the girls at Rose Vitrac's little school, and the different, harder road they were being shown.
Interesting a wealthy protector was a sure way to establish oneself, to acquire a little property, a little security in the world, without losing one's eyesight to dressmaking or one's youth to hard labor. Even the respectable wives of artisans, the free colored ladies who refused to let their daughters play with the daughters of the pla??es, envied the pla??es their ease and their wealth. He thought of Marie-Neige's older sisters, educated in the more womanly arts of music and conversation, as his sister Dominique had been. Powdered and painted and dressed in silk, they were already being escorted by their mother to the Blue Ribbon Balls.
And why not? He looked around him at the tiny room, the plain but gracefully expensive furnishings, the curtains of sprigged English chintz and the linen sheets starched and ironed by servants' hands. Why not?
Dominique would never have to fear for herself, or for the child she was now bringing into the world, thanks to his mother's hardheaded bargaining.
She was further in labor than Clisson had thought, further than she had shown while her friends were in the room. She lay back in the cushions of the cypress-wood bed while January examined her, and he saw her hand grip hard on the sheets. Once she whispered, "She'll be a little octoroon, my petite. So pretty..."
Hearing the wistfulness in her voice, January didn't ask, Would you love her less were she darker? Grief and questions were not what Minou needed now. Instead he jested, "What, you're not going to give Henri a boy? With spectacles like his and no chin?"
As he hoped, it made her smile. "Wicked one, Henri has too got a chin! In fact several," she added, and her burst of giggles dissolved into another whisper of pain.
"Where is Henri?" he asked Madame Clisson, as he and she left the bedroom a few minutes later. He'd examined Dominique two or three times in the past several months and had conferred with Olympe and anticipated no major problems with the labor itself. But the child had grown in the two weeks since he'd seen his sister last, and he guessed she'd have a difficult time.
"The Hotel St. Clair." Agnes Pellicot and her daughter Marie-Anne-a shy tall girl in her first year of pla?age to a planter's son-had joined Phlosine and Iph?g?nie in the parlor. With them were Dominique's maid Th?r?se, and January and Dominique's mother, the redoubtable Widow Livia Levesque.
"That mother of his is giving a concert and ball." The Widow Levesque uncovered Phlosine's blancmange, regarded it with a single downturned corner of her mouth, and with her free hand rearranged the decorative sprig of leaves that crowned its smooth, ivory-colored dome. She replaced the bell-shaped glass cover with a sniff, as if to say, Well that's the best that can be expected of that. "Like her, to pick the same night as the Musicale for the benefit of that heathen preacher the Americans are holding at the Washington, but there! The woman would have scheduled her own funeral rather than let the Americans have a sou for that vulgar heretic. I trust she will have her reward in heaven," she added dryly, contemplating the terrine. "You used chicken liver for this, Iph?g?nie? I thought as much."
The inflection of her voice was the same one with which she had turned every small triumph of January's childhood into a commonplace. Dr. Gomez says you will make a fine physician one day? I expect he would say that. Slender and delicate in appearance, Livia Levesque had put off her mourning for her late husband as soon as the obligatory year was up on the grounds that black did not become her-few women of color looked really good in it-but still dressed soberly. To hear her talk, she had never been any white man's pla??e, let alone a slave and the wife of a slave. January could never remember hearing her speak of his father.
"Don't tell me the girl's going to give you problems?" Livia turned immense, wine brown eyes upon her son.
"I don't think so." January kept his voice low and glanced at the half-open bedroom door. "But she's in for a good deal of pain and struggle, I think."
"Hmph." There was a world of, Not like my pain, in the single expulsion of her breath. "Fine time for that other girl of mine to be lollygagging in town. Therese, extinguish