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“She fought him, and he hurt her.”The softness of her mouth hardened again. “So you don’t fight, and it’s not so bad. But if you don’t fight, it’s not really rape, is it? And what’s the sense of fighting anyway? He’d just have one of the men come in and hold me down. That’s what he said. He said he’d have Gervase do it. You think I’d kill him over that?”
    “There’s women who would.”
    “If every woman killed every master who had her against her will, there’d be dead men lying like a carpet from here to the Moon. And that M’am Redfern, she wouldn’t get after him about it. Just made my work harder for me, like I liked being fingered and poked and pestered by that smelly old man. If it wasn’t for Gervase I think I’d have gone crazy.”
    She made a quick gesture with her small hands and faced back around. Beyond the shade of the gallery the sun smote the yard like a brass hammer. The dead-carts had finished their morning rounds, and the voice of a man or a woman in the street, or the creak of a wagon, fell singly into the hush.
    “You know how they do,” Cora said. “She tried to get me sent out to the fields, he said I was to work in the house. She said if I worked the house I’d do the chambers and the lamps. He said no, I had to do something genteel, like sewing. Me, I’d rather have cut cane than be under the same roof with her all day. She puts me hemming sheets and then makes me pick out every stitch ’cos the hem’s too wide, she says. And then he says, to
me
he says, ‘Don’t rub up against her, don’t be always givin’ her trouble, can’t you see what you do’ll come back on me?’ What I do comes back on
him?”
    She drew another breath, anger narrowing her dark eyes. “I never killed him. I ran away. I had to run away. It’s her that was out to kill
me.”
    January raised his eyebrows. “If every woman killed every wench her husband had, there’d be dead women lying like a carpet from here to the Moon.”
    “Yeah.” Cora’s mouth quirked with a kind of grim humor. “But I heard them fighting. I heard her say, ‘You sell that slut of yours if we’re so hard up for money from your gambling’—and he was a terrible gambler, Michie Redfern was. And Michie Redfern says, ‘You’re not telling me what to do, woman, and if you take and sell her I swear to you I’ll find her again and it’ll be the worse for you.’ Not that he cared about
me
, Michie Janvier. But M’am Redfern is an overbearing woman, a Boston Yankee woman, always on about how much money her daddy had had, and Michie Redfern wasn’t going to take anything off her. You known men like that.”
    January had known men like that.
    “That’s still a long way from her killing you.”
    “Michie Janvier, I swear what I’m telling you is true.” She came back and sat on the end of the bench that was drawn up near the stairs where he stood. She wore a green dress today, though she still had on the red-and-black shoes. The skirt’s folds hung limp, for it had been cut to accommodate several more petticoats than she was wearing; cut to accommodate a corset, too, as the red dress had been. No servant wore corsets, and Cora was not wearing one now.
    Where had she gotten those?
he wondered. And the soap and water to wash her face this morning. Not in the Swamp, the squalid agglomeration of grogshops and brothels that festered a few unpaved streets behind the Charity Hospital: that was the place most runaways went. But hers weren’t dresses that could be acquired, or kept in good condition, in that maze of mud-sinks and cribs. He remembered the woman Nanié two nights ago, looking forher Virgil among the sick. Her stained dirty clothes had the stink of sweat ground into them, not because she was a particularly unclean woman but because spare labor and time and the fuel to heat water were luxuries among the poor, and their clothes went a long time between washings. Neatness of appearance was something