02 Fever Season bj-2

by Barbara Hambly

  He paused for a moment, as if marshaling his thoughts, though in fact he'd rehearsed his story with Hannibal several times. "A friend of my mother's was robbed of three thousand dollars," he said at last.

  "We have no idea who took it-the house was broken into while the woman was visiting her daughter. I know that most of those who gamble here are, of course, not the men who would do such a thing, sir, but if a petty criminal should suddenly find himself possessed of that sum of money-particularly unexpectedly-he might very well come here."

  "And paint the town bright red, eh?" Davis chuckled richly. "We get them coming in all the time.

  These-what do they call themselves?-these mercenaries, these filibusters, these Kaintucks from the levee, they often `hit it rich,' as they say. Three thousand dollars." His eyes, dark as cafe noir, sharpened, speculative, as he regarded January across the rim of the bourbon glass Placide had brought on the same tray with the lemonade. Under that keen gaze January was very thankful he hadn't named five thousand as the sum. "Lot of money. Why didn't your mother's friend have credit on the bank?"

  "She didn't say, sir. She'd just sold her cook and her coachman that afternoon, a private sale. She was leaving town and needed the money pretty badly."

  Davis grimaced. "And lost it that same day? What a damn shame. This town just isn't safe. Some people don't trust banks. I don't, myself, but I trust my fellow man even less." He chuckled again, and gestured with his glass. "But fifteen hundred apiece-that's damn good bargaining, even with prices as high as they are now. Who'd she sell to, do you know?"

  January appeared to think hard, frowning. Then he shook his head. "I don't... Redfield? Redman?

  Redfern? Maybe Qtis Redfern?"

  Davis's eyes widened. "Otis Redfern?"

  "I might be thinking of someone else."

  "I'd say you are, my friend." Davis shook his head. "Otis Redfern, God rest his soul, couldn't raise three thousand dollars to pay his debts here, let alone buy a coach man and a cook. He had a cook, anyway, the best in town; that wife of his saw to that. She asked around for months, and nothing was good enough for her; in the end she paid twice what he was worth for that stuck-up yellow fussbudget who used to cook for Bernard Marigny. And for all that the man ended up sold to that church fellow for six hundred dollars-money he probably took straight out of the profits of that silly Musicale those American ladies held for him out in Milneburgh last week. Now, that's gratitude for you!" he concluded sarcastically. "At least he could have paid her a decent price."

  January remembered the Reverend Micajah Dunk bargaining in the Exchange: nine hundred, nine hundred fifty dollars for men who would be sold for over a thousand in Missouri next week. He wondered if one of them had been the Marigny cook.

  He said, "Tcha!" and related, with libelous embellishments, the tale of the musicians' contracts for the Musicale, something Davis had heard secondhand or thirdhand already, but listened to avidly again.

  "Well, for all her airs she's having the plantation sold out from under her," Davis remarked, after a fairly derogatory discussion of Emily Redfern's pretensions. "It went under seal by the bank today; Granville's going to auction it at Maspero's Monday. I never knew the lady well, but a harder, more grasping woman I have yet to meet. It must have driven her insane, the way that poor man let the ready slide through his fingers-and he was about the most inept gambler I've seen," he added, shaking his head. "Otis Redfern was one of those poor souls who couldn't let it alone, not even against plain common sense.

  He'd bet on anything, for the thrill of it. Last week-Wednesday, it would have been-when everyone in town knew he was over his ears in debt, he came in here playing roulette... Roulette, like a fool!"

  "Wednesday?" said January, startled.

  Davis's gray brows raised politely; January said, "A friend of mine tried to reach him Wednesday and was told he was indisposed."

  Davis shook his head. "The small hours of Wednesday morning it was-Redfern came in here around midnight or one, and gambled until just after sunrise. God knows what he said to his wife when he reached home."

  He gestured with his glass toward the door and the gambling room beyond. "Liam Roarke, that slick Irishman who runs some dive by the Basin, came in at four with a couple of his bravos, and braced the man over money he'd lost to them, five thousand dollars two days before. Two days before, with Fazende and Calder ready to go to law over what Redfern owed them from last year's crop coming in poorly because of the cholera, and him selling up his slaves to cover the debt. And after they left, what does the poor fool do but go back to the tables."

