02 Fever Season bj-2

by Barbara Hambly

  January turned the necklace over in his hands. He'd seen enough pearls close up, between his mother and her friends, and Ayasha's customers, to see that these were medium to high grade, lustrous, evenly sized and closely matched.

  "What can I do?" Mademoiselle Vitrac asked.

  He folded the necklace together into the palm of one big hand. "What we can't do," he replied, "is go to the police. You know that."

  "I know that."

  "I don't know what the penalty is for aiding and abetting a murder-even if you know and I know that it was Emily Redfern and not Cora who put that monkshood into Otis Redfern's soup-but at the very least I think we'd both be cleaning out the municipal gutters for a long time."

  Her mouth twitched a little in a smile, in spite of herself, and she averted her face as if she had been punished as a child for laughing when adults thought she should be having the vapors.

  He held out the pearls. "Get rid of these. Throw them in the river, but make sure nobody sees you do it."

  When he saw her hesitate-no woman throws pearls away lightly-he added, "If you're caught with them on you, I can guarantee you you'll lose everything you've worked for so hard."

  "Yes." She took them from his hand. "Yes, I see that."

  "We need to check the fever wards," said January. "Yellow Jack hits quick. If Cora started with a headache on her way home Friday night, with chills and pain and cramps, she might have been too disoriented to find her way up from Rue Royale to your school."

  "I can do that," said Mademoiselle Vitrac. "There's an emergency fever ward at Davidson's Clinic on Circus Street and another one at Campbell's. Damn the newspapers for not publishing where these things are. Didn't the Ursulines set up a ward in their old convent? The one the legislature has been using now?"

  January nodded. "I think so. Soublet has fever patients at his private clinic on Bourbon, though God help her if she was taken there. And the first thing to do," he added, rising as she rose, "is to talk to Madame Lalaurie herself."

  "You don't have to-"

  "I don't want you to be connected with Cora in any way." He handed her her reticule, and the plush purse. "Madame Lalaurie knows at least that I've spoken to her."

  Her smile was rueful as she shook out her petticoats. She wore a little gold cross around her neck, and tiny gold studs, like beads, in her earlobes. "I see I wouldn't make a particularly good desperado."

  "Want of practice." He returned her smile, and she laughed.

  "Ah. So I can look forward to getting better at skulduggery with time. Cora would be proud of me."

  "I'll let you know what I find out." He walked with her to the pass-through, opened the gate, and followed her to the street. The only movement there was a woman in a red headscarf selling kerchiefs and pins door to door and the flies that swarmed around a dead dog.

  "But I think the first thing we need to do is ascertain whether Cora made it to Madame Lalaurie's house that night at all."

  Shutters tightly closed and latched, curtains drawn to exclude any possibility of fevered air, the small ward on the ground floor of the yellow stucco building on Rue Bourbon was like those ovens in which Persian monarchs had had their enemies immured to roast. But there was no flame here. Only darkness, and the bleared glare of the jaundiced lamps; the smell of human waste, medicine, and blood, solid enough to cut. For a few moments January only stood looking down the ward, with its double row of makeshift pine-pole beds, bare for the most part of any semblance of mosquito-bars-most without sheets as well. The air was a low thick mutter of delirium and panting breath.

  No nurse was to be seen: January made his way between the beds-not more than twenty could be crammed into what was usually a shop selling coffee and tobacco to the shut and curtained door at the rear. In the courtyard behind, the air grated with the smoke of burning gunpowder. The kitchen building was nearly invisible through its cinder gray screen. A wooden stairway ascended to a gallery, and as he put his foot to the lowest step, January heard a woman groan.

  "That's good, that's good!" cried Dr. Soublet's voice, enthusiasm bordering on delight. "The ligaments and bones are accommodating themselves to the pressure of the apparatus!"

  There were three rooms upstairs. One seemed to be a sort of office, tucked in a corner where the gallery ran around to join the slave quarters, and unoccupied. In the second, several beds had been set up in the shrouded gloom. These were farther apart than those in the shop, and equipped with mosquito-bars.

