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anything can to make people . . . if not forget your race, at least not turn up their noses at you as being of no worth. Ah!” His face radiated into smiles as a high and spindly carriage known as a
volante
appeared around the corner and drew up before the
diligencia
offices. “One of my—er—parishioners, come to welcome me. Señor—Señora . . .” He shook hands with January, bent to kiss Rose’s glove. Then he sprang to the open carriage, in which waited an extremely fashionable-looking lady who greeted him with a most unparishioner-like kiss on the lips.
    As January helped Rose into the cab—and looked down his nose as haughtily as he could manage to while he tipped an Indian porter to load up their baggage on it—he wondered if Consuela Montero was still in Mexico City at all, and even if she was, whether the opera singer would be concerned with Hannibal’s fate. She was, if he recalled Hannibal’s letters correctly, the illegitimate daughter of the wealthy
hacendado
Don Prospero de Castellón, and therefore the half-sister of the murdered man.
    Yet she was the only one he knew who might know exactly how matters stood.
    In his letters, Hannibal had described the house on the Calle Jaral as “once the palace of a local marquis of impeccable heritage, now let—to the family’s enduring chagrin—to a silk-merchant and a coffee-seller on the ground floor, and to my most scandalous and beautiful Concha upstairs.” In addition to the aforementioned establishments, there was a shoemaker operating in what had been the coal room, a manufacturer of cigars operating out of—and apparently raising his family in—what had been the wood room, while the coffee-seller’s wife ran what appeared to be a public cook-shop in the palace’s old kitchen, with benches set up in the front courtyard for her customers.
    This lady was the only one still in evidence when the hack pulled in under the broad arch of the gate, just clearing up after the
comida,
the leisurely early-afternoon dinner that preceded the daily siesta. The afternoon sun poured hot rays down into the courtyard so that the very air felt smothered. “Do you think anyone will be awake to let us in?” asked Rose, looking around her at the crude chairs and tables that occupied the space where the family carriages had been stored in palmier days, and at the laundry hung from the balcony arcades.
    “I suppose we can nap in the courtyard until Prince Charming comes along and wakes Sleeping Beauty with a kiss.” January paid off the driver, who had set the baggage down near the broad stone stair that led to the upper arcade. No one appeared from any of the many doors visible on that level, so January picked up the trunk, and Rose the hat-box and carpetbags.
    “The Day of the Dead is the Feast of All Saints at home, isn’t it?” asked Rose as they climbed the stairs. “I remember Mother taking me to her mother’s tomb to clean and whitewash it—she’d have her cook make up a picnic lunch like everyone else who came to the cemetery that day, but I don’t recall anything about expecting Grandma to come out of the grave and share it with us.”
    She set the bags down at the top of the steps, put back the veils of her hat, and looked doubtfully at the shut doors and shuttered windows. In the United States it would have been illegal for her to wear a hat at all—women of color being required to wear the tignon, or headscarf, of servitude—and January delighted in the close-fitting bonnet, the neat, soft swags of her curls.
    “Mother would take me to the white section of the cemetery, too, to hang a wreath on her father’s tomb and pay our respects to the family. They always pretended to the children that she was a ‘former servant,’ but of course they all knew. The Americans in New Orleans don’t do any of that, do they?”
    “That’s because Americans breed behind fences like cats and don’t have families, according to my mother,” remarked January,