It was not something he could have asked in the presence of the man who loved Olympe, or of her children.

Marie Laveau tilted her head, and regarded him with those mocking sibyl eyes. She knew everything, they said. She read your dreams. More to the point, January knew she listened to everything, watched everything; learned from the market-women who was buying what and meeting whom; from the rag pickers what they found in the garbage and the gutters outside the big town houses on Rue Chartres and behind the American mansions on Nyades Street; from the maids and laundresses of every wealthy family in town what stains they found on whose sheets. The slaves of bankers and brokers and planters from the Belize to Natchez sold her letters, or names whispered by night, or combings of their owners' hair; and as a hairdresser herself, to white and colored alike, she heard still more. She was queen of secrets, paid sometimes in money and sometimes in kind. And this was, not all she was.

But she only answered, "There's a thousand reasons men will think a woman poisoned a man. Don't you know that, Michie Ben?"

Thunder shivered the night again, lightning limning the roofs around them, and the sudden cold breath of storm made the seven points of her tignon nod and flicker. She added, "Mostly men don't understand."

He saw the dark winds lift and ripple her dark skirts as she passed along the banquette in the direction of Rue St. Anne, and the swaying light of the next intersection splashed her briefly with color, blue and orange and red. Then she was gone.

There was a brickyard on Rue Dumaine, back in the days before the war with England, where the slaves of the town would meet at night. Sometimes it was only to talk or to sell things pilfered from their owners-a chicken, a shirt, a bundle of half-burned candles, a bottle of American whisky poured artfully off the tops of the master's supplies. But sometimes, after the whites were asleep, the drums would speak in the darkness.