away, then turned back. "I'm sorry I didn't say hello. M'sieu Janvier. Mama told me..."
"And your mama was right," said January gently. "A young lady can't let the young white gentlemen see her talking to the musicians. We can talk other times."
"Minou told me you were asking about Mademoiselle Rose," the girl said softly. She stepped closer to him, but must have smelled the blood still on his clothes, for he saw her hesitate and saw the startled movement of her whitegloved hands. Under the rouge she looked quite young and very lost. She had, January remembered, only a few months ago nursed three of her friends through a terrible illness, only to lose them-and a place where she'd been happy-in the end.
"I don't know where Mademoiselle's gone," MarieNeige went on. "She might have changed her name, you know, and gone back to New York where she went to school. She could teach school in New York, couldn't she? It makes me angry, when I hear people talk about Mademoiselle not taking care of us or stealing money."
Behind them in the ballroom, music rose again, violinless and with a fey, swooping rhythm, as if the heart and spine of the music had been taken over by Dionysus instead of Apollo.
"I know you liked her," the girl added, her voice now very quiet. "She liked you. When you were gone, looking after Minou, Mademoiselle Rose was like... like a ship without a sail, she said she felt. I'm sorry you weren't there to help her."
"I'm sorry I wasn't, too."
"I was so happy with her."
Marie-Neige turned, and hurried back to the lamps under the gallery, to the broad double-stair that led up toward her mother and her sisters and all her potential suitors; toward the more-trodden and safer road.
January sighed. "I was, too, p'tit," he said. "I was, too."
Chapter Eighteen
As if to mock January's conviction that he would never work in New Orleans again, the following week brought a note in English from a Mr. Wallace Fraikes, business manager for Mrs. Emily Redfern. Mr.
Fraikes requested his services as a musician at a St. Valentine's Day ball to be given that Friday in Mrs.
Redfern's new home.
"Ruling her out, I suppose, as the source of the libels against you," remarked Hannibal, who was the first person January saw when shown into the tiny and barren chamber where the musicians were given leave to rest for precisely five minutes every other hour through the evening.
"I don't see how she could have been the source of the campaign against me in any case." January spoke quietly, though the footfalls of the polite, livery-clad majordomo were fading down the two flights of rear stairs up which January had been shown. The room lay at the back of the enormous yellow house in the American faubourg, overlooking the yard.
"Madame Redfern left town before the campaign against me started." The penitential chamber had probably been designed for a governess, its wallpaper cheap and faded, its minuscule pine table chipped and battered. A shabby screen concealed a chamber pot. From the single tiny window January could just see down into the yard, where household slaves carried dishes across from the kitchen building: he counted two men, two women, and a young boy. The males all wore what looked like new livery.
"Never underestimate the power of the truly vindictive. I had a London aunt-Lady Elliswrode, her name was-who could slaughter, joint, dress, and smoke a repu tation in a week from a hundred miles away.
She had a truly vicious turn of phrase, and you could float a ship of the line in her inkwell. I thought you said La Redfern was destitute."
"She was." January poured a little of the liquid from the pottery jug on the table. It was beer-watered.
There was bread, thin as a communion wafer and nearly as flavorless. "Although she can't have been that destitute," he added thoughtfully, "if she was willing to whistle a pearl necklace and a hundred and ninety dollars down the wind."
"And you're sure that was her necklace?"
"What other one would Cora have?"
A man came into the yard through the tradesman's gate, and spoke to the majordomo who came out to meet him. January winced. "Wonderful. It's our privilege to have Phiiippe deCoudreau and his clarionet confusing people all evening about what tune we're playing. Who do we get on viol-Pylade Vassage?
The Deaf Fiddler of the Faubourg Tr?m?"
"Don't laugh." Hannibal took a careful swig of opium from one hip-flask and followed it with a