household last spring, made him uneasy. She was clinging and self-pitying, constantly referring to her twisted back and misaligned pelvis.
"I do my best," she said with a sigh, blinking her large hazel eyes up at him from the piano stool. "But as you see, I'm no more a musician than I am a matrimonial catch." Her lace-mitted hand, thin to the point of boniness strayed for the thousandth time to the bunches of fashionable curls that hung over her ears, readjusting the ribbons and the multifarious lappets of point d'esprit. Louise Marie was dressed as always in the height of Paris fashion, the bell-shaped skirt of girlish yellow jaconet trimmed with blond lace, flounces, and far too many silk roses. The bodice was specially cut, and the skirt specially hemmed, to accommodate the twist of her spine and the uneven length of her legs.
"As long as you do your best, Mademoiselle Blanque," replied January, with the patient friendliness he had long cultivated to deal with pupils he didn't much care for personally, "you'll make progress. This isn't a race," he added, with a smile. "It's not like you have to be ready to open in Le Mariage de Figaro at Christmas."
"Well, that's a blessing," muttered Pauline, prowling from the shuttered windows of the second-floor front parlor where the piano stood. The younger sister slapped her fan on the piano's shining rosewood top, then a moment later caught it up and beat the air with it again, as if the necessity to do so were unjust penance imposed upon her alone. Though he had bathed before coming here, January felt the stickiness of sweat on his face and under his shirt and coat.
In April or October, all the long windows onto the gallery would have been thrown wide at this time of day to catch the breezes of coming evening. But now that was a luxury that could not be risked. Fever rode the night air, invisible and deadly-that was all that anybody knew of it. The winter curtains of velvet and tapestry had been exchanged for light chintz and gauze, but those were drawn closely over the tall French doors; and the light they admitted was wan and sickly gray. The woven straw mats underfoot, and the muslin covers masking the opulent furniture, did little to lighten or cool the room. With its mirrors swathed in gauze, its ornaments veiled against flyspecks, the place had a shrouded atmosphere, tomblike and drained of color.
"Oh, darling, please..." Louise Marie made a feeble gesture toward her sister's fan and produced another cataclysmic sigh. "If you would... The heat affects me so!"
Any other family would have been in Mandeville, where January knew Madame Lalaurie owned a summer cottage and a good deal of property. Nicolas Lalaurie was a doctor-a partner at Jules Soublet's clinic on Rue Bourbon-but somehow January suspected the small, pale, silent Frenchman would have had no objection to leaving a town where only the poor remained to fall ill. But Madame Lalaurie, almost alone among the high Creole society, had chosen to remain in town and nurse the sick. January guessed that Dr. Lalaurie-not a native Creole himself-knew his reputation would never survive flight from a danger that his wife faced with such matter-of-fact calm.
He guessed, too, that one or the other of the Lalauries had-decreed that the two girls should remain as well: the doctor out of wariness about how things looked, or Ma dame simply because the possibility of falling ill had never entered her mind.
Her face like bitter stone, Pauline slapped open the sandalwood sticks and began to fan her sister, while Louise Marie, a long-suffering smile of martyred gratitude and a gleam of satisfaction in her eye, jerked and hobbled through a Mozart contredanse in a fashion that amply demonstrated that she had done none of her appointed practice during the previous four days.
But January was used to pupils not practicing, and there were things he could say to praise without condemnation, which he knew would do him no good. All girls of good family studied the piano from childhood, though few kept up lessons into their twenties. Madame Delphine Lalaurie, however, was as renowned for her piano playing as she was for her hospitality, for her business acumen, for her beauty and social connections, and it was unthinkable that her daughters should fall below the standard she set. Watching Louise Marie's exaggerated winces at her mistakes-as if they were catastrophes imposed upon her by a spiteful