she took from her belt a reticule of cardboard faced with blue silk and opened it. She withdrew a man's linen handkerchief knotted around a heavy mass of metal that clinked, a double-strand of slightly golden pearls, and Madame Lalaurie's small plush purse. This last she pushed toward him across the table. "That would be this, wouldn't it?"
January nodded. He looked inside, and saw that it still contained the ten Mexican dollars it had originally held. Then he undid the handkerchief and counted what was in it There were a few English guinea pieces and a number of Bavarian thalers, four American double eagles, and the rest in Mexican dollars-a hundred and eighty dollars all told. Nowhere near the five thousand Madame Redfern claimed had been taken.
Levelly, expecting a fight, Mademoiselle Vitrac said, "I still refuse to believe that Cora harmed a hair of Otis Redfern's head."
"This was all you found?"
"Yes. When she didn't come back Friday night I looked in her room Saturday."
Silence returned to the yard, broken by the creak of a wheel in the Rue Burgundy and a woman's voice saying impatiently, "Hurry, would you?" to some unknown servant or child.
"Well," January mused, "if she'd spent four thousand eight hundred and twenty dollars between Twelve-Mile Point and the levee, she'd have been wearing something better than that red dress."
"I gave her the dress," said Mademoiselle Vitrac, but he saw her mouth relax and the strain ease from her shoulders, not so much at his jest itself as at the fact that he was joking instead of accusing. "And the shoes. They were Genevieve's when she came to the school, and she outgrew them. The thing is, M'sieu Janvier... if Cora fled, even if she got Gervase to flee with her, why didn't she come back for the money? The pearls I can understand, if she realized they were being looked for. But the money was the only thing that guaranteed her she wouldn't have to go back to Madame Redfern."
January turned the necklace over in his hands. He'd seen enough pearls close up, between his mother and her friends, and Ayasha's customers, to see that these were medium to high grade, lustrous, evenly sized and closely matched.
"What can I do?" Mademoiselle Vitrac asked.
He folded the necklace together into the palm of one big hand. "What we can't do," he replied, "is go to the police. You know that."
"I know that."
"I don't know what the penalty is for aiding and abetting a murder-even if you know and I know that it was Emily Redfern and not Cora who put that monkshood into Otis Redfern's soup-but at the very least I think we'd both be cleaning out the municipal gutters for a long time."
Her mouth twitched a little in a smile, in spite of herself, and she averted her face as if she had been punished as a child for laughing when adults thought she should be having the vapors.
He held out the pearls. "Get rid of these. Throw them in the river, but make sure nobody sees you do it."
When he saw her hesitate-no woman throws pearls away lightly-he added, "If you're caught with them on you, I can guarantee you you'll lose everything you've worked for so hard."
"Yes." She took them from his hand. "Yes, I see that."
"We need to check the fever wards," said January. "Yellow Jack hits quick. If Cora started with a headache on her way home Friday night, with chills and pain and cramps, she might have been too disoriented to find her way up from Rue Royale to your school."
"I can do that," said Mademoiselle Vitrac. "There's an emergency fever ward at Davidson's Clinic on Circus Street and another one at Campbell's. Damn the newspapers for not publishing where these things are. Didn't the Ursulines set up a ward in their old convent? The one the legislature has been using now?"
January nodded. "I think so. Soublet has fever patients at his private clinic on Bourbon, though God help her if she was taken there. And the first thing to do," he added, rising as she rose, "is to talk to Madame Lalaurie herself."
"You don't have to-"
"I don't want you to be connected with Cora in any way." He handed her her reticule, and the plush purse. "Madame Lalaurie knows at least that I've spoken to her."
Her smile was rueful as she shook out her petticoats. She wore a little gold cross around her neck, and tiny gold studs, like beads, in her