Fever Season Read online

  “Why did you follow me?”

  “Are you M’sieu Benjamin Janvier?” The girl spoke the sloppy Creole French of the plantations, more than half African. Any town mother would have whaled the life out of a girl who used vo for vous, at least any mother who’d have been able to afford that dress.

  “That’s me.” He kept his voice as unalarming as possible. At his size, he was aware that he was alarming enough. “And I have the honor of addressing …?”

  She straightened her shoulders in her red dress, a little slip of a thing, with a round defiant chin and a trace of hardness in her eyes that may have been fear. Pretty, January thought. He could have picked her up in one hand.

  “I’m Cora …” She hesitated, fishing, then went on with just a touch of defiance, “… LaFayette. Cora LaFayette. I needed to speak with you, Michie Janvier. Are you a music teacher?”

  “I am that,” he sighed.

  After ten years he still didn’t know whether to feel amused or angry about having to work as a musician. There were free men of color who made a living—and a good living—as physicians and surgeons in New Orleans, but they were without exception light of skin. Quadroon or octoroon, they were for the most part offspring of white men and the women for whom they bought these pastel houses along this street.

  In his way, St. Denis Janvier had been as much an optimist as his mulatto plaçée’s son had been, concerning the chances a man with three African grandparents would have of earning his living in medicine in New Orleans or elsewhere, Paris training or no Paris training.

  Cora LaFayette looked down, small face a careful blank, rallying her words, desperate to get them right. January relaxed a little and smiled, folding his big arms in their sweat-damp muslin sleeves. “You followed me all the way from Charity Hospital to ask what I charge for lessons?”

  Her head came up, like a deer startled in the woods, and she saw the gentle teasing in his eyes. Something eased, very slightly, in the corners of that expressionless little mouth.

  But she did not smile. She dwelled in a country where smiles had been forgotten years ago. “Do you teach the daughters of a lady name Lalaurie? Great big green house on Rue Royale?”

  January nodded again. He glanced around him at the narrow tunnel they stood in, between Agnes Pellicot’s house and that of Guillaume Morisset the tailor, also out of town. The slot of shadow stank of mud and sewage where mosquito-wrigglers flickered among the scum. “You want to go somewhere a little more comfortable, Mademoiselle LaFayette? The town’s half closed up, but at Breyard’s Grocery over on Rue Toulouse I can get you a lemonade.”

  Eyes that seemed too big for that pointed, delicate face raised quickly and as quickly darted away. She shook her head, a tiny gesture, and January stepped past her, still cautiously, to push open the gate that led into the Pellicot yard. The French doors into the house were shuttered, as were the doors of the service building at the back of the yard. The brick-flagged porch below the slave quarters’ gallery was a slab of blue-black velvet. January led the girl to the plank bench outside the kitchen where Agnes’s cook Elvire would sit to shell peas or pluck fowl, and said, “Wait here a minute for me, if you would, Mamzelle.”

  She stiffened, panic in her eyes.

  “I’m just going around to latch the door. I’ll be back.”

  He was conscious of her, bolt upright and motionless as a scared cat, on the bench as he crossed through the yard again, down the blue tunnel of passway, and out to Rue Burgundy. He stepped back through the French doors into Agnes Pellicot’s parlor and latched them; and on the way through the cabinet pantry to the stairs, he found a cheap horn cup on a shelf beside the French china dinner service. This he carried in his waistcoat pocket up the stairs, through the attic, out the window, across the roof, and down the outside stairs, marveling that he’d made that circuit earlier at a dead run. It was a wonder what you could do with a good scare in you.

  When he returned to the yard Cora LaFayette was gone. He saw her a moment later just within the gate to the pass-through out to the street, poised to run.

  He waited in the middle of the yard, as he’d have waited not to startle a deer in the cypress swamps behind the plantation where he’d been born. In time she came away from the gate and hurried to the bench again, keeping close to the wall.

