Dunk had the gift of grave and complete attention, a way of looking at any woman with those curiously long-lashed brown eyes, that, January knew, drew women. Hannibal had it as well.
A surrogate lover? A cicisbeo, such as well-born Italian ladies kept about them, safe but titillating?
And clearly, though he gave every woman present the impression that she was the most important person in his life-or certainly the most important contributor toward the building of his new church-Dunk favored Mrs. Redfern. As she walked with him down the length of the double-parlor toward the door that led to hall and supper room, January saw the minister's gestures take in the new velvet furniture, the carved mantelpiece and the Austrian lusters of the gasolier overhead, congratulating and admonishing, but admonishing with a twinkle in his eyes.
"Now don't let me hear this new wealth has gone to your head, Madame." He had a voice trained to fill a church, and the conclusion of the contredanse "Tartan Plaid"-in which scarcely a handful of couples had participated due to the desertion of all the women-left a space of relative silence in which he could clearly be heard. "Would you believe it, ladies," he turned to take in the dozen or so who clustered at his heels,
"when I came down to the city last summer, at the very landing where I boarded they loaded a matched team of white horses whose cost alone could have provided a dozen beds for those wretched sufferers dying in the alleys of this city during the pestilence? It isn't God who sent the fever to punish mankind, ladies; it is Man who brought it upon himself, with sheer, greedy neglect of his fellow man."
"And I suppose," murmured Hannibal, plucking experimentally at a string, "that his idea of doing God's work was buying those slaves of La Redfern's at four hundred apiece and selling them the following day for nine fifty? She doesn't seem to notice that he scraped her for close to seven thousand dollars, 'doing God's work.' "
"I wonder." January blotted his forehead with a handkerchief. Though the windows to one side of the room stood open-American casements, not the French glazed doors-the place was stuffily hot, and in the hall outside he could hear voices raised:
"Sir, no man speaks ill of His Majesty while there is breath left in my body to defend him!"
Not again.
"You wonder if your services are going to be snubbed again in favor of a nice dose of calomel and citrus juice?"
"No." January turned to the next piece, a Mozart march, the last one of this set. His head ached. He felt slightly sick from the stench of tobacco soaking into wool carpets, from concentrating on the tempo above deCoudreau's constant efforts to speed it up, from remembering Cora and wondering where Rose might have gone. "I wonder what Micajah Dunk was doing at Spanish Bayou the day before Otis Redfern's death."
The men down on the engine deck pulled me up and hid me in the hay bales...
From his mother January had heard all about the white carriage team Laurence Jumon had bought, their cost to the penny, and the names of the other men who'd bid.
The horses at least stood a good chance of surviving the month of September, he thought, as he crossed the Place d'Armes in the predawn silence of bone-eating fog. Which was probably more than could have been said of the thick-crowded gaggle of Irish and Germans coming down from Ohio on the New Brunswick that Wednesday, to make their fortunes in New Orleans.
But opportunities? the Philadelphia guest had saidbroker or banker or one of those blackleg-lawyer-cumslave-dealers who haunted the saloons of Bourbon Street plotting the conquest of Mexico-and had kissed his hand like a connoisseur.
For some.
Micajah Dunk had been at Spanish Bayou on the morning before Otis Redfern died. It was in his honor, not Redfern's, that the ham and apple tarts had been laid on. It fit. Dunk looked like a man who had never missed a meal in his life.
Through the fog, the Cathedral was a blur of white, gradually resolving into twin, pointed towers, round window black as a watching eye. Men's voices chimed from the levee behind him, as they loaded wood onto the steamboat decks: the Amulet, the Missourian, the Baonslick, bound upriver for Natchez and St.
Louis as soon as the fog burned off and it got light enough, with cargoes of scythes and compasses, perfumes and coffee, and slaves for the