Yr o'bt s'vt, Abishag Shaw

She was only a plaice, after all.

January's hand shook with anger as he set the paper down.

"An American," he said softly. "We should have known better than to look for more."

Minou was silent, turning the tall crystal wine glass in her fingers. Henri Viellard was a good provider: The cottage on Rue Burgundy was decorated with expensive simplicity, the table china French, the crystal German. When first he had entered the house last November, January had immediately guessed that the podgy young man had simply given his mistress carte blanche. If tonight's simple meal was anything to go by, her choice of a cook was in keeping with the rest of the establishment-and possibly, though Viellard wouldn't have admitted it, the real attraction of the menage.

It was not the house of a prostitute, not the house of a woman who sold herself to a man. It was the home of a couple who would have been married had the Black Code not forbidden it, the home of a woman whose man was prevented by law from living with her. The home of that curiously nuanced class of individual, a free placee of color...

Whom Americans like Shaw would see only as nigger whores.

With a certain amount of effort he kept his voice even. "Do you have the notes?"

Hannibal was out of his chair and helping her rise before January could make even a belated move in that direction. Therese, the servant woman, entered in silence and cleared away plates and serving dishes as Dominique extracted a thick mass of yellow foolscap from yet another drawer in the sideboard, and in equal silence brought coffee things and a little pale brown sugar in a French porcelain bowl.

"So far as I can tell," said Dominique, spreading the papers as the men cleared the cups to one side, "these are the people who were at the ball, and next door in the Theatre d'Orleans. I checked with all my friends, and all their friends, and we figured out even the Americans and decided who had to be at least some of the people in the other ballroom... We know Henri's family had to be there, for instance, because that awful mother of his never lets him go out without taking her and his sisters and Aunt Francine, and we know Pauline Mazanat and the Pontchartrain Trepagiers had to be there because they're the heads of the subscription committee that was running the ball... That kind of thing."

Her long, slim fingers shuffled neatly through the pile of foolscap scribbled with Shaw's uneven lines and the guardsman's pinched hand, sorting them out from the scented buff sheets of her own notepaper.

"The only ones we're not sure of were the men downstairs in the gambling rooms, but of course without tickets, they weren't allowed up the stairs. You can be sure Agnes Pellicot knew exactly who was asking her about her daughters. Can you believe that awful Henry VIII with his six wives is a man named Hubert Granville who's been talking to Francoise Clisson about her daughter Violette?"

"Were all those six wives his?" asked Hannibal, interested.

"Oh, no." Dominique laughed, and ticked them off on her fingers. "One of them was Bernadette Metoyer, who knows him through her bank-he's the president of the Union Bank and he lent her the money to set up her chocolate business when Athanase de Soto paid her off. Two of them were her sisters who help her in the chocolate shop, one was Marie Toussainte Valcour-Philippe Cournand, her protector, had to attend his grandmother's dinner that night-one was Marie-Eulalie Figes, who is pla?ee to Philippe's cousin, and he had to dance attendance on Grandma Cournand as well, and one was Marie-Eulalie's younger sister Babette. Marie-Eulalie is trying to come to an understanding for Babette with Jean duBose."

With that kind of intelligence system in operation among the placees and their families, January no longer doubted the accuracy or completeness of Dominique's lists. Names were appended in Dominique's small, flowery hand to all the witnesses who had remained to testify, and to all but perhaps twenty of the costumes listed by various persons as "seen." Among those "seen," January was unsettled to note, was "Indian Princess." And she had been seen by at least three people in the upstairs lobby after the music had started playing.

Damn, thought January. The charge that she could have had anything to do with Angelique Crozat's death was ridiculous, but Madame Trepagier had put herself in serious trouble by remaining. Why had she come upstairs after he'd told her to leave? Even without a ticket, a costumed woman could have slipped past the ushers, who were only there to keep out drunks and chance strangers from the gambling rooms. But it was, after all, a Blue Ribbon Ball.

Had she had second thoughts? Something else she had to tell him and was later prevented?

Had she decided to seek out Angelique herself?

In either case, she had lied to him Friday morning when she said she had gone directly back to Les Saules.

I was home by eight-thirty, she had said.

Why the lie?

He scanned the rest of the list.

There were only three other women unaccounted for, "seen" but not identified: "lavender domino," "green-striped odalisque," and "gypsy."

"Creole girls spying on their husbands," said Dominique offhandedly, when January asked.

"Silly." She returned his look of surprise with the warm flicker of her smile. "You don't think Creole ladies sometimes try to sneak in and see what their menfolk are up to? We can spot them a mile away. I understand why they want to do that," she added more soberly. "And I... I feel sorry for them, even the ones who complain to the police if you go to a restaurant or buy dresses that are too fine. But what good will it do, to see your husband with a woman you already know in your heart exists? It only hurts more. But most of them don't think about that till later."

January remembered himself, standing on the banquette opposite Catherine Clisson's house all those hot nights of his youth and shook his head. It did only hurt more. And he knew that it was a rare man, white or black or colored, who would truly give up a mistress because of the pleading or nagging of a wife. They simply hid them deeper or put them aside for a while only to go back. He turned the lists over in his fingers, the scribbled and amended and much-crossed chronology of the evening, arranged, he was interested to note, like a dance card, by what songs were being played. Minou's dance card from the evening was included in the bundle-with every dance taken, naturally-and even Shaw's original questions were linked to what music was being played.

Dominique must have suggested it to him. He spelled waltz, "walce."

No one had seen Galen Peralta after he'd stormed downstairs following his initial spat with Angelique.

"Was there ever anything between Augustus Mayerling and Angelique?"

Dominique trilled with laughter. "Mayerling? Good heavens, no! He hated Angelique almost from the day they met."

The woman who marries him will have cause to thank the one who wielded that scarf.

"Because of the way she treated young Peralta?"

"If Trepagier and the Peralta boy were bodi his students," pointed out Hannibal, "it's my guess that's how Angelique met our boy Galen to begin with. Augustus would have had a front-row seat on the whole seduction from the first dropped handkerchief, meanwhile watching her take Arnaud for every cent he had. His... antipathy... could have been as much disgust as hatred. He's fastidious about diings like that."

Hardly a reason for murder, thought January, no matter how fond he was of Galen Peralta. But now that he thought of it, Augustus Mayerling had been absent from the ballroom for far longer than would be accounted for by the conference over the duel.

Four dances-slightly under an hour-had intervened between Bouille's challenge and Mayerling's reappearance to ask January to preside as physician over the duel. During those dances-the most popular of the evening-the lobby had been almost deserted. For the same reason, none of Dominique's friends had been willing to absent themselves from the ballroom no matter what portions of their tableau