02 Fever Season bj-2

by Barbara Hambly

  "There are," agreed January quietly. It had begun to rain again. The two men paused under the wooden awning before the doors of a grimy barrelhouse scarcely larger than the shed 'Poly and Lu had shared.

  Steam heat rose from the marshy street. Through the open doorway a slatternly woman was visible behind a plank set on a couple of kegs, dispensing what might charitably be termed whisky to a barefoot white man in the togs and tarred pigtail of a British sailor, a keelboatman whose clothing and body could be smelled from the door, and a couple of the weariest, grubbiest whores January had ever seen in his life. Even after growing up in the city it still mildly surprised him that such places, within a stone's throw of the cemeteries with their piles of corpses, could find customers willing to pay for anything within their walls.

  "That's why whoever is doing this considers himself safe."

  Shaw propped one bony shoulder against the porch post, chewing ruminatively. He made no comment about the discrepancy between those six, and January's earlier count of seven, and only spit a long stream of tobacco juice onto the boards of the porch.

  "You didn't happen to get the name of this dead-cart man, did you?"

  January shook his head. "Just that he was almost as big as me, and as dark. Heavy in the shoulders and arms. His head was shaved."

  "I'll ask around amongst 'em," said the lieutenant. "I just come down here to inquire after a little amateur surgery over a faro game. I will never in my life understand a gamblin' man."

  He shook his head marvelingly. "Bank's gonna foreclose, man's gonna lose his plantation, he comes into town with a draft for eight thousand dollars in his pocket to replace a grinder that'll keep his family's home for 'em and what's he do?" He jerked his head back in the direction of the Turkey-Buzzard. "He really think he's gonna win in a place like that? You understand it, Maestro?"

  "I don't understand the fever." January stepped aside from the stream of water that had begun to drip down from the awning above. "I just see men dying of it every day."

  Across the street a man in a formal black coat and tall hat emerged from a ramshackle conglomeration of buildings. He walked with the careful deliberation of a drunk, rain sluicing down his hat and off the shoulders of his coat, the dozen yards to the Jolly Boatman Saloon. Other than that the street was still, though a man's voice, harsh and flat with an American accent, roared out that he was a tiproarer from Salt River and wore a hornet's nest for a hat decorated with wolves' tails.

  Shaw nodded across the street at the dirty, rambling warehouses from which the man had come. "I take it you done checked the clinics? Even places like that?"

  The crudely lettered sign over the door proclaimed the place to be St. Gertrude's. God knew, thought January, the Swamp needed a clinic-most of the dying in Charity were Americans-but the existence of the place surprised him.

  "If these people took sick in the street, or in a strange part of town, they might have been took anywhere," Shaw went on. "I'll ask around the Exchanges, and amongst the dealers, and at the steamboat offices. I don't doubt for a minute that any black man who goes to the new cotton lands runs the risk of bein' kidnapped, no matter what kind of proof he's got of his freedom either on him or back here in town.

  But in the town itself-it's different. Iff'n these folks is kidnappin' people of color, they gotta be movin' 'em out of town somehow. Even quiet as things are on the levee these days, I'd feel right conscientious, myself, tryin' to get a coflle of folks that didn't want to go acrost the wharf and onto a boat."

  "You think any of those folks wants to go?"

  January met Shaw's eyes, aware of the anger in his own. There was silence between them for a time.

  Then Shaw said quietly, "You know what I mean, Maestro."

  "I know what you mean. Sir."

  It was Shaw who turned his eyes away. "We'll find 'em." He spit out into the brown lake of the rain-pocked street. "I warn you, even if we do, it'll be hard to prove. There been too many slaves smuggled in and out of this town since the African trade was outlawed for folks to want to admit somethin' like this is goin' on. But they'll slip up somewheres, and we'll be waiting for 'em when they do.

  Coming?"

  The rain was letting up. It was tempting to simply walk with the Lieutenant back to the relative safety of the French town. There, if he was regarded as something less than a man, he was at least not in peril of life and limb. January shook his head. "There's something I have to take care of," he replied.

