For an instant January was eighteen years old again, seeing her in the firelight of the brickyard. Her face hadn't changed much in the intervening years, except to lose what girlish roundness it had ever possessed. The wry quirk of her mouth was the same, over the slightly prominent front teeth; the sharp little chin had the same way of tucking sideways with the thrust of her jaw.

"Someday some white man's gonna sell you the whole city of Philadelphia, the Russian Crown Jewels thrown in for lagniappe," she said. "You are the most trusting man I ever did meet and worrying after you keeps me awake all night." And as she spoke she raised her arm from her lap and made the manacle chain jangle with a single mocking flick of her wrist.

"Where have you been?"

"Poisoning Isaak Jumon," she retorted, her eyes not leaving his. January looked away in shame.

Her mouth softened a little-which it wouldn't have, back when she was sixteen-and she added,

"Or maybe helping a friend. Which do you think?"

January grinned and replied, "Poisoning Isaak Jumon," and though the joke probably wasn't very funny Olympe burst out laughing, showing where childbirth had cost her two of her side teeth.

Paul Corbier, standing behind her with his hands on her shoulders, looked shocked.

The sealed cold quiet, the iron stiffness that January remembered from Olympe's girlhood, broke and showed underneath the woman he'd met upon his return eighteen months ago: an angry woman gentled and softened by Paul Corbier's unquestioning love and the happiness she'd had with her children. When Lieutenant Shaw had brought her out of the cells she'd been like a wary animal, silent and cold and withdrawn-the girl he had known before his departure for France.

Maybe that was why he'd spoken to her as he had.