with a needle still in it: the single big pine-pole bed each family shared-two beds if it was a large cabin and two families shared it. Pegs where clothing had hung, where pots had been removed. In one cabin someone had left a banjo, a five-stringed instrument of a skin stretched over a gourd.
January went back up to the big house, and drew himself water from the well. Returning to the cabin where the banjo was, he shook up the straw tick and tightened the bed-ropes, then for the first time since childhood lay down under a slave-cabin roof. He thought the place would trouble-him, or the fear of discovery, of being kidnapped as Cora had been kidnapped. At least the ghosts who'd died there, of pneumonia or overwork, would whisper in the corners.
But he prayed for them, those nameless ones, with his battered blue rosary, asking God's rest for their souls: The deep silence of the country, the whirring of the cicadas and the peeping of the frogs in the swamp, was a sound of comfort to him, a song from his childhood. He realized that this was the first night since July that he had not worked among the sick, the dying, and the dead.
He slept, and no one visited him in his dreams.
Chapter Thirteen
The Redfern house at Spanish Bayou was fairly new, built in the American style probably not more than a decade before. Square, brick, it had a pillared porch and galleries front and back instead of all around, as was the French or Spanish way. It was painted blue instead of whitewashed or stuccoed, the shutters of the windows painted yellow, an astonishing piece of ostentation, considering the price of coloring agents in paint. Instead of all the rooms opening onto the gallery they opened inward, into a central hall.
They'll never believe I'm not here to rob the place, January thought, as he flipped loose the catch of a ground-floor window.
His mother would disown him.
Inside there was the same elaboration, the same display, that he recognized from the Lalaurie house, though without Madame Lalaurie's exquisite taste. Where Madame Lalaurie's parlor might boast a marble-topped bureau touched up with gilt handles and hinges, here were tables of black marble crusted with ormolu, jewelers' work rather than cabinetmakers', and a bad jeweler at that. Thick-stuffed brocade furniture in the German style instead of the spare, cool French; four sets of china laden with curlicues and scrollwork instead of the single, elegant Limoges.
It was the house of a woman frantic to have the best. And it would all be sold.
No wonder Emily Redfern was angry enough to do murder.
Twilight, Shaw had said. Presumably just before the windows-American casements, far less easy to trip from the outside-were closed up for the night. If Cora had come here Tuesday it would have been simpler: into the study, take the pearls and the money, then out the same way. And there was the chance that if another servant saw her, they wouldn't realize yet that she'd run away.
If it had been Wednesday-how soon before the arrival of the boat at the Spanish Bayou wharf? How fast could a slim young girl run, when she heard the hoot of the boat whistle?-it would be more difficult by far, if she'd slipped from the study, down the central hall to the warming-pantry where she'd have had access to supper. If it had been earlier yet, before supper was finished cooking, it became more complicated.
She'd have had to cross the open yard to the kitchen, where the cook would certainly have seen her.
Would she have risked that, twenty-four hours after she'd gone missing, with no possibility of a shrug and a lie? Oh, I was just off in the woods for a little, I wasn't going to run away. Sir.
It grated on January's nerves to go upstairs. Should anyone come in, he'd be cut off from escape, but he knew he had no choice. The Redferns had slept in separate rooms: his plainly furnished, the pieces new but not extravagant, hers a fantasia of ruffles, lace, silk, carving, and gilt. It was hers that he searched.
She'd put the red-and-gold candy tin up inside the fireplace, in a sort of ledge on the inside of the mantel.
It was the fourth place January checked.
Foolish, he thought, opening the tin. At least she'd had the sense to dump out the rest of the monkshood, leaving only fragments and powder in the seams of the tin itself. But