The custom of the country, he'd told himself later. And he had known, returning from France in the wake of his wife's death from the cholera two years ago, that in the land of his birth he could be beaten up by any white man, that he had no right to resist. It was the price he'd paid, to return to the only home he had.

But the incident had cost him the clothes he wore, clothes a musician needed if he expected to be hired to play at the balls of the wealthy: long-tailed black wool coat, gray trousers, cream-colored silk waistcoat, linen shirt. And it had cost him all the music in his satchel-torn up, pissed on, dunked in the overflowing gutters of Rue Bienville-difficult and costly to replace. The season of entertainments was just beginning, after the summer's brutal heat. He could not afford delay in repurchasing the tools and apparel of his trade.

But he knew, even as he'd asked her for the money, that his mother would not let him forget.

And it was in her eyes now: that avid glitter. Envy, too, that he'd been offered the money, and the task, instead of she.

"I'm sorry, Monsieur Fourchet," he said again, and marveled to hear his own calm voice. "It isn't a matter of money. I-"

"Don't be a fool! " Fourchet's voice cracked into a full-out shout, as January remembered it. The child in him flinched at the recollection of the man's capricious rages, the sudden transitions from reasonableness to violent fury. "Too proud to get your black hands dirty? Think you're too good these days to live with the niggers you were born among?"