The Creoles had a saying, Mount a mulatto on a horse, and he'll deny his mother was a Negress.

Angelique was at the top of the stairs, exchanging a word with Clemence, who came up to her with anxiety in her spaniel eyes; she turned away immediately, however, as a rather overelaborate pirate in gold and a blue-and-yellow Ivanhoe claimed her attention with offers of negus and cake. January hesitated, knowing that an interruption would not be welcome, and in that moment the boy in gray came storming up and grabbed hard and furiously at the fragile lace of Angelique's wing.

She whirled in a storm of glittering hair, ripping the wing still further. "What, pulling wings off flies isn't good enough for you these days?" she demanded in a voice like a silver razor, and the boy drew back.

"You b-bitch!" He was almost in tears of rage. "You... stuh-stuh-strumpet!"

"Oooh." She flirted her bare shoulders. "That's the b-b-best you can do, Galenette?" Her imitation of his stutter was deadly. "You can't even call names like a man."

Crimson with rage, the boy Galen raised his fist, and Angelique swayed forward, just slightly, raising her face and turning it a little as if inviting the blow as she would have a kiss. Her eyes were on his, and they

smiled.

But her mother swooped down on them in a flashing welter of jewels, overwhelming the furious youth: "Monsieur Galen, Monsieur Galen, only think! I beg of you...!"

Angelique smiled a little in triumph and vanished into the dark archway of the hall with a taunting flip of her quicksilver skirts.

"A girl of such spirit!" the mother was saying- Dreuze, January recalled her name was, Euphrasie Dreuze. "A girl of fire, my precious girl is. Surely such a young man as yourself knows no girl takes such trouble to make a man jealous unless she's in love?"

The boy tore his eyes from the archway into which Angelique had vanished, gazed at the woman grasping him with her little jeweled hands as if he had never seen her in his life, then turned, staring around at the masked faces that ringed him, faces expressionless save for those avid eyes.

"Monsieur Galen," began Clemence, extending a tentative hand.

Galen struck her aside, and with an inchoate sound went storming down the stairs.

Clemence turned, trembling hands fussing at her mouth, and started for the archway to follow Angelique, but January was before her. "If you'll excuse me," he said, when their paths crossed in the mouth of the hallway, "I have a message for Mademoiselle Crozat."

"Oh," whispered Clemence, fluttering, hesitant. "Oh... I suppose..."

He left her behind him, and opened the door.

"How dare you lay hands on me?"

She was standing by the window, where the light of the candles ringed her in a halo of poisoned honey. Her words were angry, but her voice was the alluring voice of a woman who seeks a scene that will end in kisses.

She stopped, blank, when she saw that it wasn't Galen after all who had followed her into the room.

"Oh," she said. "Get out of here. What do you want?"

"I was asked to speak to you by Madame Trepagier," said January. "She'd like to meet with you."

"You're new." There was curiosity in her voice, as if he hadn't spoken. "At least Arnaud never mentioned you. She can't be as poor as she whined in her note if she's got bucks like you on the place." Behind the cat mask her eyes sized him up, and for a moment he saw the disappointment in the pout of her mouth, disappointment and annoyance that her lover had had at least one $1,500 possession of which she had not been aware.

"I'm not one of Madame Trepagier's servants, Mademoiselle," said January, keeping his voice level with an effort. He remembered the flash of desire he had felt for her and fought back the disgust that fueled further anger. "She asked me to find you and arrange a meeting with you."

"Doesn't that sow ever give up?" She shrugged impatiently, her lace-mitted hand twisting the gold-caged emeralds, the baroque pearls against the white silk of her gown. "I have nothing to say to her. You tell her that. You tell her, too, that if she tries any of those spiteful little Creole tricks, like denouncing me to the police for being impudent, I have tricks of my own. My father's bank holds paper on half the city council,

including the captain of the police, and the mayor. Now you..."

Her eyes went past him. Like an actress dropping into character, her whole demeanor changed. Her body grew fluid and catlike in the sensual blaze of the candles her eyes smoky with languorous desire. As if January had suddenly become invisible, and in precisely the same tone and inflection in which she had first spoken when he came in, she said, "How dare you lay hands on me?"

January knew without turning that Galen Peralta stood behind him in the doorway.

It was his cue to depart. He was sorely tempted to remain and spoil her lines but knew it wouldn't do him or Madeleine Trepagier any good. And Peralta would only order him out in any case.

The boy was trembling, torn between rage and humiliation and desire. Angelique moved toward him, her chin raised a little and her body curving, luscious. "Aren't we a brave little man, to be sure?" she purred, and shook back her outrageous hair, her every move a calculated invitation to attack, to rage, to the desperate emotion of a seventeen-year-old.

Stepping past the ashen-faced boy in the doorway, January felt a qualm of pity for him.

"You... you..." He shoved January out of his way, through the door and into the hall, and slammed the door with a cannon shot violence that echoed all over the upstairs lobby.

It was the last time January saw Angelique Crozat alive.

Bitch, thought January, his whole body filled with a cold, dispassionate anger. Bitch, bitch, bitch.

Anger consumed him, for the way she had looked at him, like a piece of property, and at the knowledge that this woman had flitted and cut and stolen her way through the life of the woman who had once been Madeleine Dubonnet. That for one moment he had wanted her-as probably any man did who saw her-disgusted him more than he could say. His confessor, Pere Euge-nius, would probably call it repentance for the Original Sin, and he was probably right.

Back in the ballroom, major war appeared to have broken out.

January heard the shouting as he crossed the upstairs lobby, which was completely deserted, men and

women crowding the three ballroom doors. Monsieur Bouille's shrill accusations rode up over the

jangling background racket of a brass band playing marches in the street outside. "A swine and a liar, a

scum not fit to associate with decent society "

Granger, thought January wryly. Bouille had used precisely the same wording in his latest letter to the Bee.

"You call me a liar, sir? Deny if you will that you helped yourself to bribes from every cheapjack railway scheme-"

"Bribery may be how you Americans do business, sir, but it is not the way of gentlemen!"

"Now who's the liar?"

There was a roar and a surge of the crowd, and Monsieur Froissart's helpless voice wailing, "Messieurs! Messieurs!

January slipped unnoticed along the back of the crowd, to where Hannibal, Uncle Bichet, and Jacques were sharing a bottle of champagne behind the piano. He had never played a white subscription ball that hadn't included beatings with canes, pistol whippings or kicking matches in the courtyard or the gaming rooms-So much, he thought wryly, for the vaunted Creole concept of "duels of honor." If it wasn't a Bonapartist taking out his spite on an Orl6aniste, it was a lawyer assaulting another lawyer over personal remarks exchanged in the courtroom or a physician challenging another physician following a lively fusilade of letters in the newspapers.