"I'll be here two days, maybe three." Natchez Jim unshipped the packages he'd brought from town, tossed them on the crude plank wharf calico, needles, coffee, a little nest of iron pans. Black-eyed women, swart-skinned men emerged from the straggle of huts and cottages among the stands of palmetto and Spanish dagger, and hastened down the path. Children darted around them like birds. From one of these January learned that the plantation of Aramis Vitrac lay on the other side of the island, "just down that road there." Their French was better than he'd feared it might be, though old-fashioned and strangely pronounced: ch'min for chemin; l' for le. Grimy, exhausted, aching in every bone and limb, he climbed the low hogback of tawny sand, through palmetto, fern, and creeper, cypress and oleander already putting forth the whites and crimsons of tropic glory. Green flats of rice bent to salt wind. On the other side of the path a work gang hacked at the ditches for next month's sugar crop. From the top of the path he heard the surf.
He half-expected to find Rose sitting on the gallery-of the three-room, post-and-daub plantation house, reading Babbage's Reflections on the Decline of Science in England. Part of him, the part that had died in Paris, half-expected not to find her at all.
In fact she was working in the garden behind the house, a half-wild riot of dark-leaved azaleas, spinaches, and young peas. The rabbitry young woman who came out onto the gallery, led by what January guessed to be the single house servant, pointed her out to him. "This isn't about that school in the city, is it? Truly, what happened there was not her fault. I know my husband's sister, M'sieu. She is impetuous, but her heart is pure, like glass, like steel. She would give everything she owns to those she loves, or those in her care." Her quick grin showed two teeth lost to childbearing, and she added,
"Except perhaps her books."
"I'm not from the school." January looked gently down into the narrow, anxious face. "I'm only a friend."
Rose sat back on her heels at the sound of the voices on the gallery. So she was watching him as he came down the gallery steps and through the neat dirt paths of the rambling garden. She pushed her spectacles straight on her nose, and he knew by the attitude of her back, by the angle of her straight square shoulders, that she recognized him instantly. She settled back, her hands folded in her lap, until he came near.
"Ben." She was trying to hide it, but there was deep joy in her face, her voice.
"Rose."
Joy sprang to her face, but when he helped her to her feet she took her hand out of his at once, closing it up on itself-her lips closed, too. He saw her at war with old hurts and old fears, thinking about what she ought to say. "I'm not here to ask anything of you," he said. "I just wanted to see if you were all right."
Three days' journey down the bayous? He could almost hear the words as they went through her mind, and he smiled at the absurdity of his own assertion.
"Well, from what you told me of your brother I knew I couldn't write."
It surprised her into laughter, like sunlight on the waning sea.
"I brought you some books." He held out to her the parcel he'd carried down from town: a volume of Sappho he'd found at a Customshouse sale; Hamilton's Theory of Systems and Rays from the same source; Lyell's Principles of Geology and a wonderfully hair-raising English novel by the poet Shelley's wife. "If you weren't here, at least I could have asked your family of you. Your sister-in-law seems a nice woman."
"Alice is a darling. Of course Aramis-my brother-half-brother-is a complete illiterate and she's not much better-why is it Creoles never educate their daughters? but Alice is like Cora: willing to accept that that's the way I am." Her face lost the sparkle of her smile. "Did you ever find out what happened to Cora?"
January shook his head. "We caught the men who were taking people off the streets. They'd been kidnapping them out of their homes, too, some of them, and out of the sheds in the Swamp where slaves sleep out if their masters let them. Hdier the water seller was trading the information to a tavern-keeper for a cut of the profits, when they sold them to cotton planters in the Missouri Territory."
He saw the fragile jaw set hard and wished there were an easier way to say it, or something better to say.
"I've been writing to brokers and authorities in Arkansas and Missouri and anywhere else we can trace the ring's contacts. But, of course, no one's going to admit they were buying kidnapped free men."
She drew in breath, hard. For a time she looked genuinely sick. But all she said was, "I never thought it would be H?lier. He was always so friendly."
