Herr Kovald had played the piano at the quadroon balls, which in those days had been held at another ballroom on Rue Royale. Then, as now, the wealthy planters, merchants, and bankers of the town would bring their mulatto or quadroon mistresses-their placees-to dance and socialize, away from the restrictions of wives or would-be wives; would also bring their sons to negotiate for the choice of mistresses of their own. Then, as now, free women of color, pla?ees or former plasees, would bring their daughters as soon as they were old enough to be taken in by protectors and become plafees themselves, in accordance with the custom of the country. Society was smaller then and exclusively French and Spanish. In those days the few Americans who had established plantations near the city since the takeover by the United States simply made concubines of the best looking of their slaves and sold them off or sent them back to the fields when their allure faded.

At Carnival time in 1811, Herr Kovald was sick with the wasting illness that was later to claim his life. As if the matter had been discussed beforehand, he had simply sent a note to Livia Janvier's lodgings, instructing her son Benjamin to take his place as piano player at the ball. And in spite of his mother's deep disapproval ("It's one thing for you to play for me, p'tit, but for you to play like a hurdy-gurdy man for those cheap hussies that go to those balls..."), he had, as a matter of course, gone. And, except for a break of six years, he had been a professional musician ever since.

The ballroom was full by the time the cotillion was done. January looked up from his music to scan the place from the vantage point of the dais, while Hannibal shared his champagne with the other two musicians and flirted with Phlosine Seurat, who had by this time discovered that powdered wigs and panniers were designed for the stately display of a minuet, not the breathtaking romp of a cotillion. Between snippets of Schubert, played to give everyone time to regain their breaths, January tried again to catch sight of Madeleine Trepagier-if that was she he had thought he'd glimpsed in the ballroom doorway-or of Angelique Crozat, or, failing either of them, his sister Dominique.

He knew Minou would be here, with her protector Henri Viellard. During the four years between Dominique's birth and January's departure for Paris, he had known that the beautiful little girl was destined for pla-fage-destined to become some white man's mistress, as their mother had been, with a cottage on Rue des Ramparts or des Ursulines and the responsibility of seeing to nothing but her protector's comfort and pleasure whenever he chose to arrive.

The practical side of him had known this was a good living for a woman, promising material comfort for her children.

Still, he was glad he'd been in Paris when his mother started bringing Minou to the Blue Ribbon Balls.

He caught sight of her just as he began the waltz, a flurry of pink silk and brown velvet in the wide

doorway that led to the upstairs lobby, unmistakable even in a rose-trimmed domino mask as she grasped the hands of acquaintances, exchanged kisses and giggles, always keeping her alertness focused on the fat, fair, bespectacled man who lumbered in at her side. Viellard appeared to have been defeated by the challenge of accommodating his spectacles to the wearing of a mask-he was clothed very stylishly in a damson-colored cutaway coat, jade-green waistcoat, and pale pantaloons, and resembled nothing so much as a colossal plum. When the waltz was over Dominique fluttered across the dance floor to the musicians' stand, holding out one lace-mitted hand, a beautiful amber-colored girl with velvety eyes and features like an Egyptian cat's.

"First I heard Queen Guenevere had her dresses made from La Belle Assemblee." Benjamin gestured to the fashionable bell-shaped skirt, the flounced snowbank of white lace collar, and the sleeves puffed out-Dominique had recently assured him-on hidden frameworks of whalebone and swansdown. Like every woman of color in New Orleans she was required to wear a tignon-a head scarf-in public, and had used the license granted by a masked ball to justify a marvelous confection of white and rose plumes, of wired and pomaded braids, of stiffened lace dangling with tasseled lappets of rose point in every direction, the furthest thing from the grace of Camelot that could be imagined.

Women these days, January had concluded, wore the damnedest things.

"Queen Guenevere is for the tableaux vivants, silly. And I'm just appallingly late as it is-you can't get any kind of speed out of waiters during Carnival, even in a private dining room-and I've just found out Iphegenie Picard doesn't have her costume for our tableau finished! Not," she added crisply, "that she's alone in that. Iphegenie was telling me-"

"Is Angelique Crozat here?" In the three months he'd been back in New Orleans, January had learned that the only way to carry on a conversation with Dominique was to interrupt mercilessly the moment the current appeared to be carrying her in a direction other than the one intended.

She said nothing for a moment, but the full lips beneath the rim of the mask tightened slightly, and the chill was as if she'd imported a chunk of New England ice to cool the air between them. "Why on earth do you want to talk to Angelique, p'tit? Which I wouldn't advise, by the way. Old man Peralta has been negotiating with Angelique's mama-for his son, you know, the one who doesn't have a chin-and the boy's crazy with jealousy if any other man so much as looks at her. Augustus Mayerling's had to pull him out of two duels over her already, which he hasn't any right to be getting into- Galen, I mean-because of course negotiations are hardly begun..."

"I need to give her a message from a friend," said January mildly.

"Better write it on the back of a bank draft if you want her to read it," remarked Hannibal, coming around to lean on the corner of the piano. "In simple words of one syllable. You ever had a conversation with the woman? Very Shakespearean."

Reaching out, he extracted two of the plumes from Dominique's hat and twisted his own long hair into a knot on the back of his head, sticking the quill ends through like hairpins to hold it in place. "Full of sound and fury but signifying nothing." Dominique slapped at his hands but gave him the flirty glance she never would have given a man of her own color, and he hid a grin under his mustache and winked at her, thin and shabby and disreputable, like a consumptive Celtic elf.

"I haven't had the pleasure," said January wryly. "Not recently anyway, though she did call me a black African nigger when she was six. But I've heard conversations she's had with others."

"I've done that two streets away."

"She'll be here." Dominique's tone was still reminiscent of the ominous drop in temperature that precedes a hurricane. "And I don't think you'll find her manners have improved. Not toward anyone who can't do anything for her, anyway. Well, I understand a girl has to live, and I don't blame her for entertaining Monsieur Peralta's proposals, but..."

"What's wrong with Peralta?" January realized he'd run aground on another of those half-submerged sandbars of gossip that dotted New Orleans society-Creole, colored, and slave-like the snags and bars of the river. One day, he knew, he'd be able to negotiate them as he used to, unthinkingly-as his mother or Dominique did -identifying Byzantine gardens of implication from the single dropped rose petal of a name. But that would take time.

As other things would take time. In any case he couldn't recall any scandal connected with that dignified old planter.

"Nothing," said Dominique, surprised. "It's just that Arnaud Trepagier has only been dead for two months. Arnaud Trepagier," she went on, as January stared at her in blank dismay, his mind leaping to the fear that she had somehow recognized Madeleine, "was Angelique's protector. And I think-"