  Small tables between them bore slop-jars and bleeding-bowls. Their contents crept with flies. The candlelit darkness reeked of opium.

  In each bed a sufferer lay, invisible behind white clouds of gauze and murmuring in narcotic dream.

  January stopped beside the first bed, put aside the netting, and looked down into the face of Hclier the water seller. The young man was strapped into an iron apparatus like Torquemada's nightmare, over head, shoulders, and back. In spite of the netting, flies swarmed on the sores that the straps had worn in the flesh of his splayed-out arms, and crawled over his unprotected eyes and mouth.

  Angrily, January leaned down and unbuckled the straps. To hell with the `process of the cure,'" he thought. It was one thing to joke with Mademoiselle Vitrac about that obscene iron maiden in the school; this was quite another.

  In all his years of witnessing "infallible machines" invented by one physician or another, he'd never seen one with his own eyes that worked.

  Could a man of color be arrested in this town for interfering with a white physician's patient?

  These days it wouldn't surprise him.

  "Get up," he said softly. "Get out of here while you can."

  But the water seller only rolled his head and stared at him with drugged turquoise eyes. "Get out?" he asked, and giggled. "All this opium and you tell me, `Get out'? Who're you to tell me anything, nigger man? Who're you to tell a white man-a white man..." He groped about for the end of his sentence.

  January took him by the arm and sat him up. "You're not a white man," he said. "And if you stay here..

  ." H?lier dragged his arm free, lips drawn back in an ugly rage. "Don't you tell me I'm not a white man, you black nigger." He crawled to his feet, and grabbed the end of the bed with a gasp of agony. "Don't you tell me anything. Why ain't I a white man, eh? Why ain't I? Look at that!" He held out his arm. "You ever see whiter?" Then the drug sponged the anger from his face. He gestured around him at the ward, and giggled again. "I'm in a white man's hospital, ain't I? Serves me right, eh? Serves me right."

  Hunched and crablike, H?lier staggered away between the beds, as if his curved spine and the additional pain of what he had been through were burdens that bent him to the ground. From the gallery January watched him descend the stairs and disappear into the shadows of the carriageway, clinging to the pale stucco of the walls, January drew a deep breath.

  The third room was Dr. Soublet's clinic per se.

  "Don't want it," muttered a woman's voice in German. "F'riedrich-wo ist Friedrich? Hurts... God, it hurts!"

  Soublet and a small, slender man of about thirty whom January vaguely recognized bent over a leathertopped table on which lay the German woman Soublet had been talking to at Charity only a few nights ago. She was nude but for a dirty shift pulled up to her belly. An enormous brace or bracket of iron and leather was strapped to her waist, thigh, knee, and down to the deformed foot. It was she whom January had heard groaning, as Soublet readjusted the straps. The slim little man held a spouted china cup to her lips, but his silent dark eyes watched Soublet's face with a disturbing cold intensity.

  "It only hurts because it's improving," replied Soublet bracingly. "Nicolas, for God's sake if the woman won't take the laudanum, hold her nose as you pour! I can't have her jiggling about so. What do you want?" He looked up irritably as the light from the outside fell through upon them with January's lifting aside of the curtain over the door. "And close that door, man! This woman has recently recovered from the fever! Do you want
to provoke a relapse?"

  January stepped in and closed the door of the ward behind him. The woman, whose arms were strapped to the table, wriggled and began to cry. "Hilf mir," she muttered, "hilf mir... Oh, Friedrich!"

  "May I speak for a moment with Dr. Lalaurie?" January looked carefully aside so they would not see the sickened rage in his eyes.

  The small man set down the cup and stepped forward. His pointed, waxy face was polite, but there was something in the way he looked at him that reminded January of the American businessman in the ballroom at the Washington Hotel: a calculation of value, an estimate of what he, Benjamin January, could be used for or sold for. "I am Dr. Lalaurie."

