And indeed, he could scarcely imagine Angelique Crozat or her mother or his own mother, who had been a slave herself, speaking to the woman.

The woman was a slave, and black.

He was free, and colored, though his skin was as dark as hers.

He watched the slim figure cross through the garden toward the kitchen, like a crow against the green of the grass, saw her ignore the old man tending to the planting, and noted the haughty tilt of shoulder and hip as she passed some words with the cook. Then she went on toward the laundry, and January saw the cook and another old woman speak quietly. Knowing the opinions his mother's cook Bella traded with the cook of the woman next door, he could guess exactly what they said.

Not something he'd want said about him.

"I've written a note for Madame Dreuze."

He rose quickly. Madame Trepagier stood in the doorway, a sealed envelope in her hand. "Would you be so good as to give it to her? I'm sorry." She smiled, her nervousness, her defenses, falling away. For a moment it was the warm smile of the child he had taught, sitting in her white dress at the piano-the sunny, half-apologetic smile of a child whose playing had contained such dreadful passion, such adult

ferocity. He still wondered at the source of that glory and rage.

"I always seem to be making you a messenger. I do apologize."

"Madame Trepagier." He took the message and tucked it into a pocket, then bowed over her hand. "I'm a little old to be cast as winged Mercury, but I'm honored to serve you nevertheless."

"After two years of being Apollo," she said smiling, "it makes a change."

He recognized the allusion, and smiled. In addition to being the god of music, Apollo was the lord of healing. "Did you keep up with it?" he asked, as he moved toward the steps. "The music?"

She nodded, her smile gentle again, secret and warm. "It was like knowing how to swim," she said. "I thought of you many times, when the water was deep. You did save my life."

And turning, she went back into the house, leaving him stunned upon the steps.

A square-featured woman in the faded calico of a servant answered January's knock at the bright pink cottage on Rue des Ursulines. The jalousies were closed over the tall French windows and a muted babble came from the dimness beyond her shoulder. There was a smell of patchouli and a stronger one of coffee.

"You lookin' for your ma, Michie Janvier?" she asked. "She in the back with Madame Phrasie." She curtsied as January regarded her in surprise.

"I'm looking for Madame Euphrasie, mostly," he said, as the woman stood aside to admit him. She had the smoother skin and unknotted hands of a longtime house servant. At first glance, in the shadows under the abat-vent, he would have put her near his own forty years, but as his eyes adjusted to the dim room he realized she couldn't be more than twenty-five. "How is she?"

The woman hesitated, then said, "She bearin' up."

There was a. world of weighted words and unspoken thought in that short phrase.

"Bearin' up, huh," said Agnes Pellicot shortly, from the green brocaded settee she shared with two other beautifully dressed, still-handsome women with fans of painted silk in their hands. The older, Catherine Clisson, had been three years ahead of January in Herr Kovald's music classes, a slim girl with high cheekbones for whom, at the time, he had nursed a sentimental and hopeless love. The younger, rounded and pretty in an exquisite rose-and-white striped dress, was Odile Gignac, his mother's dressmaker.

"Bearin' up enough to collect every earbob and pin, and cut the silver buttons off every one of her daughter's dresses, is how she's bearin' up."

"A woman can grieve her daughter and still fear for her own future, Agnes," said Clisson gently. "You know she had nothing beyond what Angelique sent her every month."

"God knows it was Angelique who paid her bills, more times than not," added Gignac, crossing herself. The daughter of respectable free colored parents, she was one of the small minority of sang meles who accepted the plafees on their own terms as friends as well as customers, though it was understood they did not speak on the public streets. "And her gambling debts, from what I hear. It's that poor child Clemence that fainted dead away when she came here this morning and heard."

Agnes only sniffed. January deduced the matter of young Peralta still rankled.

"Judith," Clisson went on in her soft voice, "please be so good as to fetch Monsieur Janvier some coffee. Or should I say Ben?" she added, her dark eyes sparkling with a friendship she'd never shown him when they were young. "I've missed you twice by your mama's. It's good to catch up with you at last."

January smiled, too. He'd been fourteen when she, far too proud of her own position to take the slightest notice of a gawky coal-black lout such as he had been, had become the mistress of a middle-aged Creole with a plantation on Lake Pontchartrain. January's adoration had lasted for years. On the nights when Monsieur Motet came into town he had been drawn to loiter on the opposite banquette of her cottage on Rue des Ramparts in an agony of jealous speculation, though they had not spoken since she had left Herr Kovald's class.

Funny, what time did.

The memory brought back all those other memories. He'd played with Odile and her brother as children, though her parents had looked askance at a placee's son, and had sent her to a Select Academy for Colored Females at an early age. A queer sense of pain touched him, which he recognized as a kind of pins-and-needles of the heart: feeling coming back into memories long buried and numb.

This city had been his home. These people had been his home.

In turning his back on Froissart and Richelieu, and on the thick heat of the fever summers, he had turned his back on them as well.

"I'd forgotten how beautifully you played." Clisson laid down her fan, French lace on sandalwood sticks, costly and new. "I didn't even think about it during the dancing, but afterward, when you were playing to keep everyone amused... The Rossini almost made me cry. I was sorry to hear about your wife."

He smiled down at her from his height. "I didn't think you even noticed how I played when we had class together," he said, with the rancorless amusement of shared old times. "You're still with Monsieur Motet?"

Her smile was no more than the tucking back of the corners of her lips, the velvet warming of her eyes. It told him everything even before she nodded, and he felt for her a rush of gladness. "Are you taking students, now you're back?" she asked. She spoke almost as if it had been a given, a foregone conclusion for all those years, that he would eventually return. He wanted to tell her he hadn't intended to return at all.

"I think your mama said you were. My daughter Isabel's eight. I've taught her a little, but it's time she had a good teacher."

January was opening his mouth to reply when a woman's voice cried out in the rear of the house, a sharp gasp, rising to a shriek "There it is! There! I told you! Oh God-"

A break, a murmur, January and Clisson and Gignac all on their feet in the sliding doorway that separated the darkened parlor from the still-darker bedchamber. "Oh, my child! Oh, my poor little one! Murder! Oh God, murder-"

"What the-" began January.

"Of course it was murder," said Clisson, puzzled. "Nobody ever said it wasn't."

The door to the bedroom sliced open and Euphrasie Dreuze stumbled through, clutching something in her

fat jeweled hand. "My God, my God, look!" she sobbed at the top of her lungs. "My poor little girl was hexed to death! Someone hid this in her mattress; she was sleeping next to this all along! It drew death down on her! It drew death!"