sort of friend?"
"A young girl, maybe twenty or twenty-one. Very thin, dark but not Congo black. I think she was wearing a red dress and red-and-black shoes. She would have been coming along Rue de l'Hopital, sometime around midnight."
Helier considered for a time, then shook his head, or made a motion that had once been a headshake but now involved his shoulders and upper back as well. "Have you checked in the Swamp? Along the levee?
She might have met a personable gentleman-maybe even a wealthy white man who promised to look after her and her son."
"She had no son," said January, aware that the last remark did not concern any event of Friday night.
"And she was just coming away from seeing a lover for whom she had made considerable sacrifice."
"The sacrifices of women, pah. They're like cats. They'll park their bottoms on the warmest chair."
January wondered what had been the reaction of H?lier's mother, when Giles Lapatie had refused further support of their son because of his deformity.
"What about Marie Laveau?" he asked. "To what length would she go, if she thought someone were a threat to her; if she thought someone knew something about her? Had seen her, perhaps, where she wasn't supposed to be?" She was waiting on the porch, in the twilight... The water seller giggled. "The whore-bitch poisoner who blackmails half the town? Mustn't say anything against her." He put a finger to his lips in owlish malice. "You'll wake up one morning to find a cross of salt on your back step and no one in the town willing to talk to you, for fear of her. If your friend ran foul of that heathen bawd she'd best cover her tracks; Laveau's hand is everywhere."
Had it been Mamzelle Marie whom Cora had met that night on the street?
He watched her that night, through a lead-tinged curtain of exhaustion: sponging off the bodies of the sick, holding the hands or heads of the dying. Her face was impassive as she bent down to listen to the broken ravings of a young Irishman-gathering secrets? Not much of importance in this place, January reflected bitterly. Charity Hospital was the final refuge of the poor, those without families to care for them, with only their hopes of making a fortune in Louisiana. And most would leave their bones in its soggy, heaving earth.
She saw me, stopped to watch me pass...
And he saw again how the voodooienne's head had turned, dark eyes taking in every detail of the street.
Marie Laveau at Black Oak. Of course Emily Redfern couldn't come into town without occasioning comment. January closed his eyes, his head throbbing like a drum.
By three in the morning he knew himself to be too exhausted to continue. He'd helped Barnard carry a woman down to the courtyard for the dead-cart and climbed back up the gallery stairs, but instead of going in again, only stood outside the door, leaning his heac against the doorframe, feeling as if he were slowly sinking into the earth. A wonderful feeling, he thought. Maybe he could fall asleep like this and not have to go to the trouble of walking home and lying down.
"You had a tiring day, M'sieu," the soft soot-and-honey voice said at his side. Turning his head he wondered how Mamzelle Marie knew this. She stood at his elbow and even the bottom edge of that fantastic seven-pointed tignon was dark with wet in the oil lamp's dirty glare "Best for all maybe that you go on home."
She fetched him his hat and coat, and walked with him to the courtyard gate, standing in the torchlight for a time, watching him as he went.
He made his way along Rue Villere, in the district of the vast, stinking charnel-houses of the two cemeteries toward Rue Douane, which would lead him back to thc relative safety of the French town. At this hour the towr was silent, save for the scuttling of rats in the alleyway: leading toward the burial grounds, the incessant whine of mosquitoes, and the roaring of the great reddish roaches and palmetto bugs around the iron lamps suspended above the intersections of the streets.
From the direction of Rue Royale and Canal Streei drifted the fat-off jingle of piano and coronet, where the lamps burned bright in gambling parlors. Insensible of mortality, Hannibal had quoted... What was the rest of it: Careless, reckless, fearless of what's past, present, or to come...
Boccacio's revelers-or was the story in Chaucer?-stumbling over the rotting