ignored by a woman, any woman. And he knew from his own dealings with the quadroon and octoroon boys in his own schooldays as the darkest boy in the little academy as well as the biggest-boys as fair as H?lier and as proud of their fairness-that boys egg each other on.
No wonder Montreuil's rumormongering touched her on the raw.
But all he could say was, "I'm sorry." He carried the tin tub to the table by the kitchen's open door, where the inevitable gallery overhead would protect it from the coming downpour. "Did you sleep last night? Then lie down for a few hours now. I don't have to be at the Hospital until eight."
"You don't have to, Monsieur Janvier."
"No," he agreed, and smiled. "And you can make that Ben, if you want."
She hesitated a long time, looking up again into his face. Then she said, very softly, "Thank you.
Monsieur Janvier."
She walked back to the house, and this time he did not follow, only waited until she had gone inside before he climbed the stairs to the attic himself.
January heard the violin as he climbed, entered that long, low room dense with heat. Hannibal was playing to the girls, frail airs from the west of Ireland, gentle and sad. When he came in, the fiddler reeled the music to its close, but January held up his hand and signed him to play on. Genevi?ve murmured in her pain-racked sleep, nearly hidden behind the white gauze of the mosquito-bar around her bed;
Victorine and Antoinette rested easily. Marie-Neige, who had come up with vinegar-water to help wash the girls, had lain down too on one of the other beds and slept as well, even her plumpness seeming somehow fragile in repose. Of Isabel there was as usual nothing to be seen.
January scratched a lucifer to light the candle under the veilleuse, and checked the round china pot for water. He dug from his satchel the red-and-gold tin of willow bark and borage, and stood for a moment holding it near the votive light, swamped with thoughts he did not care to think.
"How do they look?" Hannibal set his fiddle aside. He'd borrowed a couple of tortoiseshell combs from Genevi?ve, and knotted up his long hair like a woman's on his head.
"Better." January put the tin and his speculations aside. He looped back the mosquito-bar around Victorine's bed to feel her forehead, then her pulse. He was coming to know these girls a little, mostly from what Mademoiselle Vitrac said of them: Victorine's hotheaded stubbornness, Antoinette's day-long silences in which she'd raptly figure geometric proofs, the half-embarrassed streak of Genevi?ve's sensationalism that drew that deceptively lovely girl to the gorier chapters of Roman history and the fascinated study of poisons, explosives, catapults, and mummies.
Rose's pupils. Rose's life.
"We're holding them. The fever should run its course soon."
Hannibal turned away to cough. Strangely enough with the onset of the summer fever his own consumption had gone into one of its periodic abeyances: "Just my luck," he had remarked to January on Saturday night, "with everyone out of town and nobody hiring." Now he said, "I met her here once or twice. Cora. I didn't know who she was, of course."
"The damn thing is," said January, returning to the wooden chair, "that anything could have happened to her. The city's no Peaceable Kingdom at the best of times, and with the streets empty and the City Guards afraid to go outside at night themselves-and small blame to themanything could have happened. A young girl like that, wandering the streets at that hour of the night..."
He paused. He remembered Alphonse Montreuil's ferrety face and the way his thin white hands had picked and fidgeted with his cuffs. "What do you know about Montreuil?" he asked. Voodoos-and Marie Laveau-were not the only ones who knew everything in the town. "Alphonse Montreuil, Madame Lalaurie's neighbor? If he was up at that hour, watching her house..."
"You mean, is he dangerous?"
"Not dangerous, but..." January thought again. "Yes. Is he dangerous?"
Hannibal settled his back to the rail of the empty bed's footboard, folded small white hands, delicate as a woman's, around his bony knees. "I don't think so," he said, after long consideration. "But he's certainly cracked where Madame L is concerned. He's a cousin of sorts to the Montreuils who own that plantation downriver. It seems Alphonse's brother married a woman named Manette McCarry, who's some kind of cousin to Madame. Now, when Alphonse and Albert's father died, he left his money,