A winter of friendship. Of sitting in the markets by the coffee stands with ten cents' worth of jambalaya bought off a cart and talking with other musicians, or walking Rose home through the foggy evenings and seeing the gold lamplight bloom in windows all along the streets.

A winter of rest.

Sugar-grinding. Roulaison. The suffocating heat of the mill-house and the clammy damp of the cabins. The ache of muscles lifting, hauling, dragging armfuls of sharp-leaved cane after not quite enough food and never ever enough rest. The pain that settled into your bones when you couldn't even remember when last you'd slept to your heart's content.

Fear of being beaten. Fear of being sold.

Simon Fourchet's flaying voice and the sense that it would make no difference to anyone if he, Benjamin January, lived or died.

"You think I'd be safe there?" He threw the words at his sister like a lump of dirt. "Maybe Fourchet'll make sure I don't get kidnapped and sold, but that's not going to keep the killer from slipping poison into my food if he guesses why I'm there. And it won't keep me from being beat up by men who think I'm carrying tales to the master. Killed, maybe, if there really is rebellion planned."

"Then you'll just have to be careful," said Olympe, "won't you?"

January visited a free attorney of color whom he knew, who drew up a variety of documents attesting to and reinforcing the already recorded and notarized fact of January's freedom. Copies were deposited with Lieutenant Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans City Guard, with January's mother and both sisters, and with John Davis, owner of the Theatre d'Orl?ans and various gambling parlors and public ballrooms about the city, who for two years had been one of January's principal employers. Two copies went to Simon Fourchet's lawyer.