The Shirt On His Back - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,1

in office a week, and see what he done to the country already? We need Old Hickory back . . .

As if it wasn't 'Old Hickory' who'd precipitated the whole mess and left it for his successor to clean up.

January walked on, shaking his head and wondering what the hell he and his beautiful Rose were going to do.

It had been a bad winter. Tightening credit and the plunge in the value of banks' paper money meant that fewer white French Creoles - and far fewer Americans - had given large entertainments, even at Christmas and Twelfth Night. January, whose skill on the piano usually guaranteed him work every night of the week from first frost 'til Easter, had found himself many nights at home. The same spiral of rising prices and fewer loans had prompted many of the well-off white gentlemen who had sent their daughters 'from the shady side of the street' to board and be educated at the school that Rose operated in the big Spanish house, to write Rose letters deeply regretting that Germaine or Sabine or Alice would not be returning to the school this winter, and we wish you all the best of luck . . .

And we're surely going to need it.

Other well-off families - both white and gens de couleur libre - had decided that Mama or Aunt Unmarriageable would be perfectly able to take over teaching the children the mysteries of the piano, rather than hiring Benjamin January to do so at fifty cents a lesson. The last of them had broken this news to January the previous week.

Since early summer, January had been hiding part of what earnings he did make here and there about the house - in the rafters, under the floorboards . . . But summer was the starving- time for musicians, the time when you lived off the proceeds of last year's Mardi Gras. The little money he'd made from lessons, January had fallen into the habit of spending on groceries, so as not to touch the slender reserve in the bank.

In the God-damned locked-doors Lucifer-strike-you-all- with-lightning Bank of Louisiana, thank you very much.

Rose was sitting on the front gallery when he climbed the steps. She'd been quiet since the first time he'd walked to the bank that morning, for the week's grocery money. Sunday would be Palm Sunday, and once Easter was done, the planters who came into town for the winter, and the wealthier American businessmen, would begin leaving New Orleans. Subscription balls ordinarily continued up until April or May, but John Davis, who owned the Orleans Ballroom, had told January that this year he was closing down early. With the Bank of Louisiana out of business, January guessed that the American Opera House - where he was supposed to play next week - would follow suit.

Rose met his eyes, reading in them what he'd found - yet again that day - on Rue Royale.

In her quiet, well-bred voice, she said, 'Well, damn,' put her spectacles back on and held up the letter that had been lying in her lap. 'Would you like the good news first, or the bad news?'

'I'd like this first.' January took the letter from her hand, dropped it to the rough-made little table at her side, stood her on her feet and kissed her: slender, gawky, with a sprinkle of freckles over the bridge of her nose and the gray-hazel eyes so often found among the free colored. Though she stood as tall as many men, against his six-foot-three bulk she felt delicate, like a sapling birch. 'You're here sitting on the gallery of our house. No bad news can erase that; no good news can better it.'

She sighed and put her head briefly against his shoulder. He felt her bones relax into his arms.

'I take it that letter is from Jules Gardinier informing us that he's taking Cosette out of the school and sending her to live with her grandmother?'

She leaned back, looked up into his face in mock wonderment: 'You must have second sight! And here Cosette was the only one of our pupils left to us—'

'And her father owns stock in the Bank of Louisiana.' January grinned crookedly. 'Which is going to be converted into a livery stable as soon as they can get up enough money to buy hay. What's the good news?'

Rose was silent for a moment, as if thinking how to phrase an awkward question. Then she propped her spectacles more firmly on