  He sipped his whisky and shook his head again at the marvel of human conduct. Through the floor January heard voices rise in sudden fury, the stamp of feet and shouting: a fight downstairs, inevitable in gatherings of Creoles and Americans. He heard something that sounded like "species of American!" and "Consarn if I'll take that from any man!" Davis tilted his head a little, ready to rise, but the noises died away.

  The entrepreneur sighed, and his stout shoulders eased in their bottle green superfine. "I've been a player all my life, you know, Ben. I've seen enough money won and lost, here and in Paris and in Haiti, probably to buy back all of the Mississippi Valley from the Americans, with this city thrown in for lagniappe. I know these men who gamble everything, who can't stop gaming any more than a drunkard can stop drinking; who ruin themselves at the tables-I understand what they'll do, how they'll react, how they'll lay their bets. I can read these men like books. But I don't understand them. I don't understand why."

  The door behind January opened upon a gentle knock. Placide looked in, caught Davis's eye: "I think they need you downstairs, sir."

  "Ah." Davis sighed and stood. "My apologies, Ben..."

  "None needed, sir. It's your job."

  "For my sins." He gave a wry grin.

  "Perhaps for your virtues." January picked up his hat.

  "About your mother's friend's money." Davis waited until the waiter was gone. "I haven't seen anyone in here... How to say this? Spending money it doesn't appear they should have. It's been quiet. Mostly what you have here these days are the local men, the ones who come in all the time-the ones who stay in town, like fools, to gamble. And here I am like a fool catering to them, but there! In a year or two I'll open that place in Spanish Fort that I've been looking at, and then you'll see something like!"

  January nodded. He hadn't noticed any diminution of the establishment's clientele, but then, Davis's was not a place where he performed regularly. Maybe it was quiet.

  "You'll have better luck asking in the Swamp, and near the Basin, or down on Tchoupitoulas Street by the levee. But frankly, Ben, I wouldn't advise you to go down there. Slaves are very high this year. I wouldn't want to see you come to harm."

  So Otis Redfern had been in town all Tuesday night. January turned the matter over in his mind as he walked to the Hospital, carefully choosing the most populated and best-lit streets.

  Redfern would have ridden in Tuesday to post the runaway notice in the Bee-presumably before the loss of his five thousand dollars was discovered. And despite the debts that had forced the sale of Gervase and the others, he'd stayed on, his gambler's logic telling him that this was the way to recoup his loss.

  If Emily Redfern hadn't already been planning to include her husband, as well as his mistress, in her plans for murder, thought January, shaking his head, that would have decided her.

  Too little remained of his dwindling funds to hire a horse, so when he forced himself to wake next day in the heat of noon, he bathed and dressed and walked the six or seven streets to the levee. The Missourian had left that morning, bound on its usual run to St. Louis; the Bonnets O Blue was just in and off-loading cotton and tobacco. The Philadelphia would leave sometime that afternoon for Natchez-"Or this evenin', more like," said its engineer, with whom January managed to get a quiet word in the arcades of the market, while the small white ship sat idle on its wharf and its crew of stevedores played
monte in the shade. "That big mess of brandy that came in on the Caledonia yesterday ain't yet been brought over here, and it'll be four hours loadin' at the least. Mr. Graham-that's our pilot-says we can make as far as Red Church, 'fore we'll have to tie up for the night. You'll be fine."

  So January booked deck passage as far as Twelve-Mile Point, all he could afford, and returning home, packed a small grip with a change of linen, a blue-and-red calico shirt, rough trousers, and a corduroy jacket. While he was doing so he heard sounds, first in the little room next door to which Hannibal had moved his books and clothing the previous afternoon, then out on the gallery. He deduced that his friend was at least out of bed, if not precisely awake.

  He found him being thoroughly sick over the gallery railing. Considering the hour at which the fiddler had come in last night-well after January's predawn return from the Hospital-he suspected this illness was the usual result of Hannibal's drinking, but went to him nevertheless, and while steadying him, unobtrusively checked for fever.

  "Won vinum virus moderari," whispered Hannibal at last, draped like a wet rag doll over the railing. "Sed viri vino solent. Have I died of the fever yet?" He was panting as if he had run a long distance.

