Monsieur Tremouille, the Chief of Police, had succeeded.
Monsieur janvier If you receive this you will have heard something of what has befallen. The police came yesterday, and found hidden in the building a string of pearls and a quantity of money that they claim links me to a runaway slave, whom they likewise claim was a girl I knew in my youth.
Why didn't you get rid of the pearls? thought January furiously. I told you to throw them in the river! At least she'd taken into account the possibility that they'd show the note to someone who had been to a proper school.
The day before their arrival, Antoinette, Victorine, and Genevi?ve all succumbed, at last, to the fever. I sent word to you, but you had already left for Milneburgh, and later events prevented me from writing you there. Occupied as I was with them I could not give my full mind to matters when Madame Pellicot and Madame Moine came to remove their daughters from the school, though I understand that rumors have begun that I speculated with the school's money. These rumors are untrue, and I am at a loss to understand how or why they began.
The fact remains that I am ruined. I understand people are even blaming me for the deaths of my poor girls. I know it will be impossible for me to open the school again, even should I find pupils. At the moment I have no idea where I will or can go, or what I can do.
I may have little experience with the ways of the world, but I do know that calumny is a contagion far more to be dreaded than our friend Bronze john, and even your slight association with me in caring for the girls might be held against you by the malicious. Therefore I ask your indulgence. I know that I owe you the money we agreed upon for the girls' care...
[What money? A moment later he realized that the sentence was for the benefit of those who might read the letter, and wonder why else he would wish to seek her out.] ... but please, for your own sake, do not attempt to locate me. I will send the money to you in good time. I do not forget all the kindnesses you have done.
Thank you for the help you gave me with the girls. Without your timely assistance, matters would be far worse than they were. I am sorry that I cannot thank you in person, but you must see, as I do, that it is better we never meet again.
The letter was signed, not in Latin, but in Greek: more difficult for January to read, but impossible, he thought, for others to spy out.
He recognized it as a quote from Euripides. (Greek script unavailable) It took him a few moments to translate:
Nothing can come between true friends. Rose
Chapter Fourteen
"Obviously, someone talked."
Hannibal folded up his copy of Emma and leaned over to trim the tallow lights that transformed his little tent of mosquito-bar into a glowing amber box. Returning to his mother's house, with the dense, hot smell of storms brewing over the Gulf, January saw the thread of light beneath the door of Bella's room; even on those nights when he was sober and not working, Hannibal seldom slept before three.
"My guess is Isabel Moine, who never wanted to be at that school and hated learning of any sort. I know she'd written her parents two or three times asking for them to come and get her, and they wouldn't-Victorine told me this, one night when she couldn't get to sleep."
His brow pinched with compassion at the memory of the three girls. "They took a turn for the worse-well, Antoinette was losing ground all the way along-and they went quickly, in spite of everything Rose and I could do. Rose took it-hard."
"Do you know where she is?"
Hannibal shook his head. "I went down there Sunday afternoon, and they said they'd released her, in spite of the evidence being pretty damning. Shaw wasn't there, and nobody would tell me anything. I don't know what happened to change everybody's mind."
He reached down to the pottery jug beside the bed and offered some to January, who was sitting on the end of the bed. It was ginger-beer, lukewarm but not unpleasant. Far off to the north above the lake thunder growled. Flares of sheet lightning outlined the shutters of the room's single French window.
"How long was she in