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picking out from the several doors the one with a large bronze knocker. “Not that, as a former slave herself, my mother has a single ancestor in any graveyard in town—that she knew about, at any rate. That never stopped her from having the cook make up a basket lunch and going down to St. Louis Cemetery to spend the day visiting with her friends.”
    He was raising his hand to the knocker when the door flew open. A voice inside cried, “Señor Enero!
Madre de Dios,
come in! My house is yours, and everything in it—thank God you have come!” And a small crimson whirlwind bustled forth to catch him in a tight embrace.
    “And Señorita Rose!” Consuela Montero turned, her plump hands and ample décolletage still flashing with garnets though she’d loosened her raven curls in preparation for siesta. “The lady who made the fireworks for the opera!”
    Rose laughed as they were drawn into the
sala—
the formal and rather bare room common to the inns they had stayed at in Vera Cruz and on the road. Like those at the inns, it contained only a long table running down the middle, and ten heavily carved chairs ranged around the walls. A painting of the Virgin adorned one wall, above a blue-and-white Chinese vase of roses. Elsewhere, rather surprisingly, hung a small Turner in a gold frame.
    “Señorita Rose no longer,” said January gravely. “Madame . . . Señora Enero, my wife.”
    “
En verdad? Felicitación,
Rosita . . . may I call you Rose?” Consuela tiptoed to kiss Rose’s dusty cheek. “Señor, Señora . . . this is my companion Doña Gertrudis de Avila de Caldofranco. . . .” She gestured to the black-clothed woman who had stood beside the door through all of this, a look of impassive disapproval on her high-born Spanish countenance. “Though why it is considered correct to keep a chaperone here when all the town knows one is living in sin with a violin-player—that’s enough, Trudis, now go fetch us wine and cakes, and have Lita make up the spare bedroom for my guests—you will, of course, remain as my guests? Hannibal will be overjoyed. . . . You got my letter?”
    “We got a letter from Hannibal.”
    “He wrote one, then? I did also, once it became clear that that imbecile Ward, the minister of the British, was going to do nothing.” Consuela led the way through a door into her own bedroom, which like many in both Mexico and France—and indeed in the older houses of New Orleans as well—was set up as an informal parlor. There were comfortable chairs, a pianoforte—January couldn’t help touching a key and found it was in tune—and another small modern painting, an English cathedral beneath an astonishing sky. “That
adoquín
Ylario—the junior intendant of police in this city—has been out to the hacienda three times in the past two weeks, watching the place from the arroyos beside the road, waiting for my father to ride out so that he may go in and arrest Hannibal while most of the vaqueros are gone. He has a judge here in town. . . .”
    “How much danger is Hannibal in?”
    “A great deal, once Ylario should get him into town.” Consuela nodded thanks to the manservant who brought in a tray of light wine, coffee, and cakes:
pandolce
sparkling with crystals of brown sugar, camote, hulled peanuts, and flowers wrought of marzipan. “Ordinarily, of course, a man might remain weeks—months—in La Accordada prison before an
alcalde
even sees him, and he might never be seen if Santa Anna sends his Army recruiters through to draft the prisoners. But there are judges who, like this Capitán Ylario, are sick of Santa Anna’s favorites, and since they cannot hang my father—who paid Santa Anna’s debts for him many times when Santa Anna was still a loyal officer of the King—they will be more than glad to sentence poor Hannibal to death the moment Ylario brings him before them. By the time my father could locate Santa Anna to rescind the order—for
El Presidente
has a habit of running