men and women gasped in the heat, or wept with pain.
From the doorway January saw Madame Lalaurie, clothed in black as she had been Wednesday night and severely neat as ever. She held the hands of a man who was clearly dying, not of the fever but of the cholera: drawn, ghastly, his bedding sodden and stinking.
A priest stood by, reading the offices for the dying. January crossed himself as the Host was elevated and murmured his own prayer for the stranger's comfort and salva tion. The priest, January noticed, stood at a safe distance, or-as safe as one could be around the cholera. Madame Lalaurie, however, sat on the edge of the bed; and what arrested January again was the expression on her face, the intense, almost holy pain of a contemplative martyr, as if she herself were dying with her eyes upon the Cross. It was an unnerving sight, so at odds with her controlled strength, and shocking in its way, as intimate as if he watched her face while she submitted to the act of love. Her body swayed as the priest recited the words:
"May you never know the terror of darkness the gnashing of teeth in the flames, the agonies of torment... "
The dying man retched. Madame Lalaurie quickly and competently turned him, reached down for a basin while he vomited, and held him as he went into convulsions; the priest backed hastily away. She wiped the man's face, and wiped it again when he vomited again, all with that expression of desperate longing, of pain shared and gladly absorbed into her heart. She had lost a child, January remembered; her only son. She lived daily with her crippled daughter's pain. Was that in some way the source of that glow, that expression almost of exultation?
Or was it only the relief of release from being forever in control, forever perfect?
She murmured something else, leaning close to the beard-stubbled face. From a safe distance the priest murmured, "Remember not, O Lord, the sins of this man's youth and of his ignorance, but according to Thy great mercy, be mindful of him..."
Be mindful of us all, thought January, his hand slipping into his pocket to the rosary that never left him. Be mindful of us all.
The young man sobbed weakly, and Madame Lalaurie gathered him to her, his head on her breast. It was there that he died.
She held him still for a long time, her head bowed over his. Her face was a marble angel's in the frame of her nunlike veil, her skirts and sleeves spotted with filth and slime. January saw in his mind Emily Redfern in her black widow's cap and veil, arguing about musicians with Madame Viellard in the refulgent gaslight of the Washington Hotel. He remembered, too, the plump, self-satisfied Reverend Dunk among his adoring Committee ladies. The priest at this bedside didn't look any too happy as he whispered the final prayers, January murmuring the responses in his heart. But at least the man was there.
When he had spoken the final blessing, the priest touched Madame Lalaurie on the arm. Like one waking from a trance, the woman laid the dead man back on the shabby straw. An Ursuline Sister approached, offering a bowl of water and a clean apron to cover her simple black dress, but Madame Lalaurie shook her head, said something too softly for January to hear. She rose and started to turn away. The Sister touched her sleeve again, pointed to January. Madame Lalaurie blinked, her eyes coming back into focus.
"M'sieu Janvier." She looked down at her dress. "Please excuse me." She seemed unruffled and unembarrassed, a woman whom no disarray or dishevelment could touch, not even a dress spattered with the vomitus of death. "I shall join you in the courtyard in a few moments." And she moved unhurriedly away through one of the doors leading toward the convent itself.
In fact, it was closer to twenty minutes before the courtyard door opened and the tall, slender figure emerged, attended by one of the nuns. From a bench un der the hospital's gallery at the side of the cobbled yard, January saw her, stood, and bowed. She had not only completely changed her dress-though the new dress was also black, with touches of blue on bodice and sleeves-but had had someone comb out and redress her hair. In place of her veil she wore a bonnet, conservative by the day's standards but recognizably in the height of