straps, and delicate boxwood rollers designed to force a girl to sit upright with her wrist properly raised to the task of writing.
"Five years for poisoning Heymann, at the very least," he agreed judiciously, pausing to study the thing.
"Odd," he added, "one never sees boys forced to sit and write a certain way. Only girls."
"You notice," replied Mademoiselle Vitrac, with a touch of astringency in her voice, "which sex wears the corsets." She crossed to the divan set at right angles to the desk, where two girls slept in a mussy, crook-necked heap: Marie-Neige and a delicately pretty adolescent who was presumably the truant Isabel. The schoolmistress bent and brushed aside a strand of Isabel's coarse black hair, which, unbound and uncovered, had caught in the corner of her rosebud mouth. Both children looked desperately young.
"It must be very difficult for them," January said softly. "Coming here. Choosing this road."
"It is," she replied. "I hope at least that I've given them somewhere to come. Let them know that there is a different road to choose. It isn't an easy road. No one I've ever met seems to believe that a woman can want anything more than some man and children of her own to make her blissfully happy." There was bitterness in her voice again, the utter weariness of a warrior who has gone into battle every day of her life, in the knowledge that she will have to fight and refight for the same few feet of ground each day until she dies.
He wanted to ask her how she had come to it, how she had won the right to pursue her own strange dream of knowledge for its own sake. He had met women intellectu ala in Paris and knew their path was difficult enough. What it must be for a woman here, and a woman of color at that, was almost beyond imagining.
But weariness overwhelmed him, and he guessed that she, too, was close to the edge of collapse. So he only asked, "Will you be all right?"
"Oh, yes. Marie-Neige and Isabel help me-I have other friends, too, who come in to nurse. But nursing isn't the same as having someone who knows what he's doing look at them." She held out her hand, long-fingered and slim, but large of bone, strong to grip. "Thank you," Rose Vitrac said. "Beyond words, thank you. The medicine you gave me-will that be enough?"
"I think so." January set his satchel on the gallery rail again, tilted it to the daylight. "My sister said she'd give me more of them..."
He paused, bringing out the tin of herbs in his hand. It was easy to recognize, for it was the one thing he hadn't put into the bag himself it had to have been placed there by Olympe. And opening it, he smelled the comforting familiarity of the fever remedy.
It was the tin itself that caught his eye: bright red and gold, new and shiny, with WILLET'S BOILED SWEETS inscribed on its lid.
And remarkably similar to the tin Cora Chouteau had described as containing Emily Redfern's stock of poison.
Chapter Five
It didn't mean anything of itself, of course.
The Willet's Company of England must export thousands of these little red-and-gold tins every year, and they were precisely the right size to put things in. Everyone in New Orleans from the Ursuline Sisters to the gamblers in the Swamp must have little red-and-gold candy tins in their houses, full of coffee beans, sugar, pins, and blotting sand. It didn't mean Olympe was a poisoner. It just meant that Olympe had four children.
He intended to go to her house immediately, to ask her whether her practice of voodoo included selling powdered monkshood, but exhaustion draped him in chains as he traversed the rough planks that served as a banquette along the Rue des Ramparts; and in the end he turned left, toward home. In his dream he found himself again on the gallery outside the gar?onni?re, staring out into the pitchy darkness of those hot, silent, heavy summer nights, listening to the baying of dogs in the swamp.
In his dream he ran down the steps, bare boards splintery as they always had been beneath his bare feet.
Ran into the house, where his mother sat at the open front window, sewing on a man's white shirt. She had work candles behind her, the smell of burning tallow strong. She didn't look up from her work. In here the baying sounded louder, and January saw that outside the