Fever Season Read online

  THE CRITICS LOVE BARBARA HAMBLY’S

  Fever Season

  A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

  “This is HISTORY MYSTERY AT ITS BEST!”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “HISTORY IS IN EVERY FIBER OF THE BOOK.… BARBARA HAMBLY IS ON MY ‘A’ LIST for sure now.”

  —Charlotte Observer

  “FEVER SEASON is filled with RICH, well-researched detail and a cast of FASCINATING and COMPLEX characters.”

  —Mostly Murder

  “STELLAR.… ENTHRALLING.… THE TEEMING PLOT IS FLAWLESS, THE LANGUAGE BEAUTIFUL, AND THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL BRILLIANTLY DISPLAYED.”

  —The Drood Review of Mystery

  “A HAUNTING STORY OF INJUSTICE.… An EYE-OPENING look into a little-known period in U.S. history.”

  —MLB News

  “An ENTERTAINING and INFORMATIVE new historical series.”

  —The Rue Morgue

  More Praise for FEVER SEASON

  “A dynamite sequel to A FREE MAN OF COLOR!”

  —Booknews from the Poisoned Pen

  “Hambly proves herself to be an expert in verbal photography. Her accounts of the heat and humidity nearly drip off the pages. And the tension she creates leading up to a surprise ending is not unlike the storms brewing out in the Gulf waiting to explode over the city and citizens of New Orleans.”

  —The Tampa Tribune

  “Grips the reader from start to finish.”

  —The Washington Times

  “An intrigue more dangerous than the plague.”

  —San Diego-Union-Tribune

  “Offers a rich, detailed look at a … time in Louisiana history when it was newly made a state.”

  —Florida-Times Union

  Praise for Barbara Hambly’s

  A Free Man of Color

  “MAGICALLY RICH AND POIGNANT.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “A SMASHING DEBUT, RICH AND EXCITING WITH BOTH SUBSTANCE AND SPICE.”

  —Star Tribune, Minneapolis

  “AN ASTONISHING TOUR DE FORCE.”

  —Margaret Maron

  “A DARNED GOOD MURDER MYSTERY.”

  —USA Today

  “SUPERB.”

  —The Drood Review of Mystery

  “A SPARKLING GEM.”

  —King Features Syndicate

  Also by Barbara Hambly

  A Free Man of Color

  Graveyard Dust

  Sold Down the River

  Die Upon a Kiss

  Wet Grave

  And in hardcover:

  Days of the Dead

  All available from Bantam Books

  This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.

  NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

  Fever Season

  A Bantam Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Bantam hardcover edition published July 1998

  Bantam paperback edition/May 1999

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1998 by Barbara Hambly.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-49319.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Bantam Books.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78528-2

  Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, New York, New York.

  v3.1

  For Laurie

  Special thanks to the staff of

  the Historic New Orleans Collection

  for all their help; to Kate Miciak for her

  assistance and advice in redirecting

  the story; to O’Neil deNoux;

  and, of course, to George.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Note on Terminology

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Did She or Didn’t She?

  About the Author

  NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

  As in my previous book of this series, A Free Man of Color, I have employed, as far as possible, the terminology of the 1830s, which differs considerably from that in use today. In the 1830s, as far as I can tell, creole was generally taken to mean a native-born white descendant of French or Spanish colonists. If a person of African parentage was being referred to, he or she was specified as a creole Negro, that is, born in the Americas and therefore less susceptible to local diseases than Congos—African-born blacks.

  There was a vast distinction between black and colored. The latter term had a specific meaning as the descendant of African and European ancestors. Sang mêlé was one of the French terms: “mixed blood.” Any colored person would have been deeply offended to be referred to as “black,” since black meant “slave”; and the free colored had worked long and hard to establish themselves as a third order, a caste that was neither black nor white. Likewise, they were careful to distinguish between themselves and slaves of mixed race and between themselves and freedmen, whatever the percentage of African genetics in their makeup. Given the economics of the time and the society, this was a logical mechanism of survival. That they did survive and thrive, and establish a culture of amazing richness that was neither African nor European, is a tribute to the stubborn and wonderful life force of the human spirit.

  ONE

  In fever season, traffic in the streets was thin. Those who could afford to do so had left New Orleans with the ending of Lent; those who could not had all through the long summer hurried about their business as if Bronze John, as they called the sickness, were a creditor one could avoid if one kept off the streets.

  Midday, the molten September heat raised steam from the water in the French town’s cypress-lined gutters and the rain puddles in the soupy streets. Mephitic light filtered through clouds of steamboat soot from the levees and gave the town the look of a grimy but inexplicably pastel-walled hell. Only those whose errands were pressing walked the streets then.

  So it took no great cleverness on Benjamin January’s part to realize that he was being followed.

