02 Fever Season bj-2

by Barbara Hambly

  But he did say, "If you get a chance, Minou, would you ask Marie-Neige if she's heard from her schoolmistress, Mademoiselle Vitrac? Or if she knows where Mademoiselle might be found? I'd appreciate it."

  "Mademoiselle Vitrac?" Minou's forehead wrinkled under the snailshell curls of her powdered wig. "That woman who stole all that money and let those poor girls all die of the fever?"

  "That's a lie!" said January, shocked that the story had worked itself down to the pla??e demimonde.

  "Who told you... "

  "Hey, Maestro." Uncle Bichet set aside the champagne he'd been sharing with Hannibal during this exchange, and picked up his viol's beribboned bow. "Old Froissart squintin' this way. Looks like those folks out there startin' to die of no dancin'. Can't let that happen."

  "Will you play a Basket Quadrille for the next dance?" urged Minou. "Hercule Lafr?nni?re promised me one..."

  "I'll play one at the end of the set if you get Henri to dance with Marie-Neige." January felt a pang of pity for the girl. "She can't possibly be afraid of him."

  "Well." Minou flirted her fan at him. "I'll see what I can do. But if Henri runs away with her I'll have you to blame."

  January sank his concentration back into the musica waltz-cotillion and a delicate Mozart country dance-but his eyes returned a dozen times to the dancers, seeking out the shell hue of his sister's gown, or the multifarious greens and whites of Marie-Neige's. It was hard not to think about Rose; hard not to imagine her stumbling along the banquettes after her release from the Cabildo, frightened and wondering desperately what would become of her. Hard not to picture the men he'd seen in the darkness of the Bayou step from an alleyway in front of her-then behind her as she turned in panic-clubs and rope in hand.

  Not Rose, he thought, as he had prayed daily for months now. Not Rose.

  Shouts cracked like gunshots from the vestibule, breaking the music's flow. "You, sir, are a lying lackey of an Orleanniste whoreson!"

  "Better the lackey of true kings than a half-caste Radical murderer!"

  January broke off his playing as a woman screamed. Beside him, Hannibal murmured resignedly, "Here we go again."

  Since everyone in the ballroom was rushing to the vestibule doors, the musicians rose and followed, at a more leisurely pace, Hannibal carefully stowing his violin on top of the piano and scooping up a bottle of champagne from the buffet table in passing. "Brinvilliers and DuPage, over that Conti Street brickyard lawsuit?" he guessed, naming two lawyers who, not content with an enlivening exchange of personalities in court ten days ago, had continued their insults of one another's ancestry, ethics, and personal habits in the New Orleans Bee's ever-libelous letter columns. January's mother read them aloud over breakfast, with obvious relish-there was never any shortage of such altercations in the press, and they almost invariably ended in violence.

  The fight in progress in the upstairs vestibule was hardly the first-or the thousandth-such event January had witnessed in two-thirds of a lifetime playing at New Orleans public entertainments. Both men were armed with small swords-fatally, the employees of the ballroom had hesitated to confiscate weapons that were part of their fancy-dress costumes-and the taller lawyer, younger and fiercely mustachioed, with a Romantic's crop of long black hair, was lunging and striking at the shorter, a militarylooking little man in more-or-less Turkish garb who'd already taken a cut on his temple and was bleeding freely. The shorter man was shouting, "Cur! Coward! Having refused to meet me like a gentleman...!"

  "Refused! When you set your thugs to ambush me and prevent me from reducing your carcass to the bleeding hash God intended that I should?"

  "Brinvilliers used that sentence already in his letter about DuPage to the Bee last week," remarked Hannibal, worming his way to the forefront and taking a long pull at the champagne from the neck of the bottle.

  "I thought it sounded familiar."

  "Messieurs! Messieurs!" Froissart was bleating and circling but kept a wary distance from the fray.

