02 Fever Season bj-2 Read online

  Nowhere was safe.

  "Delphine Lalaurie, she has the best of everything." Olympe muffled her hand in her bright-colored skirts, to keep from her skin the heat of the iron hook with which she rearranged tripods and pots above the fire. Her sloppy, mo kiri mo vini French reminded January of Cora's. It was the French of Africans who'd made the language their own as they'd made what they could of the land. Their mother would faint to hear her-but then, Livia Levesque had not heard her daughter's voice for nearly twenty years.

  "When a boat comes in from France with the latest shade of silk, or some kind of bonnet they're all wearing in Paris, Delphine Lalaurie's got it. Either for her or for her daughters, for all it's said she don't let those poor girls eat enough to keep a cat alive. When Michie Davis brought in those French singers for his Opera, Delphine Lalaurie had them to her parties, to sing for her guests, before anyone else in town; and when she gives a ball, no other lady in town dare hold any kind of party that night, knowing it won't be no use."

  She wiped her face with one of the threadbare linen towels. "Hell." She chuckled. "I bet if Delphine Lalaurie were caught red-handed taking runaways out of town by the coflie there'd be folks failing over themselves to say it wasn't so. She does what she pleases. And that's what just about rots Emily Redfern's heart."

  She scooped greens from a cauldron at the back of the hearth, handed the white porcelain bowl of them to her son to carry back to the house, and shifted the coffeepot a little farther to one side, where it would warm without boiling. "The voodoos know everything that goes on in this town, Brother," Olympe said.

  "Emily Redfern wants to have that same power Delphine Lalaurie has. Wants to have it with everyone, not just with the Americans. That's what ate her about her husband's gambling. Not that it might lose them their home-that little place at Black Oak was hers, not his, and couldn't be took for his debts. But his gambling took away from what she could spend on having the best in town, on being the best."

  "Hate her enough to poison him?"

  Olympia Snakebones's dark eyes slid toward her young son, but the boy was already out of the kitchen, skipping across the dark yard to the house with his bowl of greens. "The voodoos know everything in this town," she said again, her face enigmatic. "But sometimes we don't tell even each other what we know.

  Tell your little Cora to be careful, dealing with that white woman, with any white woman. And you, Brother-you watch yourself too. You get yourself mixed up with the whites, French or American, and you'll be hurtin', too."

  They crossed the yard together, Olympe taking off her apron, leaving it on the kitchen table. The smell of burning was thick in their nostrils.

  "Tell her there's a man name of Natchez Jim down by Rue du Levee." They paused in the molten light from the dining-room door. "She'll find him near the coffee stand under the arcade of the vegetable market, when he's not out freighting firewood in his boat. He'll get her up the river safe. Tell him I said it's a favor to me."

  Dinner was a lively meal, with Gabriel and thirteen-year-old Zizi-Marie up and down, back and forth to the front bedroom where their father, Paul Corbier, was slowly convalescing from a brush with the fever.

  While listening to Zizi-Marie's account of how she'd done the finishwork on Monsieur Marigny's yellow silk chairs while her father was ill and thus helped rescue the family finances-which turned out to be quite true, for she was a good upholsterer already-and explaining correlations to Gabriel between Olympe's herbal remedies and his own medical training, it was difficult for January to remember his own worries or to feel anything but joy in the warm haven of that little house. Halfway through the meal there was a knock at the door, a woman from the shacks out toward the swamps, asking Olympe's help with her children taking sick; Olympe said, "I'll have to go."

  January nodded. He was on his way to the Hospital himself. Even this haven, he thought, looking around the candldit parlor, was not safe. It could be taken away at any time, as Ayasha had been taken.

  "I'll put up extra for you, borage and willow bark," Olympe said, going into the parlor where the shelves were that contained the potions of the voodoo: brick dust and graveyard dust, the dried bones of chickens and the heads of mice, little squares of red flannel and black flannel, colored candles and dishes of blue glass beads.