  "Please excuse the familiarity of my seeking you out, sir." January bowed. "My name is Benjamin January; I work at the Charity Hospital."

  "I know who you are," broke in Soublet. "You're one of the servants there."

  "I'm a surgeon, actually, sir," said January, in his most neutral voice. He turned back to Lalaurie. "I'm looking for Madame Lalaurie, sir. I know she nurses. I thought I might find her here. I have a few questions I need to ask her about a mutual acquaintance who may have been taken ill with fever."

  "My wife nurses at the ward set up in the old Convent of the Ursulines," Lalaurie said. About twenty years younger than his wife, he was slender and small and, January guessed, handsome in a sleek-haired, wiry way. The sleeves of his shirt were linen and very fine, his boots expensive kid, his silk waistcoat embroidered with red and golden birds, nearly hidden under the spotless white apron. His mustache and the tiny arrowhead of a Vandyke lay on the pale face as precisely as if painted. "She should be there this afternoon."

  "Really, Nicolas." January heard Soublet's voice as he lifted the heavy double-layer of curtain, stepped through the door to the opium of the ward again. "We can't allow these interruptions. Now bring me the lancets, and the clyster as well. This woman has far too much of the fiery humors in her to permit the submissive state required for proper mollification of the bones."

  There were few Sisters in the ward set up in what had been the hospital operated by the Ursuline nuns, before the convent had been moved to larger quarters nine years ago. This building, a long, low room of many windows, had returned to its original use for a time, and that may have accounted for the uncrowded look of the room, the impression of air that could be breathed. The smell here was less foul, and daylight filtered through the windows looking onto the old convent's central courtyard. On pallets, on cots, on two or three old and battered cypress beds donated by the charitable, men and women gasped in the heat, or wept with pain.

  From the doorway January saw Madame Lalaurie, clothed in black as she had been Wednesday night and severely neat as ever. She held the hands of a man who was clearly dying, not of the fever but of the cholera: drawn, ghastly, his bedding sodden and stinking.

  A priest stood by, reading the offices for the dying. January crossed himself as the Host was elevated and murmured his own prayer for the stranger's comfort and salva tion. The priest, January noticed, stood at a safe distance, or-as safe as one could be around the cholera. Madame Lalaurie, however, sat on the edge of the bed; and what arrested January again was the expression on her face, the intense, almost holy pain of a contemplative martyr, as if she herself were dying with her eyes upon the Cross. It was an unnerving sight, so at odds with her controlled strength, and shocking in its way, as intimate as if he watched her face while she submitted to the act of love. Her body swayed as the priest recited the words:

  "May you never know the terror of darkness the gnashing of teeth in the flames, the agonies of torment... "

  The dying man retched. Madame Lalaurie quickly and competently turned him, reached down for a basin while he vomited, and held him as he went into convulsions; the priest backed hastily away. She wiped the man's face, and wiped it again when he vomited again, all with that expression of desperate longing, of pain shared and gladly absorbed into her heart. She had lost a child, January remembered; her only son. She lived daily with her crippled daughter's pain. Was that in some way the source of that glow, that expression almost of exultation?

  Or was it only the relief of release from being forever in control, forever perfect?

  She murmured something else, leaning close to the beard-stubbled face. From a safe distance the priest murmured, "Remember not, O Lord, the sins of this man's youth and of his ignorance, but according to Thy great mercy, be mindful of him..."

  Be mindful of us all, thought January, his hand slipping into his pocket to the rosary that never left him. Be mindful of us all.

  The young man sobbed weakly, and Madame Lalaurie gathered him to her, his head on her breast. It was there that he died.

  She held him still for a long time, her head bowed over his. Her face was a marble angel's in the frame of her nunlike veil, her skirts and sleeves spotted with filth and slime. January saw in his mind Emily Redfern in her black widow's cap and veil, arguing about musicians with Madame Viellard in the refulgent gaslight of the Washington Hotel. He remembered, too, the plump, self-satisfied Reverend Dunk among his adoring Committee ladies. The priest at this bedside didn't look any too happy as he whispered the final prayers, January murmuring the responses in his heart. But at least the man was there.