  Runaway, he thought. And making more of it than she needed to. Did she really think that with the fever and the cholera stalking the streets, with the town half-empty and fear like the stench of the smoke in the air, that anybody would be chasing a runaway slave?

  He filled the horn cup from the coopered cistern in the corner of the yard and held it out to her. Cora drank thirstily, and he sat on the other end of the bench, laying coat, hat, and satchel down beside him. Aside from her dress, which was not a countrywoman’s dress, her hands and face were clean. She’d been in town a little time.

  “Do you know Madame Lalaurie?” he asked her, when she set the cup aside. “Or know of her?”

  The girl shook her head. “That is, I know she’s a rich lady, if she’s got a big house like that, and bought slaves.” She looked down at the toes of her shoes, black and red, to match the dress, with frivolous white lacings. “She bought a houseman, only a week or so ago, name of Gervase, from my master—that used to be my master, before he freed me,” she added hastily. “Michie …” She hesitated, fishing around for corroborative detail again. If her name were LaFayette her master’s would probably be, too, so she said, “Michie Napoleon LaFayette. But Michie LaFayette, he set me free, and I come to town looking for Gervase. We were married, me and Gervase. Really married, Michie Janvier, by a priest and everything.”

  Her dark eyes were childishly earnest, looking into his, but he saw in the flinch of her mouth, heard in the inflection of her voice, that she lied. Not that it was his business. There were a lot of men who didn’t want their people to marry, or even to become Christians. But it wasn’t any of his affair, though as a Christian he hoped this girl had at least been baptized. He asked, “So why didn’t you try to see Gervase yourself?”

  “I did!” She spread out her child-small hands, with the roughened skin of washing-up on the fingers and backs. “I tried. I went to the house on Rue Royale, and they always keep the big gate there shut. That coachman of Madame’s there, he wouldn’t let me in. I asked him.” There was anger in the set of the little mouth. “He just smiled at me nasty and said Gervase was busy and Madame wouldn’t have her people taking time off from their work to chat with girls in the street. I told him I was his sister,” she added naively, and sighed.

  January forebore to mention how many “sisters” and “cousins” and “brothers” came loitering around to speak to servants in the twilight. Only the slackest of mistresses would permit such dalliance, and Madame Delphine Lalaurie was known for the silent efficiency of her servants.

  “So you want me to talk to Gervase?”

  Cora nodded. “If you would, M’sieu. After the second time that coachman—that Bastien—turn me away, I watched the house, and I saw you go in. The cripple-man selling water across the street, he say you was the music teacher for Madame Lalaurie’s two girls. He say you also work at the Charity Hospital during the fever season, so when I … I couldn’t wait for you to come out of the house, I look for you at the Hospital.”

  Where there was too much of a crowd for you to want to come up to me, thought January, studying that wary, triangular face. It didn’t surprise him that the water seller would know everything about him. In New Orleans, the vendors who sold everything from strawberries to fire irons through the narrow streets knew everything about everyone.

  But that, too, was none of his business. This girl’s lover had been sold, and she had run away to see him again. For all his mother’s talk about the unruliness of blacks (not that his mother was so much as a half-shade paler than Cora LaFayette) he could not blame her for it.

  “What would you like me to tell Gervase?”

  Her smile transformed her like spring dawn, not just her face but her tense little body as well. Joy became her. Then she swallowed, again, thinking hard and contemplating once more the toes of her red-and-black shoes. “Could you ask him if there’s a way we can see each other? If there’s a way he can get out? Just for an evening, I mean, M’sieu. They keep that gate closed tight all the time. I’ll meet you here,” she went on quickly. “If that’s all right with you, Michie Janvier. Tomorrow night?”

  “Wednesday,” said January. “Wednesday afternoon. I teach the Lalaurie girls Tuesdays and Fridays, and I’m working at the Hospital Tuesday night.”

  “Wednesday afternoon.” She got to her feet, her smile coming and going, like a child fearing to hex a wish. “I’ll be here, Michie Janvier. Thank you.”

