saying yes. Afterward, I mean. That's when she became so ill."
January frowned. "You mean as a ruse? To get him to go away?"
"No." Madame Vitrac took back the rush basket from him with a brief smile of thanks as they reached the steps of the house. "I mean she went into the woods and ate nightshade. Cora and my mother were the ones who found her. I don't know, but I think that Cora-and my mother-were the ones who talked Papa Vitrac into giving her the money to go to New York to school."
Rose herself never spoke of the matter, and in her eyes January could see-or thought he could see-that whatever had happened in this place, she had made peace of a kind with it, and was content to be here.
They spoke of music, and the Opera in Paris and Rome; of Pakenham's invasion and the Chalmette battle; of steam engines and bombs and mummies and nesting birds. They built a fire of driftwood, bought oysters from the fisher-boys and ate them raw with the juice of limes, while the waves curled on the sand and a line of brown pelicans emerged silent as ghosts from the mists and, as silent, vanished.
They spoke of the epidemic, and of why the fever might come in the summertimes and not the winters, and why not every summer; of why sometimes cures seemed to work-even onions under the bed-and why sometimes they did not; of the white ghost-crabs that scurried in the retreating scrum of the surf, and of pirate treasure and hurricanes. "I've watched the winds and the clouds here," said Rose, "and the winds and air in the marsh. It feels different there, but I can't say why it's different, what is different about it. There has to be some way of identifying what it is. Everyone talks about the miasma of sickness, but it's only a guess, you know. There has to be a way of making it visible, like a chemical stain turning the color of water."
"Will you come back?" he asked her at last, when on the second evening it grew too dark and too damp to sit on the gallery longer. "This will blow past, like a hurricane. It always does."
"And like a hurricane," said Rose softly, "it will leave wreckage, and that long tedious season of rebuilding. But you're right," she added. "I can't stay here forever, with nothing to read but newspapers a year old, and no one but Alice to speak to. I don't know." She shook her head, and reached out, very quickly, to touch his hand in parting for the night. "I don't know."
Chapter Twenty-One
January returned to New Orleans on the twenty-eighth of February, to find that Emil Barnard-Doctor Emil Barnard-had not been idle in his absence. Six other letters had been written to the Bee, mentioning that it was the gracious and charitable Delphine Lalaurie whom January had insulted and further stating that he was known to have assisted in the escape of a number of slaves.
"Really, Ben, this is getting intolerable," pronounced his mother, the day of his return. She'd emerged from the back door of the house only minutes after he slipped from the passageway and crossed the yard, too exhausted and depressed to go in and speak to her first. Lying on his bed, he heard the light sharp tap of her shoe-heels on the steps, and closed his eyes in dread. She'd been saving all the newspapers for the preceding nine days and placed them on the end of the bed. "And don't lie on your bed with your shoes on," Livia continued. "I swear, when Bernadette Metoyer came over to tea the day before yesterday I didn't know what to say. Is it true what Agnes Pellicot tells me, that you were carrying on an affair with that Vitrac, that starved poor Marie-Neige nearly to death?"
"Mama," said January, without opening his eyes, "you need only to look at Marie-Niege to know that no one starved her nearly to death."
"Ben, that is a most unkind and unfeeling thing to say." It was the kind of thing she said all the time. "I'm sorry, Mama."
"You're my son." He imagined he could hear the admission stick in her throat. "And you will always have a home with me, even if you can't pay me the rent you owe me right now. I'll give you another few weeks on that. But I will have to ask you to be