"Just the one night. Shaw did what he could for her-not that there's much one can do for someone in the circumstances."
January shut his eyes at the memory of the crawling mattresses, the stinking heat. At the thought of the fever, should it break out in those tiny, filthy cells.
Not Rose. Not Rose.
"The first night they took her, she wrote out a paper giving me quitclaim to her books-backdated to a week before her arrest, so they can't be seized in payment of her debts when they foreclose on the building. I've brought some of them over here already." Hannibal nodded. January had been vaguely aware of what, in the dense darkness, he had taken for packing boxes in the corners of the little room.
Peering through the gloom, he saw now that they were stacks of books, piled crazily on top of one another.
"There's more in your room. And all the science texts and atlases yet to bring over. I've tried to find her,"
Hannibal added. "It was a long night, Friday. Genevi?ve must have died a little before sunset, but neither of us knew it at the time. Victorine and Antoinette both went just before dawn. As I said, Rose took it hard. I didn't like to leave her but she insisted, saying she needed to sleep. I went over there as soon as I was awake Saturday afternoon and found her place locked tight, with police seals on it. So I went to the Cabildo and she asked me to bring her some things, some clean clothing and a comb and brush, and some paper and ink-that's when she gave me the books-and she told me what happened. The police evidently walked right in and went to the compartment in her desk where she had the pearls..."
"Why didn't she get rid of them?" moaned January. Somehow, it was all he could think of to say.
"Well," said Hannibal, "I did ask her that. She had some kind of idea of faking Cora's death to get pursuit off her and using the pearls as evidence of identity. Only, of course, the girls' illness intervened. She wouldn't write to you, and made me promise not to do so either. She said she had a note from you that morning saying that your sister was ill. Is Minou better?"
January nodded wearily. "Her baby died."
"Her first." The fiddler closed his eyes, as if seeing again the three girls in the stifling attic. "I'm sorry."
"It happens." January spoke without bitterness. His mind was full of disjointed pictures, reaching back and back through the previous days: Henri Viellard, asleep in the chair beside Minou's bed, clasping the hand of the sleeping woman. The soft chatter of the women in Minou's front room, and how they would come to keep him and Minou and one another company.
Whores, white society would call them, or those who didn't understand. But they looked after one another. "Her friends are with her. I couldn't leave before this morning. Maybe it's best. that neither of you wrote."
The pain in him was a hot weight, a fever he could not shake. A slow roll of thunder shuddered the air.
"I don't know," he whispered. He felt helpless, battered. Madame Clisson and Marie-Anne and Iph?g?nie had been there for Minou. Who had been there for Rose? "I don't know. Was she all right in the jail?"
"Well, she was pretty stunned," said Hannibal. "She said she kept thinking she was dreaming, or that this was all happening to someone else. This was after she started hearing the rumors about the money, too."
"What happened about that?" January looked up angrily. I was warned, Agnes Pellicot had said. "Who says that?"
Hannibal shook his head. "I only know it's being said. They locked up the school the day she was arrested-her creditors, and her backers, I mean, demanding it as an asset. Their agents, really, because, of course, all the Forstalls and Bringiers and McCartys are still at the lake. Hence the backdated quitclaim on the books. I've been sneaking them out a few at a time for the past three nights. Most of them are her personal possessions, anyway, not the school's. She's got a wonderful volume of the Lyric Poets in the original-I haven't seen this edition since I left Dublin.
Half-gone the night, and youth going~
I lie alone.
"She hasn't even been able to get in and get her own clothing; I looked. I've asked around the Swamp... ."