02 Fever Season bj-2

by Barbara Hambly

  January had no reply.

  "She wouldn't come back, you know. Not to a town where she's been accused of harboring a murderess, or even a runaway slave, for that matter."

  Still January said nothing. The thunder rolled over the town, far off and dim, like the breathing of some unknowable monstrosity in the distance.

  Hannibal reached beneath his pillow, and brought out a sheet of creamy paper, on which Rose's penmanship lay like Italianate lace. "We have her books," he said logically. "If I know our Athene, it means we'll see her again."

  In the breathless smolder of storm-weather, January made his way down the silent streets to the Cabildo the following morning. He found Abishag Shaw laboriously composing the report of the arrest of seven or eight men "of French and American extraction" for a brawl the previous evening that had begun outside the Ripsnorter Saloon on Gravier Street and had ended with a sordid biting, gouging, and hair-pulling match encompassing most of Canal Street. "Duelin', they swears it was." The Kentuckian sighed, shoving a greasy forelock out of his eyes. "With three or four so-called seconds per side takin' swings at each other an' everyone fallin' in and out of the gutters an' cussin' fit to break a parson's heart. We got the lot of 'em in the cells now, every man jack of 'em swearin' cross-eyed as how the others busted the `Code' an' deserved the whalin' they got."

  He leaned his bony elbows on the desk, arms extended flat on the plank surface like a resting cat, and blinked up at January with deceptively mild gray eyes. "I take it you come about Mademoiselle Vitrac?"

  "Who told you Cora Chouteau took refuge with her?" January was far too angry to pretend he knew nothing of the matter now, and Shaw showed no surprise at the question. The letter January had sent asking for him to question Mrs. Redfern's servants lay between them on his desk. "That Isabel girl," replied Shaw promptly. "Isabel Moine." Any other American would have pronounced it `Moyne' instead of opening the vowel like a Frenchman. "I got to admit, Maestro, considerin' your friendship with the lady, and them inquiries you was makin' at Madame Lalaurie's, I wasn't tetotaciously astonished. And them pearls, and that sack of money, they was right where that girl said they was in the desk."

  "Eavesdropping little bitch." Isabel's sulky dark face returned to him, flushed with sleep. The way Rose had brushed a strand of hair from the girl's lips. The affection in Rose's eyes, even for her. Don't you rip up at her...

  "Emily Redfern poisoned her husband. Cora found the poison the day before and fled, thinking it was intended for her. Maybe it was. She came to town on the New Brunswick Wednesday afternoon; half a dozen stevedores on the wharf can attest it was there by four, probably earlier than that. If the cook Leonide told you he saw Cora entering the house at twilight-"

  "It was Mrs. Redfern that told me," said Shaw mildly, and spat in the direction of the sandbox. The brown expectorant fell short of its target by at least a yard. Fifteen or sixteen previous efforts marked the stone floor between box and desk. "The cook was gone by the time I spoke with her."

  "The same way she told the magistrate about her own symptoms?" January produced the menus from his pocket, laid them on the desk. "That's what they ate for supper that night. Bring in any cook in the city and ask him; there isn't a thing there that takes over an hour to prepare. Cora Chouteau couldn't have poisoned the supper before she left."

  Shaw turned the papers over with fingers like jointed oak sticks. "And you got these where?"

  January met his eyes coldly. "The rubbish bins outside the house at Spanish Bayou." He opened his mouth to add, This was in Emily Redfern's chimney, but knew even as the words came to his lips that Shaw-and any lawyer-would only ask, Did Cora Chouteau have access to that chimney? And, of course, she had. So he waited, silent, while Shaw scratched his stubbled jaw.

  "This is all very interestin', Maestro. And believe me, with your permission I'll sort of set it aside in a safe place to kind of ferment a spell, and see what else I can find. But I do think I should point out to you that even if Miss Chouteau gets cleared of Borgialatin' the soup herself, it ain't gonna win her freedom."

  The lieutenant folded up the menus and secreted them in his desk. Scraps and shards of quill lay all over its tobacco-stained and scarified surface; the report he'd been working on looked as if a lizard had escaped from the inkwell and run madly about on the page.

  At most, January thought, if Emily Redfern were hanged, Cora Chouteau would become the property of her estate. And he knew as he formed the words in his mind that Emily Redfern would never hang.

