Only one French girl had even gone near him, the daughter of an impoverished planter who'd been trying for years to marry her off. Her brothers had threatened to horsewhip the man if he spoke to her again. "Monsieur Janvier?" He turned, startled from his reverie. Madeleine Trepagier stood in the half-open doors of the central parlor, a dark shape in her mourning dress. Her dark hair was smoothed into a neat coil on the back of her head, eschewing the bunches of curls fashionable in society, and covered with a black lace cap. Without the buckskin mask of a Mohican maid and the silly streaks of red and blue paint, January could see that the promise of her childhood beauty had been fulfilled.
He rose and bowed. "Madame Trepagier." She took a seat in the other cane chair, looking out over the turned earth and winter peas of the kitchen garden. Her mourning gown, fitting a figure as opulent as a Roman Venus's, had originally been some kind of figured calico, and the figures showed through the home-dyed blackness like the ghostly tabby of a black cat's fur, lending curious richness to the prosaic cloth. Her fingers were ink-stained, and there were lines of strain printed around her mouth and eyes.
And yet what struck January about her was her serenity. In spite of her harried weariness, in spite of that secret echo of grimness to her lips, she had the deep calm diat arose from some unshakable knowledge
rooted in her soul. No matter how many things went wrong, the one essential thing was taken care of.
But she looked pale, and he wondered at what time she had returned to Les Saules last night.
"Thank you for your concern last night," she said in her low voice. "And thank you for sending me away from there as you did."
"I take it you reached home safely, Madame?"
She nodded, with a rueful smile. "More safely than I deserved. I walked for a few streets and found a hack and was home before eight-thirty. I... I realize it was foolish of me to think... to think I could speak to her there. I'd sent her messages before, you see. She never answered."
"So she said."
Her mouth tightened, remembered anger transforming the smooth full shape of the lips into something bitterly ugly and unforgiving.
January remembered what Angelique had said about "little Creole tricks" and his mother's stories about wives who'd used the city's Black Code to harass their husbands' mistresses. For a moment Mme. Trepagier looked perfectly capable of having another woman arrested and whipped on a trumped-up charge of being "uppity" to her-though God knew Angelique was uppity, to everyone she met, black or colored or white-or jailed for owning a carriage or not covering her hair.
But if Angelique had told him to take her a warning about it last night, it was clear she hadn't exercised this spiteful power.
The woman before him shook her head a little and let the anger pass. "It wasn't necessary for you to come all the way out here, you know."
Something about the way that she sat, about that strained calm, made him say, "You heard she's dead."
The big hands flinched in her lap, but her eyes were wary rather than surprised. She had, he thought, the look of a woman debating how much she can say and be believed; then she crossed herself. "Yes, I heard that."
From the woman who brought in her washing water that morning, thought January. Or the cook, when she went out to distribute stores for the day. Whites didn't understand how news traveled so quickly, being too well-bred to be seen prying. Having set themselves up as gods and loudly established their own importance, they never ceased to be surprised that those whose lives might be affected by their doings kept up on them with the interest they themselves accorded only to characters in Balzac's novels.
"You heard what happened?"
Her hands, resting in her lap again, shivered. "Only that she was... was strangled. At the ballroom." She glanced quickly across at him. "The police... Did they make any arrest? Or say if they knew who it might be? Or what time it happened?"
Her voice had the flat, tinny note of assumed casual-ness, a serious quest for information masquerading as gossip. Time? thought January. But as he studied her face she got quickly to her feet and walked to the gallery railing, watching an old man planting something in the garden among the willows as if the sight of him dipping into his sack of seed, then carefully dibbling with a little water from his gourd, were a matter of deepest importance.
"Did they say what will happen to her things?" she asked, without turning her head.
January stood too. "I expect her mother will keep them."
She looked around at that, startled, and he saw the brown eyes widen with surprise. Then she shook her head, half laughing at herself, though without much mirth. When she spoke, her voice was a little more normal. "I'm sorry," she said. "It's just that... All these years I've thought of her as some kind of... of a witch, or harpy. I never even thought she might have a mother, though of course she must. It's just..." She pushed at her hair, as if putting aside tendrils of it that fell onto her forehead, a gesture of habit. He saw there were tears in her eyes.
He had been her teacher when she was a child, and something of that bond still existed. It was that which let him say, "He gave her things belonging to you, didn't he?"
She averted her face again, and nodded. He could almost feel the heat of her shame. "Jewelry, mostly," she said in a stifled voice. "Things he'd bought for me when we were first married. Household things, crystal and linens. A horse and chaise, even though it wasn't legal for her to drive one. Dresses. That white dress she was wearing was mine. I don't know if men feel this way, but if I make a dress for myself it's... it's a part of me. That sounds so foolish to say out loud, and my old Mother Superior at school would tell me it's tying myself to things of this world, but... When I pick out a silk for myself and a trim, and linen to line it with-when I shape it to my body, wear it, make it mine... And then to have him give it to her..."
She drew a shaky breath. "That sounds so grasping. And so petty." They had the ring of words she'd taught herself with great effort to say. "I don't know if you can understand." She faced him, folded her big hands before those leopard-black skirts.
He had seen the way women dealt with Ayasha when they ordered frocks and gowns, when they came for fittings, and watched what they had asked for as it was called into being. "I understand."
"I think that dress made me angriest. Even angrier than the jewelry. But some of the things-my things- he gave her were quite valuable. The baroque pearls and emeralds she was wearing were very old, and he had no right to take them..."
She paused, fighting with another surge of anger, then shook her head. "Except of course that a husband has the right to all his wife's things."
"Not legally," said January. "According to law, in territory that used to be Spanish-"
"Monsieur Janvier," said Madeleine Trepagier softly, "when it's only a man and a woman alone in a house miles from town, he has the right to whatever of hers he wishes to take." The soft eyes burned suddenly strange and old. "Those emeralds were my grandmother's. They were practically the only thing she brought with her from Haiti. I wore them at our wedding. I never liked them- there was supposed to be a curse on them-but I wanted them back. I needed them back. That's why I had to speak to her."
"Your husband died in debt." Recollections of his mother's scattergun gossip slipped into place.
She nodded. It was not something she would have spoken of to someone who had not been a teacher and a friend of her childhood.
"It must have been bad," he said softly, "for you to go to that risk to get your jewels back. Do you have children?"
"None living." She sighed a little and looked down at her hands where they rested on the cypress railing
of the gallery. He saw she hadn't resumed the wedding band she'd put off last night. "If I lose this place," she said, "I'm not sure what I'm going to do."