orange with the mask of fever. Yesterday Mademoiselle Vitrac had cropped the girl's long black hair, which tangled and knotted with Genevi?ve's helpless thrashing. January had suggested it, a few days ago; now he was sorry, knowing she would be buried thus. She looked like one of the dried Indian mummies that trappers found sometimes in the mounds and caves upriver.
"I can't believe they could be just-just selling them." Mademoiselle Vitrac's voice was shaky, as she bent over Victorine, sponging the girl's thin body. "I mean, the first time this Madame Perret, or the woman Lu, could slip away, couldn't they go to-Well, not the local magistrate, but someone... and say, I was kidnapped? Their free status is on public record here..."
"And who's going to check?" said January softly, when she failed to finish her sentence. "These are people who have no family in town. People who mostly don't even speak English. And what white man is going to run the risk of alienating all his neighbors, whose help he depends on, for the sake of a man or a woman who's probably lying? On the frontier, where people must have each other's help at picking time and planting? Men don't need to be evil, Mademoiselle. They just have to be bad enough to say, There's nothing I can do." He straightened up. "How well is this place locked and bolted at night?"
"Pretty well." She picked up her bowl of vinegar-water and brought it to the dying girl's bed. "And Madame Deslormes at the grocery on the corner and the Widow Lyons across the way both see me every day."
January nodded. Still he felt uneasy, but knew a part of that uneasiness was less for her than for Olympe and her husband, for young Gabriel and Zizi-Marie. These marauders did not content themselves with taking people whom no one would miss from their homes or from the tiny rooms they'd rented in the back streets of the town. Three or four of them, wandering the streets with clubs. The men who'd tried to abduct him.
The men who'd taken Cora Chouteau off the banquette.
Mademoiselle Vitrac bent over Genevi?ve's bed and spunged the girl's heat-blotched face and body.
"She was the most beautiful of them, you know," she said, keeping her voice matter-of-fact; a line of concentration marked her fine-drawn brows, as if she were doing accounts or grinding up mineral salts for a chemical experiment. "Her mother was just waiting for her to finish `this nonsense' as she called it, and start going to the Blue Ribbon Balls. She seemed to take it as a personal insult that Genevi?ve wouldn't consent to be the most beautiful girl there, so that she could be the mother of the most beautiful girl." She shook her head. "We-Genevi?ve and I-had one quarrel with her already, at the beginning of this year. She was so afraid of it," she added softly. "Genevi?ve."
I'm not very good at this, she had said to him once, and she still wasn't. Spilled water blotted her dress and soaked her sleeves, dribbling black patterns on the floor all around. She'd pulled off her tignon in the heat, and her dark hair, drawn back in a clumsy knot, was beaded with sweat, long curly tendrils of it escaping to drift around her face. Her hands were blistered with the unaccustomed work, and January saw how achingly she moved.
"It's funny," she went on, more softly. "Because when it came to chemical experiments, to fire and explosions, she was-not even brave is the word, she simply didn't think about fear. She even learned how to make bombs, stuffing gunpowder in the bottom of a clay jar and packing it in with cotton, and sawdust to take fire in the explosion and make the explosion seem bigger-I remember her timing how long it took a fuse to burn. The other girls were terrified."
Her mouth curved, cherishing the memory, bright as a stand of daffodils that catches sunlight before the engulfing shadow of storm.
In time Genevi?ve's feeble movements ceased and she lay with shut eyes, beaten. Mademoiselle Vitrac got quickly to her feet and went from the room, leaving the vinegar-water where it was. Leadenly weary, January finished dosing Antoinette and went to Genevi?ve, but the girl still breathed, though barely. He wrung out the sponge, finished neatly the job Mademoiselle Vitrac had abandoned, and dressed the girl again-it was like dressing a stick-puppet-in one of the nightgowns that he, or Hannibal, or Mademoiselle Vitrac endlessly