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him sidelong as if he fully expected him to scoop up any loose money or stray gold stickpins in the process. As they passed through into Derryhick’s room, January heard him say, ‘I trust you will give me a proper receipt . . .’
    Behind him in the parlor, January heard the almost soundless rustle of Mr Stuart stepping back – light-moving for all his bulk – to catch the Viscount by the arm. Droudge’s exclamation, ‘Good Lord! What on earth—?’ covered whatever soft-voiced words passed between uncle and nephew, but the Viscount cried, ‘Stop it, for God’s sake! Is that all you can think about?’
    ‘It’s what you should be thinking about, my dear boy. And it’s no more than justice. He killed your father, and he killed my son, not to speak of robbing you into the bargain for all these years. So I think he owed us something.’
    The young man said quietly, ‘You are despicable,’ and the next moment the corridor door slammed.

FOUR
    R ose asked, ‘What are they doing in New Orleans in the first place?’
    January handed her a cup of tafia – cheap rum cut with lemonade – and perched on the gallery railing of what had once been cook’s quarters above the kitchen. The two rooms that opened off the gallery behind them – one of them Rose’s chemical laboratory, the other scoured and fitted with makeshift chairs and school desks – were the only two in the house not currently crowded with neighbors, friends, and semi-strangers, talking quietly, uneasily, angrily.
    Hannibal had been quite right to wonder if two women who detested each other as did January’s mother and sister Olympe could manage to avoid one another at the wake until morning.
    At least the food was plentiful and good.
    ‘It’s a thought that’s crossed my mind as well, my nightingale. Why would anyone in their right mind come to New Orleans at this time of year?’
    After the burial, under ordinary circumstances the procession would return – joyful, dancing, waving handkerchiefs and scarves like flags – to the home of the dead man’s family, or in this case to the home of the friend best able to host the night-long wake. Death was not invited to the party. January frequently suspected that his recent election as the newest member of the FTFCMBS board had as much to do with the size of the ramshackle Spanish house he and Rose had bought on the Rue Esplanade as with his willingness to be of service.
    The house had sprung from Rose’s ambition – realized last winter – to re-establish her school, which had been destroyed a few years previously by a combination of the cholera epidemic and the enmity of a socially prominent French Creole matron. * But in this slack infernal tail-end of the hot season, before the heat broke and the wealthy returned to town, January was glad he could open his doors for those who lived in rooms, for those whose families had been destroyed in the cholera or had left the town for good . . . for friends who otherwise might have had no one to give, on their behalf, a final party whose guest of honor could not attend.
    There had been a time – not long ago – when he had numbered himself among them. In those days it had been good to know that he could count on his friends to see him remembered and wept for, one last time.
    His mother certainly wouldn’t have invited that many people into her house.
    ‘According to Shaw,’ January went on, his eyes on the crowded house gallery opposite, ‘Patrick Derryhick intended to invest in cotton plantations upriver, in partnership with the young Viscount Foxford. Derryhick was a second-cousin of the family, completely impoverished until the wealthy aunt, whose private fortune the Stuarts had been counting on to retrieve the family acres from mortgage, left her money not to Germanicus Stuart, the twelfth Viscount Foxford, but to Derryhick instead.’
    ‘Ouch.’
    ‘I’m sure that’s what the entire senior branch of the family said after the reading