"I'd like you to think about saving the lives of the hundred or so folks who didn't put nightshade into that brandy. However much they might have wanted to."

For that moment, January hated her. He hadn't thought about it consciously, but he realized now that in addition to his sense that Simon Fourchet deserved whatever retribution was coming to him from his slaves-whether incited by his neighbors or not-in addition to his fears of something going wrong, he had been looking forward to a pleasant winter of playing music and being paid for it.

The days of summer heat and summer fever were done. The wealthy of New Orleans the sugar brokers, the steamboat owners, the bankers and landlords and merchant importers, both French and American-were coming back to town to attend the opera and give parties and marry off their daughters and sons to the sons and daughters of their friends. The militia companies and burial societies, those bulwarks of the free colored community, would be organizing subscription balls and fund-raisers even more entertaining than the galas of the whites. January not only earned his bread through Mozart and Rossini, cotillions and schottisches and valses brilliantes. They were the meat and drink of his soul, the fire at which he warmed himself.

For a year he'd lived in pain, after the death of his wife in the cholera. For a year music had been his only refuge.

After that year, there were other refuges in the city as well.

He looked up now, studying Rose's long delicate profile. The cool mouth that was so sensitive beneath the mask of its primness. The way her smile came and went, as if in girlhood she'd been punished for laughing at the world's absurdity. Slim strong hands, stained with ink-she was currently making her living correcting young boys' Greek examinations for a school on the Rue d'Esplanade-and blistered from the chemical experiments that were her refuge and her joy.