  When he had spoken the final blessing, the priest touched Madame Lalaurie on the arm. Like one waking from a trance, the woman laid the dead man back on the shabby straw. An Ursuline Sister approached, offering a bowl of water and a clean apron to cover her simple black dress, but Madame Lalaurie shook her head, said something too softly for January to hear. She rose and started to turn away. The Sister touched her sleeve again, pointed to January. Madame Lalaurie blinked, her eyes coming back into focus.

  "M'sieu Janvier." She looked down at her dress. "Please excuse me." She seemed unruffled and unembarrassed, a woman whom no disarray or dishevelment could touch, not even a dress spattered with the vomitus of death. "I shall join you in the courtyard in a few moments." And she moved unhurriedly away through one of the doors leading toward the convent itself.

  In fact, it was closer to twenty minutes before the courtyard door opened and the tall, slender figure emerged, attended by one of the nuns. From a bench un der the hospital's gallery at the side of the cobbled yard, January saw her, stood, and bowed. She had not only completely changed her dress-though the new dress was also black, with touches of blue on bodice and sleeves-but had had someone comb out and redress her hair. In place of her veil she wore a bonnet, conservative by the day's standards but recognizably in the height of fashion, and gloves of black kid. As she came closer, he saw that she had also taken the time to apply fresh rouge. She looked, in fact, as she always looked: flawless.

  She must have brought the fresh gown, the cosmetics, the bonnet with her when she came to nurse. Of course, the nuns would trample one another to give her a place to change.

  "M'sieu Janvier, I hope you will excuse a woman's vanity. Sister Jocelyn, would you have my other things sent without being possessed of a devil. But Emily Redfern has always believed that whoever causes her annoyance must be an emissary of Satan. Like that poor girl."

  January said nothing for a time, but the red-and-gold candy tin rose to his mind.

  "Did Gervase say anything about where she might have gone?" he asked.

  "Only that she said she was `getting on a boat' that night. He is... quite desolate. He's a simple soul at heart, you know. I think he thought that, having run away from the Redferns, the girl was going to remain in the city and meet with him on a regular basis." She frowned, dark brows pulling together over the brilliant eyes. "I sent him into the country, upriver to my cousin's plantation. In a few weeks I'm sure he'll be fine."

  They turned along Rue Royale, passing an open lot and then a small, graceful town house plastered with rustcolored stucco, before reaching the pale green fortress on the corner.

  "I never saw her very closely, you understand, M'sieu." Madame Lalaurie paused
before the gorgeously carved front door. "Only as a shadow, passing along Rue de l'Hopital in the darkness." She nodded up along the street, in the direction of the swamps. "But she seemed so... alone. A little colored girl, going out to brave the world. I hope no ill befell her."

  The door opened at her back. "Madame, Madame," chided Bastien in his soft voice, "you should have sent for me."

  She laughed. "What, to spare myself a walk of two streets? You should have been a nursemaid, my Bastien." Smiling, she held out her gloved hand to January. "Good luck with your search, M'sieu."

  He bowed over her fingers. "Thank you, Madame."

  The door closed. January looked up along Rue de l'Hopital, in the direction of her nod. She'd been watching in a window, then: natural enough, if she had worries about Gervase fleeing with his lover. And Cora had gone back in the direction of town-in the direction of Mademoiselle Vitrac's school, where Madame Redfern's necklace and nearly two hundred dollars were cached.

  And had never reached her goal. "M'sieu!"

  He turned his head. In the doorway of the little rustcolored town house stood the Creole gentleman in the dark coat, the one who had crossed the street to avoid an encounter with the Americans.

  The man beckoned him, and January walked to where he stood.

  "I beg your pardon," the gentleman said in a low voice. "I could not but overhear what passed between you and Madame. You have a friend, a young woman of color, who went to Madame's house by night?"

  He was stooped and thin, pointed of nose and graying of hair, rather like a harassed ferret.