quiet when you come and go, and not draw attention to this house."
"Ben, you really have to be more careful," cautioned Dominique, a few nights later, when both were invited to Olympe's house for dinner. "Rumors get around so terribly. You can't insult someone like Delphine Lalaurie! Why, she's seen to it that crazy man Montreuil has nearly been run out of business, for spreading those horrid lies about her keeping slaves chained in her attic."
"Those rumors were around before she lived next to Montreuil." Olympe laid down her spoon and regarded her younger sister with boneyard eyes. "I heard things like that when she still lived over near the bank on Rue Royale."
"That's silly," protested Dominique. "Ben's been in the house, haven't you, Ben? Did you see any slaves chained up?"
"I doubt she'd give her daughters' piano teacher a tour of the dungeon." January ate a forkful of Olympe's excellent grillades. Dominique hadn't invited him to her house, as was her usual wont, since his return from Grand Isle. Coincidence? he wondered. Or an overwhelming dread that news of his unhallowed presence might somehow reach Henri? Or, God forbid, Henri's mother? "The housemaid I saw looked all right."
"So she's not keeping them chained up in an attic, for the Lord's sake!" Dominique gestured impatiently.
Small pendant diamonds flashed in her ears. "Monsieur Montreuil's just insane, and an opium-eater too, I've heard. I mean, Madame Lalaurie did manumit old Davince-"
"Who then had to leave the state," pointed out Olympe. "Mighty convenient for her-as it is for everyone who frees a person who's lived in their house-and knows their affairs. And she does have her favorites."
"Well, so does everyone. Besides, Henri eats over there all the time, and he's seen her servants. Every white person in town knows that's a lie." Dominique shrugged, and picked at her food, clearly uncomfortable. At the far end of the table the children, from Zizi-Marie to the baby, were following this discussion with interest. "You just hate her because Mamzelle Marie hates her. Blacks are always complaining that their white folks don't feed them. Goodness knows Bella always is, about Mama, and she's certainly not about to die of starvation."
January held his peace. He'd seen his mother count and weigh not only leftover meat so that her cook would be accountable for it, but the burnt stumps of household candles. It was true, he knew, that for every servant who was kept to rice and beans, there was another who made a fair living off selling surplus food and pocketing the profit.
But his mind returned to the shadowed figure in the music-room doorway, to the voice cold as struck gold. "Begin again. Begin again. Begin again. "
"What do you think of her?" he asked.
"I think," said Paul Corbier, glancing along the table at the four pairs of voracious eyes consuming the conversation as if it were a rare and ravishing dessert, "that little pitchers have big ears."
Olympe's face softened, like a black Benin sculpture melting into a thousand smiling wrinkles. "So they do." But the seeress, the Pythoness, remained in her eyes as they met January's again. "Truth usually lies somewhere in the middle," she said. "But I think Madame Lalaurie's one to stay away from."
Walking back along the Rue Burgundy after depositing Minou at her door-and being asked inside for a placatory cup of coffee January felt again the stirring of weary anger, the bitter irony that while his lies or alleged lies were denounced, hers were overlooked, even by his own family. He felt, too, a backtaste of disappointment in his mouth, a grief-when he analyzed it-that stemmed from realizing that the woman who labored so selflessly among the horrors of the fever season was not, in fact, a good person. He had wanted very much to know that there was good in the world.
But what was good? Those whose lives she saved or whose ends she had made more comfortable didn't care whether Madame Lalaurie kept her slaves chained up or ruled her daughters with an iron hand.
They didn't care that the domineering nature that so completely discounted danger of the plague would also react with single-minded venom against what it perceived as betrayal. Betrayal being, reflected January wryly, anything or anyone that didn't accept Delphine Lalaurie's arrangements of how the world should be.
It came to him then-and with no great feeling of surprise or discovery-that it wasn't beyond the bounds of possibility that Cora had, in fact, not left Madame Lalaurie's house