"It surprised me, too. And, of course, it was to his profit to be friendly. Maybe I should have seen it. I would have thought..." He shook his head. "He had a grievance against the entire world, larger than anything he could have felt for any individual's rights." He was silent for a time, plucking a long stem of the jasmine that grew up the nearby fence and turning the small gold blossoms over in his hand. Then he said,
"For a time I was afraid you'd been kidnapped, too."
"I'm sorry about that." She answered the thought that he did not speak aloud: Why didn't you let me know? "It wasn't completely shame-well, not after the first day or two. I know how rumors operate. I've seen how vicious they can be, especially about women. You've seen it, too. Half the women in the market seem to believe Delphine Lalaurie is the Devil's sister." (From the beginning again, please...) January shook the thought away.
Rose's mouth tightened. "People believe what they want to believe. And I... it seemed to me so deliberate. So planned. Aimed, like a gun. And like me, you're a teacher. You depend on the goodwill of those around you for your daily bread."
January said nothing, looking down into her eyes. Even here on the island, the old laws against women of color uncovering their hair seemed to hold, or maybe it was just the habit she'd had in the city. Like the women of color he'd seen by the wharf, she wore a tignon, white and soft and clean as it had been in the city. Her complexion had darkened with the sun of the island sunlight, matte velvet the color of cocoa.
She saw his thought, the way he'd seen hers, and her eyes fell. He felt her move away from him, not physically, but in thought. Her fingers caressed the leather of the books. "I'm sorry," she murmured.
"I meant it when I said I didn't come here to ask you anything, only to see that you were well. Sometimes friends do that. I've missed you, Rose."
He hadn't known how badly, until they sat on the gallery after supper-which they ate with the house girl and the cook-watching the last color stain the clouds over the Gulf and talking about Mardi Gras, and the ending of the fever, and the spectacular change in the fortunes of Emily Redfern.
"Good for her," said Rose bluntly. And then, "I shouldn't say that, because she sounds like a horrible woman. But Monsieur Redfern sounded like a horrible man. And in fact I wondered once or twice about whether Madame Redfern really wanted Cora found."
She sat forward in her rough-made chair of bent willow, leaned bare forearms on the gallery rail, and frowned in the direction of the darkening sea. "When I read that second advertisement in the paper, the one that spoke of the five thousand dollars... The name was the same, but the description was all wrong. Madame Redfern had to advertise for Cora's capture, to look good to her creditors, but she did it in such a way that Cora would have every chance of escape.
"I think..." She drew in her breath again, and let it out, trying to speak calmly of the ruin of her dreams.
"I think she must have been behind the rumors about the school somehow, trying to drive me out of town.
She must have been horrified when I was actually arrested, and might be questioned. But I don't see... she doesn't have influence with those people. Certainly not with my investors."
"Who were your investors?"
"Armand d'Aunoy, Placide Forstall, Edmond Dufossat, Pierre Tricou, and the Lalauries," replied Rose promptly. "All of them old Creoles, you see. It was through Delphine Lalaurie's kindness that the loan was forthcoming at all. Emily Redfern's pretensions would
be anathema to them."
January nodded. "True. Even after Lieutenant Shaw mentioned that it was one of your investors-who could have been given the hint by anybody, of course-I thought it still might be Madame Redfern. But she was the only person to hire me for a private ball in all of the Mardi Gras season." He withdrew Monday's Bee from his coat, and laid it, folded to the place, on the railing of the gallery.
" `Murderer?' " Rose took off her spectacles, held the newspaper close to the window, where the light from inside could fall on it, peering with her shortsighted eyes.
" `Intolerable insult offered to a lady of quality.. '? What lady of quality? `Spread lies and calumny...'?
This person"-she glanced at the bottom of the letter-"This Dr. Barnard has his nerve, talking of lies and calumny. What is this?"
"This," said January, "is the reason the trip down here left me penniless-and in debt to Hannibal, which has to be the greatest joke of the decade. I have exactly two pupils left and have barely worked all winter. It's the same person," he said, "spreading the rumors. I know it."
She sank down in her chair with a whisper of heavy skirts. Like countrywomen or servants, she had dispensed with the multiple petticoats of fashionable wear. The dark, thick twill, dusty from the garden's earth, became her. In the open neck of her countrywoman's waist a small gold cross glinted, fire on the dusky skin.
