"I know that." Her voice was tiny. From his pocket January drew one of the several clean handkerchiefs he always carried, and she took it, smudging her war paint a little in the process. She drew a deep breath, let it go, and raised her eyes to his again. "It's just that... there was no other way. My name is Trepagier now, by the way."

"Arnaud Trepagier?" His stomach felt as if he'd miscalculated the number of steps on a stairway in the dark.

He'd heard his sister's friends gossip about the wives and the white families of the men who bought them their houses, fathered their children, paid for their slippers and gowns. For any white woman to come,

even masked, even protected by the license of Carnival, to a Blue Ribbon Ball was hideous enough. But for the widow of Arnaud Trepagier to be here, dressed like Leatherstock-ing's worst nightmare less than two months after her husband's body had been laid in the Trepagier family crypt at the St. Louis cemetery...

She would never be received anywhere in the parish, anywhere in the state, again. Her husband's family and her own would cast her out. The Creole aristocracy was unforgiving. And once a woman was cast out, January knew, whether here or in Paris, there was almost nothing she could do to earn her bread.

"What is it?" he asked. She had never been stupid. Unless she had fallen in love with intense and crazy passion, it had to be something desperate. "What's wrong?"

"I have to speak with Angelique Crozat."

For a moment January could only stare at her, speechless and aghast. Then he said, "Are you crazy?'

He'd only been back in New Orleans for three months, but he knew all about Angelique Crozat. The free colored in their pastel cottages along Rue des Ramparts and Rue Claiborne, the French in their close-crowded town houses, and the Americans in their oak-shaded suburbs where the cane fields had been-the slaves in their cramped outbuildings and attics-knew about Angelique Crozat.