  "No," replied January unfeelingly. Given the present possible fates of free colored who lived alone with no one in the houses on either side, he felt safer knowing there was another person on the premises, and he was genuinely fond of the fiddler, but sharing quarters with Hannibal Sefton did have its disadvantages.

  "It isn't Bronze John-just your old friend John Barleycorn. And if you'd moderari your intake of vinum you wouldn't be having this problem."

  "Ah, but think of the others that would be caused by worry in its place." He wavered back into the dark little chamber that had from time immemorial been occupied by the Widow Levesque's cook Bella and, unequal to the task of fighting his way back through the mosquito-bar, simply collapsed on the floor with his back against the foot of the bed. "I'll sleep here, thanks."

  January went into his own room and brought in the tub of water he'd drawn to sluice his head and arms before getting dressed for the Blanque girls' piano lessons. Hannibal thrust his head into it as if he expected there to be a twenty-dollar gold piece on the bottom that he could pick up only with his teeth.

  He came up dripping and gasping, like a drowned elf.

  "Thank you," he said.

  "Thank you," replied January seriously. "The two young ladies who brought you home this morning told me you'd been making enquiries among their friends about people spending more money than is their wont to have. Did you learn anything?" Anything you can remember? he wanted to add, but didn't.

  Hannibal was having enough problems this morning.

  "Ah. The lovely Bridgit and the equally lovely Thalia. They did say that nobody's showed up with five thousand all in a lump, but, of course, if Cora were abducted by a group the money would have been split. No one seems to have even been throwing around as much as a thousand. They did say that Roarke, the proprietor of the Jolly Boatman, had been expecting such a sum, that he'd won from one Otis Redfern, but nothing came of it: Roarke's inamorata du jour, one Miss Trudi, abused the other girls for a week on the strength of the disappointment."

  "That sounds genuine," murmured January. He thought that one of the girls who'd greeted him in the yard in the small hours-an incapable Hannibal in tow had looked vaguely familiar. She'd been dishing the crawfish and rice yesterday, behind the gotch-eyed bartender's back.

  "Are you off to Mademoiselle Vitrac's, when you're feeling better? Then let her know I've gone up to Spanish Bayou, to have a look at the Redfern place. They're auctioning it Monday. The slaves are gone;

  Madame Redfern herself is in Milneburgh; this is our last chance to see anything there that is to be seen. I should be back tomorrow, when the Lancaster makes her usual run down from Natchez. Copies of my papers are in my desk."

  Hannibal nodded. January scooped aside the mosquito-bar and helped him back into bed, exasperation and pity in his heart. January knew better than to remonstrate with a man whose illness and pain had led him into addiction. The road that led away from opium would lead only back to pain, and both had given Hannibal an uneradicable taste for oblivion. So he said only, "Will you be all right?"

  "Eripere vitam nemo non homini potest, at nemo mortem; mille ad hanc aditus patent. I'll look after Athene of the Bright Eyes. You watch yourself, upriver."

  There wasn't time to walk to the levee and check on the progress of the Philadelphia's cargo; January could only hope it was delayed. Most steamboats left before noon, and with the waning moon rising late he guessed the captain of the vessel would be pressing the pilot and the engincer to be off as soon as could be. The next upriver boat was the Lancaster, early Sunday morning, and January did not like to count on the house at Spanish Bayou remaining empty for that long. As he walked the length of Rue Burgundy, and down Rue de l'Hopital, he found himself listening for the groan of steamboat whistles that would tell Zob Barbara Hambly Fever Season Zo7 him he was too late and had lost his passage money; within the high walls of the Lalaurie house he strained his ears, and grudged the thick curtains that masked all noise from the streets.

  The heavily decorated, ostentatious parlor was nearly dark, as usual; oven-hot, as usual; and neither Pauline nor Louise Marie had practiced, as usual. Pauline was peevish, caustic, and spiteful; Louise Marie sniveling with an exquisitely calculated appearance of martyrdom: "It's only that my silly pain has made it so difficult for me to practice. The pain, and the heat, and one of my dizzy spells." She raised a wraithlike hand to her forehead. "I have told you of my spells, have I not, M'sieu Janvier?"

