comes back on him?"
She drew another breath, anger narrowing her dark eyes. "I never killed him. I ran away. I had to run away. It's her that was out to kill me."
January raised his eyebrows. "If every woman killed every wench her husband had, there'd be dead women lying like a carpet from here to the Moon."
"Yeah." Cora's mouth quirked with a kind of grim humor. "But I heard them fighting. I heard her say, 'You sell that slut of yours if we're so hard up for money from your gambling' -and he was a terrible gambler, Michie Redfern was. And Michie Redfern says, `You're not telling me what to do, woman, and if you take and sell her I swear to you I'll find her again and it'll be the worse for you.' Not that he cared about me, Michie Janvier. But M'am Redfern is an overbearing woman, a Boston Yankee woman, always on about how much money her daddy had had, and Michie Redfern wasn't going to take anything off her. You known men like that."
January had known men like that.
"That's still a long way from her killing you."
"Michie Janvier, I swear what I'm telling you is true." She came back and sat on the end of the bench that was drawn up near the stairs where he stood. She wore a green dress today, though she still had on the red-and-black shoes. The skirt's folds hung limp, for it had been cut to accommodate several more petticoats than she was wearing; cut to accommodate a corset, too, as the red dress had been. No servant wore corsets, and Cora was not wearing one now.
Where had she gotten those? he wondered. And the soap and water to wash her face this morning. Not in the Swamp, the squalid agglomeration of grogshops and brothels that festered a few unpaved streets behind the Charity Hospital: that was the place most runaways went. But hers weren't dresses that could be acquired, or kept in good condition, in that maze of mud-sinks and cribs. He remembered the woman Nanie two nights ago, looking for her Virgil among the sick. Her stained dirty clothes had the stink of sweat ground into them, not because she was a particularly unclean woman but because spare labor and time and the fuel to heat water were luxuries among the poor, and their clothes went a long time between washings. Neatness of appearance was something that could be maintained only with great care and with a certain minimum of money.
His own coat and waistcoat, folded tidily over the rail of the stairs behind him with the cravat tucked into a pocket, were one badge of his freedom. Even more than the papers the law demanded he carry-and as much as the well-bred French his tutors and his mother had hammered into him as a child-they said, This is a free man of color, not somebody's property to be bought and sold.
A woman dressed like a slave on the streets would be noticed, especially by someone looking for a runaway. The dress was a disguise.
The cleanliness was a disguise.
Both depended on money and a place to stay.
After a long time of silence, Cora said, "Me and Gervase, we used to meet over by Black Oak. That's the place next up the river from Spanish Bayou-Michie Redfern's plantation just south of Twelve-Mile Point. Black Oak isn't hardly a plantation, just a little bit of land, but M'am Redfern's pa bought it for her when she came down from Boston to marry Michie Redfern. At least that's what Leonide told me, Michie Redfern's cook. They was gonna go to business together, M'am Redfern's pa and Michie Redfern, only he died. Michie Kendal, I mean."
She took a deep breath, not meeting his eyes, folding carefitlly the pleats of her green cotton sleeve where they ran into the wristband. There was a thin line of tatted cotton lace there, pale ecru, the kind schoolgirls produced by the yard while their governesses read to them from edifying books.
"That's where Gervase and I went, after Michie Redfern told him and the others-Laurent, and Randall, and Marcel, and Hermes, and Sally-that he was selling them on account of what he owed Michie Calder and Michie Fazende. Michie Redfern, he found us there. He sent Gervase back to the house and he hit me a couple times, then he had me, like your policeman said; though what that was supposed to prove I don't know. That