  "We can't stay, either," Gabriel announced, as Chouchou gathered the dishes to carry back to the kitchen with the solemn care of an eight-year-old, and Olympe lifted Ti-Paul down from the box on the chair seat that raised him up to the level of the table. "Zizi and I, we got to help Nicole Perret and her husband pack up. Would you know it, Uncle Ben? Uncle Louis says now his cook and yard man gone over to Mobile, Nicole and Jacques can stay on the porch of his house out by Milneburgh, that he rent for the summer, and work for him. Now the fever here's so bad, Nicole and Jacques will do that just to be away from town."

  He pulled on his jacket, ran quick fingers over his close-cropped hair, a tall, gangly boy, like January had been, but with the promise of the gentle handsomeness still visible in Paul Corbier's face. "I ain't scared of no fever, me. Just it's so hot here I wish we could go, too. You think Grandmere might let us, just for a while?"

  January couldn't imagine his mother inconveniencing herself to the extent of giving her elder daughter floor space in her lovely rented room at the Milneburgh Hotel-let alone her elder daughter's decidedly working-class husband and four children-to save her had Attila the Hun been on the point of sacking the town. "Stranger things have happened," he told his nephew.

  But probably not since the Resurrection of Christ. "Take a smudge with you," he cautioned, as Zizi-Marie came out of the bedroom with her jacket, her father leaning on her shoulder. "And a cloth soaked in vinegar." He tried to think of anything that actually seemed to have some effect in deflecting the fever, the poisons that seemed to ride the stinking, mosquito-humming darkness.

  Slices of onion?

  Get out of this town, he thought despairingly. Get out of this town.

  "You could do us a favor, if you would, Ben." Paul Corbier sat carefully on the parlor divan. He was breathing hard just from the effort of coming out to bid his brother in-law good night. "Alys Roque was here this afternoon, Olympe's friend. She says her husband, Robois, didn't come in last night from working the levee. She's already been to Charity, and the Orleans Infirmary, and Dr. Campbell's, and that clinic the Ursulines have set up where the convent used to be, but... it strikes so fast, sometimes.

  And if it's the cholera, it's all the worse. Me, I was shaping an arm cushion one minute and the next thing I knew I was lying on the floor, without the strength to so much as call out."

  He shook his head. His face, round when January had first met him in the spring, had thinned with the effects of the disease; and it would be some time before he'd recover the lost flesh. By the look of him he had a good deal of African blood, which had probably been the saving of him. The lighter-skinned colored, quadroons and octoroons, suffered more with the fever. The exquisitely pale musterfinos and mamaloques were as susceptible to its effects as the whites.

  "You were lucky," said January softly. Not least, he added to himself, in having a wife who knew about herbs and healing and wouldn't call in some sanguinary lunatic like Soublet to bleed you to death.

  Soublet was at the top of his form that night when January returned to the hospital, opening veins and applying leeches with the pious confidence of a vampire. "Balderdash, sir," January overheard him saying to Dr. Sanchez. "Salts of mercury are all very well in their place, but fever resides in the blood, not in the nervous system."

  "Salts of mercury mixed with turpentine have been shown to be of sovereign benefit-sovereign, sir!-in cases of fever!" Sanchez retorted. "But the dosage must be heroic! Nothing is of any benefit unless the patient's gums bleed..."

  Balderdash? wondered January, as he lifted the half-dead Italian, waxen with phlebotomy, to sponge him clean. The heartbreaking, terrifying thing about the fever was that he didn't
know. Nobody knew. Maybe Soublet and Sanchez were right.

  On the bed next to the Italian's a dead woman lay. Her face was covered with a sheet, but her hair, long and black, hung to brush the reeking floor, and the sight of it cut his heart. Had he returned soon enough to find Ayasha still alive, could he have saved her by bleeding? By forcing calomel and turpentine down her throat until her gums bled?

  Why did one person recover, and another succumb? Might Monsieur A have recovered without the remedy, and did Madame B perish in its despite?

  "Stick to surgery, my son," Dr. Gomez had said to him, all those years ago. "These physicians,' they know nothing but calomel and opium, the clyster and the knife. When a man breaks a bone, by God, you know what you've got."

