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deter him in the slightest from gallantries toward both women. Then the amusement faded from her eyes. ‘I’m not certain whether it’s something he’d write to me about. I did ask Uncle Veryl about it – in Latin, to preserve the proprieties:
lascivia puella, et fugit ad salices, et se cupit ante videri
– but he was horrified that I should even
think
of such a thing in connection with the President of the British Mathematical Society. And I did write to the Chief Constable of Washington, several times.’
    â€˜And heard nothing?’
    â€˜Congress is in session,’ said Chloë, who was one of the few women January knew who read newspapers regularly, ‘and will be until June or July. Heaven knows what the town is like at such times. It is very close to the North.’
    Yes
, he thought as he rose and offered Dominique his arm against the slow roll of the ship. It was very close to the North.
    He had been to Europe, and he had been to Mexico, nations where, to one degree or another, he had been regarded as a man among other men and not twelve hundred dollars’ worth of cotton hand walking around asking to be kidnapped.
    He doubted he could return to France. Even after almost five years back in Louisiana, the pain of the loss that he had suffered there – the death of his first wife in the great cholera, which had torn the heart out of him in ways that he suspected might never be healed – was still too great to face, even with Rose at his side. And in Mexico, that land of peril and violence, he had learned that though there was no slavery, black men were almost as little regarded as they were in the United States. It was not a land in which he wanted to bring up his children.
    Increasingly, neither was Louisiana.
    As he made his way through rainy blackness to the companionway, clinging to the guy rope stretched along the waist of the ship with one hand and to Dominique’s slender waist with the other, he thought about the North.
    The other half of the United States. The world of factories and traders, where men either worked their own farms or paid a wage for the labor of others. The world where slavery had been outlawed. Where men of color, if they were not permitted to vote or serve on juries or hold office, at least were permitted to choose their own jobs and raise their families without fear of being sold off like cattle when ‘Michie’ needed some extra cash.
    Where he did not know a soul.
    Rain smote his face. The ship fled on into darkness.

THREE
    W hen January was not quite eight years old, the smallest of the other boys in the ‘hogmeat gang’ on Bellefleur Plantation had come running out to the chicken runs where the gang was assigned to clean that day – it was spring, and already hot. He could still smell the reek of chicken guano. The boy had said, ‘That man’s buyin’ your mama, Ben!’
    He’d seen ‘that man’ arrive two days before, a sugar broker from New Orleans, St-Denis Janvier. January – only his name had not been that then, only Ben, or Livy’s Ben – knew he’d be whipped for leaving his chores but he’d run to the house anyway, sick with dread. On the back gallery he’d found Senja the cook, and she’d confirmed it: Michie Fourchet had sent for Livy from her work in the laundry, and the three of them were in the plantation office. ‘Don’t worry, Ben.’ Senja had hugged him, a compact woman of Yoruba ancestry, smelling of sweat and molasses. She had a kindness for Ben because he’d cut kindling for her and never seriously tried to steal food. ‘Michie Janvier live in New Orleans. That’s just a little ways down the river. You can walk it ’fore sunrise an’ be back home for breakfast.’
    Desperately, he pushed back the tears that burned his eyes. All his short life he’d lived in terror of this moment. Obscurely, he knew, in his