"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..."