"No," said January, "it's all right."

Madeleine Trepagier's face was still set, scared but calm, like a soldier facing battle. She'd never survive, he thought. Not if La Crozat guessed her identity...

"Listen," he said. "I'll find Angelique and set up a meeting between you at my mother's house, all right? I'll send you a note tomorrow."

She closed her eyes, and some of the tension left her shoulders and neck; she put out a hand to the corner of the desk to steady herself. She too, realized January, had heard everything there was to hear about Angelique Crozat. A deep breath, then a nod. Another black cock feather floated free, like a slow flake of raven snow.

"All right. Thank you."

They left her in the office, Hannibal checking the corridor, right and left, before they ducked out and hastened up the narrow, mildew-smelling flight of the service stair. In the hall January retrieved another cock feather from the bare cypress planks of the floor, lest Richelieu happen by and be of an observant bent. With luck once the music started everyone would be drawn up to the ballroom, and Madame Trepagier could slip away unnoticed. It shouldn't be difficult to hire a hack in the Rue Royale.

Didn 't I tell myself fifteen minutes ago, 'Let's not do this again'? An interview with Angelique Crozat-spiteful, haughty, and so vain of the lightness of her skin that she barely troubled herself to treat even free colored like anything but black slaves-a clout in the mouth from Cardinal Richelieu promised to be mild in comparison. At least being struck was over quickly.

"Who's the lady?" asked Hannibal, as they debouched into the little hall that lay between the closed-up supper room and the retiring parlor.

"A friend of my sister's." The parlor door was ajar, showing the tiny chamber drenched in amber candlelight, its armoire bulging with costumes for the midnight tableaux vivants and two girls in what was probably supposed to be classical Greek garb stitching frantically on a knobby concoction of blue velvet and pearls.

"In case you've forgotten, that kind of tete-a-te'te's going to get you shot by her protector, and it probably won't do her any good, either."

They passed through an archway into the lobby at the top of the main stair. The open stairwell echoed with voices from below as well as above, a many-tongued yammering through which occasional words and sentences in French, Spanish, German, and Americanized English floated disembodied, like leaves on a stream. Pomade, roses, women, and French perfumes thickened the air like luminous roux, and through three wide doorways that led into the long gas-lit ballroom, only the smallest breath of the night air stirred.

Hannibal paused just within the central ballroom door to collect a glass of champagne and a bottle from the bucket of crushed New England ice at the buffet table. One of the colored waiters started to speak, then recognized him and grinned.

"You fixin' to take just the one glass, fiddler?"

Hannibal widened coal-black eyes at the man and passed the glass to January, ceremoniously poured it full and proceeded to take a long drink from the neck of the bottle.

"Oh, for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene.

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stained mouth."

He solemnly touched the bottle to January's glass in a toast, and resumed his progress toward the dais at the far end of the ballroom. January collared two more glasses for Jacques and Uncle Bichet, who awaited them behind the line of potted palmettos. The waiter shook his head and laughed, and went back to pouring out champagne for the men who crowded through the other doorways from the lobby, clamoring for a last drink before the dancing began.

As he settled at the piano-a seven-octave Erard, thick with gilt and imported at staggering cost from Paris -and removed his hat and gloves, January thought he caught a glimpse of the creamy buff of a buckskin gown in the far doorway. He swung around, distracted, but the shifting mosaic of revelers hid whoever it was he thought he'd seen.

Concern flared in him, and anger, too. Damn it, girl, I'm trying to keep you from ruining yourself His hands passed across the keys, warming up; then he nodded to Hannibal and to Uncle Bichet, and like acrobats they bounded into the bright strains of the Marlboro Cotillion. First thoughts were best- I'm getting too old to be a knight-errant. His lip smarted and he cringed inwardly at the thought of seeking out and interviewing Angelique Crozat later in the evening.

And for what? So that she could come up here anyway...

But why would she come up? He'd seen her relax at the thought that she didn't have to find the woman herself, saw the dread leave her.

He'd probably been mistaken. He hoped he'd been mistaken. Men were leading their ladies in from the lobby, forming up squares. Others came filtering through the discreetly curtained arch that led to the passageway from the Theatre next door, greeting their mistresses with kisses, their men friends with handshakes and grins of complicity, while their wives and fiancees and mothers no doubt fanned themselves and wondered loudly where their menfolk could have got to. The custom of the country. January shook his head.

All of Madeleine Trepagier's family, and her deceased husband's, were probably at that ball. He'd never met a Creole lady yet who didn't have brothers and male cousins. True, if they didn't know she'd be here they wouldn't be expecting to see her, but there was always the risk. With luck the first dances-cotillion, waltz, Pantalon- would absorb their attention, giving the woman time to make her escape.

If that was what she was going to do. The skipping rhythms of the cotillion drew at his mind. He knew that for the next hour, music would be all he'd have time to think about. Whatever she decided to do, she'd be on her own.

It was her own business, of course, but he had been fond of her as a child, the genius and the need of her soul calling to the hunger in his. She had to be desperate in the first place to come here. Quiet and well-mannered and genuinely considerate as she had been as a child, she had had the courage that could turn reckless if driven to the wall. He wished heartily that he'd had time to escort her back to the Trepagier town house himself.

He was to wish it again, profoundly, after they discovered the body in the parlor at the end of the hall.

Benjamin January's first public performance on the piano had been at a quadroon ball. He was sixteen and had played for the private parties and dances given during Christmas and Carnival season by St.Denis Janvier for years; he was enormously tall even then, gawky, lanky, odd-looking, and painfully

shy. St.Denis Janvier had hired for him the best music master in New Orleans as soon as he'd purchased-and freed-his mother.

The music master was an Austrian who referred to Beethoven as "that self-indulgent lunatic" and regarded opera as being on intellectual par with the work hollers Ben had learned in his first eight years in the cane fields of Bellefleur Plantation where the growing American suburb of Saint Mary now stood. The Austrian-Herr Kovald-taught the children of other placees and seemed to think it only the children's due that their illegitimate fathers pay for a musical as well as a literary education for them. If he ever thought it odd that Ben did not appear to have a drop of European blood in his veins it was not something he considered worthy of mention.

Ben was, he said quite simply, the best, and therefore deserved to be beaten more, as diamonds require fiercer blows to cut. Common trash like pearls, he said, one only rubbed a little.