January didn't really expect to be allowed to speak to the houseman Gervase. His query met a bland, sleek smile and a murmured "Oh, Gervase is at his work right now. Madame doesn't hold with servants leaving their work."

He'd never liked the Lalaurie coachman, Bastien. The round-faced, smooth-haired quadroon had a smug insolence to him, a self-satisfaction that boded ill for the other servants of the Lalaurie household, despite all that Madame herself might try to do.

Born a slave and raised in slavery until the age of eight, January had always found it curious that colored masters so frequently worked their slaves hard and treated them cruelly, even if they had once been slaves themselves. Given a chance, he suspected that Bastien would have been such a master, exercising petty power where he could. He knew the coachman had been with Madame Lalaurie a long time, perhaps longer than Dr. Nicolas Lalaurie himself. Upon those occasions when he'd seen them together, it was clear to January that the face Bastien showed his mistress was not the face his fellow slaves saw.

The two Blanque girls-daughters of Delphine -Lalaurie by her second husband, the late banker Jean Blanque-were older than one usually found still unmarried Creole belles of good family: Though they were soft-spoken and polite, as Creole girls must be, January liked neither of them. Even Louise Marie, the cripple, for whom he had expected to develop sympathy when first he had been introduced to the household last spring, made him uneasy. She was clinging and self-pitying, constantly referring to her twisted back and misaligned pelvis.

"I do my best," she said with a sigh, blinking her large hazel eyes up at him from the piano stool. "But as you see, I'm no more a musician than I am a matrimonial catch." Her lace-mitted hand, thin to the point of boniness strayed for the thousandth time to the bunches of fashionable curls that hung over her ears, readjusting the ribbons and the multifarious lappets of point d'esprit.