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be,” he continued. “I
knew from what Casmalia said – and from the color of her dresses
and her jewels – that Marie-Zulieka was fair enough to pass. And
she’d clearly planned her escape. The only reason she would have
wornevening jewels to the market was because she planned to sell
them and flee.”
    “The rubies were worth more,” pointed out the
fiddler.
    “If she was the kind of girl who’d take
jewels from one suitor to hand to another, she might have.” January
picked apart the little screw of newspaper the coffee-woman had
sold him for a penny, fished forth a broken lump of strong-tasting
muscavado sugar. “She could have stuffed them into her
marketing-basket, along with the worming-medicine that she used to
poison Marie-Therese.”
    Behind and around them, market-women,
porters, slaves with shopping-baskets came and went among the
stalls with their bright heaps of vegetables, their silver cascades
of fish; a thousand elbows and basket-rims brushed his shoulders
from behind, like the leaves of a gently-moving tree. “But their
disappearance would announce her intentions more quickly. It’s just
possible that Nicholas Saverne would know the voodoos in town, and
where to find poison like that to slip into Marie-Therese’s coffee:
if he was disguised he could probably have done it undetected. But
if Zozo didn’t expect to disappear, why would she have worn any
jewels? No,” he said softly. “She planned it herself. And she
wanted no fortune to hand to an indebted lover; nothing that came
from her family, or the protector she was leaving behind. That much
was clear. She took only what her grandmother had given her – and
her gris-gris. Even if she were fleeing New Orleans, taking another
life and another name, she would not leave that behind.”
    “Is that what she did? What she’s doing?”
    January nodded. Behind Hannibal’s shoulder,
he caught a brief glimpse of a thin, stooped, scholarly old man in
a rusty black coat, leading a young woman along the wharves toward
the gangplank of the Mary , bound for Boston, according to
the chalked board outside the shipping office. A lovely
eighteen-year-old with dark curls escaping from beneath her bonnet,
and the gray eyes that told nothing of her heritage.
    I will not be what my mother was , he
heard her voice again in his mind, the words she had spoken to him
that morning in old M’sieu Vouziers’s little house. I will not
take a kind protector, only to save me from an unkind one. It is
the world that I must flee, and not only one man .
    The crowd closed around them and they were
gone.
    “I knew she spoke Spanish from the copy of Don Quixote I saw in her room – well, half the people in New
Orleans do. And since the only family she has are under the thumb
of her father, I guessed she’d go to her tutor, for advice at
least. If old M’sieu Vouziers trusted her enough to lend her books
that he’d owned for years – books he’d brought with him from Paris
– that argued a bond beyond what her family would comprehend or
even be aware of. I’ll have to get the books back from her mother,
by the way, and return them to the old man. I’ll do that sometime
after I slip this under the door, early tomorrow morning.”
    He held up the note she’d given him. A single
pale spot on one edge of the wafer marked where her tear had fallen
as she’d sealed it up.
    Hannibal coughed, the racking wheeze of a
consumptive that shook his whole thin frame. “You’ll have to be
quick about it, before she sells them.” He fished in his pocket for
his laudanum-bottle as January tucked the note back into his
jacket. “She won’t have an easy time, you know.”
    “She knows that. It’s infinitely harder for a
woman to leave a man, not for another man, but for herself,” he
went on softly. “And harder for a woman of color than for a white
woman; a woman of color moreover whose family can conceive of no
other position for a woman, if she’s fair-skinned and