  The tall Brinvilliers lunged in in a whirl of lace collar and bucket-top boots. But his shorter opponent sidestepped, knocking the blade on the forte so that it spun from Brinvilliers' hand. Nothing discomposed, Brinvilliers seized the nearest chair and heaved it at DuPage, impaling the cushion and breaking DuPage's blade. With the older man thrust back and off balance, the taller proceeded to kick and bludgeon him when he fell to the floor. Everyone in the vestibule was shouting. A stout American in truly appalling Indian buckskins, whom January recognized as the banker Hubert Granville, lunged in to try to drag Brinvilliers off. He was himself seized by two of, presumably, the taller lawyer's friends; a second fight erupted, all participants of which staggered too far back and fell down the stairs, turkey feathers flying in all directions. Brinvilliers half-turned his head to see what the commotion might be; and DuPage lunged up from the floor, a knife every bit as long and deadly as any Kaintuck's in his hand.

  Someone yelled a warning, which was the only reason Brinvilliers wasn't gutted. As it was, he took the blade in the left chest; and amid curses, screams, and fountains of arterial blood, the combatants were finally separated, all the women scurrying back, clutching at their skirts.

  January was already striding forward, pulling his handkerchief from his pocket and calling out,

  "Handkerchiefs-quickly-anything..."

  Hannibal, with surprising speed considering the amount of alcohol he had consumed, thrust at least two of the buffet towels into his hands; January wadded them into a pad and pressed them hard on Brinvilliers' chest. "Knife," he said. "Scissors, anything..."

  A lady's lace-gloved hand passed a pair of reticulesized German scissors over his shoulder. Hannibal was kneeling beside him. "Hold this," January told him. The towels were already a warm crimson wad under his hands. "I'll cut away the shirt..."

  Someone seized his shoulder, thrust him roughly aside. "If you please, sir...!" It was Emil Barnard.

  Emil Barnard in the new black swallowtail coat and tall hat of a prosperous doctor. Emil Barnard with a fourguinea pearl stickpin in his cravat and expensively scented macassar oil on his slick snuff-colored hair.

  January was shocked, but not so shocked that he didn't make a grab for the pressure pad Barnard had dislodged from the pouring wound. Barnard pushed his hand away, "Keep your hands off him," he commanded ringingly. "I am a doctor. The man's constitution needs to be lowered before any further medical attention can be of the slightest avail."

  "That man is bleeding to death!"

  "Don't give way to panic at the sight of a little blood," said Barnard. "What kind of a surgeon are you?"

  He removed his glove, and pushed the sodden towel just slightly to one side, so that the blood would not spurt. "Indeed, I may have to bleed the man again tomorrow, should his sanguine humors remain elevated." He took the scissors from January's hand, snipped Brinvilliers's shirt free, and proceeded to extract a pad of clean bandages from his own medical bag, which someone had brought him double-time from the cloakroom below.

  "Now this," he said, holding up a phial from his bag, filled with something that looked like rusty water to the view of the crowd, "is a formula of my own making, a compound of calomel and opium, to further depress the patient's humors and-"

  "The man is bleeding to death," January interrupted grimly, pressing forward and pulling another towel from the nerveless grip of one of the waiters. He started to slide it under Brinvilliers' body, to tighten the dressing; again, Barnard thrust him aside.

  "Will someone please remove this man? He is interfering with me when Monsieur Brinvilliers's life may be at stake!"

  Someone took January's arm. "The man knows what he's doing, son," said a firm but kindly voice.

  January stared at the speaker, a Creole businessman probably ten years his junior. "He does not know what he's doing," he said, surprised at how level his own voice was. "Less than five months ago he was stealing clothes off the dead at the Charity Hospital! He-"

  "You're speaking of
a partner of one of the foremost physicians in the city, boy," snapped someone else, and Froissart hurried between, catching January's arm. Exasperated at being handled, January pulled free, but Froissart was already herding him to the back of the crowd.

  "It's all right," the manager was saying in a mollifying tone, "he's only upset at the sight of the blood..."

  "Monsieur Froissart," said January in a low voice, as the manager pushed him toward the little hallway that led from the vestibule to the supper rooms-closed during the Blue Ribbon Balls-and a sort of retiring parlor where women could fix their hems and flounces and hair. "Monsieur Froissart, I was a surgeon at the Hotel Dieu in Paris for six years! When a man is bleeding-"

  "Yes, yes, but Monsieur Couret is right, you know," said Froissart. "Emil Barnard is one of the rising doctors of the city, one of the best of the new young men. Surely he knows what he's doing. I hope he didn't hear your remarks about him..."

