02 Fever Season bj-2

by Barbara Hambly

  I'm not very good at this, she had said to him once, and she still wasn't. Spilled water blotted her dress and soaked her sleeves, dribbling black patterns on the floor all around. She'd pulled off her tignon in the heat, and her dark hair, drawn back in a clumsy knot, was beaded with sweat, long curly tendrils of it escaping to drift around her face. Her hands were blistered with the unaccustomed work, and January saw how achingly she moved.

  "It's funny," she went on, more softly. "Because when it came to chemical experiments, to fire and explosions, she was-not even brave is the word, she simply didn't think about fear. She even learned how to make bombs, stuffing gunpowder in the bottom of a clay jar and packing it in with cotton, and sawdust to take fire in the explosion and make the explosion seem bigger-I remember her timing how long it took a fuse to burn. The other girls were terrified."

  Her mouth curved, cherishing the memory, bright as a stand of daffodils that catches sunlight before the engulfing shadow of storm.

  In time Genevi?ve's feeble movements ceased and she lay with shut eyes, beaten. Mademoiselle Vitrac got quickly to her feet and went from the room, leaving the vinegar-water where it was. Leadenly weary, January finished dosing Antoinette and went to Genevi?ve, but the girl still breathed, though barely. He wrung out the sponge, finished neatly the job Mademoiselle Vitrac had abandoned, and dressed the girl again-it was like dressing a stick-puppet-in one of the nightgowns that he, or Hannibal, or Mademoiselle Vitrac endlessly boiled and washed.

  Some said the clothing and bedding of fever victims ought to be burned. With only a few paying pupils, Rose Vitrac could barely afford to put food on the table, much less buy new sheets and nightclothes, or even pay a laundress to do them. More than anything in the world he wanted to go down after her, to comfort her in the face of the approaching death of the girl who had been her pupil and her friend.

  But all he could see in his mind was Ayasha with her lifeless fingers stretched toward the water pitcher, and there were no words in his mind to say. And in any case he would not leave the dying girl alone.

  He was still sitting by Genevi?ve's bed, holding her burning hand, when he heard the stairs creak, and the rustle of skirts.

  "I'm sorry. That was inexcusable of me."

  In the dimness of the attic he could see that she'd slopped water on her face to take down the swelling of tears.

  "I was here. And she wouldn't have known."

  "They do know." She crossed from the door and sat on the bed next to Genevi?ve's pillow, stroked the hacked bristle of hair. "At least I did."

  "Did you have the fever?"

  She shook her head. "I..." She hesitated for a long time. Then, very carefully, "I was sick. Eight, nine years ago, just before I went away to school in New York. Father told me later I didn't know one person from another, but that isn't how I remember it. Cora..."

  She broke off again, wrapped her arms around herself, though the attic was sweltering. Looked down into the face of the dying girl.

  Her words came slowly, "I don't know whether this really happened or not. But I remember one night when Cora heard my father pass the door. She went out into the hall and told him, `The least you could do is go in there and hold on to her hand.' "

  "Did he?" He saw it in his mind, as he saw Cora's small straight shadow disappearing in the darkness of the street: the shadow of the dark girl on the wall, tiny before the tall white man. Arms folded, looking up at him the way she'd looked up at January under the shadows of the Pellicots' kitchen gallery.

  "His wife told him not to." Mademoiselle Vitrac sounded resigned about it, accepting that such was how things were.

  "Were you contagious?"

  It's not bad if you don't fight...

  He knew Rose had not been contagious.

  She was silent for perhaps a minute. Then, "I wasn't an easy child to have in the house." She touched Genevi?ve's hand, her own cut and bandaged fingers rendered exquisite and alien, like intricately jointed bamboo, by the knife of sunlight that fell across them. "Like Genevi?ve. And Victorine, and Isabel, and some of the others. The ones who can't be what their mothers were, or want them to be. The ones who see too clearly, and speak too frankly. The ones who... who damage themselves and their position in the house every time they open their mouths, but can't keep from doing so."

