dimly, although someone had lent him a pair of rough osnaburg trousers. He pressed his head to her arm, tried to hold her.
She was, he saw, dressed neatly in yellow sprigged with blue, as if for a day's work translating Catullus.
His blood and the sweaty filth from the attic floor left great blotches on the crisp cloth.
"I thought you'd gone there," he said. "I saw your book, and your gloves. I thought you saw Cora's shoes."
"I went early in the day, when I knew she was out, to leave a note about Dr. Barnard's letters," Rose said. "It was stupid of me, to leave the book. Later I had an appointment with a Dr. Groeller in Carrollton-he operates a boys' school-and I was nearly late, trying to find you. I left word with Olympe, and with Dominique, and your mother, to tell you that Cora's shoes had turned up at the Ursulines'. Her dress was there, too."
A few feet away one of the men who'd been brought out of the attic was groaning, writhing on his makeshift cot. His belly was hugely swollen, from gorging himself on the market-womens' berries and fritters, the rest of his body a handful of sticks. Dr. Ker knelt beside him, daubing with alcohol at the galls on his wrists and waist, at the jagged wounds left by a spiked collar in his neck. Past them, Hannibal knelt by Cora, talking gently while she clung to the hand of one of the exhausted skeletons-it had to be Gervase-as if she would never release it.
"They didn't know who had brought the shoes in, or how long they'd been there," Rose said. "I thought I should find you, and ask what should be done."
"I was afraid you'd gone to Lalaurie first." Rose shook her head. "I knew she'd only lie."
His eyes went to the two dark forms, of the Reverend Dunk and Madame Redfern, standing now in a corner of the courtyard talking very quietly, very earnestly, with Mamzelle Marie. Mamzelle Marie shook her head and said something with an air of patient repetition. Dunk retorted, eyes blazing, and Emily Redfern pulled hard on his sleeve and told him to hush. Dunk looked as astonished as if a pet cat had given him an order. But he hushed.
From there January's gaze traveled up to the thirdfloor gallery of the prison: the womens' cells. Rose had been locked up there, he thought. Locked up with the drunkards, the prostitutes, with madwomen and women like Kentucky Williams. Lying on dirty straw and sick with grief over the death of her girls, over the collapse of everything she had worked for so hard.
He felt strange inside, hollow; empty of everything that had shaped his life for months. But she hadn't moved away from him, or made even the show, as another woman might, of protecting her dress from the muck that covered him. Her hand, resting lightly where his shoulder muscles met his neck, was cool in the spring morning heat.
"What did she say," he asked after a time, "when they brought her in? Madame Delphine?"
Rose's mouth folded tight, and for the first time he saw a flash of anger behind those round spectacle-lenses. "They haven't brought her in," she said.
Rose would not leave Cora, and told him not to be stupid. Hannibal, who was still with Cora when Rose and January returned to her, told him not to be stupid as well. "I can stand," said January doggedly.
"So does my violin bow, if I prop it up very, very carefully."
In the end Hannibal and Paul Corbier walked with him down Rue Chartres, to the big green house on Rue Royale.
The doors and the carriage gate were shut. Men and women, several hundred strong, were gathered outside in Rue de l'Hopital and the Rue Royale, muttering among themselves, little gusts of sound, like the wind a coming storm makes in trees. About half seemed to be idlers from the levee, Kaintucks and whores from Gallatin Street, people who ordinarily would have stepped over the body of a dying black in the gutter, or at most paused to check his pockets. But the lure of scandal was strong. Self-righteousness is a heady drug.
Mixed with them were the folk of the market, vendors and farmers and shopkeepers; colored stevedores and Irish workmen and householders, catchoupines and chacalatas, their anger and outrage the summer pulse of bees. Though the fire had been doused, the smell of smoke hung heavy on the air, like