January folded his powerful arms and waited. He had not, he noticed, been invited to sit in the presence of a white man and his former master. Nor had his mother said, Get yourself some coffee, Ben.

It was one thing for a white man to share coffee with a velvet-brown mulatto woman. White men did it all the time, in these small cottages at the rear of the French town. The custom of the country. For generations French and Spanish Creoles had taken free women of color as their mistresses, as St.-Denis Janvier had thirty-three years ago freed and then taken her. It was another thing January could see this in her eyes, hear it in her artfully artless silence-to ask a white gentleman to sit in the same room drinking coffee with the coal-black son of a mulatto and a slave.

In the eighteen months since his return from sixteen years in Paris-years in which he had practiced both surgery and music-January had never been permitted to forget that this house was his mother's, not his.

If Simon Fourchet was conscious of any of this, he didn't show it. Maybe he accepted it as natural that a grown man wouldn't be permitted to drink coffee in the house where he lived, should a white man be seated there.

"There's a secret campaign of deliberate destruction going on at Mon Triomphe," the planter said, glancing up at January from under the grizzled overhang of his brows. "Spoliation, arson, wrecking, ruin-and murder. And maybe open revolt."

Mon Triomphe, January recalled, was Fourchet's other plantation. When Fourchet had sold Bellefleur-years after January, his mother, and his younger sister had been sold and freed-the planter had gone there permanently. It lay upriver in Ascension Parish, some twenty miles southeast of Baton Rouge. Twenty miles, that is, if you wanted to hack your way through cypress swamps and untamed woodland, instead of journeying twice the distance in half the time via steamboat on the river.