  He saw in the long oval bones of her face the face of a proud, gawky child: erudite, stuck-up, above herself and everyone around her. As she would have been to him, he realized, had they not met as they had.

  A shudder went through her, tears suppressed as they had always been suppressed. "She never had a chance." January gathered her against him as he would have gathered one of his sisters, had she been in pain, and felt the woman's body stiffen like wood. He released her, stepped back the instant before she wrenched herself from him...

  "Don't..."

  He stood back helplessly, his hands at his sides.

  She was trembling, looking away from him. "I..." There wasn't a thing she could say without saying everything. He could feel the knot of it, wringing tighter and tighter, like a noose of pain.

  To sever it he said, "She had what no one else could have given her: the assurance that there was a path for her, even if it was narrow and lonely." What he wanted to say was not that: what he wanted to say was, Don't turn away! I wasn't the one who hurt you! But he knew that did not matter, against the touch and the strength of a man's hands, and the smell of a man's sweat. Some women never recovered.

  If you don't struggle it's not so bad.

  He forced himself to speak of this dying girl, whom he had never truly known, instead of to the bitter, struggling adolescent trapped within the schoolmistress's brittle calm.

  "At least she knew someone else had walked that way before her."

  The schoolmistress fought for a moment more to steady her breath, to regain her composure. To pretend she hadn't cried out, and pulled herself from what she knew was offered only in comfort and in love.

  Then she turned her face toward him again, and said, "I'm sorry. It's... she was the oldest of them, and the closest to me."

  She looked down at Genevi?ve's face again, and from being, a moment ago, a shield against him, the girl became again a friend in her own right, a loved friend with one foot in Charon's boat.

  "I tried. I did try. If she hadn't been so bright-if she hadn't been so cutting about everything she saw and heard-her mother would have been gladder to have her with her in Mandeville."

  "We can't know that," said January steadily, his eyes meeting hers. Her trembling ceased, and there was only grief, and no more vile memory, in her face. "We can't know what would or would not have befallen her, if she'd gone with her mother out of town. I suspect she was happier here, without her mother on her to put up her hair and go to the balls."

  The sensitive mouth flinched. He saw old memory flit across the back of her eyes, trailing a silvery wake of pain. "That's true," Rose Vitrac said. "Her mother..." She made a small gesture, and ceased.

  "If we start to make up those stories in our heads, about would-have and might-have and if-only-we-hadn't, we'll go mad," said January softly. "You know that."

  "I know... You're seeing me at a bad time, M'sieu Janvier. I'm not usually this... this ticklish."

  He met the green-gray eyes again, and smiled. "Well, Mademoiselle Vitrac, since you're the only woman of my entire acquaintance to ever be brought down by the death of those she loves, the fear of the plague, and the sheer exhaustion of a hero's work in nursing, I'll have to give it some thought before I forgive you."

  She gave a swift, tiny spurt of laughter, clapped behind her hand again before sheer fatigue could turn it into tears, and her eyes sparkled quick gratitude into his. "Dum spiro spero; where there's life there's hope."

  "And as a doctor I can tell you," he replied, "that where there's hope, there's often life."

  "And where there's a will," added Hannibal, climbing up the last few boards of the stairway with his arms full o
f rough-dried sheets, "there's a relative, and I've found a most curious thing in the newspaper."

  "What?" January turned, grateful for the diversion. "An admission there's an epidemic on?"

  Mademoiselle Vitrac flung up her hands like a comic servant in a play. "An epidemic? Really?"

  "Heaven forfend. Nothing so custard-livered and contrary to the principles upon which Our Great Nation was founded, whatever those are." Hannibal dumped the sheets on one of the unoccupied beds, and from the rear pocket of his trousers produced a folded page of the New Orleans Abeille. He was in shirtsleeves, the shirt itself stained with soap and blotched with water, his long brown hair wound up in a knot on the top of his head scarcely dissimilar to Mademoiselle Vitrac's makeshift coiffure. Like hers, his small, pale hands were blistered and burned. Perching tailor-fashion on the end of the bed beside the sheets, he unfolded the paper.

