the gallery of the gar?onni?re would come back, the boy who waited for his father to come see him, the dream image of the man with the tribal scars on his face, pursued through the woods by dogs. And he didn't know what to think or feel.
I couldn't not.
Would Shaw accept that as an argument?
It would be like Shaw, he thought, to watch Madame Lalaurie's house if he could get the men for it.
His only hope lay in proving that Emily Redfern had poisoned her husband, had attempted or intended to poison Cora, or at least given the girl reason to believe she so intended... And how could he do that?
Ask Mamzelle Marie?
He looked across the ward at her, remembering her on the street that day. Now she held the hands of a laborer who gasped, wept, flopped like a landed fish, his body voiding the wastes that were the sign that the fever had broken, the disease had run its course. Her face was calm and distant as it was when she danced, an Adamless dark Eve, with the great snake Damballah in Congo Square. She'd seen Cora.
Here, and at Black Oak.
It didn't take a genius to guess that pasteboard coffins, black candles, and graveyard dust could be easily backed up with galerina mushroom or Christmas rose.
He'd confided everything in Olympe: Sometimes we don't tell even each other what we know. Would his sister put his confidence above the woman who was her sworn Queen?
His head ached with heat and worry and sheer fatigue by the time he left the Hospital, well after dawn.
Shaw was not waiting for him outside. So far, he thought bitterly, so good.
He crossed Canal Street, with its usual rabble of drunken keelboatmen, carters cursing as they hauled firewood and produce from the turning basin of the canal where they were unloaded. Dead dogs and garbage floated in the reeking gutters-gnats and mosquitoes whined about his ears. A few vendors moved along the streets by houses shuttered tight, or stopped to gossip at the rare doors that opened to them, hawking eggs or rat poison, asking after neighbors who were gone. His sister's house was shuttered but the plank lay welcomingly across the door, so he assumed that things were as they should be there. His hand fumbled for the rosary in his pocket and he whispered a prayer, Dear God, not them.
Lying awake in the breathless heat of his room, he wondered if they'd hcard word yet of Alys Roque's missing husband. Wondered how Zizi-Marie and Gabriel had fared, packing up the indigent Perrets for their sojourn on Uncle Louis's floor.
Wondered if he had gotten Ayasha out of Paris-if they'd had the money to go anywhere else-if she would have survived.
That way lay madness, and he shoved the images from his mind.
Tried to think instead of Cora Chouteau. The thought was scarcely more comforting. He felt a little embarrassed as he groped for his rosary again -Dear God, don't let her have got caught-but he did it anyway. He remembered the night he'd spent in the Cabildo last spring, the prison hot as it was hot here, stinking of human waste and human fear. Remembered the voices of the jailers down in the courtyard in the morning, and the smack of the whip as slaves were disciplined.
Stupid; he thought. Stupid, stupid, stupid, to have let yourself help her...
Twenty years old, terrified, running away from a woman who would have killed her...
Presumably God knew whether he had done well or ill to help her.
Between fear and guilt he slid again into uneasy dreams, from which he was waked by the sound of footfalls on the gallery stairs.
Shaw. Panic grabbed his heart. He could probably make it to the far end of the gallery, drop the twelve feet or so down to the yard, make it through the passway and out to Rue Burgundy before the Lieutenant could follow...
And then what? Hide in the swamp for the rest of your days?
Why don't you see who it is first before you decide to turn maroon at your time of life?
He got to his feet, put on his boots and a shirt. The room was still an oven, and another trail of ants had started along the wall, (What, you boys like red pepper?) but the light had changed. Long gold slats of it leaked through the jalousies before they were blotted by the shadow of a man.
"Hey inside?"
It wasn't Shaw's voice.
January shrugged his shirt straight and went