willing to gossip as always. The boy who worked at the livery stable around the corner. The cook and the housemaid for a lawyer named Guttman in the yellow cottage that backed onto the school.
"It is a terrible shame... "
"No, Mademoiselle had no family that I heard of."
"Imagine, her taking all that money and living like a pauper-and making those poor girls live that way, too."
"Stuck-up yellow bitch." H?lier's voice was bitter. He was clearly struggling to balance his yoke and buckets at the new angle across his shoulders necessitated by the damage Soublet's "mollification of the bones" had done to his back. His fair, handsome face was drawn with exhaustion and pain. "Like all the colored, thinks herself better than everyone around her."
Including you, my friend, thought January, remembering the water seller's drugged tirade in the clinic. And all the white fathers in the world won't make you white.
Or straight-backed, he thought, suddenly ashamed. He thanked him, and walked on, turning back to see the twisted form staggering crablike along the banquette with his yoke and his cane, water slopping from the buckets and dribbling around his feet.
"I never held with education for girls," declared an Italian woman who kept a shop down the street.
"Look what it led to, eh?"
"Is it true she starved them to death?"
Calumny, Beaumarchais had written sixty years ago. You don't know what you are disdaining when you disdain that... There is no false report however crude, no abomi nation, no ridiculous falsehood which the idlers in a great city cannot, if they take the trouble, make universally believed. And Rose's education, her reserve, her strength had made her a target. No wonder she'd lashed out at him when he'd mentioned Alphonse Montreuil's jealous fantasies about Madame Lalaurie torturing her slaves. In her own way, Rose, like that beautiful Creole matriarch, was everything a woman should not be.
And she was gone.
He was obsessed with the thought that, returning from the Cabildo, she had been snatched from the side,walk by the same men who had tried to kidnap him, who had abducted Cora on the threshold of her freedom. Remembering Hannibal's earlier living arrangements, he slipped through the pass-throughs along the sides of houses shuttered tight, looking for signs of occupation.
He found none. But he did find, in two other houses, broken hasps on the rear shutters, bedclothes rumpled, the signs of swift and unwilling departure. In neither house and in a shed where he found a little heap of clothes and the tin badge of a slave who earned his own keep-was there evidence of children. In all three cases, the houses on either side were closed and empty.
Rain began to fall, wild and blowing and bathwater warm. Lightning cut the darkness, not bolts and spears but sheets of whiteness, prodigal and terrible, leaving denser dark behind. January, who by three in the afternoon had made a circuit of every cheap lodging house in the city, took the steam-cars to Milneburgh again, to be greeted by the news that the Widow Redfern had departed for the remainder of the fever season. Stopping at Minou's house cost him more time; and the returning train was overtaken by the storm, the branches lashing frenziedly in the gloom of the swampy woods on either side of the tracks and the dark, near-empty cars shaking with the blasts of the wind. By the time he walked back from the terminus to his mother's house it was nearly ten, lightless as the Pit save where the wildly swaying street lamps flung ragged flares of red across the intersections, the blowing rain transformed to bloody jewels.
He made his way across the yard by memory in the dark, groped for the rail of the stairs. No light shone from behind Bella's shutters. It was logical that were Hannibal making a little money playing in a tavern somewhere, he would stay rather than soak himself walking home. Still, January felt his way along between wall and gallery railing, and passed his hands over the latch of the shutters.
They were bolted from the outside. Hannibal had not returned. January was turning back to the door of his own room when a white flare of lightning illuminated the length of the gallery. It showed him two men just clambering up the stairway, knives in their hands.
Blindness returned the next second, but January had seen in their faces their surprise that he hadn't gone into his own room. With the noise of the storm, he'd never