"I need to give her a message from a friend," said January mildly.

"Better write it on the back of a bank draft if you want her to read it," remarked Hannibal, coming around to lean on the corner of the piano. "In simple words of one syllable. You ever had a conversation with the woman? Very Shakespearean."

Reaching out, he extracted two of the plumes from Dominique's hat and twisted his own long hair into a knot on the back of his head, sticking the quill ends through like hairpins to hold it in place. "Full of sound and fury but signifying nothing." Dominique slapped at his hands but gave him the flirty glance she never would have given a man of her own color, and he hid a grin under his mustache and winked at her, thin and shabby and disreputable, like a consumptive Celtic elf.

"I haven't had the pleasure," said January wryly. "Not recently anyway, though she did call me a black African nigger when she was six. But I've heard conversations she's had with others."

"I've done that two streets away."

"She'll be here." Dominique's tone was still reminiscent of the ominous drop in temperature that precedes a hurricane. "And I don't think you'll find her manners have improved. Not toward anyone who can't do anything for her, anyway. Well, I understand a girl has to live, and I don't blame her for entertaining Monsieur Peralta's proposals, but..."

"What's wrong with Peralta?" January realized he'd run aground on another of those half-submerged sandbars of gossip that dotted New Orleans society-Creole, colored, and slave-like the snags and bars of the river. One day, he knew, he'd be able to negotiate them as he used to, unthinkingly-as his mother or Dominique did -identifying Byzantine gardens of implication from the single dropped rose petal of a name. But that would take time.