in town won't have it any other way."
Lieutenant Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans City Guard widened his eyes in momentary startlement at this piece of journalistic cooperativeness, then shrugged. "Well, I don't suppose it's any news to anybody in town." He tucked the paper away. "I understand yore laid out, Maestro, and gotta be back at the Hospital tonight, but there's sort of a matter I gotta take up with you." He spat again and wiped his bristly chin. "You acquainted with a gal by name of Cora Chouteau?"
He pronounced the French name correctly, something one wouldn't have expected from the raspy, American flatboat-English he spoke, and January tried not to react.
By the sharpening of those rain-pale eyes, he didn't think he succeeded.
"Chouteau?" He shook his head. "The name isn't familiar."
"Little gal so high, 'bout as dark as yore ma." Shaw had made the acquaintance of the redoubtable Widow Levesque last Mardi Gras. "Skinny. Sort of pointy chin they say. Twenty-two, twenty-three year old."
January manufactured furrows of thought in his brow, then shook his head again. "Why are you looking for her? A runaway?"
"In a manner of speakin'." Shaw gently scratched under the breast of his coat. "She did run away, yeah.
But when she left she helped herself to five thousand dollars from the plantation accounts and the mistress's pearl necklace and poisoned the master an' the mistress both for good measure. The mistress'll live, they say. They buried the master Friday."
Chapter Three
"It isn't true!" January thought that Cora would flee from him entirely, but in fact she only turned her back on him sharply and went a few steps, her arms folded over her breasts, hands clasping her skinny shoulders. In the dense noon shadows under the Pellicot kitchen gallery her face was unreadable, like a statue, always supposing some Greek sculptor would have expended bronze on the pointed, wary features of an urchin and a slave. A wave of trembling passed over her, an ague of dread.
January leaned against the rail of the gallery stairs. What was it, he wondered, that she feared he would read in her face?
"What this policeman tell you?" She flung the words back at him over her shoulder.
"Why don't you tell me?"
Her breath sipped in to spit some counter-accusation, but she let it go. She rubbed one hand along her arm, as if trying to get warm.
"Did this Otis Redfern rape you?" January asked.
Cora sniffed. "What's rape?" she demanded. "My... a girl I knew, a friend of mine, she was raped. She was sick after for a long time. I took care of her..." She shook her head. "She fought him, and he hurt her."
The softness of her mouth hardened again. "So you don't fight, and it's not so bad. But if you don't fight, it's not really rape, is it? And what's the sense of fighting anyway? He'd just have one of the men come in and hold me down. That's what he said. He said he'd have Gervase do it. You think I'd kill him over that?"
"There's women who would."
"If every woman killed every master who had her against her will, there'd be dead men lying like a carpet from here to the Moon. And that M'am Redfern, she wouldn't get after him about it. Just made my work harder for me, like I liked being fingered and poked and pestered by that smelly old man. If it wasn't for Gervase I think I'd have gone crazy."
She made a quick gesture with her small hands and faced back around. Beyond the shade of the gallery the sun smote the yard like a brass hammer. The dead-carts had finished their morning rounds, and the voice of a man or a woman in the street, or the creak of a wagon, fell singly into the hush.
"You know how they do," Cora said. "She tried to get me sent out to the fields, he said I was to work in the house. She said if I worked the house I'd do the chambers and the lamps. He said no, I had to do something genteel, like sewing. Me, I'd rather have cut cane than be under the same roof with her all day.
She puts me hemming sheets and then makes me pick out every stitch 'cos the hem's too wide, she says.
And then he says, to me he says, `Don't rub up against her, don't be always givin' her trouble, can't you see what you do'll come back on me?' What I do