  "Suit yourself. Mind how you go, though." Shaw touched his hat-something not many white men would have done in the circumstances-and made his way down the sodden slop of the street in the direction of the French town and the Cabildo, shoulders hunched, like a soaked scarecrow in the rain.

  January took a deep breath, glanced around him for further warning of trouble, then mucked his way across the street to the shabby walls of St. Gertrude's.

  Eleven

  St. Gertrude's Clinic was completely unattended. A ramshackle building or collection of buildings that had once been a warehouse, it was nearly windowless, its roof leaked in a dozen places, and the smell would have nauseated Satan. As his eyes struggled to adapt to the grimy light admitted by a few high-up squares of oiled linen, January heard the scuttle and swish of rats in the darkness around the walls, and the hard whirring flight of a palmetto bug. Somewhere a man sobbed. When his eyes did adjust, he saw some twenty men and women lying on the floor on straw mattresses, tossing and shuddering with fever.

  None of them was anyone that he knew. Seven were dead, three clearly dying. Along the wall two corpses, wrapped roughly for the dead-cart man, were already the target of long ribbons of ants. January steeled himself to pull the sheets from their faces.

  Both were naked, and had been harvested of their teeth, the white man of his hair. The other, either a slave mulatto or a man of color, was far older than any of the men who had disappeared. January would have scrupulously avoided most of the sick men in the clinic had he encountered them on the streets: sailors, vagrants, upriver Kaintucks or Irish laborers, bewhiskered, gasping obscenities in barely comprehensible English.

  But seeing them lying in a thin soup of rainwater and their own filth, January felt a blaze of anger go through him. Even Saublet's hellish premises didn't enrage him like this. At least the man had a dedication, and kept the place reasonably clean. People might be objects to Soublet, but he had the decency not to relieve them of their teeth when they died.

  He left the clinic, and sloshed through the mire to the doors of the Jolly Boatman.

  The black-coated, top-hatted man who'd emerged from the Clinic sat on one of the rude benches that flanked both sides of the big room, consuming a plate of crawfish and rice with a brown bottle of whisky at his side. Rather unusually for the district the place had a floor, wrought of used flatboat planks like the walls. With every other saloon in the Swamp awash in seepage the investrnent must pay off on rainy days.

  Two tables stood in the center of the room, under soot-blackened lamps suspended from the low ceiling; at one of them a broad-shouldered, fair-haired man in a tobacco-colored coat played solitaire. Behind a plank bar another man, heavily mustachioed and with one pale blue eye bearing all the signs of an old gouging-it tended out, the torn muscles having never recovered-dipped a brownish liquor from a barrel on the floor beside him into a tin funnel, refilling the bottles of his stock. Past him two doors sported tattered curtains. A couple of men leaned on the bar itself, hard-bitten roughnecks of the sort who reluctantly ended up joining the crack-brained military adventures launched from New Orleans from time to time against the Spanish or the French. It was one of them who looked up as January's shadow darkened the door.

  "Don't you know better than to come in here, boy?" He shoved himself away from the bar and crossed to January, rapidly, to block his way.

  "Is there something you're after, my friend?" The card-player rose from the table with no appearance of, hurry, but he was between them with surprisin
g quickness nevertheless.

  January recognized him as the fair-haired Irishman who'd searched through the ward of the Charity Hospital the night Mademoiselle Vitrac had come to ask his help for her girls.

  "I'm looking for the man in charge of St. Gertrude's Clinic." It was an effort to keep his voice steady, let alone affect the soft-spoken subservience white men expected of those darker than themselves. January had no clear idea of what he was going to say, or how he would phrase it. His one desire was to drive his fist into the jaw of the man who slouched on the bench, sucking his bottle when men wept and pleaded for water next door.

  "Furness," the gambler called out gently. And, to the mercenary beside him, "That'll do, Hog-Nose, thank'ee." The black-coated man took another pull on his whisky, and sulkily came to the door, bottle still in hand. "This bhoy has a word for you."

  "What you want, boy?" Close up, Dr. Furness's face was unshaven, mouth embedded in a brown smear of tobacco stains, nose and eyes alike red veined. His breath was a lifetime of alcohol and uncleanness.