  "I don't give a... it doesn't concern me if he did! Sir," added January. "If Brinvilliers were conscious enough to choose his own treatment it would be one thing, but-"

  "You're upset," said Froissart. "I understand. Perhaps it would be better if you went home now. The others can manage without you, and I'm afraid after all this unpleasantness you probably wouldn't be able to perform."

  That was all I needed, thought January, swiftly descending the service stairs to the courtyard a few minutes later, his bloodied coat and gloves folded carefully into his music satchel and his shirtsleeves damp from the wash water in the upstairs parlor in which he'd wrung them out. What may be my only work this season-the quadroon balls -and now Froissart's worried about what his clients will think of me.

  The night was mild and thickly foggy, permeated with the haunting burnt smell of the sugar houses across the river. Each paper lantern on the courtyard trees was ringed in its own muzzy moondog of light. By their glow January saw a pale figure beneath the trees: the round little face, the explosion of pomaded curls beneath turban and jewels.

  "It's only me, Mademoiselle Marie-Neige, Monsieur Janvier. It's all right." He nodded back toward the ballroom. "You can go back in. The trouble's over."

  "Thank you." The girl's voice was small and shaky. For all her pushiness, Agnes Pellicot kept her daughters fairly sheltered. It would have been Marie-Neige's first encounter with the violence of the city in which she lived. She started to hurry away, then turned back. "I'm sorry I didn't say hello. M'sieu Janvier. Mama told me..."

  "And your mama was right," said January gently. "A young lady can't let the young white gentlemen see her talking to the musicians. We can talk other times."

  "Minou told me you were asking about Mademoiselle Rose," the girl said softly. She stepped closer to him, but must have smelled the blood still on his clothes, for he saw her hesitate and saw the startled movement of her whitegloved hands. Under the rouge she looked quite young and very lost. She had, January remembered, only a few months ago nursed three of her friends through a terrible illness, only to lose them-and a place where she'd been happy-in the end.

  "I don't know where Mademoiselle's gone," MarieNeige went on. "She might have changed her name, you know, and gone back to New York where she went to school. She could teach school in New York, couldn't she? It makes me angry, when I hear people talk about Mademoiselle not taking care of us or stealing money."

  Behind them in the ballroom, music rose again, violinless and with a fey, swooping rhythm, as if the heart and spine of the music had been taken over by Dionysus instead of Apollo.

  "I know you liked her," the girl added, her voice now very quiet. "She liked you. When you were gone, looking after Minou, Mademoiselle Rose was like... like a ship without a sail, she said she felt. I'm sorry you weren't there to help her."

  "I'm sorry I wasn't, too."

  "I was so happy with her."

  Marie-Neige turned, and hurried back to the lamps under the gallery, to the broad double-stair that led up toward her mother and her sisters and all her potential suitors; toward the more-trodden and safer road.

  January sighed. "I was, too, p'tit," he said. "I was, too."

  Eighteen

  As if to mock January's conviction that he would never work in New Orleans again, the following week brought a note in English from a Mr. Wallace Fraikes, business manager for Mrs. Emily Redfern. Mr.

  Fraikes requested his services as a musician at a St. Valentine's Day ball to be given that Friday in Mrs.

  Redfern's new home.

  "Ruling her out, I suppose, as the source of the libels against you," remarked Hannibal, who was the first person January saw when shown into the tiny and barren chamber where the musicians were given leave to rest for precisely five minutes every other hour through the evening.

  "I don't see how she could have been the source of the campaign against me in any case." January spoke quietly, though the footfalls of the polite, livery-clad majordomo were fading down the two flights of rear stairs up which January had been shown. The room lay at the back of the enormous yellow house in the American faubourg, overlooking the yard.

  "Madame Redfern left town before the campaign against me started." The penitential chamber had probably been designed for a governess, its wallpaper cheap and faded, its minuscule pine table chipped and battered. A shabby screen concealed a chamber pot. From the single tiny window January could just see down into the yard, where household slaves carried dishes across from the kitchen building: he counted two men, two women, and a young boy. The males all wore what looked like new livery.