  Charity Hospital, where he’d spent the night and all the morning among the dying, lay on the uptown side of Canal Street, the American side. It was against January’s nature to spend more time on that side of town than was absolutely necessary, to say nothing of the fact that Americans seemed to regard all free persons of color as potential slaves, money on the hoof going to waste that could be going into their pockets in the big markets along Baronne and Levee Streets. Americans made no distinction, as the French were careful to do, between African blacks—be they slaves or freedmen—and the free persons of color whose p
arents had been both colored and white. Not, January reflected wryly, that it made a great deal of difference in his case.

  But even in fever season, when men and women, black and white and colored, were only hands to hold off Bronze John from one another—to carry water and vinegar and saline draughts, to fan away the humming swarms of mosquitoes and flies—he felt uneasy uptown.

  Maybe that was why he realized so quickly that someone was dogging his steps.

  His head ached from twenty-four hours without sleep. His senses felt dulled, as if someone had carefully stuffed his skull with dirty lint soaked in the stinking fluids of the dying; his very bones weighed him down. His last patient that day had been a nine-year-old girl who’d walked the twelve streets to the hospital from the levee where she’d been selling oranges. Her mama, she said in English, before delirium claimed her, would whale her for not staying on to finish the day. The child had died before she could tell anyone who her mama was or where that lady could be found.

  As of that morning, no newspaper in the town had yet admitted that there was an epidemic at all.

  The fever had first come to New Orleans in January’s sixteenth year. In those days you never heard English spoken at all, though the city already belonged to the United States. He’d been studying medicine then with Dr. Gomez and had followed his teacher on his rounds of the hospitals; it seemed to him now, twenty-four years later, that the ache of grief and pity never grew less. Nor did his fear of the fever itself.

  He wasn’t sure exactly what it was that made him realize he was being stalked.

  A glimpse from the corner of his eye as he dodged across Jackson Street among the ambulance wagons, the produce carts, the drays of sugar and indigo on their way to the levee from the inland plantations along the lake. A horse lurched to a stop, tossed its head with an angry snort. A driver cursed in Spanish. Steps away, Freret Street lay deserted under the hot weight of brazen sky, but January knew he wasn’t alone. He quickened his stride.

  If he walked down Canal Street, among the hip-high weeds, strewn garbage, and dead dogs of what French and Americans alike called the “neutral ground,” he would be spared at least some of the stenches of the cemeteries. There seething corpses lined the walls three-deep, like bales on the levee, waiting for tomb space and the men to bear them in. But though he was an accredited member of the Paris College of Surgeons who had practiced at the Hôtel Dieu in that city for six years, January was perfectly well aware that he looked like a field hand: six feet, three inches tall, powerfully built despite the dust of gray that now powdered his short-cropped hair, his skin as glossy black as his African father’s had been. That was one reason why it was only in the fever season that he practiced medicine. The rest of the year he played piano to earn his bread. It was an injustice he’d accepted, upon his return to New Orleans from Paris, nearly a year ago.

  And things had changed in the city since his departure in 1817.

  So he followed Rue Villere downstream, past shabby cottages and grubby shacks in rank jungles of weed, the stench of untended privies, of gutters uncleaned for weeks, and of sties and coops, neglected by their owners, thick as fog around him. An unpaved path, mucky from the morning’s rainstorm, led him toward the river.

  He was definitely being followed. He didn’t want to look back; he couldn’t tell by whom.

  Rue Douane, the first street of the French town itself, was usually alive with cart and foot traffic. Today, there were only two women in the faded calico of poverty, hurrying with bowed heads. Those, and the dead-carts that lurched toward the cemeteries with their stiffened cargoes wrapped in cheap Osnaburg sheets and their throbbing armies of attendant flies. Like the Americans uptown, the householders here burned piles of hair and hooves from the slaughteryards or smudges made up with gunpowder, to clear the disease-ridden miasma from the air. The smell was foul—charnel house and battlefield rolled into one. The Four Horsemen, January thought, coughing, would bear that smell on their wake when they reaped the plain of Armageddon with their swords.

  He cut across Rue Douane midway between two streets, mud sucking his boots. Just before he sprang across the gutter he glanced back. He saw no one.

  What do I do? he wondered. What do I do?

  The houses on the other side of Basin Street were mostly small, but built better than those that bordered the swampy town pastures. Neat cottages of plaster and brick lined Rue des Ramparts and Rue Burgundy, pale yellows and celery greens, pinks and sky blues under the savage light. For years, wealthy bankers and planters and brokers had been buying their quadroon and mulatto mistresses dwellings like these, along the back edge of the old town. These days just as many belonged to respectable craftsmen and artisans, clerks and tailors, whose wives and families turned their eyes from their sisters and cousins and neighbors of the demimonde.

  His mother’s protector had bought her such a house, when January was eight and his full-sister, six. The daughter his mother had subsequently borne to St. Denis Janvier had recently been given the deed to such a house herself, by a fat, indolent Creole named Viellard.

