Jennet couldn’t help herself; she sobbed out loud. “Yes,” she said. “I believe you now. Do you have word of my husband?”

“Not yet,” said Jean-Benoît.

Those two words filled Jennet with hope for the first time since Titine’s disappearance. She forced her voice to steady.

“I will come to Hannah, if you can arrange it without arousing Mme. Poiterin’s suspicions.”

“When you go to read to her this afternoon she will suggest the trip herself,” he said. “Be ready.”

“Wait,” she said. “What does the new priest know about all this? Have you bribed him to allow you to speak to me?”

“Not all priests are like Petit. Tomaso Delgado is a good man, and my friend. Does that satisfy you?”

It did not; it could not. She said, “I am struck by the coincidence that Père Petit should die just now, so suddenly. So conveniently for my cause.”

After a moment Ben said, “Do you want my help?”

“Of course,” said Jennet. “Of course I do.”

Chapter 22

“I think I could learn almost everything there is to know about this city just listening at the window,” Jennet said to Hannah later that day. “Listen, here comes Mr. Occhiogrosso.”

Hannah stood to look out the window. A small man was walking along the street, as laden as a donkey. There was a wooden frame on his back filled with panes of glass in all sizes that rattled with every step. He carried a long wooden ruler that he used as a sort of walking stick, clicking it against the cobblestones. He looked up at Hannah in the window and flashed a smile around the stem of his pipe, his teeth the color of tobacco.

“How do you know his name?”

“Henry has made a study of all the vendors and workers who come by. He’s especially fond of the Italians because they stop to talk to him. Won’t Jean-Benoît be waiting for you?”

“I wish you could come with me,” Hannah said. “It’s not good for you to be cooped up here constantly.”

Jennet threw her a suspicious look. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of Ben Savard. Not Hannah Bonner, who faced down the likes of Mac Stoker and Baldy O’Brien.”

Hannah knew better than to respond when Jennet was in a mood like this: unable to voice her fears, and set on distracting herself and everyone else with the combination of wit and impudence that was all her own. She wondered, again, if she should have told Jennet this latest news about Titine.

She watched for a moment as Jennet turned over a card and considered it. Then she asked a question she had been holding back since the day they had come to the L’Île de Lamantins.

“You’ve never explained about the cards you left behind at Nut Island.”

Jennet looked up. “The seven and the Queen of Swords, aye. I missed them. There was no paper on the island except for the navigation maps on the ships, so I had to make replacement cards out of palm fronds that I wove and cut to size.”

Hannah said, “And who is the Queen of Swords? Is that you, or me?”

“It will have to be you,” Jennet said. She tilted her head thoughtfully. Her expression said she was looking back to the day Dégre had taken her away, out of her life and into his, and set them on the path that had brought them to New Orleans. Hannah had seen many men talk of battles with the same expression: as closed and unwelcoming as a fist.

Jennet said, “I knew Luke would come after me, but I wanted you too. I wanted both of you.”

“I needed no convincing,” Hannah said. “There was no question but that we’d come after you.” She bent over the baby on Jennet’s lap and ran her fingers through the curls, feather soft and slightly damp, that fell over his brow. He looked up at Hannah with perfectly round and trusting eyes, her brother’s son. Her missing brother.

“We never lost faith that we’d find you,” Hannah said, and she saw a tremor move across Jennet’s face. “We must do the same for Luke.”

Then she kissed them both and left Jennet to her solitude.

With the coming of the late fall, New Orleans was filled with a new vigor, due, Hannah had no doubt, to the fact that the terrible draining heat of late summer was truly gone. Here the coming of winter was welcome, because with it came parties and dinners and long walks on the levee without fear of sunstroke. It all reminded Hannah how far she was from home.

At Lake in the Clouds there would be at least a foot of snow on the ground, and soon the ice on Half Moon Lake would be thick enough to support a man. Partridge would explode out of the underbrush in a shower of snow so white against a pale blue sky that it made the eyes water. But in New Orleans the breeze that came off the Mississippi was warm enough that she might have done without the shawl draped over her shoulders.

Standing in the courtyard while she waited for Ben Savard, the sun, even low on the sky, touched her face like a blessing. Tomorrow the cold rain would most likely return, but she could be thankful, just now, for this small respite, for the deep red of the damp cobblestones and the shadowy loggia with its arches and pillars. Even now there was a good deal of green about: a red clay pot of chives on a windowsill, fig and date and palm trees around the fountain in the middle of the courtyard, where water fell from the mouth of a mermaid to wash over alabaster breasts and pool around her tail.

Paul Savard bought this property from a French merchant who had gone bankrupt. Now the kine-pox clinic was on the ground floor with the general clinic immediately above it. The family apartment where Jennet was hidden away was on the topmost floor. From the courtyard Hannah could see the window, but there was no sign of her cousin.