and pursued them into Dan. The guests turned up half an hour ago to discover that the Committee in charge of the Musicale for the Benefit of the Reverend Micajah Dunk had hired away every musician but me and Uncle Bichet. Madame Viellard's fit to burst a corset string and she's gone to the Washington Hotel-with Our Boy Henri in tow-to get them back."
January swore. "I'd have thought that at this time of year there were at least enough musicians in town for two concerts on the same evening. Even if one of them does have to feature Philippe de Coudreau on the clarinet."
Hannibal winced at the mention of one of the worst musicians of the rather slender selection available, even at the best of times, in New Orleans, and shrugged. "You reckon without the necessity of showing up the Americans. Madame Viellard heard that the Committee to Buy a Church for Micajah Dunk was having a Musicale to raise money-and Dunk being a hellfire lunatic who believes the Devil is French makes it all worse-and moved her concert and ball up to the same evening, to make sure that anybody with any pretentions to society in Milneburgh came to her party and didn't drop money at the Musicale when the collection plate went around. That would have settled the Musicale's hash, except that the Committee that's running it is headed by a lady rejoicing in the name of Emily Redfern, who's damned if she's going to let herself get shown up by French heathens who keep the Sabbath the way people in Boston keep the Fourth of July. The result being that Mrs. Redfern upped her Musicale to include an orchestra that would shame the Paris Opera."
He poured out a glass of champagne for January; he drank his own from the bottle. "La Redfern offered me twice what Madame Viellard did-enough to keep me in opium for weeks. I strongly suspect old Reverend Hellfire isn't going to get a whole lot of money once expenses are met, but I also suspect that's no longer the point."
"Wonderful." January sighed, too used to the rivalries between Creole society and the lately come Americans to even attempt to argue the matter logically. Maybe Ma dame Lalaurie had been trying to pick her rival Redfern's pocket.
"So if you've got your music with you, Maestro," added Uncle Bichet, a thin old freedman who still bore on his face the tribal scarrings of the African village where he'd been born, "I opine you.can make a good five dollar this evenin'-or ten, if you want to walk over by the Washington and play the piano there."
"Not this evening." January reflected ruefully that tonight was the only occasion in the past ten years on which he stood to make more from his medical skills than from his piano playing. "But I do need to go to the Washington, if that's where Monsieur Viellard's to be found. Hannibal, can I beg your assistance?" At a Creole society ball, January knew, a man of color could enter without problems, provided he knew his place and kept to it. But the matter would almost certainly be otherwise at a function given largely by Americans.
They collected Cyrus and the horses from the courtyard in the front of the hotel. As the three men walked the crushed-shell path along the lakefront toward the Wash ington Hotel, January asked, "What's Madame Redfern doing running the Committee? She's newly a widow and just over being sick, at that."
Hannibal shrugged. He had a fresh bottle of Madame Viellard's champagne in hand, but aside from a slight lilt to his well-bred, Anglo-Irish French he didn't show the wine's effect-not that he ever did unless well and truly in the wind. "If you know that much about her you'll know of her determination to figure in society-society as Americans understand it, that is. They're a repellently godly lot."
Away from the hotels the darkness lay warm and silken, thick with the smell of water and decaying foliage, and the drumming of cicadas in the trees.
"What else do you know about her?"
"Redfern's late lamented owned a plantation down the river from Twelve-Mile Point and, as you say, has just shuffled off this mortal coil. But since God has almost universally been known to make exceptions to social rules if you hand His Representatives enough money, I suppose it's perfectly acceptable for her to carry on whatever chicanery necessary for the good of the Church. You thinking of marrying La