"She works with me at the Hospital. It's nothing to worry about. I spoke to Madame Lalaurie."
Cora's eyes, wide already, stretched farther with alarm. He took from his pocket the little purse of silver and put it in her hand. "Madame Lalaurie sends you this," he told her.
Suspicion leapt into the girl's eyes, but her small hands closed tight on the little oval of plush. It was an expensive purse, with a line of jet beading along its bottom and a tassel, but someone had dripped grease on it. A tiny spot, and easily hidden if a woman carried it with the spot turned toward her skirts, but enough, evidently, for Madame Lalaurie to want it out of her house.
"Why? Why'd she do a thing like that?"
January sighed inwardly. "I think she's got a score to settle with Madame Redfern," he said, reflecting that it was a sorry state of affairs when a woman's good deed was more easily explained by spite than by generosity. "She's got to know Madame Redfern's hard up for cash and will be selling up her slaves soon. She gets you out of town, she's picking her enemy's pocket six hundred dollars' worth."
The thought, or perhaps the irony, made Cora grin, a quick smile quickly put away.
January continued, "My sister said for you to speak to a man named Natchez Jim, who has a firewood boat on the river. He'll take you out of town, after you've seen Gervase."
"Madame'll let me see Gervase?"
"She'll leave her gate open tonight," January said. "Her coachman will be watching, so don't try anything foolish, like getting Gervase to run away with you. That won't work. I promise you you'll be caught."
Her face went expressionless, and January felt a sinking in his heart.
"Don't go inside right away," he cautioned. "Wait down the street and look real close in case there's someone watching the gate. The police know about you and Gervase; they know that's where you're likely to go. And if you see someone waiting in the shadows, watching for you to go in, walk away."
Something changed in her expression. "All right," she said.
"But whatever you do, don't try to get Gervase to leave with you. If you get caught, I'll get in trouble, too, bad trouble." He didn't even want to think about what he was risking, and the sight of the defiance flickering in her eyes was enough to scare him badly. "You can't do it."
She said nothing, stubborn. Clinging to the dream of freedom for them both.
"At least you'll have seen him, Cora. Tell him I'll be in touch with him. When you reach New York, or Philadelphia, or wherever you choose to go, you can get in touch with me and earn money to buy him free. But don't try to get him to run away with you. Promise?"
The sullenness in her silence made his heart sink. There was a world of You don't understand and I'll be quicker than that in her averted face.
Dear God, what have I got myself into?
His silence made her look up at him, and for a moment. their eyes met in understanding. She mumbled,
"If I get caught I won't say who helped me."
"No. Not good enough." He wanted to shake her. "Promise you won't try."
"I promise."
She had no intention of keeping her word. He knew that as she slipped from him and fled up the passway to Rue Burgundy through the gathering dusk.
Damn it, he thought. Damn it, damn it, damn it.
The night was endless. For hours at a time the demands of the sick, the fear of the disease, the sweltering heat and sickening stenches, buried his mind in the immediate and hellish present. He sponged down exhausted bodies, carried out the dead, followed Dr. Soublet on his sanguinary rounds. A family was brought in, mother, sons, granddaughter all suffering the cholera; they were isolated in a stuffy little chamber as far from the other patients as possible, with the nearly twenty other sufferers of the disease.
January worked vainly to keep them at least clean and keep them from going into convulsions. Fear of contracting the disease was enough to keep his mind from Cora Chouteau's defiant eyes, and the way she'd turned her face away as she'd said, "I promise." She was going to try to get Gervase to flee with her.
And they'd be caught. He'd be caught.
I should never have helped her, he thought. I should never have helped her.