light from inside could fall on it, peering with her shortsighted eyes.
" `Intolerable insult offered to a lady of quality.. '? What lady of quality? `Spread lies and calumny...'?
This person"-she glanced at the bottom of the letter-"This Dr. Barnard has his nerve, talking of lies and calumny. What is this?"
"This," said January, "is the reason the trip down here left me penniless-and in debt to Hannibal, which has to be the greatest joke of the decade. I have exactly two pupils left and have barely worked all winter. It's the same person," he said, "spreading the rumors. I know it."
She sank down in her chair with a whisper of heavy skirts. Like countrywomen or servants, she had dispensed with the multiple petticoats of fashionable wear. The dark, thick twill, dusty from the garden's earth, became her. In the open neck of her countrywoman's waist a small gold cross glinted, fire on the dusky skin.
"Emil Barnard," she said. "That's a French name."
"He's a Thompsonian charlatan who worked around the Charity Hospital during the epidemic," said January. "By his accent he's from Pau or the Languedoc, coincidentally the same part of France Nicolas Lalaurie comes from. Lalaurie's recently taken him on as a partner."
"I don't..." Rose left her sentence unfinished, sat for a time running the folded paper through her fingers, as he'd seen her run the ribbons with which she'd tied back the sick girls' hair. Then her eyes met his.
January slowly shook his head.
"Placide Forstall is Delphine Lalaurie's son-in-law, you see," Rose went on, speaking as if to herself, trying to fit pieces together. Trying to align the woman whose reputation she'd so furiously defended with the one who would so casually and so thoroughly destroy all she, Rose, had worked to create.
"D'Aunoy's her cousin. Jean Blanque was on the board of the Louisiana State Bank; Madame knew everyone there. That's how she influenced them to lend me the money to start the school. It has to be her.
But I don't understand why."
"I'm only guessing," said January. The shadow in the doorway returned to him again, the voice like a golden whip, the silvery rustle of petticoats. The absolute fear in Pauline Blanque's eyes. "And I can't know, not knowing Madame. I'm beginning to wonder if anyone really knows her."
He frowned, as the woman's face came back to him,the desperate, yearning expression in her beautiful eyes as she sponged the bodies of the dying. "I think now that Cora must have tried to get Gervase to run away with her. And either Madame overheard them, or quite possibly Gervase actually made the attempt to leave, later that night or the following day. I never actually saw Gervase; Madame sent him out of town very soon thereafter. But I'm almost certain she'd see the attempt as betrayal, after all she did, for whatever reasons of her own, to make things easy for Cora. And that she would not forgive."
In the silence, the boom of the surf sounded very loud.
"I can't believe that she'd be that vindictive." Rose's hand sketched a gesture of denial in the air, but turned, folding in on itself with the refusal only half made. Her profile was only a shape of darkness now against the fading light. "To do this to me only for harboring Cora, to you for helping her..."
"I think it made it worse," said January. "She helped you, and you conspired to betray her, too."
"How would she know? I can't imagine her eavesdropping. But, of course, Bastien would have. Or even Dr. Lalaurie. I never liked him." She shivered. "He crept so, and he was always asking if he could do `tests' on the girls. He was the one who invented those postural contraptions I showed you. I never understood how a woman of her-her excellence-could love a man so wormy."
"One thing I've learned," January said with a smile, "love is beyond comprehension. Anyone can love anyone. It's like the cholera."
Rose laughed, spectacles flashing in the reflected lampIiKht. "Very like the cholera," she agreed, and he heard the jest in her voice, and laughed too, at himself, and the ridiculousness of his love.
"But just saying that," said Rose at length, "makes me realize: it's true. I don't know that much about Madame Lalaurie. She might be an habitual eavesdropper, for all I know. I was thinking, `She isn't a vindictive woman,' but I don't know that. I've never seen her be vindictive. I don't want a woman I've looked up to, as I've looked