her. Hard not to picture the men he'd seen in the darkness of the Bayou step from an alleyway in front of her-then behind her as she turned in panic-clubs and rope in hand.
Not Rose, he thought, as he had prayed daily for months now. Not Rose.
Shouts cracked like gunshots from the vestibule, breaking the music's flow. "You, sir, are a lying lackey of an Orleanniste whoreson!"
"Better the lackey of true kings than a half-caste Radical murderer!"
January broke off his playing as a woman screamed. Beside him, Hannibal murmured resignedly, "Here we go again."
Since everyone in the ballroom was rushing to the vestibule doors, the musicians rose and followed, at a more leisurely pace, Hannibal carefully stowing his violin on top of the piano and scooping up a bottle of champagne from the buffet table in passing. "Brinvilliers and DuPage, over that Conti Street brickyard lawsuit?" he guessed, naming two lawyers who, not content with an enlivening exchange of personalities in court ten days ago, had continued their insults of one another's ancestry, ethics, and personal habits in the New Orleans Bee's ever-libelous letter columns. January's mother read them aloud over breakfast, with obvious relish-there was never any shortage of such altercations in the press, and they almost invariably ended in violence.
The fight in progress in the upstairs vestibule was hardly the first-or the thousandth-such event January had witnessed in two-thirds of a lifetime playing at New Orleans public entertainments. Both men were armed with small swords-fatally, the employees of the ballroom had hesitated to confiscate weapons that were part of their fancy-dress costumes-and the taller lawyer, younger and fiercely mustachioed, with a Romantic's crop of long black hair, was lunging and striking at the shorter, a militarylooking little man in more-or-less Turkish garb who'd already taken a cut on his temple and was bleeding freely. The shorter man was shouting, "Cur! Coward! Having refused to meet me like a gentleman...!"
"Refused! When you set your thugs to ambush me and prevent me from reducing your carcass to the bleeding hash God intended that I should?"
"Brinvilliers used that sentence already in his letter about DuPage to the Bee last week," remarked Hannibal, worming his way to the forefront and taking a long pull at the champagne from the neck of the bottle.
"I thought it sounded familiar."
"Messieurs! Messieurs!" Froissart was bleating and circling but kept a wary distance from the fray.
The tall Brinvilliers lunged in in a whirl of lace collar and bucket-top boots. But his shorter opponent sidestepped, knocking the blade on the forte so that it spun from Brinvilliers' hand. Nothing discomposed, Brinvilliers seized the nearest chair and heaved it at DuPage, impaling the cushion and breaking DuPage's blade. With the older man thrust back and off balance, the taller proceeded to kick and bludgeon him when he fell to the floor. Everyone in the vestibule was shouting. A stout American in truly appalling Indian buckskins, whom January recognized as the banker Hubert Granville, lunged in to try to drag Brinvilliers off. He was himself seized by two of, presumably, the taller lawyer's friends; a second fight erupted, all participants of which staggered too far back and fell down the stairs, turkey feathers flying in all directions. Brinvilliers half-turned his head to see what the commotion might be; and DuPage lunged up from the floor, a knife every bit as long and deadly as any Kaintuck's in his hand.
Someone yelled a warning, which was the only reason Brinvilliers wasn't gutted. As it was, he took the blade in the left chest; and amid curses, screams, and fountains of arterial blood, the combatants were finally separated, all the women scurrying back, clutching at their skirts.
January was already striding forward, pulling his handkerchief from his pocket and calling out,
"Handkerchiefs-quickly-anything..."
Hannibal, with surprising speed considering the amount of alcohol he had consumed, thrust at least two of the buffet towels into his hands; January wadded them into a pad and pressed them hard on Brinvilliers' chest. "Knife," he said. "Scissors, anything..."
A lady's lace-gloved hand passed a pair of reticulesized German scissors over his shoulder. Hannibal was kneeling beside him. "Hold this," January told him. The towels were already a warm crimson wad under his hands. "I'll cut away the shirt..."
Someone seized his shoulder, thrust him roughly aside. "If you please, sir...!" It was Emil Barnard.
Emil Barnard in the new black swallowtail coat and tall hat of a prosperous doctor. Emil Barnard with a fourguinea pearl stickpin in his cravat and expensively scented macassar oil