  January thought of Hannibal, weaving exquisite beauty through pain to earn enough to sleep under a roof. , Of Rose Vitrac, sponging off the bodies of the dying in the heat. ,,The heat?" Pauline laughed with a sound like breaking glass. "We're like to die in the heat. It isn't as if we; didn't have a house at the lake." "

  "Oh, but you can't expect Dr. Lalaurie to give up his work with Dr. Soublet, just for us." Louise Marie lifted sunken eyes to meet her sister's. January recalled what the market-women had said, when he'd asked them about Madame Lalaurie: "She's had enough to bear, with that poor girl of hers in and out of that clinic, but she never would have no truck with laudanum... "

  Soubiet's? Was that where Madame had met the suavely dandified Lalaurie? `No more than she deserved, "had grumbled another. `I,.1 heard how she throwed a little pickaninny of hers off'n the, roof... " i "I heard it was down a flight of stairs, " had said some- i one else, and the discussion dissolved into an exchange of ~ rumor that would, January reflected angrily, have made Monsieur Montreuil proud.

  "And with a doctor in the house, and Mama, you know we must be perfectly safe." Louise Marie's plaintive. tones tugged back his thoughts. "We can survive the heat." She sighed as she said it, to let everyone know she did not expect to. "I'm just so sorry, Monsieur Janvier, that I haven't been able to learn my pieces better. I did try."

  Pauline's mouth twisted, her sharp nostrils flaring with an unmade comment. Was this, January wondered, one of those girls of whom Mademoiselle Vitrac had spo ken? The. ones who were too. bright, too sharp, for their own good? Delphine Lalaurie was the pinnacle of Creole womanhood: hostess, businesswoman, mother, manager of a household of twenty or more persons. What recourse had a daughter of this house, if that daughter's goals and needs did not include a husband and children, Creole tradition, and Creole society?

  Halfway through Pauline's careful but unpracticed recital of a Haydn contredanse the door opened. He saw the thin back of the girl at the piano grow rigid. The sticklike hands fumbled on the keys. Louise Marie, in the midst of a complaint about her ankles, fell silent and seemed to shrink into the hard golden upholstery of the divan.

  A gleam of silk, dark peacock blue veiled with the shadows of the lightless hall, flickered in the doorway.

  A pale face crowned by a glory of dark hair.


  "Pauline," chided that lovely contralto in a tone like level steel, "after all Monsieur Janvier's work, that is as well as you can do? From the beginning again, please."

  They'd be finishing the loading of the brandy onto the boat at the wharf, but something in the tone of her voice stilled January's protest in his throat. It was the voice of a woman who has never been contradicted, a woman who will tolerate no less than the perfect.

  Pauline played as if a gun were pressed to her back. "Pauline," said her mother, still unseen within the rectangle of gloom, "from the beginning again, please. You know that no one appreciates mistakes in a piece of music, any more than they appreciate food spots on a silk dress."

  "Yes, Mama." Sweat stood out in a crystalline wash on Pauline's forehead; January thought he had never seen such rage, such hatred, in a girl's downcast eyes. The spindly fingers trembled as they lurched through the first three bars.

  "From the beginning again, please." The voice was a whalebone lash.

  "From the beginning again, please."

  "From the beginning again, please."

  Pauline was crying without a sound. Her body was a wooden doll's in her overlacy pink gown; and her hands fumbled, groped, struck note after note awry. In the door way, her mother's face remained in shadow, the strong, white, black-laced hands moveless where they rested among the folds of her dress.

  "From the beginning again, please."

  It was nothing January would have put anyone through, even in private, much less before a music-master and a colored man to boot. For a white girl the humiliation would have been excruciating. In her chair Louise Marie made neither sound nor movement, her hands locked around the lemonade she had sent for, as if she believed that by keeping very still she could avoid some terrible fate. Somewhere outside January thought he heard a steamboat whistle. But he would no more have spoken than he would have spoken to a madman with a knife.

  At last Pauline broke down completely. She sat at the keyboard, fighting the dry, racking sobs with all that was in her and shuddering like a beaten racehorse. From the doorway that exquisite golden contralto said, "I see we're only wasting Monsieur Janvier's time, Pauline. You may go to your room."