Hannah was across the room and leaning over the baby’s cot while Jennet went on, her voice wobbling. “The general opinion is that he’s got a tooth coming. Please don’t wake him, Hannah. Dr. Savard came up earlier and pronounced him perfectly healthy.”

“Hmmm,” Hannah said, and Jennet gave a weak laugh, putting up both hands in a gesture that said she was done protesting. Instead she came to stand beside Hannah while she examined the sleeping boy, her touch quick and so gentle that he hardly stirred.

“Clémentine thinks something I ate spoiled my milk, and says that I’m to have nothing but boiled hominy for a day. I’ve come to the conclusion that cooks are the same wherever you go. Do you remember how we sat in the kitchen at Carryckcastle and listened to Cook lecture on the evils of eating the strange things my faither was growing in his greenhouse?”

“Food as both the cause and the cure for every human ailment,” Hannah agreed. And then: “You are trembling, Jennet, but he’s in perfect health, now that he’s done such a fine job of worrying his mother and setting the household on its ear.”

Jennet collapsed into the chair next to the cot. She said, “I don’t know what I’d do if I lost him, too.”

Hannah put a hand on her cousin’s shoulder and pressed, and then she went back to stretch out on her bed. For a long time they were silent, and Hannah was about to drift off to sleep without eating dinner or washing or even changing out of her clothes, when Jennet spoke.

She said, “Is it settled then, about your clinic?”

Hannah turned on her side. “New Orleans is an odd place, Jennet.”

Her cousin leaned forward to cross her arms on her knees to listen, and so Hannah told her what she had learned and seen, and she heard her voice trembling.

When she had finished Jennet said, “But you needn’t, if you don’t want to.”

“I’m not sure I do,” Hannah said. “But I think I must try.”

Chapter 28

Pressed into service on the Puma among men who routinely killed for tarnished baubles and imagined slights, Luke had gone for days at a time without speaking. As it was, they already knew more about him than was to his taste; they had gone through his things and pocketed everything of worth. It was pure luck that he had kept the most important papers tucked under his shirt.

Now he found that the habit of silence was harder to shake off than he had imagined. Alone with Jennet, all the things he thought to say, had meant to say, were gone. She didn’t seem to care, or maybe, Luke realized, she was feeling the same way. They spoke very little that first night. He told her the minimum she needed to know: about being boarded, his escape when the Puma docked at São Paulo, the voyage back as a crew member on another ship.

“What about money?” she had asked him. “Didn’t the pirates take everything?”

“They did,” Luke said. “But I retrieved what I could before I left them.”

She didn’t require details, and he was glad.

In the morning the Savards were presented with the fact of Luke Bonner’s unannounced arrival. They never flinched at the idea of another guest in an already overcrowded apartment, or at least they showed nothing but kindness and hospitality. Paul Savard examined the wound to Luke’s head, made a deep sound that seemed to be approving of his condition, and handed him something to drink that Luke swallowed down without a question. Laudanum, he realized too late, and the next time he woke it was mid-afternoon and his headache was much improved.

Hannah had gone to her clinic for the day, Jennet told him, because it would arouse suspicion if she did not. And the young woman Luke had interviewed at the slave market had arrived and was established in one of the two cots, under Hannah’s care.

“How is she?”

“Dying,” said Jennet. “Hannah says the trouble is in her belly.”

“I’m sorry for the girl,” Luke said. “But I need to hear about you.”

Sitting beside him with the baby on her lap, she told him in more detail about the weeks since they had last seen each other in Pensacola. Luke stopped her now and then to ask a question.

“And Savard’s brother, the one who—” he gestured at his own bandaged head. “It was his idea, how to get you away from the Poiterins?”

Jennet said, “It was his doing, from beginning to end.” And then she gave him a small smile, one of the few she had been able to produce during the telling of the story. “So you see you will have to forgive him for last night.”

“Aye,” Luke said. “I suppose I will.”

When she was done he understood three things very clearly. The first was that the debt they owed the Savards, most especially Ben Savard, was so large that he would never be able to repay it. The second was that they could not impose on their hospitality much longer, and the last: that they had nowhere to go. He couldn’t even go out on the street, for fear that Poiterin might see him. What he needed, he realized, was a lawyer he could trust, one who would tell him whether the Poiterins’ claims had any chance of being honored in court. Something to ask Savard about, when they could talk.

The rest of the first afternoon passed in relative solitude. Luke still had his own story to tell, but Jennet didn’t seem in a hurry to hear it. It was a relief to simply sit together with the boy between them.

Their son. A vigorous, healthy child of almost eight months. A being with a surfeit of personality. If Jennet put him down on the floor he crawled away at high speed, his mouth set in a determined line. Caught up and tickled, he opened his mouth wide to show four white teeth. He had an infectious belly laugh, and when presented with anything he had never seen before—a quill, a shoe buckle, a stranger’s hand, a newspaper—he would turn it over once or twice in his hands, his gaze as serious as any banker’s, and then put it in his mouth to see if it might be edible.