  What you had, of course, thought January, as he was summoned to hold down a laborer who wept and fought and cursed at them in Gaelic, was a mechanic of the body's armature who had to sit by while a man he was certain was an imbecile opened the patient's veins for the fifth time in as many days.

  Rain began to fall: hard, steady, drenching rain that abated not an atom of the suffocating heat. Ants crawled steadily up the walls and over the floor, in spite of the red pepper sprinkled along every baseboard. A man came in, his coat of fine tobacco-colored wool sticking to his broad shoulders with wet and his fair hair and extravagant sidewhiskers dripping on his shoulders, and searched among the sick, as the woman Nanie had searched a few nights ago. Handsome face impassive, he passed once through the ward and then made a second circuit, as if not believing the one he sought was not there.

  January saw that it was the men of color he went to, lifting the sheets over the faces of the dead, looking down at them for a few minutes before moving on.

  "Can I help you, sir?"

  The man turned, and met his eyes with eyes of bright Irish blue. "Thank you kindly, no." His voice had the soft lilt of the well-bred Irish gentry, like that of January's friend Hannibal the fiddler when Hannibal was more than usually drunk. "Just seekin' after a friend."

  There was a jewel in his stickpin the size of little Ti-Paul's fingernail-what kind, it was too dark to tell-and except for the soak of the rain his linen was clean and very fine. His coat, with its wasp waist and lavishly wadded shoulders, was too flashy for a broker's or a planter's. A gambler, January guessed, or someone in the theater.

  "Does he have a name, if they bring him in after you've gone?"

  The man hesitated, then shook his head. "I'll be back," he said.

  There were many people who came in, seeking those they knew among the dying or the dead. Later in the night January thought he saw the woman Nani? return, but through the grind of exhaustion and the haze of smoke could not be sure. He himself studied the faces of the patients, asked the names of those still conscious enough to reply, searching for Robois Roque, as his brother-in-law had requested. When the ambulance came in, toward midnight, he looked again. There was no one he sought, but there was an elderly German woman with a withered and shortened leg, and Soublet descended upon her at once, rubbing his thick-muscled hands.

  "Would you like to have the affliction of your limb cured?" the doctor murmured-he had a beautiful voice whcn he chose to soften it-and the woman thrashed her head giddily and muttered something in her own tongue. January saw Soublet look around quickly for Ker, and then wave his servant over. "If you consent to come to my clinic, you can be better cared for there, and not only will you be cured of the fever but full use of the limb will be restored to you within a matter of weeks."

  January shuddered, but knew if he interfered he might be put out of the Hospital altogether. It was not for surgeons to question the work of actual doctors, and certainly not for a black man to question the opinion of a white. He looked around for Ker, as Soublet had done, but the Englishman was not to be seen.

  "M'sieur?"

  A woman had been standing beside him for some time, a wet cloak hanging from her square, slender shoulders and a look of sickened horror on her face. And well she might look so, thought January, seeing anew the smoky hell of the long room, roaches rattling ferociously around the lamps, the dying laid on pallets along the wall for lack of beds. Barnard crouched beside one old man and shoved what looked like garlic tops into his ears while Soublet and his servant hovered like a pair of sable-cloaked vultures above the delirious German woman. "Do you need help, Madame?"

  She raised her eyes to his. Not far-she was a tall woman. Her eyes seemed dark in the shadows, behind thick slabs of gold-rimmed spectacle lenses, but when she turned toward the lamps, they showed their true color, cindery gray flecked with green.

  "I need a doctor," she said. She wore a free woman's tignon, and in the dusky half-light she had a free woman's complexion. Her face was a long oval with a mouth too prim and a chin too pronounced for real beauty. All arms and legs, she moved as if she were always going to trip, but never did.

  January glanced back at Soublet and the beggar woman. "I'm a doctor." He went to fetch his satchel from behind the door.