  "I would suggest that you speak to Mademoiselle Vitrac about why Emily Redfern would want to shift the blame for the murder onto Cora," he said, more quietly.

  "Except that Emily Redfern seems to have taken pains to have her driven out of town in disgrace."

  "Well, it's a funny thing about that." Shaw dug in the back of his desk drawer, and withdrew a double-strand of softly golden miniature moons. "Miz Redfern says these ain't her pearls. And that hundred and ninety dollars we found at the school-Miz Redfern says the money that feller Granville from the Bank of Louisiana paid her Tuesday was all in banknotes. Not a coin in the lot."

  He trailed the pearls from one big hand to the other, as if admiring the smoothness of them, the organic satiny texture, like flower petals, so different from the jewels of the earth.

  "What?"

  "Well, them was my very sentiments, Maestro. You ever have the privilege of meetin' the lady?"

  January nodded. He had, he realized, only the dim vision of blurred whiteness behind crepe veils, and the sharp hard voice biting out orders to the obsequious Fraikes. But he'd seen Emily Redfern in action. That was enough.

  "She strike you as a lady who'd forbear to recover a necklace worth five hundred dollars out of consideration for a schoolmarm's reputation? Or who'd pass up a hun dred and ninety dollars which could be hers for the sayin' of, `Yes, it's mine?' 'Specially now, with her not able to even pay the rent where she's stayin'?"

  January opened his mouth, then shut it again. Someone came over behind Shaw's desk and lit one of the oil lamps; with the thickening of the storm clouds the big room was fast becoming dark as evening, though it was barely ten. "Have you investigated?"

  "Investigate what? Why a lady chooses not to prosecute or pursue the gal she claims killed her husband?

  Iff'n she says these ain't her pearls I can't shove 'em in her pocket for her, nor," Shaw added shrewdly,

  "would you want me to."

  January was silent, trying to fit pieces together that would not fit.

  "Now as for them servants," Shaw went on after a moment. "I checked every exchange and barracoon from here to Carrollton. I got a passel of directions." He delved into the drawer once more to produce a sheaf of unreadable notes. "But I can't go traipsin' to the Missouri frontier lookin' for 'em to ask.

  'Specially when you know and I know the case would be just as likely to go against her as for her, with the evidence we got."

  Shaw cached the notes back in his drawer, and dumped the pearls unceremoniously in after them. "That whole business about havin' only Miz Redfern's word about her symptoms, and all the servants bein' gone now, kind of itches me, too, Maestro. But if we took it to court there'd only, be one person hurt... . And she's gone missin' anyway."

  Two people, thought January. Two.

  "And what about Mademoiselle Vitrac?" he asked, after Shaw's words had lain silent on the air for a time. "Do you know where she went?"

  "Once the charge against her was dropped," pointed out Shaw, "it ain't our lookout where she goes nor what she does. Miz Redfern sayin' those pearls wasn't hers, and that money wasn't the banknotes that Cora girl stole, means we got no case against Miss Vitrac for harborin' a fugitive-nor you, neither. Given what they's sayin' about her school, I'd say she left town."

  A blue-uniformed City Guard came through, leading a line of chained men with buckets and shovels. A city street-cleaning contractor ambled dispiritedly in their wake. Shaw smiled and saluted the
m as they went past; the contractor mouthed something, but didn't make an audible noise.

  "Who, " asked January, slowly and coldly, "is saying about Rose's-Mademoiselle Vitrac's-school?"

  "Well, everybody, now. Chief Tremouille's been asked to investigate the finances of the place. Armand d'Anouy's one of the backers; he's close as a louse with Mayor Prieur. They all say one of the other backers tipped 'em, but they won't say who. And if you think I can ask 'em," Shaw added, scratching his long hair, "you don't know as much about this town as I thought you did, Maestro."

  Another Guard pushed through the doors from the Place d'Armes, called out, "Lieutenant? Trouble at Kentucky Williams's." Blood streamed from the man's nose, mixing with the sweat on his face to accomplish a truly sanguinary effect.

