To talk to him."
For a time January said nothing. Madame Lalaurie was an astute businesswoman, and it wasn't outside the realm of possibility that she'd let a slave operate independently, though not, probably, a trained houseman. But looking at that down-turned little face, the careful deliberation of those little fingers tracing the folds of the cloth, he knew those were not Cora's thoughts.
He'd seen monkshood poisoning, in Paris, at the Hotel Dieu; a woman named Montalban had poisoned the brother with whom she lived. He thought about the agonies of vomiting and blindness, the sweating, convulsions, pain. Thought about Shaw sitting on the steps of his mother's gallery, spitting tobacco and recounting the facts of the case without ever asking why or if January had made inquiries about the purported murderess's lover scant days after the woman herself had been seen at the Lalaurie house.
Bastien the coachman would have reported her to Shaw, he thought. Would have reported, too, January's request to speak to the young man.
It didn't mean Shaw didn't have other information, held back as a speculator holds sugar or cotton, against a rise in prices.
"Cora," said January slowly, "whether or not you put poison into Otis Redfern's supper, Madame Redfern thinks you did. The police think so, too. Now, I told them I hadn't met you, hadn't ever heard of you, and I implied I hadn't ever been asked to take any kind of message from you to Gervase. At least when Lieutenant Shaw asked me to notify him if you did ask me, I said I would. All this is illegal. I could get into serious trouble for it."
Cora licked her lips and folded her arms again, as if chilled despite the day's burning heat. "You mean you can't help me anymore." It was not phrased as a question. That's what he meant.
And that, he thought later, should have been the end of it. For everyone's good.
That's when he should have walked away. Last night he had dreamed about his father.
He didn't often. His memories of his father-or the man he believed to have been his father-existed only in flashes, isolated incidents of time: being picked up, up and up and up at the end of those powerful arms, and the coal black face with the gray shellwork of tribal scars grinning joyfully below him, or walking along the edge of the bayou, listening to the deep bass voice hum-sing songs he barely recalled. He didn't even know where his father had been when he was told that his mother was being sold to St. Denis Janvier, whether his father had still been on Bellefleur Plantation then or not.
But he did remember, hot summer nights, creeping out of his room to sit on the gallery of the gar?onni?re, waiting for his father to come for him.
That had to have been shortly after they'd moved into the pink cottage on Rue Burgundy. January was eight. His father wouldn't let them leave him, he had told himself. He'd come slipping through the passway into the yard, to tap on his wife's shutters, to stand below the gallery of the gar?onni?re, white teeth gleaming in the moonlight, waiting for his son to come running down to him and be lifted up in those powerful arms.
January had crept out of his room most nights for a year, he remembered-except those nights when St.
Denis Janvier would come to visit his mother-to sit on the gallery in the darkness and wait. The town had been smaller then, with vacant land between the cottages on Rue Dauphine and Rue Burgundy, and between Rue Burgundy and the old town wall, rank marsh where moonsilvered water gleamed between forests of weeds. January had given names to the voices of the frogs crying in the darkness and made up words to the heavy, harsh drumming of the cicadas and the skreek of crickets; the drone of mosquitoes in the blackness. His sister Olympe jeered at him, but he'd waited nonetheless.
His father had never come.
"You have to lie low," he said slowly. Cora looked up, startled, at the sound of his voice. "You have to stay quiet. You can't even think about 'making money somehow' to help Gervase." Even as the words came out of his mouth he couldn't believe he was saying them.
"Slaves are just too expensive these days for them to let him go-or you either. They're watching for you, Cora. You have to get out of New Orleans if you possibly can, and remember