"Emil Barnard," she said. "That's a French name."
"He's a Thompsonian charlatan who worked around the Charity Hospital during the epidemic," said January. "By his accent he's from Pau or the Languedoc, coincidentally the same part of France Nicolas Lalaurie comes from. Lalaurie's recently taken him on as a partner."
"I don't..." Rose left her sentence unfinished, sat for a time running the folded paper through her fingers, as he'd seen her run the ribbons with which she'd tied back the sick girls' hair. Then her eyes met his.
January slowly shook his head.
"Placide Forstall is Delphine Lalaurie's son-in-law, you see," Rose went on, speaking as if to herself, trying to fit pieces together. Trying to align the woman whose reputation she'd so furiously defended with the one who would so casually and so thoroughly destroy all she, Rose, had worked to create.
"D'Aunoy's her cousin. Jean Blanque was on the board of the Louisiana State Bank; Madame knew everyone there. That's how she influenced them to lend me the money to start the school. It has to be her.
But I don't understand why."
"I'm only guessing," said January. The shadow in the doorway returned to him again, the voice like a golden whip, the silvery rustle of petticoats. The absolute fear in Pauline Blanque's eyes. "And I can't know, not knowing Madame. I'm beginning to wonder if anyone really knows her."
He frowned, as the woman's face came back to him,the desperate, yearning expression in her beautiful eyes as she sponged the bodies of the dying. "I think now that Cora must have tried to get Gervase to run away with her. And either Madame overheard them, or quite possibly Gervase actually made the attempt to leave, later that night or the following day. I never actually saw Gervase; Madame sent him out of town very soon thereafter. But I'm almost certain she'd see the attempt as betrayal, after all she did, for whatever reasons of her own, to make things easy for Cora. And that she would not forgive."
In the silence, the boom of the surf sounded very loud.
"I can't believe that she'd be that vindictive." Rose's hand sketched a gesture of denial in the air, but turned, folding in on itself with the refusal only half made. Her profile was only a shape of darkness now against the fading light. "To do this to me only for harboring Cora, to you for helping her..."
"I think it made it worse," said January. "She helped you, and you conspired to betray her, too."
"How would she know? I can't imagine her eavesdropping. But, of course, Bastien would have. Or even Dr. Lalaurie. I never liked him." She shivered. "He crept so, and he was always asking if he could do `tests' on the girls. He was the one who invented those postural contraptions I showed you. I never understood how a woman of her-her excellence-could love a man so wormy."
"One thing I've learned," January said with a smile, "love is beyond comprehension. Anyone can love anyone. It's like the cholera."
Rose laughed, spectacles flashing in the reflected lampIiKht. "Very like the cholera," she agreed, and he heard the jest in her voice, and laughed too, at himself, and the ridiculousness of his love.
"But just saying that," said Rose at length, "makes me realize: it's true. I don't know that much about Madame Lalaurie. She might be an habitual eavesdropper, for all I know. I was thinking, `She isn't a vindictive woman,' but I don't know that. I've never seen her be vindictive. I don't want a woman I've looked up to, as I've looked up to her, to be vindictive. But I don't know. How vindictive is she?"
"I don't know either." January rose, and took her hand to bid farewell before seeking the room alotted him above the kitchen. "I think I'm going to find out."
He remained on Grand Isle another day, going to Mass in the island's tiny wooden Church. Later, despite the fact that it was Lent, he tuned up and played the old guitar owned by Aramis Vitrac-there wasn't a piano on the island-and sang ballads and arias from the operas popular in Paris two seasons ago, to the delight of his hosts and the dozen or so neighbors who walked that night from all over the island to dinner. Alice Vitrac joined in gamely on a flute while Natchez Jim rattled spoons and bones and tambourine. "It's George Washington's birthday," reasoned the island's black-eyed priest. "Well, near enough, anyway."
The women brought cakes and scuppernong wine, the men brandy from the smuggler boats that still plied the Gulf.
