Pritchard warmly on her unpowdered cheeks and took her departure on her son's black-banded arm. "What can one do?"

Gabriel was waiting in the kitchen. He was a tall boy, slim like his mother, January's sister Olympe, and handsome as his father, who was an upholsterer with a shop on Rue Douane. He had, too, his father Paul's sunny goodness of heart. As January crossed from the back gallery to the kitchen he could see his nephew, through the wideflung windows, helping Aeneas and the kitchen maid clean up endless regiments of crystal wineglasses, champagne glasses, water glasses; dessert forks, coffee spoons, teaspoons, dessert spoons; platters, salvers, pitchers, creamers, tureens; a hundred or more small plates of white German china painted with yellow roses, half again that many napkins of yellow linen.

Above the foulness of the privies on the hot night air, the dense stink of Camp Street's uncleaned gutters, from around the corner of the stables January could still catch the whiff of drying blood.

"Uncle Ben!"

"You look like you been pulled through the mangle and no mistake." Aeneas set aside the mixing bowl he was drying and unstoppered a pottery jar of ginger water.

"Danny, bring Michie Janvier a cup." The little waiter fetched it; Gabriel discreetly supported January's elbow while January raised it to his lips. "You ever want to hire this boy out as a cook, you come speak to me about it, hear?"

"I'll do that." January returned the cook's grin, then studied the inside of the empty cup with mock gravity and measured with the fingers of his other hand the distance from the rim to the damp line the liquid had left. "Looks like a gill and a half I drank. You want to mark that down for the Colonel's records, in case he gets after you for where it went?"

Aeneas laughed. "Me, I'm just thanking God there's no way for him to measure the air in here, or he'd sure be after us about what your nephew breathed since eleven o'clock. Kitta, you got all the saucers in?"