  "I just wanted to let you know you've got about seven dead in your clinic, sir, and water coming in through the roof so they're lying in puddles on the floor."

  The doctor stared at him open-mouthed. "Who the hell you think you are, boy, coming here telling me how to run my business? You get the hell outa here! Goddamn uppity..."

  January inclined his head and stepped back, trembling with rage. Everything he would have said to the man had he been in France How dare you set yourself up as a healer, you incompetent drunkard? Who put you in charge of a clinic, even in times such as these? died in his mouth, with the knowledge that to speak-even to raise his eyes-would only earn him a beating from the military filibusters and maybe the gambler as well. But he was so angry that all he could see were the toes of his own boots, and the tips of Dr. Furness's, mud-soaked and dripping on the dirty boards of the floor.

  Thus he didn't even see the blow Furness aimed at him, until the gambler moved and caught the drunken man's arm. January looked up and saw the cane in the doctor's hand.

  "Leave it," warned the gambler softly. Furness made an effort to jerk his arm free for another strike. The cane was teak with a head of brass, and by the way Furness handled it, he'd used it as a weapon before.

  "Boy got no goddamn business telling me how to run my hospital!" he screamed, angry-drunk. He wrenched his arm again but the gambler's grip was strong.

  "The bhoy has a point, Gerald." The mellow voice was as mild as that of a governess. But in the tanned face the blue eyes were pale steel. " 'Tis true ye've no business bein' away from the place, and anyone walkin' in off the street. I think it best ye'd be gettin' back."

  "I'm not going back because no buck nigger comes here all high and mighty and tells me-"

  "You're not. You're goin' because Liam Roarke's tellin' You." Furness's jaw jutted so far he seemed in danger of dislocating it, but his bloodshot gaze couldn't endure the cold pale blue. He yanked his arm a third time, and this time the gambler released him, making him stagger.

  "I'll have Trudi send one of the girls over with your breakfast."

  Cursing, the doctor pushed through the door, jostling January as he passed, so heavily that January was thrown up against the framing. January watched him stomp through the mud, pausing to finish his bottle with another long pull, then send it spinning away above the barrelhouse roof.

  "Ye'll have to excuse him." Liam Roarke guided January out into the doubtful shelter of the porch that ran around three sides of the building. "Settin' up a fever hospital in that old warehouse of his was the one decent act the man's ever done, and without help nor even a relief that can be counted on, the rage of it and the helplessness get to him. And he's bone weary."

  As he had been even in the dead of night in the Charity Hospital, Roarke's chin was cleanly shaven between the l golden wings of his side-whiskers and his linen was spotless, his coat pressed. "As who is not?" January said. "Did you find your friend?"

  Roarke hesitated, some thought passing fast behind the pale eyes. Then he said, "That I did not. I fear the fever's took him, poor fellow. And yoursel', sir? You're one of the surgeons at the Hospital, are you not?

  And no man's bhoy?"

  "That's true, yes, sir," said January. "I looked in, searching for a friend who's taken ill, no one knows where. I suppose I should only be glad this part of town has someone willing to run a hospital, with the Charity and the regular clinics overflowing."

  "He's a good man in his heart, you know." Roarke gazed sadly in the direction of the shambling labyrinth that was St. Gertrude's. "I've never been one as has a spark in his throat, as they say, but I can pity a man who has. You say you're after searchin' for a friend? It's turn and turn about, then. Come over there wi' me. I'll make him take you round, never fear."

  "I've had a look already. I'd best be on my way." The rain had ceased, the day's heat redoubled.

  January, still in the black coat and white shirt of his medical office, felt himself more and more acutely a target in a hostile land. Exhaustion descended on him, the endless night and the day that had gone before it crushing him like seven hundredweight of chain.

  "Come back, then, when you've a chance." Roarke smiled in the shadows of the porch. "The fact is, Gerald needs a surgeon in the place, and it might so be he'd pay you better than the Charity folk do."

  And what makes you think I can get to the clinic and back alive? Even if I didn't mind being belabored with a cane if I should happen to forget to call that drunken lout "sir"?

