was Reverend Dunk and his little court of females, but he realized in the next moment that the man was enormous and powerful and black.
Bronze John the dead-cart man. January could see only the women's backs, but he saw that one of them walked like a jockey or a dancer, her witch-black hair unbound to her hips, and the other wore a neat white tignon, a simple green wool skirt. The women held hands, like sisters or friends. He cried out their names, and the shock of trying to do so, trying to run to catch up with them, was like falling.
It was fully light. Someone was knocking at the door. January stumbled across and opened the shutters.
"I purely hate to be always comin' up on you this way." Abishag Shaw shoved aside his disreputable hat to finger-comb his long hair. His thin, rather creaky tenor was carefully neutral. "But I got orders to put you under arrest."
"Arrest?" January glanced past him toward the house. The rear door was shuttered fast. If his mother knew of Shaw's presence, which she surely must, she was having nothing to do with it.
All he could think of was Mrs. Redfern. "Arrest for what?"
Shaw spit a line of tobacco to the gallery boards by his feet. "Murder."
Chapter Nineteen
"This is ridiculous." Judge J. F. Canonge slapped the warrant on his desk. "Who swore this out? Who's behind this?"
January opened his mouth to remark that he had wondered about that himself, but decided against it. He folded his manacled hands and forced himself to look at the floor until he had his face under control.
He knew he should be afraid, but all he felt was the trapped, blind rage of a baited bull and an overwhelming desire to break somebody's neck.
"Louis Brinvilliers is the brother of Jean Brinvilliers," said Shaw, in his mild voice, "who-"
"I know who Jean Brinvilliers was," snapped Canonge. His craggy face was that of a man who has packed life with everything that it will hold, in great careless handfuls: burnt brown, deep-lined, dark eyes impatient and intolerant of fools. There was a story that he'd once sworn out a warrant on all five State Supreme Court Justices rather than change his conduct of a case. Looking at him now January believed it. The Judge's English was pure as an upper-class Londoner's, his deep voice wrought gold. "The whole concept of a medical man's being held liable for a patient's death in these circumstances is absurd. That's like hanging me along with a thief if I failed to get him acquitted."
It was dark outside. Saturday night;' Canonge was probably the only justice of the Criminal Court who'd have come in late rather than let a man spend the night in a cell, waiting for the Recorders' Court to reopen. With the part of him that wasn't seething with rage January felt grateful. The day had been a profoundly awful one.
Canonge turned the warrant over, looking for signatures. "Whose idea was this? Louis Brinvilliers doesn't have the brains to read a contract. Jonchere signed the warrant." He glared across at January, eyes piercing under graying brows. "You run yourself foul of one of Brinvilliers's friends, boy?"
"I don't know," answered January, and remembered to add, "sir." His knuckles smarted from an altercation with another prisoner-Tuesday would be Mardi Gras and every drunken keelboat hand, every argumentative Napoleoniste, every filibuster in the city, it seemed, had been in the jail cheek-by-jowl and looking for a fight. January's head ached from the constant thump and howl of brass bands and revelers in the street, and from the yammering of a madman in the cell next door. One of the men in his own cell had been far gone in delirium tremens. January felt like he'd never be clean again.
"I wouldn't know Jean Brinvilliers from President Jackson, sir. He was bleeding, he needed a doctor. I was a surgeon for six years at the Hotel Dieu in Paris. Next time I see a man bleeding-". He bit the words off. One had to be careful with whites.
The first time he'd been locked in the Cabildo, almost exactly a year ago, he had been consumed by fear that he'd be sold into slavery by venal officials or simply from care lessness. Now he was sufficiently sure of his own position in the free colored community-and sufficiently confident that people, including Lieutenant Shaw, would vouch for him as a free man-that he had not suffered the same sleepless anxiety