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.“I didn’t even think about it during the dancing, but afterward, when you were playing to keep everyone amused … The Rossini almost made me cry.I was sorry to hear about your wife.”He smiled down at her from his height.“I didn’t think you even noticed how I played when we had class together,” he said, with the rancorless amusement of shared old times.“You’re still with Monsieur Motet?”Her smile was no more than the tucking back of the corners of her lips, the velvet warming of her eyes.It told him everything even before she nodded, and he felt for her a rush of gladness.“Are you taking students, now you’re back?” she asked.She spoke almost as if it had been a given, a foregone conclusion for all those years, that he would eventually return.He wanted to tell her he hadn’t intended to return at all.“I think your mama said you were.My daughter Isabel’s eight.I’ve taught her a little, but it’s time she had a good teacher.”January was opening his mouth to reply when a woman’s voice cried out in the rear of the house, a sharp gasp, rising to a shriek.“There it is! There! I told you! Oh God—”A break, a murmur, January and Clisson and Gignac all on their feet in the sliding doorway that separated the darkened parlor from the still-darker bedchamber.“Oh, my child! Oh, my poor little one! Murder! Oh God, murder—”“What the—” began January.“Of course it was murder,” said Clisson, puzzled.“Nobody ever said it wasn’t.”The door to the bedroom sliced open and Euphrasie Dreuze stumbled through, clutching something in her fat jeweled hand.“My God, my God, look!” she sobbed at the top of her lungs.“My poor little girl was hexed to death! Someone hid this in her mattress; she was sleeping next to this all along! It drew death down on her! It drew death!”“Phrasie, don’t be a goose.” Livia Levesque emerged from the bedroom on her friend’s heels and made an unsuccessful grab at the filthy little wad of parchment and bone.Euphrasie Dreuze wrenched herself free.Only five years older than January, she was plumper than she’d been when first he had seen her but retained the impression of kitten-soft cuddliness that had attracted a well-off young broker thirty years before.Her chin was pouchy and deep lines graven on either side of her painted mouth, but she was still a lovely woman, fair-skinned even among quadroons, with small, grasping hands.Even for day wear her tignon was orange silk, glittering with an aigrette of jewels.With a shattering sob she brandished what she held.January took it, turned it over in his hands.A dried bat, little bigger than a magnolia leaf.A gris-gris.A talisman of death.“Madame Dreuze, Madame Dreuze,” bleated Clemence Drouet, fluttering at her heels the way she had fluttered at Angelique’s, her round face still gray with shock and tears.“Please don’t.…”“Throw that piece of trash out,” commanded Livia sharply and snatched it from her son’s hands.Even as she did so, Euphrasie turned with a hysterical cry upon the servant girl Judith, frozen in the act of pouring coffee from a pot at the sideboard.“You did this!” Euphrasie shrieked, smashing cup and saucer from the girl’s hands.“You black slut! You planted it there, you wanted my child to die!” Her hand lashed out, quick as a cottonmouth striking, and clapped the girl on the ear.Judith gasped and tried to run, but the room was choked with furniture, new and English and thick with carving.Odile and Pellicot clogged the door to the other half of the parlor, Clemence and Euphrasie herself that to the bedroom.“You did it, you did it, you did it!” Euphrasie struck her again, knocking her white head scarf flying, her gesture almost an identical echo of Angelique’s last night, when she had struck young Peralta.“You cheap, lazy whore! You dirty black tramp!” She caught Judith by the hair, dragging her forward and shaking her by the thick pecan-colored mass until the girl screamed.“You wanted her dead! You wanted to go back to that mealymouthed white bitch! You hated her! You got some voodoo and got her to make gris-gris!”“Phrasie!” Clisson caught the hysterical woman’s wrist.“How can you, with Angelique dead in her bed there?”“Phrasie, don’t be a fool.” Livia thrust herself into the fray, slapped Euphrasie loudly on her plump cheek.Euphrasie fell back, opening her mouth to scream, and Livia picked up the water pitcher from the sideboard.“You scream and I dump this over you.”Clisson, Odile, and Agnes Pellicot promptly retreated to the doorway, hands pressing their mountains of petticoats back for safety.January reflected that they’d all known his mother for thirty years.Euphrasie, too, wisely forbore to scream.For a moment the only sound was the girl Judith sobbing in the corner, her hair a tobacco-colored explosion around her swollen face.The smell of coffee soaking into wool carpet hung thick in the air.Outside a woman sang “Callas! Hot callas hot!”Then Euphrasie burst into fresh tears and flung herself onto the bosom of the only male present.“They murdered my little girl!” she howled.“My God, they witched her, put evil on her, so someone was drawn to kill her!”Livia rolled her eyes.January’s mother was small and delicate, like her younger daughter but not so tall, almost frail looking, with fine bronze skin and Dominique’s catlike beauty [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]