  Nevertheless January thanked him and left, to make his way along Rue des Ramparts. At St. Anthony's Chapel lie stopped, and in its silent dimness knelt for a time, glad only for the silence and the peace, telling over the prayers of the rosary in the dark.

  Praying that he would survive the fever season. Praying that he would not come one day to Olympe's house to find her, and Paul, and the children dead with blackened faces in puddles of their own bile.

  Praying that he would not receive today, or tomorrow, a letter from Milneburgh informing him that his mother, or Dominique, or her child, had succumbed.

  Praying that he would not be left to face the remainder of his life utterly alone.

  It was the second of October. Only a few weeks, he thought, until the summer broke. Until the fever broke. When he emerged from the chapel, he knew that he ought to go to Mademoiselle Vitrac's, to relieve her for a time of her nursing duties, as Hannibal had done. But he went home instead. He stripped and bathed in tepid rainwater from the cistern and for a long time lay on his bed, the heat of the day on him like a soaked blanket. Remembering Ayasha. Trying to remember his father's face. Seeing in his mind the straight slim figure of Cora Chouteau, walking up Rue de l'Hopital in the dark.

  Through the open windows he smelled the smoke of burning, and he slept at last in the terrible silence of Bronze John's domination of the town.

  He reached the school a few hours before sunset the following day and related to Mademoiselle Vitrac all that had befallen him since leaving Charity Hospital and all he had learned or guessed. "Not that the Guards will do a thing about it," he concluded bitterly. He tilted the veilleuse, carried the cup of tisane to Genevi?ve's bed.

  The girl was dying. January could see it in her face. There was little more to her than a skeleton, her exquisite complexion livid orange with the mask of fever. Yesterday Mademoiselle Vitrac had cropped the girl's long black hair, which tangled and knotted with Genevi?ve's helpless thrashing. January had suggested it, a few days ago; now he was sorry, knowing she would be buried thus. She looked like one of the dried Indian mummies that trappers found sometimes in the mounds and caves upriver.

  "I can't believe they could be just-just selling them." Mademoiselle Vitrac's voice was shaky, as she bent over Victorine, sponging the girl's thin body. "I mean, the first time this Madame Perret, or the woman Lu, could slip away, couldn't they go to-Well, not the local magistrate, but someone... and say, I was kidn
apped? Their free status is on public record here..."

  "And who's going to check?" said January softly, when she failed to finish her sentence. "These are people who have no family in town. People who mostly don't even speak English. And what white man is going to run the risk of alienating all his neighbors, whose help he depends on, for the sake of a man or a woman who's probably lying? On the frontier, where people must have each other's help at picking time and planting? Men don't need to be evil, Mademoiselle. They just have to be bad enough to say, There's nothing I can do." He straightened up. "How well is this place locked and bolted at night?"

  "Pretty well." She picked up her bowl of vinegar-water and brought it to the dying girl's bed. "And Madame Deslormes at the grocery on the corner and the Widow Lyons across the way both see me every day."

  January nodded. Still he felt uneasy, but knew a part of that uneasiness was less for her than for Olympe and her husband, for young Gabriel and Zizi-Marie. These marauders did not content themselves with taking people whom no one would miss from their homes or from the tiny rooms they'd rented in the back streets of the town. Three or four of them, wandering the streets with clubs. The men who'd tried to abduct him.

  The men who'd taken Cora Chouteau off the banquette.

  Mademoiselle Vitrac bent over Genevi?ve's bed and spunged the girl's heat-blotched face and body.

  "She was the most beautiful of them, you know," she said, keeping her voice matter-of-fact; a line of concentration marked her fine-drawn brows, as if she were doing accounts or grinding up mineral salts for a chemical experiment. "Her mother was just waiting for her to finish `this nonsense' as she called it, and start going to the Blue Ribbon Balls. She seemed to take it as a personal insult that Genevi?ve wouldn't consent to be the most beautiful girl there, so that she could be the mother of the most beautiful girl." She shook her head. "We-Genevi?ve and I-had one quarrel with her already, at the beginning of this year. She was so afraid of it," she added softly. "Genevi?ve."