The man who stood there wore the leather breeches of a groom, and a rough corduroy coat.
"Michie Janvier? Cyrus Viellard here, for Michie Henri Viellard." The man bobbed a little bow, and took off his hat. "Michie Henri, he say bring you out to Milneburgh, if you please, sir. Your sister, Mamzelle Dominique, took in labor, and she wants you there."
Chapter Six
Milneburgh stood some four miles north of the city on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain. The elegant hotels, modest boardinghouses, and small wooden cottages sprinkled along the shallow beaches or sheltering in the pines presented a soothing contrast to the shut houses, reeking heat, and terrible silence of the city. The air here was sweet.
As January and Henri Viellard's groom rode up the white shell road along the bayou, the sun was just setting, the golden peach of a full moon low in the east. Doorways and windows stood open to the fresh breezes. Lights from a thousand candles made glowing patchwork of the dovecolored gloam. Even the bathhouses of the two main hotels were illuminated, floating topaz reflections gemming the lake at the end of the long piers.
Impossible, thought January, that this could exist in the same world as the stricken city he had left. He'd passed through a fairy gate somewhere in the twilight swamps along the Bayou St. John and left the earth of plague and loss and stench and grief behind.
"Henri is an old lady." Dominique held out her hands to him from her bed as he entered the bedroom of the cottage Henri Viellard had bought for her, three tiny rooms arranged one behind the other in a little stand of red oak at the water's very edge. The rear gallery perched on stilts in the lake itself; two chairs of white-painted willowwork were just visible through the open doors, and a cage of finches, fluffing their feathers for the night.
"There's absolutely nothing to be worried about," added Catherine Clisson, friend to both Dominique and January's mother, still the pla??e of the protector who'd taken her under his wing twenty years ago. "We sent as soon as her water broke, but with first babies these things take time." As she spoke she brought extra candles from the dresser drawer. Nearly every candlestick and holder in the house stood on its marble top, a bright regiment of porcelain and silver drawn up for battle.
"Is my mother here?"
"Livia said she would be shortly, when she's finished her dinner."
Madame Clisson sounded like a woman carefully keeping her personal opinions out of her voice. But her statement didn't surprise January in the least. Having lavished on Dominique all the care and attention of which she scanted her two older-and darker-hued-children, Livia Levesque seemed to have lost interest in the girl once she'd negotiated a suitably cutthroat contract for her with the wealthiest white planter Livia could find. She herself owned a neat four-room cottage in the pines on the other side of the Washington Hotel, here in Milneburgh, but rented it out at an extortionate rate to a white sugar broker, and occupied a pleasant room at the Louisiana House, which catered to well-off merchants and landlords of color.
"I hope everything's well with your sister Olympe?" Madame Clisson handed him a towel, and folded back the wide lace cuffs of her sleeves. "We sent for her as well."
"She might be with Nicole Perret."
Dominique's friend Phlosine Seurat came in from the gallery in a froufrou of pink jaconet. "I don't think Nicole Perret-was she the one who's going to stay with M'sieu Louis Corbier?-I don't think she's come."
She closed the shutters carefully behind her, for the night was coming on, and drew the curtains over it.
"Nonsense, darling." Dominique turned her head from the pillows. "I saw all their baggage carried into M'sieu Corbier's this afternoon."
January related his dinner at Olympe's while shedding his coat, then herded Phlosine and Iph?g?nie-Dominique's other bosom friend-from the room, keeping Clisson to help him with the examination. Quite a number of New Orleans planters and brokers paid to bring their pla??es as well as their white families out of the city, especially if there were children involved. Iph?g?nie Picard and Phlosine Seurat had walked over from their own painted cottages to support their friend through her confinement, bringing blancmanges, terrines, and lemonade.
Pretty women, all of them, beautifully turned out in their summery muslins and lawns, silk tignons folded and tied and trimmed for maximum allure. And why not? thought January, remembering