speak of this dying girl, whom he had never truly known, instead of to the bitter, struggling adolescent trapped within the schoolmistress's brittle calm.
"At least she knew someone else had walked that way before her."
The schoolmistress fought for a moment more to steady her breath, to regain her composure. To pretend she hadn't cried out, and pulled herself from what she knew was offered only in comfort and in love.
Then she turned her face toward him again, and said, "I'm sorry. It's... she was the oldest of them, and the closest to me."
She looked down at Genevi?ve's face again, and from being, a moment ago, a shield against him, the girl became again a friend in her own right, a loved friend with one foot in Charon's boat.
"I tried. I did try. If she hadn't been so bright-if she hadn't been so cutting about everything she saw and heard-her mother would have been gladder to have her with her in Mandeville."
"We can't know that," said January steadily, his eyes meeting hers. Her trembling ceased, and there was only grief, and no more vile memory, in her face. "We can't know what would or would not have befallen her, if she'd gone with her mother out of town. I suspect she was happier here, without her mother on her to put up her hair and go to the balls."
The sensitive mouth flinched. He saw old memory flit across the back of her eyes, trailing a silvery wake of pain. "That's true," Rose Vitrac said. "Her mother..." She made a small gesture, and ceased.
"If we start to make up those stories in our heads, about would-have and might-have and if-only-we-hadn't, we'll go mad," said January softly. "You know that."
"I know... You're seeing me at a bad time, M'sieu Janvier. I'm not usually this... this ticklish."
He met the green-gray eyes again, and smiled. "Well, Mademoiselle Vitrac, since you're the only woman of my entire acquaintance to ever be brought down by the death of those she loves, the fear of the plague, and the sheer exhaustion of a hero's work in nursing, I'll have to give it some thought before I forgive you."
She gave a swift, tiny spurt of laughter, clapped behind her hand again before sheer fatigue could turn it into tears, and her eyes sparkled quick gratitude into his. "Dum spiro spero; where there's life there's hope."
"And as a doctor I can tell you," he replied, "that where there's hope, there's often life."
"And where there's a will," added Hannibal, climbing up the last few boards of the stairway with his arms full of rough-dried sheets, "there's a relative, and I've found a most curious thing in the newspaper."
"What?" January turned, grateful for the diversion. "An admission there's an epidemic on?"
Mademoiselle Vitrac flung up her hands like a comic servant in a play. "An epidemic? Really?"
"Heaven forfend. Nothing so custard-livered and contrary to the principles upon which Our Great Nation was founded, whatever those are." Hannibal dumped the sheets on one of the unoccupied beds, and from the rear pocket of his trousers produced a folded page of the New Orleans Abeille. He was in shirtsleeves, the shirt itself stained with soap and blotched with water, his long brown hair wound up in a knot on the top of his head scarcely dissimilar to Mademoiselle Vitrac's makeshift coiffure. Like hers, his small, pale hands were blistered and burned. Perching tailor-fashion on the end of the bed beside the sheets, he unfolded the paper.
"This is Wednesday's," he announced. "The eighteenth of September. Runaway-Cora Age about twenty-one, housemaid. Small, mulatto, well set up, speaks both French and English. Stole $250 and a necklace of pearls from Mrs. Emily Redfern, thought to be going to New Orleans. Reward."
"Two hundred and fifty dollars?" said January, baffled. "What happened to the five thousand in cash Redfern got from Madame Lalaurie and the Bank of Louisiana? What happened to the birthmark on her shoulder?"
"Cora didn't have a birthmark on her shoulder." Mademoiselle Vitrac sat back down on the edge of Genevi?ve's bed, and took the wasted hand in hers. "At least not one that I ever saw, and we washed each other's hair a thousand times."
"The two hundred and fifty would be the original sum of that hundred and eighty you found, Rose," said Hannibal. "What did you do with that money, by the way?"
"It's in my desk." She looked slightly embarrassed. "I know it's stolen money, but... I'm keeping it for now, in case things get worse