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the young Madame Viellard. ‘I’m afraid our dear friend Mr Singletary disappeared in Washington City, and it’s there that we need to go, to pick up his trail again.’
    â€˜It should be perfectly safe,’ Henri Viellard hastened to assure him, and wiped powdered sugar from the gateau off his fingers with finicking care. ‘I am told that last summer you undertook a rather dangerous expedition to the Rocky Mountains, but this is nothing of that sort. I’m sure there must be some simple explanation for Mr Singletary’s disappearance. He is a rather absent-minded soul. Ah!’ Bliss transformed his face as Zizi-Marie returned, with a platter of pralines this time: coconut-white and cochineal-pink as well as the traditional golden. ‘Exquisite! But as for our search—’ His attention returned to January. ‘How much peril could one encounter in our nation’s capital?’

TWO
    P assage had been booked for them on the British merchantman
Anne Marie
, en route from Havana to Baltimore and eventually back to Liverpool. Henri Viellard chose the vessel because neither its captain nor its owners had any objection to assigning a cabin to a couple of color and their child, if they could pay for it.
    January only wished that the ‘wife’ and child he was to accompany to Washington were his own.
    But when hands had been shaken, and preliminary arrangements made for the payment of one hundred and fifty dollars to Rose – half of the agreed-upon fee – Henri took January aside and whispered discreetly, ‘If you would, M’sieu, I should be personally very much indebted to you, should you consent to act as escort for your sister. She’ll be accompanying us to Washington as well.’
    January reminded himself that
personally very much indebted to you
meant
in the event of financial disaster, you can come to me for help
, and refrained from moaning aloud.
    The sister Henri meant was not Olympe – mother of Gabriel and Zizi-Marie – but their younger half-sister Dominique: frivolous, beautiful, privileged since birth as the daughter of a white sugar-broker, and Henri Viellard’s mistress. January was dearly fond of Dominique and understood why this fat, scholarly mama’s-boy of a planter would want to bring her on an expedition in which he had been included merely because respectable wives did not travel unaccompanied. But he understood also that his duties as sleuth-hound and henchman would now be expanded to include posing as Dominique’s husband, sharing the minuscule cabin with four trunks containing her dresses, and vacating it whenever Henri arrived for a visit.
    Not to mention listening to any amount of his sister’s non-stop prattle of dresses, hats, gossip about fellow-passengers and the myriad perfections of her beautiful daughter Charmian, who would – along with her nurse and Dominique’s maid – also be part of their little shipboard household.
    The voyage to Baltimore took almost three weeks. The weather in the Caribbean was stormy; in the Atlantic, the ship rolled in high seas under an almost constant pelting of sleety rain. Henri remained in his cabin in an agony of seasickness, and because Chloë was impervious to the ailment – and had the maternal instincts of the average garden-spider – Dominique spent most of every day at his side.
    January walked the decks when he could, his muscles screaming for exercise, but many days Captain Fancher issued orders that the passengers must remain below, out of the way of the struggling crew. The only other passengers were three German businessmen and the seventeen-year-old son of a Mexican grandee bound for school in France – and all their respective valets, who, along with Henri’s valet Leopold, slept and ate with the crew. All of them fell immediately and violently in love with Dominique. When the pitching of the ship permitted, January and Herr