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mean to.”
    “Responsibility is one thing, Boss. But to take the blame! Sacrebleu! She may hate you tomorrow!”
    “Let’s hope not, brother. A wife shouldn’t hate her husband.”
    The dream voices drifted off out of Nicolette’s consciousness with the rest of the world. She missed the end of the conversation—the part where Jean Laffite told his brother how much he loved her. She slept.

Chapter Three
    Sukey and Gabrielle both went to Nicolette’s room as soon as Jean Laffite left her. But when Madame DelaCroix saw that her niece was sleeping peacefully, she left for her own bed, trusting the servant to keep careful watch over her charge.
    Sukey eased her old bones into a fragile gilt chair beside the bed, where she could monitor every breath Nicolette took—every flutter of an eyelash or twitch of a muscle. Out of habit from years long past, she crooned a soft lullaby in gombo, the patois spoken by Creole slaves, a combination of French and ancient African dialects. One toe tapped the thick Turkish carpet and her turbaned head nodded slowly.
    For nearly an hour, Sukey’s eyes never left Nicolette, who slept fitfully, her dreaming obvious in the soft sounds she uttered from time to time. Still, the smile on her face indicated to Sukey that her night-wanderings were pleasant. She had no need to worry about her enfant.
    The servant nodded off finally, releasing her own mind to travel back over well-worn roads of memory. She saw herself, a younger and more energetic woman, hovering over the accouchment bed as Francine Vernet, frail and terrified, struggled to give birth to Nicolette on December 8, 1794.
    Sukey might not remember her own birthdate, but she would never forget the day Nicolette was born, during the great holocaust that destroyed most of New Orleans.
    She could still see the unearthly orange glow on the blush-pink walls of the third floor bedroom of the old house on Toulouse Street. She remembered the hysteria in her mistress’s pain-filled eyes, heard her frantic moans: “The bells… the cathedral bells! Why don’t they ring?”
    She listened in her dream to her own words of reassurance: “Don’t fret yourself, madame. This time won’t be like back in the fire of ‘88. This isn’t Good Friday. The priest, he’ll ring the bells in time… bring all the menfolk running to put out the blaze before it gets to us. You just lay easy. Let that baby come natural.”
    In her dreams, Sukey went again to the window of the bedroom. She felt the air, stifling for the month of December. She gazed out at the tongues of flame licking along Royal Street, leaping and gnawing across rooftops to threaten Toulouse Street. She prayed fervently for M’sieu Claude to hurry back with Dr. de Beaumont. But the men never came. The bells never rang. Sukey alone tended her mistress—sponging her, trying to quiet her, promising her things that only God could deliver.
    The sleeping servant broke out in a sweat and squirmed in the elegant, uncomfortable chair. Somewhere deep in Laffite’s mansion, a clock chimed five.
    Sukey started joyfully out of her doze. “The bells, Miss Frannie! The bells, they ringing!” Then she realized where she was.
    She rose and went to gaze down at her sleeping mistress. “Those bells rang that day, Mam’zelle Nikki, and you came into this world right then. Couldn’t wait to hear their beautiful sound. Not you! No, you never could wait, little missy.”
    Nicolette stirred and smiled, seeming to understand that Sukey was watching over her—that all was well.
    Sukey sat for a while longer, remembering. Francine Dubois Vernet had had other pregnancies, other children. But one by one, they slipped away—fever, measles, even a freak carriage accident, which plunged two of the Vernet children, their nurse, and the driver off the top of the levee to watery deaths in the river. Only Nicolette, the child born of fire and fear, had survived.
    “The one horn for love,” the old servant