it was possible to start a business, to buy a boardinghouse or rental property, to invest in steamship stocks or sugar futures. Men would start a pla??e's son in business, but rarely her daughter. "What do you think of Cora?" he asked. "You met her. Do you think she'd have done murder?" Hannibal considered for a time, tatting his bits of Rossini and Vivaldi into a glittering lacework in the dimness. "I think she could have," he said at last. "She's hard-but then most women are harder than one thinks. Even our Athene." He nodded toward the house below them, where Rose Vitrac would be lying, sleeping, January hoped. Alone as she had always been alone. "Whether she would have is another question. The problem could have been solved fairly simply by her running away-if she hadn't decided to take the money and the pearls with her-and of course as a house servant she'd have known where to find them. Myself, I wouldn't have taken the whole five thousand dollars, let alone the pearls, because the theft would be a guarantee of pursuit. But it may be she wasn't thinking very clearly." Beside him, the girl Genevi?ve turned in her sleep, and whispered something, despairing. Hannibal leaned close, but the girl fell silent again. The sound of the rain seemed very loud.
"I know Cora did tell Rose not to seek out or try to speak to Madame Lalaurie for her, not that Rose has more than a bowing acquaintance with Madame. It's hard to tell how people will react to things, and Cora didn't want to jeopardize her friend's position. Which doesn't mean she didn't dose Otis Redfern's souffle for him: a woman can treat those she cares for with kindness and still be an ogre to her enemies, the same way a man can manumit a loved and loyal slave on the same day he whales the living tar out of another slave for putting too much sugar in his tea. People have surprisingly hermetic minds." "Do you think Emily Redfern poisoned her husband? If the mistress was gone beforehand, the wife would have no cause to do it; if it was before Cora left, would she have done herself out of six or seven hundred dollars by poisoning her?"
"Don't ask me." Hannibal wrapped his fiddle in its holed and faded silk scarves, and stowed it carefully in its case. "It's hard to believe La Redfern would pass up a chance at the money, but one can't tell. Maybe not even the servants in the household could tell. In Dublin when I was growing up there was a woman who kept her two nieces chained in a cellar for five years so she could go on lending their inheritance money out at four and a half percent. One's always hearing about domestic tyrants who beat or mistreat their wives and children, and no one in the family dares speak of it because they know it'll do them no good. There may have been things going on in that household we'll never know about-which may be one reason why our Emily is trying so hard to retrieve her runaway property."
The rain was lightening. Pale daylight leaking through the cracks in the shutters struggled against the candle glow, then slowly bested it. Hannibal gathered up his fiddle case to go.
"One thing I do know, though," he added, pausing in the door. "And I think you know this, too, if you talked to her even for a short time. Cora isn't one to give up. I don't think she'd have left New Orleans without Gervase. And given her circumstances, I don't think she'd walk out either on that money, or on Rose."
Chapter Nine
January was careful, upon approaching the Lalaurie house later that afternoon, to stay on the downstream side of Rue de l'H?pital, crossing over only when directly opposite the gate rather than risk another encounter with Monsieur Montreuil. The rust-colored town house seemed shabby and sordid to him, and he imagined, as he studied it through the thin-falling rain, that the curtains in the upper-floor windows were half-parted, to afford a view of whoever might be passing in the street. The Montreuil house and the Lalaurie shared a parry wall. There was no way that he could perceive for anyone in the Montreuil house to see if Madame Lalaurie hurled a dozen slaves from her own roof.
The bony servant entered with the inevitable glass of lemonade for Mademoiselle Blanque in the