  "Never underestimate the power of the truly vindictive. I had a London aunt-Lady Elliswrode, her name was-who could slaughter, joint, dress, and smoke a repu tation in a week from a hundred miles away.

  She had a truly vicious turn of phrase, and you could float a ship of the line in her inkwell. I thought you said La Redfern was destitute."

  "She was." January poured a little of the liquid from the pottery jug on the table. It was beer-watered.

  There was bread, thin as a communion wafer and nearly as flavorless. "Although she can't have been that destitute," he added thoughtfully, "if she was willing to whistle a pearl necklace and a hundred and ninety dollars down the wind."

  "And you're sure that was her necklace?"

  "What other one would Cora have?"

  A man came into the yard through the tradesman's gate, and spoke to the majordomo who came out to meet him. January winced. "Wonderful. It's our privilege to have Phiiippe deCoudreau and his clarionet confusing people all evening about what tune we're playing. Who do we get on viol-Pylade Vassage?

  The Deaf Fiddler of the Faubourg Tr?m?"

  "Don't laugh." Hannibal took a careful swig of opium from one hip-flask and followed it with a sip of rum from another. "That's exactly who we have to work with. And Laurent Lamartine on flute. It may be coincidence, but I doubt it. The moment La Redfern set the date for tonight's entertainment, Delphine Lalaurie moved up her ball..."

  "Not again!"

  "And this time, Madame managed to bag the best musicians-all the best musicians. She must have ten of them tonight, everybody who wasn't already playing at Caldwell's Theatre. The only reason I'm not there too is because one of Big Annie's girls-did I tell you I'm living in the shed behind Big Annie's these days?-cut up her note and used it for curling-papers before I got it. God knows how many others have gone the same way this month." He coughed and took another sip of the opium tincture. "At least they don't steal my violin."

  January stood still, hearing the far-off pressure of the door opening, closing; the muffled voice of the worst musician in Louisiana trying to cadge supper off Madame Redfern's majordomo. For all the good that's likely to do him.

  He hurt inside, like a child left out of a party, and knew that his hurt was childish. "Hannibal, what's going on? What is this? I'm better than that. I know I am. Who could get to Madame Lalaurie? Tell her not to hire me? She's above pettiness like that, she does what she pleases and be damned. I ta
ught her daughters..."

  He hesitated, the ugliness of that hellish session returning to him. From the beginning again, please...

  And the hatred and terror in Pauline Blanque's eyes.

  There was a woman who kept her two nieces chained in acellar...

  One's always hearing about domestic tyrants... No one dares speak of it... They know it'll do them no good. Was this all because he'd seen her do that to her daughters?

  "Damn it, the woman gave me money to help a runaway slave!"

  Hannibal gave up looking around for another lamp-the one on the table gave barely more light than a candle-and opened his violin case. "They wouldn't have to tell her not to hire you," he pointed out. "Just tell her that you were an atheist, or a bigamist. Or that you helped Rose kill those three girls so she wouldn't have to feed them."

  January felt his skin prickle with rage. "Is that what they're saying?"

  "Ben, I don't know what they're saying. I don't move in those circles. Madame Lalaurie-or any of them-doesn't even have to believe you actually did anything. Just that your presence will offend someone who'll be there. They're all connected: the Prieurs, the McCartys, the Forstalls, the Blanques, the d'Aunoys... They've all got daughters to marry off."

  The door opened. Philippe deCoudreau entered, laughing and shaking his head, a slim young dandy with skin as fair as H?lier Lapatie's had been and a marvelous and unfounded conceit of himself.

  "You know as well as I do they can't take risks about not being invited to the right parties."

  "And isn't it just the right party tonight?" deCoudreau laughed, picking up the beer pitcher and sniffing it.

  "For a woman paying off her creditors at a shilling on the pound five months ago, Our Hostess sure found some money someplace." He nudged January in the ribs. "Think Madame Redfern found a wealthy widower to set her up? Did you take a look at that buffet she's laying down? Boeuf a la mode and wine jellies-we're in for some of that I don't think."