then, the slaves' children probably checked the rubbish heap regularly for broken china and bits of scraps, if she was supposed to be so sick from the poisoning that she couldn't leave her bed she'd hardly have been able to throw it down the outhouse.
He wrapped the tin carefully in two handkerchiefs, so am not to confuse whatever marks might still be on it, and stowed it in his grip.
In the warming-pantry at the back of the house he searched drawers until he found what he guessed would be there: Emily Redfern's menu for the week of the fifteenth. Of course Bernard Marigny's stuck-up yellow fussbudget cook would do things the French way. He'd consult his mistress over a written menu, which would be amended in her hand.
And there it was. On the eighteenth of September the fare had consisted of turtle soup, sauteed shrimp and mushrooms, grilled tournedos of beef, roasted guinea hen, rice and gravy, fresh green beans, with jam crepes and berry cobbler for dessert. Breakfast, he was interested to note, had originally been omelettes and creamed gizzards with waffles and jam, but had been augmented-apparently at the last minute-with apple tarts, ham, and crepes.
Company for breakfast? Michie Otis returning in a foul mood after being threatened by Roarke and his bravos in full view of Monsieur Davis's gambling hall?
It was still early morning, barely eight by the sun. The Lancaster would not be coming down the reach above Twelve-Mile Point until three at the earliest. Cora Chouteau had spoken of Black Oak, as lying next to Spanish Bayou. Coming along the top of the levee last night he had seen that on the upriver side of the Redfern property there was only cultivated land. Downstream, however, lay a long tangle of woodlot and swamp, through which the bayou meandered in a couple of lazy curves.
January drew another pail of well water and ate some of the bread and cheese he'd packed and added to this apples from the small orchard behind the house, or what passed in Louisiana for apples anyway. It was a walk of about two miles, on the narrow paths between the canes, to the silent woods of black oak and ash, the suffocating green gloom of the slip of property that had been Madame Redfern's own.
The house here was much older than her husband's, and smaller, an old Creole dwelling from a time when Black Oak had been a proper, if minor, plantation. Like Mademoiselle Vitrac's school, the building was three rooms raised above three low storage chambers, with a couple of cabinets tacked onto the back for good measure. The kitchen and the quarters beyond had long ago crumbled to nothing, swallowed up in thickets of hackberry and elder when the fields had been bought up by the bigger planters on either side. Stripped of its whitewash by the weather, the house itself bore signs within of leakage, storm damage, and vermin.
January found the candle cupboard in the side of the fireplace where Cora had discovered the tin of poison. The small, square hollow had a lock, but had been opened, and was empty. In another room a pile of old leaves and branches was spread with a couple of blankets. Here Cora and Gervase had shared the only privacy, the only happiness, permitted those whose bodies and lives and service belong to other people.
He looked through the rest of the house, opening cupboards, looking in fireplaces, not sure what he was seeking or what he thought he might find. People had been in and out, that much was clear from the way the dirt on the floor was scuffed up, but who they might have been he could not tell. He went out on the gallery, where Cora said she Irad seen Mamzelle Marie waiting in the twilight. But beyond ascertaining that the path back to Spanish Bayou did emerge from the oleander bushes at a point where someone on the porch could easily see someone approaching the old house unawares, he found nothing.
There was a well between the house and where the Icitchen had been, and the water in it was still good.
He drank, and washed himself, and changed back into his white shirt, bettermost trousers, sober waistcoat, and black coat and hat; and so attired, made his way the three-quarters of a mile or so through a frog-peeping hush of red oak, hickory, palmetto, and vine to the levee once again, and so upstream to the plantation called