artisans' cottages, backed up against the side of a modest town house; it, and about half the houses of the row, were shuttered and lightless. January hopped the gutter-for as Gabriel had said, their plank was taken up-and rapped sharply on the shutter.
But there was no sound within the Perret house, and no light gleamed out through the jalousies. He was late already to the Hospital. He made his way there through thick hot gathering twilight, trouble and defeat in his heart.
Early the following afternoon he told Rose Vitrac what he had heard, what he had sought, and what he had not found. "I picked up this morning's Gazette," he added. "Madame Redfern is still advertising for her recapture, so Cora hasn't been caught yet."
Mademoiselle Vitrac sat on the corner of Antoinette's bed, next to his hard wooden chair. She pushed her spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of her nose, and read past his shoulder the few lines printed next to the standard slug of a negress running:
Ran away-Cora Aged about twenty-five, a skilled house servant and cook. Of medium height and very dark, with a black birthmark upon her left shoulder. Speaks both French and English, thought to be going to New Orleans. Stole $5000 upon her departure.
"If that's the best description of her Madame Redfern can come up with," remarked Mademoiselle Vitrac, "Cora's quite safe, wherever she is. `Medium height?' "
"Have you seen La Redfern?" Hannibal Sefton emerged from the small door at the top of the steps. He carried a pitcher of lemonade, the result of a windfall heap of lemons on the levee, and his dark hair hung over his shoulders and down his back. "I could eat sandwiches off the top of her head."
January recalled that stout tiny figure in widow's black, and laughed. He'd been a little surprised to arrive at the school and find his friend there, but only a little. Hannibal had known Rose Vitrac, it transpired, since they'd been the only two patrons of a job-lot sale at the Customhouse to be looking at the books rather than bolts of silk or boxes of lace fans from Paris at fifty cents the dozen. In the ten months since then, she had occasionally bought books from him when he was particularly hard up for opium or medicine or had given him a place to sleep when he'd been turned out of whatever whorehouse attic he'd been occupying that week.
Now he set the pitcher down on the dresser and poured a cup for Victorine, who though weak and wasted sat propped among her pillows, and held it for her while she drank. Her fever had broken the previous night, Mademoiselle Vitrac had told January on his arrival. A dozen years seemed to have been erased from the schoolmistress's face.
"Something clearly prevented Cora from coming back," January said thoughtfully. "Either physically, or she saw something or someone that frightened her so badly she fled. If she was arrested, Shaw would have spoken to me by this time. Was anything happening in town Friday night? Or has there been anything taking place at nights?"
The drunken American returned to his mind, staggering along the banquette, banging on the shutters.
With Gallatin Street so close and every gaming hall in town open nearly all night it was possible that two or three such men might have encountered the frail, tiny woman walking alone...
"I was out of town that night and I've been in the Hospital every night for weeks. Hannibal?"
"Insensible of mortality, yet desperately mortal... Bar the occasional straying inebriate there's been nothing I've heard of. Though of course with so many people out of town there's always some who'll risk the night air, in order to help themselves to unguarded plate or trinkets-and it would take a fine, strong febrile miasma indeed to penetrate the alcoholic fog that surrounds some of our bold American boys.
Have you thought that Cora might simply be living in one of the houses you passed?"
Mademoiselle Vitrac laughed, "That's ridiculous. Isn't it?" She looked hesitantly at January.
"What's ridiculous about it?" demanded Hannibal indignantly. "I've been living in the town house of one Eustace Dolier and his family since July, which is cheaper than paying rent to Willie the Fish over on Perdidio Street. Quieter, too, and it isn't as if I'm taking anything from the family. How could anyone tell?"
How indeed? January remembered the shuttered doorways, the silent houses along every street in the town. "Why?" he asked. "Why not come back