need any such melodramatic expedient of a blow over the head and unceremonious burial in the nearest well. A five-dollar ticket on the next New York packet would do the trick as well. Better, in fact.
She'd have taken her books.
A vision of hope, of Rose teaching at some comfortable girls' school in New York, somewhere that would properly value her erudition, crumbled like a sugar palace in rain. The image of Rose sharpening a quill in the bar of cold pale New York sunlight...
Monsieur Janvier, I take pen in hand at last... Nothing can come between true friends.
But according to Miss Claire, Rose never went to Redfern's at all.
She has no one in New York. No one anywhere. At least when my life fell to pieces in my hand I could come home. I could come here.
Even in defeat, Rose Vitrac had a kind of clear, cool courage that could go to an unfamiliar city and start anew.
But she had no money to get there. If she hadn't gotten passage-money from La Redfern...
Memory touched him as he walked on toward the brick-arcaded shadows of the market, the tall iron-crowned towers of the steamboat stacks: the memory of a dream, of shadows on a hallway wall. A tall man's and a tiny, slender girl's. You're her father, the girl was saying. You're her father...
Rose had never spoken of her home.
But once, on their first meeting, Cora had.
It was three days' voyage to Grand Isle in the Barataria country. Froissart having canceled January's engagement to play at the Orleans Ballroom's Mardi Gras Ball, January would have left that day, had any boat been departing on the eve of the feast. As it was, he fumed and fretted and cursed the revelers who jammed every street and filled the endless night hours with riot. The moment "Ite missa est" was out of the priest's mouth at the first Ash Wednesday Mass, January was out the Cathedral door and on his way to the levee.
Natchez Jim followed the still, green reaches of Bayou Dauphine to Lake Catahouatehe, motionless in fringes of cypress and reed, rowing or poling where there wasn't wind to fill the lugger's sail. January, helping on the oars or leaning on the long oak poles, watched the few houses on the banks grow more primitive with distance from the city, until they were little more than a couple of post-and-daub rooms circled by a gallery, presiding over a few arpents of indigo or rice. Now and then they'd pass the shack of a trapper or fisherman, perched on sandbars and chenieres but even these grew far between. They both slept with knives and pistols beneath the wadded-up jackets that served them for pillows, and never at the same time, for the Barataria had been the sole province of slave smugglers and outlaws until very recently. There was no telling who or what might lurk in the spiderweb mazes of bayou and marsh. Still, the green-gray aisles of water hickory and tupelo, bald cypress and palmetto were hushed, save for the slap of the water on the lugger's sides. Wind murmured among the endless reeds, and once, somewhere far off, they heard the rattle of African drums.
From Catahouatehe they entered Lake Salvator, and after that the world known as the prairie tremblant, the quaking lands: salt marsh, reeds, birds, February sky. Natchez Jim pointed out the salt grass that would tell a man where solid ground lay, the cattails that spoke of mud too soft to carry weight: "Even those who are born in these lands sometimes make mistakes about the walking prairie and are never seen again." An alligator slid down the trunk of a dying cypress, gray as the fading roots left out in sun and wind.
They came ashore on Grand Isle in midmorning, at a sort of settlement of oyster fishers and trappers on the landward side of the island. The night's fog still hung on, cottony and tasting of salt. The silence that had seemed menacing in the bayou country was calming here. Though the world slept its winter sleep still, all was lush with green.
"I'll be here two days, maybe three." Natchez Jim unshipped the packages he'd brought from town, tossed them on the crude plank wharf calico, needles, coffee, a little nest of iron pans. Black-eyed women, swart-skinned men emerged from the straggle of huts and cottages among the stands of palmetto and Spanish dagger, and hastened down the path. Children darted around them like birds.