New Orleans now exactly thirteen months. It had been his im pression that balls and parties began earlier than Christmastime, at least among the town dwellers, though the big families didn't come in from the plantations until after the grinding was done. But with no notes or requests coming in he'd thought that perhaps the fever-or maybe the summer's "hard times"-had affected the Creoles' enthusiasm for holding dances whenever and wherever they could.
But Uncle Bichet, who played the violoncello, shook his head when January had asked him about the matter in the shadowy vaults of the market one afternoon. "I thought you managed to make some remark about Ma'am Soniat that got repeated back to her, that she didn't hire you for her little ball last week-either your or that mama of yours." The old man shook his head again and dusted the powdered sugar of a beignet from his fingers.
"You know you got to be careful, Ben." Bichet eased himself back on the brick of the bench where he sat. "These Creole ladies, they take against a man, they tell all their friends. You not talkin' out of turn, since you came back from Paris, are you?"
"I didn't think Creole ladies even knew one musician from the next," replied January bitterly. "Let alone paid attention to what we say-and no, I haven't had any particular opinion about Solange Soniat. And my mother slanders everyone in town, and I've never been blackballed because of it. Have times changed that much?"
"Ben," sighed the old man, "times changin' now so that I don't know what to expect." Steamboats whistled sadly, invisible through fog gritty with soot and thick with the burnt-sweet smell of a thousand sugar vats. "All I know is you wasn't playing at the Soniats' last week, or the Bringiers' Wednesday, and that Richard Maissie that can't find his way through a country dance with a compass and a Chickasaw guide just been hired to play the Opera when they open with Euryanthe next month. You got somebody real mad, and that's for sure."
Xavier Peralta? January wondered. It was true that he'd run afoul of that haughty old planter last winter, when it had appeared that either he or the Peralta's son was going to hang for the murder of an octoroon beauty at a ball. But in clearing himself, he had cleared Peralta's son as well; and though at one point Peralta had attempted to kidnap him and put him on a boat out of the country, he'd gotten the impression that the planter now considered the matter closed.
In any case a few enquiries among the market-women satisfied him that Peralta pc're was still on his chief plantation at Alhambra, where he had been since May. And certainly a man who owned five plantations and nearly four hundred slaves had better things to think about at grinding time than scuppering the career of a piano player.
But whoever had declared himself-or herself-his enemy, thought January, he or she was almost certainly white. He was asked to play at the Blue Ribbon Balls at the Orleans Ballroom-not so frequently as last winter, to be sure-and Monsieur Froissart showed no embarrassment in dealing with him on those terms.
Nor did the ballroom manager make mention of passing him over for the St. Stephen's Day subscription dance. January, hoping the matter would be forgotten, said nothing.
Still, after speaking to Uncle Bichet he began to feel uneasy whenever he passed through the brick carriageway into the courtyard behind the ballroom building, or climbed the service stairs to the ballroom itself above the gambling halls on the lower floor. From childhood he'd never liked the sense of people talking of him behind his back.
At a Mardi Gras Ball early in February he asked Dominique about it, Dominique masked and radiant in a rose silk Court-dress of sixty years ago: panniered, powdered, and patched, clinging close to Henri's side. Henri for his part did not speak to January or acknowledge that anything had ever passed between them in that little cottage in Milneburgh: but that was only the custom of the country. It wasn't done to admit