  She looked so fragile, standing poised in the brazen sunlight, that it was on January’s tongue to ask her if she had a place to stay. But if she were a runaway, he thought, she wouldn’t tell him. And if she were a runaway it was better that he didn’t know. Still he felt a pang of worry for her, as she darted away like a small rusty damselfly into the dark beyond the gate.

  He shrugged his coat back on, shifting his wide shoulders beneath it, shirt gummy with sweat. As he donned his hat again, tucked his bag under his arm and crossed Agnes Pellicot’s yard, he thought of his own room behind his mother’s house, his own bed, and a few hours’ sleep without the stink of death in his nostrils, without the whimpers of the dying in his ears.

  Mostly the runaways went back home. They had nowhere else to go. Their families and their friends were all on the home place, wherever the home place was, like the villages in Africa from which their parents and grandparents had come. He remembered someone—his father?—telling him about how in old times there’d been whole v
illages of escaped Africans in the cipriere, the cypress swamps that lay behind the line of river plantations. They’d raised their own food, hunted, and set scouts, hidden from the eyes of the whites. But that was long gone even in his childhood.

  Still, at Bellefleur where he’d been born, there were a couple of the hands who ran off two or three times a year, to live in the woods for a few days or a week. They never went far.

  Maybe that was because they knew they wouldn’t get more than a beating. A beating was worth it, as far as they were concerned. It was the price they were willing to pay for earth and peace and silence of heart. Try as he would, January could not recall whether his father had been one of them.

  He let himself out the gate. Cora LaFayette—or whatever her name actually was—had vanished from the empty street. January strode quickly toward his mother’s house, sweating in the penitential coat. Twice he looked around, as if he half expected to see the black, tall, smoky form of Bronze John himself stepping through the thin scrim of gutter steam. But he saw only Hèlier the water seller, with his buckets and his yoke on his twisted back, calling out hopefully, “Water! Water! Clean cold water!” to the shut and bolted houses.

  Benjamin January prayed that when he slept, he would not dream.

  TWO

  January drew the ragged sheet up over the face of the man on the floor before him and sat back on his heels. Toward the end the man had begged for something, January didn’t know what, in a language he could not understand. Dr. Ker, the head of Charity Hospital, guessed he was a Russian, a sailor who’d jumped ship hoping for a chance of making a better life for himself ashore.

  Poor fool.

  “You stupid dago, I’m doing this for your own good!”

  January turned his head at the sound. Emil Barnard, a gangly young man who had styled himself “a practitioner of the healing arts” when he’d volunteered his services to Dr. Ker, backed nervously from the cot of a man who’d been brought in that afternoon. The patient’s face was flushed the horrible orange of the fever, and black vomit puddled the floor beside the rude wooden bed. The sick man was cursing weakly in Italian, swearing that no priest should come near him, no murdering government spy.

  “Own good, you understand?” yelled Barnard, more loudly. “You understand?”

  It was quite clear, of course, that the Italian didn’t understand. Probably even if he knew French when he was in his right mind, the fever’s delirium had sponged such knowledge from his screaming brain. All he knew—he was shouting this over and over again now—was that he was in hell. In hell with all the murdering priests.

  January closed his eyes. He knew he should get up and go over to them—his Italian was good enough to make himself understood—but exhaustion held him like a chain. Maybe they were in hell.

  It was hot enough, God knew. In the long upstairs ward, the clotted black heat was imbued with the stenches of human waste and fever-vomit and the peculiar, horrible stink that reeks from the sweat of those in mortal fear. The long windows that gave onto the gallery were shut tight and heavily curtained in the hopes of excluding the pestilence that rode the air of night, and January’s face ran with sweat as if he’d put his head in a rain barrel. Like hell’s, the dark was smudged with fire. The lamps were too few and burned the cheapest oil obtainable; smoke hung beneath the high ceiling and the smell of it permeated clothing, hair, flesh. Like hell, even in this dead hour of the night, the room murmured with a Babel of voices: German, Swedish, English …

  Like hell, it was a place without hope.

