He had studied healing also, and in much the same fashion: first with old Mambo Jeanne at Bellefleur Plantation, who'd showed him and Olympe both where to gather slippery elm, mullein, lady's slipper, and sassafras in the woods. Later he'd been apprenticed to Jose Gomez, a free man of color who had a little surgery down on Rue Chartres. Reading the books Gbmez had of the English surgeons John and William Hunter and watching dissections of sheep and pigs from the slaughterhouses, January had seen no difference between the music that was the life of his soul and the harmonies of blood and organs and bones. And when, finally, the long wars between France and England and the United States were done and it was safe to cross the seas, January had gone to Paris, to study surgery at the Hotel-Dieu.

He'd been admitted to the College of Surgeons there and had continued to work at the clinic, unable to go into private practice either in Paris or in New Orleans. To be sure, free surgeons of color practiced in both cities, but they were invariably of a polite walnut snuff, or hue. January had long accepted the fact that no American, and few Frenchmen, were ready to trust their lives to someone who so much resembled a pantomime-show Sultan's Ethiopian door guard.

"At least here in Paris one is free," Ayasha had said to him, Ayasha who had fled her father's harim in Algiers rather than be wed against her will. "And no one can take that from you."

Ayasha had worked in Paris as a seamstress since the age of fourteen. By the time January met her, she owned her own shop.

No one can take that from you.

Except, of course, January had discovered, Monsieur le Cholera.

It would be two years in August since he had returned home and found Ayasha dead.