brother and trundled her books down to her, load after load of them in the hot bright April sun.
They bought jambalaya from the woman who sold it off a cart for a picayune a plate and ate it sitting on the steps up to the gallery outside Rose's room, drank lemonade, and devoured Mexican mangoes bought on the wharf, like three children with the juice running down their chins. The local streetwalkers called greetings to Hannibal on their way down to the wharves-he knew them all by name-and January played the guitar, and Hannibal the fiddle, by the light of a couple of tallow candles far into the warm spring darkness.
"Monsieur Lyons, who runs the bookshop on the Rue Esplanade, is paying me two dollars a volume to translate Acschylus and Euripides," said Rose, leaning back against the gallery post and setting aside her plate. "This place is fifty cents a week; he says there'll be more. And Monsieur Damas on Rue Marigny said he'd pay me a little to help him read the boys' Greek and Latin-he runs the school at the corner of the Avenue of Good Children. And more will come."
Another boarder came up the outside stairs, a young man in clothing stiff with smeared plaster; he smiled at her as he passed and said, "Good evening, Madame Trevigne."
January raised his eyebrows; Rose averted her face a little, said, "Don't say it. I know. I should have more courage but... I'm still tender, as if I've had a bruising."
"I wasn't going to say anything," said January. "I just wondered how you came by papers in another name."
"You wound me," Hannibal lowered his violin from his chin and coughed heavily. "You cut me to the quick. I'd have had our Glauk-Opis"-Rose slapped at him, laughing, at being called by the goddess Athene's appellation-"in town sooner if those last few trading-boats to Grande Isle had been quicker, her letter to me asking for papers, and my papers, distinguishable only by their superior spelling from the illiterate scrawls turned out by city authorities for respectable free persons of color, going back the other way."
January laughed, too, and leaned back against the other post, his arm looped over the waist of the old guitar. He wondered how long it would be before he'd have to change his name, wondered whether he would be able to work in New Orleans again. Wondered what else might be in store for him, by way of dirty tricks from Madame Lalaurie and her friends...
A week later he saw her, as he walked down Rue de fHopital toward the market: the black-lacquered carriage drawn up before the great door on Rue Royale, the matched black horses tossing their silkily groomed manes. Bastien was helping her to the banquette, her gown of plum-colored taffeta a somber note against the bright heat of the spring afternoon. Beautiful and flawless, like a queen.
On impulse, January leapt over the gutter and crossed the mud of the street. "Madame..."
Bastien, at the top of the steps already, with the door open for her, stopped and opened his mouth to make some haughty dismissal, but Madame Lalaurie's face warmed with a smile. "M'sieu Janvier." She held out her hand, her friendliness as gracious as a bright-lit window seen through rain. "It has been a long time."
"Too long." January bowed, taken aback as the image of her shadow in the corridor, of Mademoiselle Pauline's haunted eyes and the dim shape of men with clubs and swords, melted away, suddenly ridiculous, as fevered as Montreuil's dreams. He found himself saying, "I trust the young ladies are well?" as if Emil Barnard had never written all those letters. As if Cora had never disappeared.
"Quite well, thank you." Behind her, Bastien still stood in the half-open door. Through it January could see a corner of a hall table, cypress wood waxed to a mirror shine, a dark-covered book and a pair of mended gloves. "And all is well with you?"
So caught was he by that generous charm, that January almost said, Yes, perfectly well thank you... In a way, it was as if she would not permit any answer but that. As if no other possible answer existed in the world she created.
Instead he said, his eyes properly cast down, "In fact it isn't, Madame." It cost him an effort to speak the words. "And if you've read the letter columns of the newspapers you would know something of it."