"Oh, darling, please..." Louise Marie made a feeble gesture toward her sister's fan and produced another cataclysmic sigh. "If you would... The heat affects me so!"

Any other family would have been in Mandeville, where January knew Madame Lalaurie owned a summer cottage and a good deal of property. Nicolas Lalaurie was a doctor-a partner at Jules Soublet's clinic on Rue Bourbon-but somehow January suspected the small, pale, silent Frenchman would have had no objection to leaving a town where only the poor remained to fall ill. But Madame Lalaurie, almost alone among the high Creole society, had chosen to remain in town and nurse the sick. January guessed that Dr. Lalaurie-not a native Creole himself-knew his reputation would never survive flight from a danger that his wife faced with such matter-of-fact calm.

He guessed, too, that one or the other of the Lalauries had-decreed that the two girls should remain as well: the doctor out of wariness about how things looked, or Ma dame simply because the possibility of falling ill had never entered her mind.

Her face like bitter stone, Pauline slapped open the sandalwood sticks and began to fan her sister, while Louise Marie, a long-suffering smile of martyred gratitude and a gleam of satisfaction in her eye, jerked and hobbled through a Mozart contredanse in a fashion that amply demonstrated that she had done none of her appointed practice during the previous four days.

But January was used to pupils not practicing, and there were things he could say to praise without condemnation, which he knew would do him no good. All girls of good family studied the piano from childhood, though few kept up lessons into their twenties. Madame Delphine Lalaurie, however, was as renowned for her piano playing as she was for her hospitality, for her business acumen, for her beauty and social connections, and it was unthinkable that her daughters should fall below the standard she set. Watching Louise Marie's exaggerated winces at her mistakes-as if they were catastrophes imposed upon her by a spiteful Muse instead of the result of her own negligence about practice January felt a pang of pity for them.