the carters away with the heavy baggage that afternoon. I saw lights in the house and heard voices when I went out Thursday evening, and they were gone the next morning when I came back."
"How'd you know they were gone?" Thursday night, the twenty-sixth, was the night Rose Vitrac had come to find him at the clinic, the night Zizi-Marie and Gabriel had helped the Perrets pack.
"The house was locked up," said Hannibal. "The plank was up. I'm out most nights-I can still get money playing at Davis's gambling palace on Rue Royale-but it's been still as death in the days. If they'd taken sick with the fever," he added with a wry practicality, "there would have been some sign-flies, and smell, and rats when I come in between midnight and dawn. It's one thing I worry about here-that I'll be taken sick, and present my poor hosts with a most unpleasant surprise on their return. I would feel bad about that."
January shivered, both at the thought that it could happen to the fiddler, or to himself, alone in the gar?onni?re. His mother wouldn't even inquire as to why she wasn't receiving letters from him anymore.
She never answered in any case. Olympe would check, he thought, and tried to put from his mind the memory of his own steps ascending the narrow stairs, his own hand on the handle of the door of that Paris apartment...
"Would you like to move into Bella's rooms at my mother's house?" he asked the fiddler. "My mother will be in Milneburgh until the fifteenth. At least you wouldn't be alone. Or wondering if you're going to wake up in the morning to find the D?lier servants getting the place ready for Monsieur and Madame to come back."
"There is much in what you say," agreed Hannibal gravely. "Why ask about the Perrets?"
"Because they never reached Milneburgh," answered January. "Nor have they appeared in any of the clinics-I've been asking. They're the poorest people in this street, you know, and since Jacques's brothers died last year they have no other family in town. Everyone else has just enough money to leave: the D?liers, and the Dugues on the other side; I think the Widow Kircher across the street and her daughter have gone as well, if I remember what Olympe's told me. Get some candles," he said, sliding carefully out from beneath the mosquito-bar again. "There's some things I'd like to have a look at over there."
The latch on the rear door of the Perrets' small house had been broken, and by the stains and mildew on the floor just within the doorway this had been done not quite a week ago. "Robbed right after they left," murmured Hannibal, holding aloft half a dozen beeswax candles in the D?lier's best dining-room candelabra. January had left money for the candles in the store cupboard they'd broken into, reckoning they would need the stronger light.
"Were they? I wonder." The house consisted of two rooms only. This, their bedroom, looked out onto the yard with its tiny kitchen. There were no slave quarters, no gar?onni?re over the kitchen: a young couple, the Perrets had been childless so far and certainly too poor to afford a slave. "They didn't have much to steal. Just looking at the outside of the house, any thief would know that." He touched his friend's wrist, raising the lights. They showed the white gauze of the mosquito-bar hanging down free, not tied back out of the way.
January had hunted enough mosquitoes within the tents of mosquito-bar-trying to singe them to death with a bedroom candle where they clung to the gauze without immolating the house-to know that nobody in Louisiana would leave the bar untied.
He led the way to the narrow cypress bed. Unlike those at the Delier house next door, there were sheets still on the mattress, the top sheet simply flung back.
It could mean only that Nicole Perret was an untidy housekeeper, but the spic-and-span neatness of the rest of the room put a lie to that. In the armoire that was one of the room's very few pieces of furniture he found a smock-such as a harness-and-wheel mender like Jacques Perret would wear to work-folded on a shelf, along with two calico shirts and two pairs of breeches. In the drawers were two petticoats, some stockings, a few chemises and tignons, and two corsets.
Folded up and put away upon retiring?
Two pairs of shoes, a man's and a woman's, were under the bed.