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.There may have been things going on in that household we’ll never know about—which may be one reason why our Emily is trying so hard to retrieve her runaway property.”The rain was lightening.Pale daylight leaking through the cracks in the shutters struggled against the candle glow, then slowly bested it.Hannibal gathered up his fiddle case to go.“One thing I do know, though,” he added, pausing in the door.“And I think you know this, too, if you talked to her even for a short time.Cora isn’t one to give up.I don’t think she’d have left New Orleans without Gervase.And given her circumstances, I don’t think she’d walk out either on that money, or on Rose.”NINEJanuary was careful, upon approaching the Lalaurie house later that afternoon, to stay on the downstream side of Rue de l’Hôpital, crossing over only when directly opposite the gate rather than risk another encounter with Monsieur Montreuil.The rust-colored town house seemed shabby and sordid to him, and he imagined, as he studied it through the thin-falling rain, that the curtains in the upper-floor windows were half-parted, to afford a view of whoever might be passing in the street.The Montreuil house and the Lalaurie shared a party wall.There was no way that he could perceive for anyone in the Montreuil house to see if Madame Lalaurie hurled a dozen slaves from her own roof.The bony servant entered with the inevitable glass of lemonade for Mademoiselle Blanque in the stifling heat, and vanished in well-trained silence.If nothing else, thought January, Jean Blanque’s widow would have far too accurate a knowledge of what men and women cost to indulge in that kind of waste.When the lesson was over he asked one of the market-women selling berries in the street outside if she had seen or heard of anyone leaving the Lalaurie house the previous Friday night, but the woman only crossed herself quickly, and hurried on her way.January put up his oiled-silk umbrella and made his way riverward to the cafés that sheltered under the market’s tile-roofed arcade.Most of the market-women were gone, and the shadowy bays empty to the coming twilight.The air smelled thick of sewage, coffee, tobacco, and rain.A few crews still worked in the downpour, unloading cargoes from the steamboats at the levee.Others sheltered on the benches under the arcades, black and white and colored, joking among themselves and laughing.At the little tables set up on the brick flooring, brokers and pilots and supercargoes sipped coffee and dickered over the prices of flour and firewood, corn and pipes of wine.At other tables, upriver flatboatmen or the crews of the keelboats that still plied the river’s jungly shores muttered in their barely comprehensible English; and under the arches on the river side a stocky, curly haired man in a somber black coat argued prices with the broker Dutillet over a little coffle of slaves standing, manacled, in the rain.As he passed them January heard Dutillet say in English, “Nine-fifty is as high as I’ll go; take it or leave it, sir.” And the man protested, “Nine-fifty! Why, a good field hand’s going for over eleven hundred in the Missouri Territory!”January paused, recognizing the melodic organ-bass of the voice.“Then take ’em up to Missouri and sell ’em there, by all means, Reverend,” retorted the broker.“And considering what you paid that poor widow for ’em, you ought to take shame to yourself.”January realized the man in the black coat, whose face was vaguely familiar to him, was the Reverend Micajah Dunk, in whose honor Emily Redfern had gone to battle with the entire Creole community over the matter of musicians.He passed on, shaking his head.A market-woman pointed out the man he sought, sitting alone at a table with a cup of coffee and beignets before him.January approached him, held out his hand: “Natchez Jim?”“I was last time I looked.” The boatman smiled, and clasped January’s fingers in a grip like articulated oak logs.“You’re the musician, Mamzelle Snakebones’s brother [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]