Allowing a white man to strike him without raising a hand in his own defense was the custom of the country as well, but of that, he had never spoken.

Why would she struggle? And who was she, that she'd known his name?

He paused beneath the gallery, his hand on the latch of the inconspicuous service door that led to offices, kitchen, and service stair, scanning the court behind him for sight of that deerskin dress, that silly feathered headdress that more resembled a crow in a fit than anything he'd actually seen on the Choctaws or Natchays who came downriver to peddle file or pots in the market.

Most of the women who came to the quadroon balls came with friends, the young girls chaperoned by their mothers. Women did come alone, and a great deal of outrageous flirting went on, but those who came alone knew the rules.

Above him, one of Henry VIII's wives trilled with laughter and threw a rose down to a tobacco-chewing Pierrot in the court below. The gaudy masks of the wives set off their clouds of velvety curls, chins and throats and bosoms ranging from palest ivory through smooth cafe-au-lait. In London, January had seen portraits of all the Tudor queens and, complexion aside, none of the originals had been without a headdress. But this was one of the few occasions upon which, licensed by the anonymity of masks, a free

woman of color could appear in public with her hair uncovered, and every woman present was taking full and extravagant advantage of the fact.

The French doors beneath the gallery stood open. Gaslights were a new thing-when January had left in 1817 everything had been candlelit-and in the uneasy brilliance couples moved through the lower lobby and up the curving double flight of the main stair to the ballroom on the floor above. As a child January had been fascinated by this festival of masks, and years had not eroded its eerie charm; he felt as if he had stepped through into a dream of Shelley or Coleridge where everything was more vivid, more beautiful, soaked in a crystalline radiance, as if the walls of space and time, fact and fiction, had been softened, to admit those who had never existed, or who were no more.