when she gives a ball, no other lady in town dare hold any kind of party that night, knowing it won't be no use."
She wiped her face with one of the threadbare linen towels. "Hell." She chuckled. "I bet if Delphine Lalaurie were caught red-handed taking runaways out of town by the coflie there'd be folks failing over themselves to say it wasn't so. She does what she pleases. And that's what just about rots Emily Redfern's heart."
She scooped greens from a cauldron at the back of the hearth, handed the white porcelain bowl of them to her son to carry back to the house, and shifted the coffeepot a little farther to one side, where it would warm without boiling. "The voodoos know everything that goes on in this town, Brother," Olympe said.
"Emily Redfern wants to have that same power Delphine Lalaurie has. Wants to have it with everyone, not just with the Americans. That's what ate her about her husband's gambling. Not that it might lose them their home-that little place at Black Oak was hers, not his, and couldn't be took for his debts. But his gambling took away from what she could spend on having the best in town, on being the best."
"Hate her enough to poison him?"
Olympia Snakebones's dark eyes slid toward her young son, but the boy was already out of the kitchen, skipping across the dark yard to the house with his bowl of greens. "The voodoos know everything in this town," she said again, her face enigmatic. "But sometimes we don't tell even each other what we know.
Tell your little Cora to be careful, dealing with that white woman, with any white woman. And you, Brother-you watch yourself too. You get yourself mixed up with the whites, French or American, and you'll be hurtin', too."
They crossed the yard together, Olympe taking off her apron, leaving it on the kitchen table. The smell of burning was thick in their nostrils.
"Tell her there's a man name of Natchez Jim down by Rue du Levee." They paused in the molten light from the dining-room door. "She'll find him near the coffee stand under the arcade of the vegetable market, when he's not out freighting firewood in his boat. He'll get her up the river safe. Tell him I said it's a favor to me."
Dinner was a lively meal, with Gabriel and thirteen-year-old Zizi-Marie up and down, back and forth to the front bedroom where their father, Paul Corbier, was slowly convalescing from a brush with the fever.
While listening to Zizi-Marie's account of how she'd done the finishwork on Monsieur Marigny's yellow silk chairs while her father was ill and thus helped rescue the family finances-which turned out to be quite true, for she was a good upholsterer already-and explaining correlations to Gabriel between Olympe's herbal remedies and his own medical training, it was difficult for January to remember his own worries or to feel anything but joy in the warm haven of that little house. Halfway through the meal there was a knock at the door, a woman from the shacks out toward the swamps, asking Olympe's help with her children taking sick; Olympe said, "I'll have to go."
January nodded. He was on his way to the Hospital himself. Even this haven, he thought, looking around the candldit parlor, was not safe. It could be taken away at any time, as Ayasha had been taken.
"I'll put up extra for you, borage and willow bark," Olympe said, going into the parlor where the shelves were that contained the potions of the voodoo: brick dust and graveyard dust, the dried bones of chickens and the heads of mice, little squares of red flannel and black flannel, colored candles and dishes of blue glass beads.
"We can't stay, either," Gabriel announced, as Chouchou gathered the dishes to carry back to the kitchen with the solemn care of an eight-year-old, and Olympe lifted Ti-Paul down from the box on the chair seat that raised him up to the level of the table. "Zizi and I, we got to help Nicole Perret and her husband pack up. Would you know it, Uncle Ben? Uncle Louis says now his cook and yard man gone over to Mobile, Nicole and Jacques can stay on the porch of his house out by Milneburgh, that he rent for the summer, and work for him. Now the fever here's so bad, Nicole and Jacques will do that just to be away from town."
He pulled on his