"My mother says she can't believe Bouille didn't accept whatever bribes Granger was handing out because Bouille's palm is greasier than a candlemaker's apron, but that Granger makes his money stealing cows in St. Charles Parish and selling them back to their owners, so what does he care about his silly streetcar line anyway? I'd forgotten," he added reminiscently, "how much I loved New Orleans politics."

The sword master gave him a quick grin. "Better than Balzac, no? I am a peaceful soul... no, it's true," he added, seeing January's eyebrows shoot up. "Fighting is either for joy, or for death-to push and test yourself against your friend, or to end the encounter as quickly as possible so that your enemy does not get up again, ever. This silliness..." He waved a dismissive hand, as they dodged through the early traffic of carts and drays and handbarrows in the flickering oil-lit darkness of Rue du Levee.

Mayerling's students were waiting for them around the corner on Rue Conde, clustered beside a chaise and a barouche. It was a smaller group than had formed his court at the quadroon ball, but the faces were much the same. The red Elizabethan costume was familiar and the rather sissified Uncas; a blue-and-yellow Ivanhoe and a corsair who looked as if he'd be more familiar with the interior of a jewelry shop than the deck of a pirate vessel. City Councilman Jean Bouille had eschewed his Renaissance trunk hose in favor of evening dress and a crimson domino. January wondered if this had something to do with uneasiness about the possible dignity of his corpse.

"Come to watch the show?" January asked, as he, Mayerling, and Bouille got into the chaise. He stowed his medical bag under his feet-the usual collection of cupping glasses, calomel, opium, and red pepper. At least, he thought, this would be a straightforward matter of wounds, bleeding, possibly broken bones. The four revelers piled into the barouche and dragged Hannibal in after them, all plying him in turn with their flasks, to be rewarded with an impassioned recitation of Byron's "Destruction of Sennacherib," as the vehicles pulled forward.

"They have come to witness justice being done against a perjured and impotent Kaintuck swine," declared Bouille, with comparative mildness and restraint, for him. "For me, I am glad of their presence. I would not put it past that infamous yellow hound to appear with a gang of like-minded bravos and ambush us, for he knows well he cannot prevail honestly in a man's combat."

Mayerling only raised his colorless brows.

Crowded close against him-the single seat of the two-wheeled chaise barely accommodated three people at the best of times, and only the Prussian's slightness made it possible for a man of January's size to fit-January said softly, "Young Peralta's taking it hard, isn't he? Mademoiselle Crozat's death."

The strange eyes cut to him, then away.

"It takes a lot to make a Creole absent himself from backing a friend's honor."

"The boy is a fool to mourn," said Mayerling, his voice cold. "The woman was evil, a poisonous succubus with a cashbox for a heart. Whoever he marries will have cause to thank the person who wielded that scarf."

January glanced in surprise at the ivory profile. "I didn't know you knew her." He remembered the way the Roman had lurked and lingered in the ballroom, the way masculine conversation stopped when she appeared, like a glittering idol of diamonds, in the ballroom doorway, the way all men had clustered around her.

Except, now that he thought back on it, Mayerling.

"Everyone in this city knows everyone," replied the sword master. "Trepagier was one of my students. Did you not know?" He returned his attention to the road.

The duel itself went as such things customarily did. The two carriages followed the Esplanade to the leaden, cypress-hung waters of Bayou St. John, and as dawn slowly bleached, the mists reached a patch of open ground on the Allard plantation, near the bayou's banks, overshadowed with oaks the girth of a horse's body.

Granger, too, had decided against the possibility of being carried dead back to his family in the white baggy costume of Pierrot, and had worn evening dress instead. His second, however, still sported the gleaming pasteboard armor of the Roman legions, while the purple pirate with his unfortunate copper-colored beard held the heads of their phaeton's team. Both Granger and Bouille, January noticed, wore dark coats whose buttons were noticeably small and inconspicuous.

Mayerling produced the pistols, a pair of his own Mantons that Jenkins and the blue-and-yellow Ivanhoe examined minutely. While the fencing master loaded the pistols, the seconds made a last effort-albeit a fairly perfunctory one-to talk their principals out of battle: January heard Granger state loudly, "Were I not given the opportunity to sponge away this impudent crapaud's bilious spewings in blood I would be forced to reenact the final scenes of Macbeth upon his verminous person." A remark clearly intended for Bouille's ears since Granger, an American speaking to two other Americans, said it in French.

Bouille replied-to his own seconds, but in loud English-that he had no fear of "a canaille who can no more pass himself for a gentleman than our surgeon can pass himself for a white man. One cannot pretend to be what one is not."

And January, standing next to Mayerling, saw the sword master's ironic smile. Bouille, that champion of Creole culture, like Livia Levesque, had evidently forgotten that he'd fled a typesetter's job in France ahead of a couple of sordid lawsuits and a welter of bad debts. Mulattos were not the only ones to suffer amnesia on horseback.

January and Hannibal prudently retired to the shelter of the oak trees fifty feet away. Mayerling, with what January considered reckless confidence in both men's aim, remained where he was. "You going to bleed whoever gets hit?" inquired Hannibal irreverently, leaning his chin on a horizontal bough.

January nodded. "And purge them. Two or three times."

"Couldn't happen to more deserving men."

There were two loud reports. Egrets squawked in the misty bayou.

January peered around the deep-curved limbs of the tree in time to see William Granger stalk back to his phaeton and climb in. Bouille was expostulating to the little cluster of fencing students.

"You see?" the city councilman crowed triumphantly. "The coward has outsmarted himself! In fear of my marksmanship he selected an impossible distance- fifty feet-at which he himself could not hit the door of a barn! Myself, I saw the shoulder of his coat rent asunder by my bullet."

While the exultant Bouille and his fellow pupils toasted one another and Hannibal with more hip flask brandy, Mayerling, with the air of a naturalist in quest of a new species of moth, paced off the spot where Granger stood and searched the surrounding trees until he found the bullet. Given even the most flattering estimate of its trajectory, it would have missed the American by yards. "More work in the gallery," he

said to Bouille, returning like the ghost of another century through the knee-deep ground mist, white ruff and sleeves pale in the dawn gloom. "Or less at your writing desk."

They climbed into the vehicles once again.

The entire colored demimonde, past and present, turned out for Angelique's funeral, Euphrasie Dreuze weeping in too-tight weeds and covered with veils that hid her face and trailed to her knees. From his position at the organ of the mortuary chapel of St. Antoine, January counted and tallied them: The chapel itself was small, but the overwhelmingly female audience did not overcrowd its hard wooden pews. In New Orleans' climate of fevers and family ties there were few women who didn't possess mourning dresses, but January was aware that if Angelique had been better liked many of those tricked out in well-fitting plum- and tobacco-colored silks would have worn black even if it didn't show off their figures. Few women of color looked really good in black.