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of Aunt Elodie’s will. The Foxford lands in County Mayo cannot be sold because of the entail, but for three generations there has been virtually nothing to support them with.’
    In the yard below them, children chased each other wildly in sticky-handed excitement. Thunder grumbled, and wind pushed a breath of gray coolness down on them from sullenly gathering clouds.
    ‘And had Derryhick in fact murdered Foxford’s father? Not to mention Uncle Diogenes’s son?’
    ‘There are two schools of thought on that.’
    Bernadette Metoyer – a handsome woman in her forties whose tignon flashed with a sable firestorm of jet fringe – interrupted them, climbing the stair halfway and demanding, ‘What have the City Guards found out about Rameses’s body? Not that they will inquire, of course, the corrupt, lazy, blankitte pigs.’
    It was a question January had answered twenty times between the time he’d entered the house and the time he’d located Rose in the crowd, but he replied, again, that it looked to be one of three men, but the Guards needed more proof before they made an accusation, and he descended to take the handsome chocolatiere’s arm.
    ‘And what proof do they need, to start searching the swamp?’ Madame Metoyer sniffed. ‘That’s where they’ll have thrown him.’
    ‘Probably,’ January agreed. In a week, in this weather, the body of an unidentifiable black man would raise no great fuss, unlike that of a white man traveling with those who seemed to have good reason to wish him dead.
    He guided her up the back steps, across the crowded gallery, and into the dimness of the house. Under ordinary circumstances, the wake for a member of the FTFCMBS – or indeed for anyone in the tight-knit community of the libres at the back of town – would have involved wailing grief in one room, and lively music, jokes, dancing, and great quantities of food and tafia in the other, as people came to pay their respects and offer the family their support. But the circumstances were not ordinary. So there was neither the gay music nor the howling lamentation that the blankittes – the whites – found so disconcerting at such events.
    Men and women gathered in the long central dining-room and parlor, in bedrooms and dressing-rooms and cabinets , hashing over the unfinished, and consuming the food that everyone had brought for the wake. In the parlor, Mohammed LePas, the blacksmith, was quietly organizing where the men would meet in the morning, to search the swamps that lay at the back of town. In the swamp-side bedroom – as such things were reckoned in Creole houses – the buzz of gossip among the women was like the throb of a bee tree. January picked out his sisters in the group: Olympe in her best dark Sunday Church-dress, like a market-woman save for the shape of her tignon, which announced to anyone who didn’t already know it that she was one of the town’s voodoo-queens; and the lovely Dominique, in sober spinach-green silk with touches of black where they wouldn’t wash out her café-crème complexion. ‘Liselle is in the cabinet. ’ Dominique nodded toward the smaller chamber, set up as Rose’s office. ‘Claire and Iphigènie are with her.’ She named the girl’s closest friends.
    ‘Good,’ said January. ‘Best she’s not alone right now.’ Half a dozen infants were laid down on the bed, tiny faces like a box of bonbons. Dominique’s year-old daughter Charmian slept among them, perfect as a furled rosebud. The French doors were open on to the front gallery that overlooked Rue Esplanade, and the older children dashed in and out, while mothers gauged the day’s clouded darkness against how quickly they could get home before rain began.
    Rain was beginning to patter as January returned to Rose. ‘You were about to tell me how Patrick Derryhick had murdered the previous Viscount Foxford,’ she said.
    ‘Actually, the eleventh Viscount succumbed to perfectly natural causes at the age of threescore