  "Lordy, those girls of hers got energy." Shaw got to his feet, and fished his disreputable hat from the floor. "I'm purely sorry, Maestro. I know what you're thinkin' that this Redfern bissom started them rumors to run Miss Vitrac out of town to punish her for harborin' Miss Chouteau and shut her up into the bargain. But it don't fit. If Miz Redfern wanted to punish Miss Vitrac, she had her in her hand Sunday, and she let her go."

  "And made it impossible for her to remain in New Orleans."

  "We don't know that." He studied the inside of the battered hat for a moment, then retrieved a flea and crushed it between his thumbnails. "If so be I hear anythin', you know I'll tell you, first thing."

  "I know."

  From the stone arcade before the Cabildo's doors, January watched the tall Kentuckian and his little escort of Guards disappear around the corner into Rue St. Pierre.

  No, he thought. No. There seemed to be nothing in his heart but a kind of strange stunned disbelieving blankness. No.

  She has to have gone somewhere.

  And he went out into the streets to search. Throughout the day, under the sickly blanket of the growing storm heat, he paced the streets of the town. At the grocery on. the corner opposite the boarded-up Spanish building on Rue St. Claude, he spoke to the woman behind the counter.

  "It's a crime," she said, shaking her head. "A crime. Never will I believe Mademoiselle Vitrac stole that money.

  After I've seen her work so hard to make that school, coming down here after she had to let her cook-woman go -I cooked for her many nights, you know." The woman nodded, a withered walnut face within the startlingly gaudy blue-and-yellow tignon's folds. "I never thought it right, her teaching all that Latin and Greek and silliness, but she was a good sort, once you got to know her, for all her top-lofty airs. She could have come here. I'd have got my man to let her have a bed in the attic."

  "But she didn't."

  The woman shook her head again and ran her dustrag over the already spotless planks.

  "Did she have family? Any other friends?"

  But Rose was not the sort of woman who easily makes friends. The woman did not even know where Rose's home had been.

  Even in the dead, ghastly stillness of the fever season, it was surprising how many people could be found in a neighborhood, once January started to look. Unobtrusive people, little more than the furniture of the street. A woman selling soap from a willow basket. A man hawking pokers. Women peddling pralines and needles. A pharmacist's assistant, fishing for leeches in the gutter. H?lier the water seller, far out of his own territory but willing to gossip as always. The boy who worked at the livery stable around the corner. The cook and the housemaid for a lawyer named Guttman in the yellow cottage that backed onto the school.

  "It is a terrible shame... "

  "No, Mademoiselle had no family that I heard of."

  "Imagine, her taking all that money and living like a pauper-and making those poor girls live that way, too."

  "Stuck-up yellow bitch." H?lier's voice was bitter. He was clearly struggling to balance his yoke and buckets at the new angle across his shoulders necessitated by the damage Soublet's "mollification of the bones" had done to his back. His fair, handsome face was drawn with exhaustion and pain. "Like all the colored, thinks herself better than everyone around her."

  Including you, my friend, thought January, remembering the water seller's drugged tirade in the clinic. And all the white fathers in the world won't make you white.

  Or straight-backed, he thought, suddenly ashamed. He thanked him, and walked on, turning back to see the twisted form staggering crablike along the banquette with his yoke and his cane, water slopping from the buckets and dribbling around his feet.

  "I never held with education for girls," declared an Italian woman who kept a shop down the street.

  "Look what it led to, eh?"

  "Is it true she starved them to death?"

  Calumny, Beaumarchais had written sixty years ago. You don't know what you are disdaining when you disdain that... There is no false report however crude, no abomi nation, no ridiculous falsehood which the idlers in a great city cannot, if they take the trouble, make universally believed. And Rose's education, her reserve, her strength had made her a target. No wonder she'd lashed out at him when he'd mentioned Alphonse Montreuil's jealous fantasies about Madame Lalaurie torturing her slaves. In her own way, Rose, like that beautiful Creole matriarch, was everything a woman should not be.

  And she was gone.

  He was obsessed with the thought that, returning from the Cabildo, she had been snatched from the side,walk by the same men who had tried to kidnap him, who had abducted Cora on the threshold of her freedom. Remembering Hannibal's earlier living arrangements, he slipped through the pass-throughs along the sides of houses shuttered tight, looking for signs of occupation.

