The house itself was silent and dark.
Walking downriver along Rue Burgundy, January had almost reached Rue Esplanade when he realized he was being followed. In the fog it would be a waste of time to glance behind him, even when he passed the intersections where the city’s iron lanterns hung on chains across the streets. To stop and look back would let his pursuer know that he’d been detected, though January was almost certain who it was. He turned down Rue Ursulines, and then along Rue Dauphine, and still his own footfalls on the wet brick banquettes were echoed by the muted drip-drip of following boot heels. Lantern light up ahead outlined the dark shape of a man washing down the banquette ahead of him: Country Ned, that would be, he guessed, Mâitre Passebon the perfumier’s yardman.
As he came even with the old man January called out a greeting in the sloppy Gombo French of the cane fields, the half-African patois that the tutors his mother’s patron had hired for him in childhood had never quite been able to beat from his memory. “Got a buckra hound-doggin’ — you be a mama partridge for a dollar?” he said. “No ewu—” He used one of the several African words for danger, and the tribal scars on Country Ned’s face twisted their patterns with his grin.
“Shit, Ben, ewu just fluff up my feathers.” He took the proffered dollar, passed his broom to January, and walked off down the street without breaking the rhythm of January’s steps. January himself continued to scrape the broom on the bricks, and swept himself back into the moist dark of the carriageway from Passebon’s courtyard as the pursuer solidified out of the fog.
That it was Nicholas Saverne on his heels, January had never had a doubt. Casmalia’s yardman Tommy might have told the young lawyer that Marie-Zulieka was being hunted by the big piano player, or the maid might have given that information, for fifty cents or just because they sympathized with any girl who’d flee from an “arrangement” with Jules Dutuille: It didn’t matter. As Saverne passed through the ravelly blotch of lantern light that had illuminated Country Ned’s sweeping, January identified the blink of expensive watch fobs, the sharp cut of m’sieu Bourdet’s tailoring, and the varnished shine of Parisian boots. He’d meant to wait till Saverne’s footfalls died away into the distance before himself emerging from his hiding place and circling around in the opposite direction, but at a guess Country Ned stopped too soon.
While January was still waiting in the carriageway, he heard Saverne stop, then come striding back, fast. He turned to duck down the carriageway and into the dark yard but the yellow light veered and jerked as the lantern was snatched up from the pavement where it had rested, and a voice called out, “You, boy, stop!”
Since Saverne almost certainly knew who he was anyway, January halted, stood waiting in the high brick arch for the white man to stride up to him, Country Ned’s lantern in hand. “Are you Janvier?” He used the familiar address tu — as most white Frenchmen did to children, pets, or slaves. One day January supposed he’d get used to being called that again.
“I am.”
“Have you found her?”
January folded his hands, replied, “No, sir, I have not.”
“You’re lying.” A white man would have called another white man out for the words — a custom January had always regarded as perfectly insane. “Where’d you be going at this hour, if not to her?”
“I guess I’m going home, sir.”
Saverne’s cane came up, the instinctive gesture of a man who doesn’t take even respectfully phrased impudence from Negroes; January steeled himself to take the blow rather than risk escalating the violence by warding it off. But when he didn’t flinch, Nicholas Saverne stopped, as if the idiocy of assaulting the one man who might possibly help him penetrated his shapely skull and golden hair. He stood for an instant, his mouth hard with frustrated anger, struggling with the idea that there were things a black man — or any man — could not be forced to do.
The rage died out of his eyes. The cane came down. “You know where she is?” Though he still used tu, his tone had changed, as if he spoke to a fellow man, of whom one must ask, rather than casually command. “Where she might be?”
He pulled a wallet from his pocket, fished coins from it that flickered gold in the oily orange light. January remained standing with his hands folded, and neither reached for nor looked at the proffered money.
Saverne lowered his hand. “Don’t tell me you agree with that harpy mother of hers, that’d turn her over to a — a boar-pig like Dutuille. Talk about pearls to swine! What do you want, then, to take me to her?”
“Her word that it’s what she wants.”
For one instant, January thought the young man was going to snap, Girls don’t know what they want! There was certainly something of the kind on his lips as he drew in breath, then let it out again.
January said nothing.
After a moment, slowly, the young man said, “Girls — sometimes they let themselves be pushed, by their families and their friends. Make no mistake, Janvier: I love that girl. And she loves me, I know she does. I will treat her like a princess, like a queen; I’m not a rich man now, but I will be one day soon. She will never have cause to regret it if she comes back to Mobile with me. I swear that to you. I swear that to her, if you speak to her.”
“If I speak to her,” said January, “I’ll tell her.”
Saverne stepped closer, pleading in his pale eyes. “Tell her not to worry about her father. I’ll keep him away from her, no matter what he tries or says. In Mobile he can’t get to her.”
It wasn’t a black man’s place to ask whether Saverne had considered what Louis Rochier might do to the rest of the family, and he doubted whether the man would consider it if reminded how completely in Rochier’s power Casmalia and Lucie and the several brothers were.
“I love her,” Saverne repeated softly. “Make her understand.”
The sun had risen, turning the fog to milk, by the time January reached Rue Marigny. He loitered outside Number 53, smelling the smoke of kitchen fires all up and down that quiet street of tiny wooden cottages, until he saw the white-haired Alois Vouziers emerge, resplendent in a rusty black coat, and totter off down the street, a satchel of books on his back. Not long after that a stout young woman came out the same door, ushering four blond boys of stair-step ages, from about thirteen by the look of him down to about eight, dressed as boys would be who are apprenticed to craftsmen or clerks. Not so very different, thought January, from Marie-Zulieka’s brothers, except that these boys didn’t have to worry about being kidnapped on their way to and from work, and sold up to the newly opening cotton territories in Missouri. Though the neighborhood was one of poor French and poor Germans, the refugees from the continuing turmoils in Europe that had followed Napoleon’s downfall, the woman called after the boys in the pure French of the educated Parisians not to be late for their grand-père’s lessons that night.
When the younger children came out to play January crossed to the oldest of them, a little girl of six or so, and said, “Would you take in a note for me, to the young lady who is staying with your grand-père?”
“Señorita Maria?” asked the girl, and January nodded.
“Señorita Maria would be her name.”