  “He thinks you’re a priest.” January got to his feet, slowly, like an old man. “He has no use for priests.”

  “An Italian?” Emil Barnard straightened indignantly. He spoke the singsong French of the Midi, with its trilled vowels and rolled r’s. “Absurd. They’re all priest ridden, Romish heathens. You are mistaken.” Yet Barnard did look a little like a priest, in his long, old-fashioned black tailed coat and his shirt of biscuit-colored calico that looked white in the lamp glare and smoke.

  “He thinks that’s the viaticum—the Host—you have … sir.” In his days in Paris, January had called no man “sir” unless he thought they deserved it: the physicians at the Hôtel Dieu, the wealthy men who had hired him to play, the Director of the Opera. It was hard to return to his childhood, to call even a street-sweeper “sir” if that street-sweeper happened to have been born white, to look down or aside so as not to meet their eyes. “What is it?”

  “Onion.” Barnard had a very long narrow face that was carefully shaved, light brown hair a trifle too curly for Nature’s unaided hand. “Placed near or under the bed of a sufferer from the yellow fever, it is a sovereign remedy against the miasmatic influence of fever-air.” He stepped aside a pace as a woman came to mop up the Italian’s vomit from the floor by the cot; he didn’t even look down at her as he continued his lecture. “The onion is a near-perfect remedy for all imbalances of the bodily humors. Its wonderful absorptive powers will draw forth the febrile vapors from the lungs and gradually purify the lymphatic and bilious systems. It was a common remedy among the great Indian nations that anciently inhabited these countries, and was written of in papyri of Egypt in the reigns of the Pharaohs, long before the birth of Christ.”

  “Get him away from me!” screamed the Italian. “Clerical scoundrel! Starver of babies! Thief of a poor man’s belongings! You stole the bread out of the mouths of my children and left them to die!”

  “Here, now, what have we here?”

  Dr. Jules Soublet, in charge of the ward by night by virtue of having one of the oldest practices in the French town, approached them, a tall, brisk, bustling man only a few years January’s senior. His coat of black superfine wool was expensively tailored over heavy shoulders, his linen immaculate—Soublet changed it every few hours. His servant followed him, bearing on a japanned tray a jar of slow-squirming brown leeches, six knives of German steel, an array of cupping-glasses and a bleeding-bowl whose white porcelain was daubed and splashed with red.

  “Mary, Mother of God, save me!” shrieked the Italian. “I have not loved those fat capons of Satan but I always loved Thee! Do not leave me in Satan’s hand!” He began to vomit again, clotted black rivers of spew. Barnard and Dr. Soublet both stepped back in alarm; January caught the man’s shoulders to steady him, helped by the tall woman who’d been mopping up. The vomit spattered her calico skirt. Her face, beautiful and impassive under an elaborately folded tignon, did not change, dark eyes like a serpent’s, registering neither disgust nor pity.

  “This man doesn’t need your silly Thompsonian trash,” Soublet said to Barnard, not sparing a glance for the sick man. “Weeds and vinegar and cinchona bark—fie! It’s clear that his constitution needs to be lowered. Boy …” The doctor addressed January. “Hold him down.”

  Barnard backed away, clutching his slice of onion, which in the dim light did indeed resemble the Eucharist. The Italian, too spent to struggle, only wept a little as January gripped his right arm and shoulder, Soublet’s servant his left. Soublet opened the patient’s vein at the elbow. The blood was inky in the semidark.

  “There. He should do now. Bind that up.” Soublet turned away. “I’ll leave instructions to Ker to take another pint at noon.”

  The servant gathered up the reeking bowl and moved off in his master’s wake.

  January muttered, “I saw less blood when Jackson beat the British than I do on any night he’s in charge.” The tall woman, turning away, paused, a flick of a smile in the ophidian eyes.