Clisson, at least, would give him space to sleep above the kitchen of the little cottage on London Street.
He walked as far as the long wharf of the Washington Hotel's bathhouse, nearly a thousand feet out in the warm shallow waters of the lake, then ascended the gentle slope to the grounds of the hotel itself.
He wondered what Emily Redfern would have to say about the time and circumstances of her husband's death to an enquirer about poisons in use by those of African descent, but when he sent up his card-or more properly the card of one Hilaire Brun-a servant informed him that Mrs. Redfern had gone into town. "She got this letter, see," the boy said, when January handed him a half-reale. "She sent for that Reverend Dunk that's staying here, and they both went off for town in his gig, 'cause she don't have no carriage no more."
"Did you see who the letter was from?" January held out another half-reale.
The boy nodded, though he seemed a little puzzled at the obviousness of the question. "It was from a lettercarrier, sir."
January wondered whether it was worth his while to try again in the morning.
When he reached Madame Clisson's cottage, only his mother and Euphrasie Dreuze still occupied the porch. Madame Dreuze was saying, "... wouldn't be at all surprised if she was feathering her own nest all along! I'm sure she didn't feed those poor girls enough to-"
They broke off as January came up to the porch. "Your sister's sick," said the Widow Levesque bluntly, snapping shut the crimson silk fan. "The baby, too. I told that maid of Dominique's when she came over here I'd send you on to have a look, but in heat like this I don't see what the good of it is."
January felt the cold clutch of terror in his heart. Not Minou...
"I'll be there," he said.
That night he wrote to Hannibal Sefton, care of his mother's house, that he would be delayed in Milneburgh for as many as three or four days. He asked Hannibal, if at all possible, to check the barracoons of Dutuillet or Hewlett's or the St. Charles Exchange. to see if any of the former house servants of Emily Redfern still remained in the city.
Of Abishag Shaw, he asked the same, adding in his note that though the local magistrate of St. Charles Parish had signed the death certificate of Otis Redfern, no investigation of the death had been performed and only the widow's word existed as to her husband's symptoms or her own.
And in between mixing saline draughts for Dominique, and sponging Charles-Henri's tiny, brittle frame with vinegar-water and cream of tartar, he would sometimes unwrap the red-and-gold candy tin from his grip, and wonder where, and when, he ought to confess to Lieutenant Shaw that he had spoken to Cora Chouteau and was an accessory after the fact to the murder that she had not done.
What use to find Cora, if she would only be returned to be hanged?
Yet he could not leave her where she was wherever that was.
Head aching, he would return to Dominique's feverish murmurings, and the patient, endless, agonizing work of dripping saline draught thinned with a little milk into Charles-Henri's tiny mouth.
On the second night he understood that he was going to lose the child.
It happens, he thought, while the pain of the realization sank through him slowly, like a stone dropped in a bog's peaty waters. His mother had lost her first two babies by St. Denis Janvier-not that his mother had cared more than a cat cares about one drowned kitten more or less. Not many weeks ago Catherine Clisson had spoken to him of a child she'd lost, a boy of four, and he knew Olympe had had at least one still-birth. New Orleans was an unhealthy place at best, and it was dangerous to birth a child in the time of plague.
Still, he thought, looking from the white wicker cradle across at the white-draped bed where his sister lay, it was a grief he would have spared her. Life held grief enough.
Coming out of the bedroom he found Henri Viellard, dressed for a party in a coat of prune-colored superfine and a vest the hue of new lettuces, sitting on the cypress-wood divan. The fat man stood up quickly January had not been completely aware before this of how tall he was, easily six feet. "Will she be all right?" he asked.