  "This is Wednesday's," he announced. "The eighteenth of September. Runaway-Cora Age about twenty-one, housemaid. Small, mulatto, well set up, speaks both French and English. Stole $250 and a necklace of pearls from Mrs. Emily Redfern, thought to be going to New Orleans. Reward."

  "Two hundred and fifty dollars?" said January, baffled. "What happened to the five thousand in cash Redfern got from Madame Lalaurie and the Bank of Louisiana? What happened to the birthmark on her shoulder?"

  "Cora didn't have a birthmark on her shoulder." Mademoiselle Vitrac sat back down on the edge of Genevi?ve's bed, and took the wasted hand in hers. "At least not one that I ever saw, and we washed each other's hair a thousand times."

  "The two hundred and fifty would be the original sum of that hundred and eighty you found, Rose," said Hannibal. "What did you do with that money, by the way?"

  "It's in my desk." She looked slightly embarrassed. "I know it's stolen money, but... I'm keeping it for now, in case things get worse before the fever season ends. There's a hidden compartment, a false back behind the left-hand upper drawer. And I'd say it's fairly clear why the five thousand isn't mentioned. The advertisement must have been placed Tuesday. When did Otis Redfern come down sick, M'sieu Janvier?

  Tuesday? Wednesday?"

  "Wednesday night." January leaned over to take the paper from Hannibal. "When did Cora come to you?"

  "Wednesday night, after the girls were asleep. It must have been ten or ten thirty."

  "This would have been placed Tuesday. Cora told me she slept out in the Swamp the night before coming down here. Obviously whoever placed this didn't know yet that the five thousand dollars were missing."

  "Do you think she took it?" asked Hannibal.

  Rose Vitrac sighed again and sat for a time with folded arms, hands on shoulders as if instinctively protecting her breasts. Not wanting to be disloyal, thought January. But she knew Cora.

  At length she sighed, surrendering one bastion of the fortress she could no longer defend. "I think she would have, if she'd known it was in the house," she admitted. "If both the Redferns were ill, and she saw her chance to get away in the confusion. But she didn't have it when she came to me. I know she didn't.

  And if she'd taken it..." She had clearly been about to say, She would have told me, but the discovery of the hundred and eighty dollars, and the necklace of pearls, had proven that trust untrue.

  "In any case," she finished, after that sentence had died untouched, "I know she wouldn't have done murder.

  "She may not have," said January. He sorted two sheets from the pile and went over to one of the stripped beds; Hannibal went to help him. "But you're going to have a hard time proving she didn't. What I'm trying to figure out is why the money was in cash instead of a draft."

  "Easy," said Hannibal. "If you were a gambling man yourself Benjamin, you wouldn't be asking a silly question like that. No, stay where you are, Athene, we don't want your help."

  Rose smiled a little at the nickname and settled back on the edge of Genevi?ve's bed gathering the girl's hand again in hers. Grateful, January thought, to be still.

  "It takes only an hour to come downriver from Twelve-Mile Point," said January thoughtfully. "Cora could have slipped back into the house Wednesday evening sometime..."

  "Wouldn't she have known the Redferns were sick, then?"

  He shook his head. "According to Shaw, at least, that didn't take place until after dinner." He didn't add that if Cora had slipped back into the Redfern house Wednesday evening she would have had access to the food, but he saw the searching look Mademoiselle Vitrac gave him. "Monkshood acts fast. The coroner would know what time, exactly, they started to show signs of illness. And he's the only one, now that the servants have all been sold off." He spread the clean sheet over the bed, and gently lifted the girl Victorine from her soiled, sweaty, wrinkled sheets to the clean ones, the endless, brutal labor of sick nursing.

  After a time he went on, "If Cora took the five thousand dollars, it might explain why she left the hundred and eighty dollars here-a hundred and ninety, counting Madame Lalaurie's money-and the pearls. If she had the five thousand with her, in a pocket or a reticule, she might not feel she needed what was here. I certainly would think twice about trying to bribe Madame Lalaurie's coachman. But if the five thousand was on her when she was taken, it'll show up somewhere. And given human nature, I suspect I know where."

