The knife slashed and gleamed. January twisted sideways, losing his grip, and then the man was pelting away along the building fronts of Rue Chartres, as a slender old man with a coachman's whip came running up unsteadily, gasping for breath, his face ashy.
Madame Trepagier was trying to rise, her dragging skirts and veils a soaked confusion about her, trembling so badly she could barely stand. She shrank from January's steadying hand with a cry, then looked up at his face. For an instant he thought she would break down, cling to him weeping, but she turned away, hugging herself desperately in her soaked winding-sheets of veils. "I'm all right." Her voice was tense as harp wire, but low and steady. "I'm all right."
"Madame Madeleine, Madame Madeleine!" The old coachman looked as if he needed to be propped up himself. "You all right? You hurt?" In the shadows of the alley mouth only his eyes and teeth and silver coat buttons caught the reflection of the lights along the Cabildo's colonnade. Like a drenched crow in mourning weeds, wet veils plastered over her cheeks, Madame Trepagier was little more than a sooty cloud. "Come on, Madame Madeleine. I'll take you back to your Aunt Pi-card's, get those wet clothes off you-"
"No," she said quickly. "Not my aunt's."
Not, thought January, if she'd left there three hours ago with a manufactured headache.
He put a steadying hand under her elbow. She stiffened, but did not pull away.
"Come," he said. "I'll get you to my sister's."
"It... was foolish of me. Walking down that alleyway, I mean." Madeleine Trepagier made a small movement with her hand toward her unraveled torrent of dark hair, and Dominique said, "Sh-sh-sh," and moved the trembling fingers away. Her own hands worked competently with the soft pig-bristle brush,
stroking out the long, damp swatches, less now to untangle them than to let them dry and to calm the woman who sat in the chair before her, laced into a borrowed corset and a borrowed dress and with a cup of herb tisane steaming before her. The honey-gold moire of the gown, with its ribbons of caramel and pink, set off Madeleine's warm complexion as beautifully as it did Dominique's. January wondered how long it would be before the woman abandoned her mourning and returned to wearing colors like this again.
"I never thought ruffians would be lurking that close to the police station," continued Madeleine, folding her hands obediently in her lap. "I was just walking back from my Aunt Picard's over on Rue Toulouse."
Dominique's dress was cut lower than a widow's high-made collar, and the small gold cross Madeleine wore around her throat was just visible in the pit between her collarbones. January saw again the way her head had fallen back to receive the sword master's mouth on hers, the desperate strength with which they had held each other in the thin spit of the rain.
Augustus and Madeleine. A glimpse of deerskin, as golden as the dress she wore now, in the doorway as he began the first waltz. Looking for him? And the Prussian in his black-and-green Elizabethan doublet, crossing the downstairs lobby as Galen Peralta descended after his fight with Angelique.
Questions crowded his mind, a jam of logs at high water behind his teeth, and the first of them, the largest of them, was always, What do I do?
He was glad of Dominique's prattle, of her presence in the room. It gave him time to think.
"Cathedral Alley isn't so very far from the levee," he pointed out in time. "Or from Gallatin Street. We had Kaintucks all over town during Mardi Gras."
Dominique sniffed. "And I'm sure the significance of Ash Wednesday completely escaped them. One would think after a week they would get the hint." If she felt any uncertainty at all about the presence of a white lady in her parlor, she certainly didn't show it. "You poor darling, thank God Ben was there. What were you doing down on Rue Royale, anyway, Ben? I thought you were going to Olympe's."
"I thought I saw someone who could give me an explanation about the night of the murder," said January, and his glance crossed Madeleine's. Her eyes, downcast with confusion at finding herself in the house of a placed, went wide with shock and dread.
"Now, don't talk about murders," said Dominique severely, and patted Madeleine's shoulders. She hesitated for a long moment, then picked her words carefully. "My brother is helping the police investigating Angelique Crozat's murder-for all they're doing," she added tartly. "Personally, I'm astonished the one who was strangled wasn't that awful harpy of a mother. I was speechless when I heard how she'd sold off all your jewelry and dresses... and do you know, Ben, she's been flouncing around town for days in a mourning veil down to her feet, and the most dreadful cheap crepe dress. It streaked black all over Mama's straw-colored divan cushions. Excuse me, dears, I'll just go to the kitchen and see if your coachman is all right."
Not even random violence that could have ended in murder, thought January wryly, could shake Dominique's sense of caste. Watching his sister through the arch into the rear parlor, and thence through the French door at the back and into the rainy yard, he knew that the coachman would be shown all consideration, given a cup of coffee and some of Becky's wonderful crepes, in the kitchen. The rain had let up almost completely, and through the open French doors to the street a few droplets still caught the lamplight as they fell. The streaming brightness flashed on the millrace of the gutter, and on the slow, lazy drips from the abat-vent overhead. A fiacre passed, the driver cursing audibly at the Trepagier carriage that stood, horse blanketed, before the cottage. A few streets away a man's voice bellowed, "Now, don't
you push me, hear! I am the child of calamity and the second cousin to the yellow fever! I eats Injuns for breakfast..."
Madeleine shuddered profoundly and lowered her forehead to her hand. Very softly, she said, "Don't ask me about it tonight, Monsieur Janvier, please. Thank you -thank you so much-for helping me, for being there." Her shoulders twitched a little, as if still feeling the grasp of heavy hands, and she brought up a long breath. "I know why you were there. You followed me from... from Rue Bienville, didn't you? I thought I saw you as the fiacre pulled away."
"Yes," said January softly. She raised her face, her eyes meeting his, steadily, willing him to believe.
"He is innocent. I swear to you he had nothing to do with the murder. I-" She took a deep breath. "I strangled Angelique. Please, please, I beg you..."
"You didn't," said January quietly, "and I know you didn't, Madame. That outfit of yours was leaking black cock feathers all over the building and you were never near that parlor. And you had nothing on you that could have been used for a garrote. Did you stay to see him?"
"No! He had nothing to do with it, I swear to you."
"Were you with him?"
She hesitated, searching in her mind for what the best answer would be, then cried "No!" a few instants late. "I saw him-that is, I saw him across the lobby... I saw him the whole time. But we weren't... we didn't..."
She was floundering, and January turned away. The woman sprang to her feet, caught his arm, her face blazing like gold in the soft flicker of the lamp. "Please! Please don't go to the police! Please don't mention his name! Come..." She hesitated, stammering, scouting, staring up into his face, trying to read his eyes. "Come to Les Saules tomorrow. I'll talk about anything you want me to then. But not tonight."
"So you can get a note to him?" asked January.
Her eyes flinched, then returned to his. "No, of course not. It's just chat-"
She got no further. Hannibal Sefton, threadbare coat and long hair damp with the rain, singing a von Weber aria and more than slightly drunk, sprang lightly through the French door from the banquette outside directly behind Madeleine's back, caught her around the waist, and gave her a resounding kiss on the neck.