his size, he was aware that he was alarming enough. "And I have the honor of addressing...?"
She straightened her shoulders in her red dress, a little slip of a thing, with a round defiant chin and a trace of hardness in her eyes that may have been fear. Pretty, January thought. He could have picked her up in one hand.
"I'm Cora..." She hesitated, fishing, then went on with just a touch of defiance, "... LaFayette. Cora LaFayette. I needed to speak with you, Michie Janvier. Are you a music teacher?"
"I am that," he sighed.
After ten years he still didn't know whether to feel amused or angry about having to work as a musician.
There were free men of color who made a living-and a good living-as physicians and surgeons in New Orleans, but they were without exception light of skin. Quadroon or octoroon, they were for the most part offspring of white men and the women for whom they bought these pastel houses along this street.
In his way, St. Denis Janvier had been as much an optimist as his mulatto placee's son had been, concerning the chances a man with three African grandparents would have of earning his living in medicine in New Orleans or elsewhere, Paris training or no Paris training.
Cora LaFayette looked down, small face a careful blank, rallying her words, desperate to get them right.
January relaxed a little and smiled, folding his big arms in their sweat-damp muslin sleeves. "You followed me all the way from Charity Hospital to ask what I charge for lessons?"
Her head carne up, like a deer startled in the woods, and she saw the gentle teasing in his eyes.
Something eased, very slightly, in the corners of that expressionless little mouth.
But she did not smile. She dwelled in a country where smiles had been forgotten years ago. "Do you teach the daughters of a lady name Lalaurie? Great big green house on Rue Royale?"
January nodded again. He glanced around him at the narrow tunnel they stood in, between Agnes Pellicot's house and that of Guillaume Morisset the tailor, also out of town. The slot of shadow stank of mud and sewage where mosquito-wrigglers flickered among the scum. "You want to go somewhere a little more comfortable, Mademoiselle LaFayette? The town's half closed up, but at Breyard's Grocery over on Rue Toulouse I can get you a lemonade."
Eyes that seemed too big for that pointed, delicate face raised quickly and as quickly darted away. She shook her head, a tiny gesture, and January stepped past her, still cautiously, to push open the gate that led into the Pellicot yard. The French doors into the house were shuttered, as were the doors of the service building at the back of the yard. The brick-flagged porch below the slave quarters' gallery was a slab of blue-black velvet. January led the girl to the plank bench outside the kitchen where Agnes's cook Elvire would sit to shell peas or pluck fowl, and said, "Wait here a minute for me, if you would, Mamzelle."
She stiffened, panic in her eyes.
"I'm just going around to latch the door. I'll be back." He was conscious of her, bolt upright and motionless as a scared cat, on the bench as he crossed through the yard again, down the blue tunnel of passway, and out to Rue Burgundy. He stepped back through the French doors into Agnes Pellicot's parlor and latched them; and on the way through the cabinet pantry to the stairs, he found a cheap horn cup on a shelf beside the French china dinner service. This he carried in his waistcoat pocket up the stairs, through the attic, out the window, across the roof, and down the outside stairs, marveling that he'd made that circuit earlier at a dead run. It was a wonder what you could do with a good scare in you.
When he returned to the yard Cora LaFayette was gone. He saw her a moment later just within the gate to the pass-through out to the street, poised to run.
He waited in the middle of the yard, as he'd have waited not to startle a deer in the cypress swamps behind the plantation where he'd been born. In time she came away from the gate and hurried to the bench again, keeping close to the wall.
Runaway, he thought. And making more of it than she needed to. Did she really think that with the fever and the cholera stalking the streets, with the town half-empty and fear like