  The rain had eased to a patter, but the air outside smelled thick of it. It was only a break in the storm. An electric wild warmth charged the night, monstrous clouds advancing over the lake like the siege engines of some unimaginable army. He wondered where the girl Cora Chouteau was tonight, and if she was sleeping dry.

  "Three of my girls are down sick." The wind caught the woman's cloak, whirled it like a great cracking wing. "I'm sorry," she added, as they passed through the gate of the Hospital courtyard, and he handed her across the gutter and into the morass of Common Street. "You've got as much as you can do here, I know. But I've done everything I can, everything I know how to do. I'm not... I'm not very good with the sick."

  She had a small school on Rue St. Claude, not far from the Bayou Road. Her name, she said, was Rose Vitrac.

  "Sometimes this past year I've felt like a peddler trying to sell S?vres teacups to the Comanche," she remarked ruefully, taking off her spectacles to wipe rain from the Ienses. Away from the Hospital she seemed to gain back some of her poise, to be less like a very young egret trying to balance on its long legs. There was a wry little fold in the corner of her mouth and, even in this time, a dry capacity for amusement. "It's difficult enough to find Creole girls, let alone girls of color, whose parents are willing to pay for them to learn Latin-or proper French, for that matter, much less, God help us, natural philosophy.

  But there have to be a few Comanche warriors out there who like..." She hesitated, fishing for exactly the proper word, and January smiled and suggested,

  "Tea?"

  Rose Vitrac chuckled. "Beautiful things, I was going say." She put the spectacles back on. "Learning for its own sake, for the joy of knowing how the universe is put together. Things that have nothing to do with hunting buffalo or scalping people."

  "You're probably in the wrong town for that," he said, still smiling.

  The face she turned to him, as they stopped before a crumbling, galleried Spanish house, post-and-brick raised high off the ground, was suddenly serious again. Quiet intensity illuminated her eyes. "No," she said. "I'm in the right town for that. If you're a colored boy-if your father is a rich white man-he'll see to your education if you say you want to study Hebrew, or optics, or how logarithms unfold invisible universes that you never even suspected. But if you're a girl? If you're hungry to know, to learn? To see the magic in cosines and radii, to learn how to call lightning out of water and steel and copper wire? This is the only town where that fulfillment is even possible."

  "You teach all that?"

  "If they want to learn, I find a way to teach it." She looked away from him, suddenly embarrassed, and drew a key from the reticule at her belt. Dawn was just coming, down the river and above the clouds, enough light to show him the freckles that dusted her nose and cheekbones, and to turn the oil lamps in their iron brackets along the wall to fey shreds of torn silk. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm lecturing again. It's a noxious habit."

  January shook his
head, recalling Dr. Gomez's quiet study, with its glistening jars of specimens preserved in brandy or honey, its worn medical books and ferocious looking galvanic battery. He climbed the tall steps beside her to the gallery, the warm damp wind smiting them again as he scraped the mud from his boots, and she unlocked the door. "And did you find buyers for your philosophic tea sets?"

  She glanced up at him, the fear that had come into her eyes with the touch of the door handle leaving them for a moment. She smiled. "A few."

  The smell of fever and sickness flowed from the black dark of the house, vile and frightening. Just enough light trickled in from outside to show up a branch of candles on a table just beside the door.

  Mademoiselle Vitrac kicked her feet out of the wooden patterns that guarded her shoes, took a match from her reticule, scratched it on the matchpaper. By the growing light January was just able to discern looming bookcases, a blackboard, a globe, and a couple of straight-backed chairs. Saw, too, the knot of fear bunch at the corner of the schoolmistress's jaw. He remembered coming into a house in Paris, smelling that smell as he ascended the stairs.

  "It will be all right." He took the candelabra from her unsteady hand.

  There were eight beds in the long, low attic above the school's three rooms. Three were occupied. A girl of thirteen-Zizi-Marie's age-sat beside one of the beds, a china basin of water and a candle on the floor beside her. She turned, gratitude flooding her round, pug-nosed face as she heard the steps on the stairs, saw the light of the candles imperceptibly brighten the terrible blackness of the room.