that even with the fever on they'll be watching the steamboats on the river and on the lake. You think you can do that?"
She made no reply, neither nodded nor shook her head. But trembling passed over her again, a long silvery shiver, like a horse at the starting line of a race, before they whip the flags down to let them run.
"You send me a note under another name," said January. "Post it after you get to some other city. Set up some way for me to send a letter to you. Can you write?"
"A little," Cora whispered. "My friend taught me." The girl who'd been raped?
"My next lesson with the Lalaurie girls is Friday. Can, you be here Friday evening about sunset?" It meant going to the Hospital again without sleep, but these days that was common enough.
She nodded. Her lips formed the words thank you, without sound. She waited in the dark of the gallery while he slipped away up the pass-through between houses, still as a mouse waiting for the cat to go by.
Idle to suppose that a slave girl accused of murdering her master could turn the accusation on her master's wife. He thought again about poor Anne Montalban, trying to convince her neighbors, and later the police and the press, that Brother Jean, professor of law and pillar of the community, had raped both her and her daughter (and possibly three other local girls who could not be brought to testify) and was in the habit of keeping his niece locked in her room for weeks on end "for the good of her soul." Lying naked on his bed in the heat, hearing the roaring of afternoon rain on the slates, he tried to sleep, and his mind returned to the small, taut face, the wary eyes, of Cora Chouteau.
If you don't fight it's not really rape.
According to Shaw, the Redfern cook had seen Cora slip back into the house, some time after she was supposed to have run away. How long after? In the twilight, Shaw had said.
I slept out in the swamp.
Then after supper Wednesday night Otis Redfern had stumbled against the wall, trying to get outside to the outhouse, gasping and crying with a mouth half-paralyzed, pleading in the heat that there was ice water in his veins. Madame Redfern was found sick in her room only half an hour later, having collapsed from dizziness, too weak to call for help.
Had Cora returned only to steal five thousand dollars and her mistress's pearls? What the hell was five thousand dollars doing lying around the house? Money and credit were impossibly tight this year (his mother had investments, and he'd been hearing about the tightness of money at great length for months).
Most plantations dealt in letters of credit. In the best of times it was rare that even the richest of the planters, the Destrehans or the McCartys, had a thousand dollars cash money readily available.
Or had she gone back to slip powdered monkshood into whatever was being prepared for that evening's meal? Shaw had made no mention of the candy tin. January wondered if he knew about it. He could not imagine a Boston-raised merchant's daughter knowing how to identify monkshood in the woods, much less how to cull and dry it. If Cora didn't prepare the stuff herself, Emily Redfern would have to have acquired it somewhere.
And after all that, were Cora to testify that Emily Ftedfern kept powdered monkshood in the locked cupboard on her own property, and her case failed, she would be in serious trouble indeed.
He closed his eyes. The rain eased off, and a breeze walked across his bare belly and thighs. Why Cora Chouteau concerned him he didn't know. It was madness, insanely risky. He'd learn what he could, but there were things he simply could not do.
At least it was better than lying here obsessively inventorying his own body: did his head ache? (That's just lack of sleep.) Was he thirsty? (That's nothing. It's hot. No worse than yesterday.) Were his joints sore? Nausea? Belly cramps? Was he hot with fever or was it just hotter today? There had been a time when he'd wanted to die, wanted some shining angel from his childhood catechism to appear and tell him he didn't have to be in pain anymore, didn't have to deal with loss and grief and wondering why. But the only psychopomp in town these days was old Bronze John. At the memory