In his way, St. Denis Janvier had been as much an optimist as his mulatto placee's son had been, concerning the chances a man with three African grandparents would have of earning his living in medicine in New Orleans or elsewhere, Paris training or no Paris training.

Cora LaFayette looked down, small face a careful blank, rallying her words, desperate to get them right.

January relaxed a little and smiled, folding his big arms in their sweat-damp muslin sleeves. "You followed me all the way from Charity Hospital to ask what I charge for lessons?"

Her head carne up, like a deer startled in the woods, and she saw the gentle teasing in his eyes.

Something eased, very slightly, in the corners of that expressionless little mouth.

But she did not smile. She dwelled in a country where smiles had been forgotten years ago. "Do you teach the daughters of a lady name Lalaurie? Great big green house on Rue Royale?"

January nodded again. He glanced around him at the narrow tunnel they stood in, between Agnes Pellicot's house and that of Guillaume Morisset the tailor, also out of town. The slot of shadow stank of mud and sewage where mosquito-wrigglers flickered among the scum. "You want to go somewhere a little more comfortable, Mademoiselle LaFayette? The town's half closed up, but at Breyard's Grocery over on Rue Toulouse I can get you a lemonade."

Eyes that seemed too big for that pointed, delicate face raised quickly and as quickly darted away. She shook her head, a tiny gesture, and January stepped past her, still cautiously, to push open the gate that led into the Pellicot yard. The French doors into the house were shuttered, as were the doors of the service building at the back of the yard. The brick-flagged porch below the slave quarters' gallery was a slab of blue-black velvet. January led the girl to the plank bench outside the kitchen where Agnes's cook Elvire would sit to shell peas or pluck fowl, and said, "Wait here a minute for me, if you would, Mamzelle."