  He found none. But he did find, in two other houses, broken hasps on the rear shutters, bedclothes rumpled, the signs of swift and unwilling departure. In neither house and in a shed where he found a little heap of clothes and the tin badge of a slave who earned his own keep-was there evidence of children. In all three cases, the houses on either side were closed and empty.

  Rain began to fall, wild and blowing and bathwater warm. Lightning cut the darkness, not bolts and spears but sheets of whiteness, prodigal and terrible, leaving denser dark behind. January, who by three in the afternoon had made a circuit of every cheap lodging house in the city, took the steam-cars to Milneburgh again, to be greeted by the news that the Widow Redfern had departed for the remainder of the fever season. Stopping at Minou's house cost him more time; and the returning train was overtaken by the storm, the branches lashing frenziedly in the gloom of the swampy woods on either side of the tracks and the dark, near-empty cars shaking with the blasts of the wind. By the time he walked back from the terminus to his mother's house it was nearly ten, lightless as the Pit save where the wildly swaying street lamps flung ragged flares of red across the intersections, the blowing rain transformed to bloody jewels.

  He made his way across the yard by memory in the dark, groped for the rail of the stairs. No light shone from behind Bella's shutters. It was logical that were Hannibal making a little money playing in a tavern somewhere, he would stay rather than soak himself walking home. Still, January felt his way along between wall and gallery railing, and passed his hands over the latch of the shutters.

  They were bolted from the outside. Hannibal had not returned. January was turning back to the door of his own room when a white flare of lightning illuminated the length of the gallery. It showed him two men just clambering up the stairway, knives in their hands.

  Blindness returned the next second, but January had seen in their faces their surprise that he hadn't gone into his own room. With the noise of the storm, he'd never have heard them till it was too late. Even the thunder of their boots on the gallery, running toward him, was drowned. He caught the railing in both hands, swung himself over, felt their bodies blunder and slam against the rail as he let go and dropped.

  He heard one say "Tarnation!" in a heavy Irish brogue, as he ducked through the kitchen door and by touch in the dark found where Bella kept the iron spits, and the woodbox with it
s short, heavy logs.

  There was no time to search for anything more-Bella's knives were in a drawer someplace, but the building was already shaking with the descending boots, and he knew he had to take them when they came off the stairs, when they'd still be single file.

  He made it, barely, driving the spit in pure darkness out of the abyssal night beneath the gallery, hearing and smelling the assassin as he reached the bottom of the stairs and knowing by touch, because he had ascended those stairs himself a thousand thousand times, where the man had to be. He felt the sharpened end of the iron plow into meat; he heard the man scream, a dreadful animal sound.

  Feet blundered, then more shrieking as the second man fell over the first. January swung his makeshift club like Samson smiting the Philistines and felt it connect with something, but a hand grabbed his arm, and he twisted out of the way of the foot-long knife he'd glimpsed on the gallery. The blade opened his sleeve and the arm beneath in a long mouth of shocking pain. He grabbed where he guessed the man's head had to be and drove his knee up hard. Metal rattled on the brick underfoot, then the two of them fell outward, landing in the oozing muck and sluicing rain of the yard.

  Hands groped and fumbled at his throat. He saw the silvery flash of eyes. With his forearm he smashed away the man's hands, grabbed for him again and dragged him bodily up to slam him into one of the gallery posts, but the marauder slithered free. An instant later, above the hammering of the rain, January heard the yard-gate rumble as heavy weight clambered over it.

  He turned back, flung himself into the kitchen again and grabbed another spit, then, when there was no pursuit, groped, shivering and dripping, for the tinderbox and striker always kept in a tin holder above it, Bella not holding with new-fangled stinking lucifers in her kitchen. Wedged into a corner, listening with what felt like his entire body and unable to hear a thing over the rain, January kindled the tinder. By the flickery light, he found candles and a lamp.

  The man he'd stabbed with the spit lay facedown in the mud of the yard. The metal had pierced the thorax just under the rib cage. January suspected, by the strong smell of the blood as he dragged him back under the shelter of the gallery, that he'd gone into shock and subsequently drowned and suffocated in ooze. In addition to the skinning knife he found at the foot of the steps-and the one the second man had dropped in the gallery-the first man had a slung-shot-a lump of lead on the end of a leather thong-at his belt, and a pistol wrapped in greased leather under his shirt.