  Most stood empty now, shuttered tight in the hot glare of morning. When Bronze John came calling, a lot of people, no matter how strait their circumstances, came up with the money to remove for the summer to one of the hotels or cottages on the shores of the lake, where the air was cleaner, in Milneburgh or Mandeville or Spanish Fort. Those who hadn’t done so from fear of the fever, which came nearly every year—or from the horrible combination of summer decay and summer insects—reconsidered the matter when the first cases of the cholera were diagnosed.

  As he walked along Rue Burgundy, January counted off houses. After sixteen years’ absence he was just coming to know these people again. The yellow cottage belonged to his mother’s dressmaker; the two-and-a-half-story town house occupied by Dr. LaPlante and his family (currently residing at his cottage in Milneburgh); the pink cottage owned by the perfumer Crowdie Passebon. The planks that ordinarily bridged the deep gutter from the unpaved street to the brick banquette were one and all propped beside the high brick steps. If anyone was home, no one was receiving visitors. Narrow spaces gapped between house and house, pass-throughs, leading back to the yards behind where slant-roofed outbuildings, of a sort January had never seen in any other city, housed kitchens, laundries, storerooms at ground level and slave quarters above. Each house, even the cottages, was an enclave; each a little fortress walled into itself. In New Orleans there was no such tangle of alleys as had cut and twisted through the inner arrondissements of Paris, enabling a man to duck inconspicuously from one street to the next.

  But January had been brought up on this street and knew the quirks and features of any number of those hidden courts. As he approached the pale green cottage belonging to his mother’s bosom-bow Agnes Pellicot, he found his muscles growing tense.

  Agnes and her daughters had departed, like January’s mother, when the first cases of cholera were rumored in June. But the cottage, given to Agnes by her protector—with a sizable annuity—when they had terminated their relationship upon the occasion of his second marriage, had undergone a number of remodelings in the years before Agnes owned it. One of these had included the erection of an outside stairway up the rear wall of the building and the enlargement of one of the attic gable windows to form a door.

  That door was kept firmly locked, but the window of the gable beside it had only a catch. He might be perilously close to his forty-first birthday, but January was fairly sure he could make the short scramble across the roof to effect an entrance.

  Whether he could do so with sufficient speed to trap his pursuer was, of course, another question.

  He counted steps in his mind, tallied details. The possibility that whoever dogged him might be armed tugged uncomfortably; so did the thought that there might be more than one of them.

  He carried his medical bag, part of his persona as surgeon, like the tall-crowned beaver hat or the threadbare black wool coat that became a p
ortable bake oven in heat like this. Casually he brought the bag up under his arm and fumbled at the catch like an absentminded man trying to open it while pondering something else, just as he turned into the pass-through that led to the Pellicot yard.

  The moment he was out of sight of the street he bolted down the narrow space like a spurred horse, tearing off his hat as he ran, clutching the black leather satchel tight. He whipped through the wooden gate and shucked his coat as he darted across the dusty yard, flung himself up the outside stairs as though the Platt-Eye Devil of childhood legends ran behind. At the top he paused only long enough to find his longest-bladed scalpel, then tossed bag and hat and coat on the topmost step to make the quick, careful scramble across twenty feet of roof to the other gable.

  With the back edge of the scalpel it was ridiculously easy to flip the window catch. All these cottages were built the same, and he knew the layout of the Pellicot attic was identical to that of his mother’s home. Two chambers and a perilously steep wooden stairway that led down through the cabinet tacked onto the back of the house, a little pantry-cum-warming room opening in its turn into the rear parlor, which served as a dining room. Within moments January crossed through the dining room, through the archway to the front parlor, and flipped the catch on the shutters of the tall French doors that looked onto the street. Stepping out, he closed the shutters silently behind him and rounded the corner of the house into the pass-through again.

  “You wanted to have a word with me?”

  The woman—girl—who stood peeking cautiously through the gate into the yard spun, her hand flying to her mouth. She blundered back against the fence, catching the gate for support. January said, “There’s no way out, that way.”

  He walked down the passage, more wary that she’d try to bolt past him or that someone else might come in behind, than from any fear that she might be armed. As he got close he saw that her clothing was plain but very well cut. The dark red cotton gown, high waisted and with narrow sleeves made down to the wrists, was the kind a young girl of good family might wear. By the fit of the bust, it hadn’t been made for her. The headcloth mandated by law for all black or colored women was dark red too, but tied as a servant, or a country-bred slave, would tie it. His younger sister Dominique had tried to initiate him into the intricacies of the proper tying of tignons into fanciful, seductive, or outrageous styles in defiance of the law, but without much success. January knew a confection when he saw one, though, and this wasn’t a confection. It was a headcloth, the mark of a slave’s humility.