"Mathurin? With the Jumon money I'd think Pritchard would thank him for showing interest in that poor sister of his."

A sharp rustle sounded in the trees to the side of the house. January held up his hand, listening. The drums were silent.

Aeneas and the original waiter had been joined by a third man, young and barely five feet tall, hastily buttoning a white linen jacket and rinsing something off his hands with water dipped from the rain barrel. With him was a young woman in the first stages of pregnancy, retying the headscarf that all women of color, slave or free, were by law required to wear. They turned immediately to lay out the slices of beef and ham, the tarts and cakes and petits fours, on the yellow-flowered plates. "I'll be back," said January softly. He slipped down the gallery steps and around the corner of the house into the trees.

Given the trouble his curiosity had caused him in the past, January reflected that he should know better. In any case, he had a good idea of what he would find in the darkness where the trees got thick. Though by this time, he told himself, if she'd been there-been part of it-she'd be gone. And what good would it do me to know? He didn't want to admit it, but the brought back memories.

Mats of leaves and pale shaggy curtains of moss quickly obscured the bright cool rectangles of the windows. Light glinted on puddles of standing water, and the ground gave squishily underfoot. Twenty feet from the house, January scented blood again and the heavy grit of drums had quenched smoke still hanging in the air. He listened, but all was still. Even so, he felt their eyes. Not those who'd risked a whipping to sneak out and follow the sound of the drums. Not those who'd sung the keening, eerie, driving rhythms of those songs in a half-forgotten tongue. The eyes he felt on his back were the eyes of those they'd come to see, to touch; to sing to and to give themselves to, flesh and hearts and souls. January knew them well.