  Twelve

  I will never in my life, Abishag Shaw had said, understand a gamblin' man.

  But at least, thought January, if you did happen to want one you knew where he'd be.

  Naturally, no man of color was permitted through the front doors of John Davis's casino on the corner of Rues Bourbon and d'Orleans. From the small service courtyard in the building's rear, January could look through the windows to the salons within. The flickering glow of gas lent a curious cast to the faces of the men grouped so intently around the roulette wheels, to the polished tabletops scattered with the garish reds and golds of the cards.

  Maybe it was just the heavy buzzing of sleeplessness in his head, the too-recent memory of that stifling dormitory bedchamber he had just left, but there was something weirdly disjointed about that sight.

  Money lay on the tables, too, green or orange or brown banknotes, gold American cartwheels and eagles, silver Spanish dollars. Folded papers-deeds to houses, papers for slaves, letters of credit for crops or cargoes. Men who had only their six-reale daily wage to gamble away didn't come to Davis's.

  The croupiers-fair-haired Germans, quick, small Frenchmen or Mexicans, mustachioed Italians-scooped up cards and money impassively, deft and expert. Did they realize that newcomeis to the city were the first to die in the epidemics?

  Maybe the management didn't beat up greenhorns or rob winners the minute they cleared the door, as was the procedure in the hells of the Swamp or Gallatin Street, but the net result was usually the same.

  As Shaw had asked, did those men around the tables think they were actually going to win money here?

  Did they think the fever, or the cholera, would not get them, if they remained long enough in this town?

  The rear door to the service wing stood open. A waiter in shirtsleeves was washing glasses in the tiny kitchen, his crimson coat hung on a peg on the wall behind him. An other arranged oysters on a tray. No gaslight burned in these rear purlieux; the gluey heat of the evening curdled with the smells of the tallow candles, with the tang of spicy sauce and the garbage in the gutters outside. The man in shirtsleeves saw January and grinned. "How you keepin' yourself, Maestro?"

  One of his mother's greatest objections to January's musical calling was that it put him on the same standing with servants.

  "Getting by." January accepted the lemonade that the man poured out for him. In the heat, after the hours spent caring for the sick girls on Rue St. Claude, the liquid was mouth-wringingly sweet. "Yourself?"

  "Can't complain. We're stayin' well, is all that counts." Like January, the man was sufficiently dark to stand a fighting chance against the fever. His mother denied there was a difference, of course. But Ja
nuary suspected his mother would cheerfully succumb to the fever if by doing so it would prove her to be more white than her neighbors.

  "Would you mind taking this in to Monsieur Davis?" January fished one of his cards from the breast pocket of his black wool coat. On the back he'd already written his request for a few minutes of the entrepreneur's time. Though he couldn't really afford it, he held out, along with the card, a two-reale bit as well. The waiter straightened his sleeves, resumed his coat, and returned a few minutes later to lead January up a narrow flight of service stairs to a smother-box of an office on the upper floor.

  "Ben." John Davis rose from his desk, held out his hand.

  "M'sieu Davis."

  "Get Ben some champagne, would you, Placide? Unless you'd like something a little stronger?"

  "Only lemonade, if that's all right, sir," answered January. "I'm going straight on to Charity Hospital tonight. To tell you the truth I've been so short of rest that if I had anything stronger you'd probably have to carry me out of here."

  Davis shook his head with a chuckle. "Don't have enough men for that, Ben." With a gesture he invited January to sit, then peered at him closely in the candle light. "You don't look well, and that's a fact."

  January reflected that the entrepreneur didn't look any too well himself stouter than when he'd seen him last and with far more white in the grizzle of his hair.

  "Well, it can't last-it never does." Davis's French carried an echo of the Caribbean islands, after all these years. "I'll have something for you come November, when people start coming back to town. What can I do for you?"

  "I'm not sure how to put this, sir." January turned in his hands the cool glass of lemonade the waiter Placide had brought him. "I know you have the confidence of your clients here, and I wouldn't ask you to violate it. I'm only asking if you feel you can help me."