By day he walked with Rose on the beaches, both bundled alike in rough jackets, the sand chilly between his toes above the tangled chevaux-de frise of driftwood along the shore. It was difficult not to reach across and touch her hand, her face. Yet in some ways it was easier than he had feared it would be. If a friend was all she could bring herself to be, he thought, he would accept her on those terms; on any terms that would let him continue the quick-sparkle entertainment of her conversation, the rare chance to speak of other things besides the day-to-day commonplaces of life in a small French provincial town.
Early on Monday morning January walked to the beach alone, to watch the waves roll in from the Gulf.
Coming back he encountered Alice Vitrac, with oysters she'd bought from one of the fisher-families, and took from her the rush basket to carry to the house.
"You're good for her," said Madame Vitrac. She looked up at him with her pale, lashless eyes, myopic as Rose, and smiled a little. "I'm glad you've come. I was worried for her. I'm sorry you weren't able to bring her any word of Cora..."
"Did you know Cora?"
"Oh, yes." Her voice grew less shy. "I grew up just over on P'tit Ch?ni?re. I've known Rose most of my life. Cora, too. They were inseparable."
January thought of those two girls, growing up in this world of driftwood and tawny sand.
"Cora told me she nursed Rose when she was sick." Alice glanced up at him, quickly, looking to see what and how much he might have guessed. They stood still for a moment, sea wind blowing cold over them and rippling the long grass; then she said, "Well, I've always thought Papa Vitrac... I think he was only trying to do right by Rose. By his own lights. The man who-who hurt her-was a neighbor of ours, a planter, a man of color like yourself. Much lighter than you, but big like you. He tried for years to get Rose to marry him, you see. I think he thought that by doing what he did, he would force her hand. Force her father's hand."
January said softly, "I see."
Something of his anger must have shown in his eyes, for Madame Vitrac went on, "Papa Vitrac wasn't the only one who thought it would be the thing. You know that generally if a man does ruin a girl, the first thing everyone thinks of is to have him marry her. So I suppose Mathieu can be excused for thinking it was a good idea." She shrugged. Her own opinion on the subject was plain in the sudden set of
that soft mouth.
"And I take it," said January, resuming his way toward the house, "that Monsieur Vitrac thought so, too."
Madame Vitrac put up her hand to brush the fair strings of her hair out of her face, where the wind took them. "He told Rose that she would have to marry this man. I think he was only trying to get her established creditably and didn't want to have to look very far or very hard. The man did have quite a nice little plantation, over on Isle Derniere, though they said he was hard on his slaves. He later sold up and moved to the mainland, up in the Cane River country; Cora must have told Rose that, or she never would have returned. Because he-he came around. Trying to force her into saying yes. Afterward, I mean. That's when she became so ill."
January frowned. "You mean as a ruse? To get him to go away?"
"No." Madame Vitrac took back the rush basket from him with a brief smile of thanks as they reached the steps of the house. "I mean she went into the woods and ate nightshade. Cora and my mother were the ones who found her. I don't know, but I think that Cora-and my mother-were the ones who talked Papa Vitrac into giving her the money to go to New York to school."
Rose herself never spoke of the matter, and in her eyes January could see-or thought he could see-that whatever had happened in this place, she had made peace of a kind with it, and was content to be here.
They spoke of music, and the Opera in Paris and Rome; of Pakenham's invasion and the Chalmette battle; of steam engines and bombs and mummies and nesting birds. They built a fire of driftwood, bought oysters from the fisher-boys and ate them raw with the juice of limes, while the waves curled on the sand and a line of brown pelicans emerged silent as ghosts from the mists and, as silent, vanished.
They spoke of the epidemic, and of why the fever might come in the summertimes and not the winters, and why not every summer; of why sometimes cures seemed to work-even onions under the bed-and why sometimes they did not; of the white ghost-crabs that scurried in the retreating scrum of the surf, and of pirate treasure and hurricanes. "I've watched the winds and the clouds here," said Rose, "and the winds and air in the marsh. It feels different there, but I can't say why it's different, what is different about it. There has to be some way of identifying what it is. Everyone talks about the miasma of sickness, but it's only a guess, you know. There has to be a way of making it visible, like a chemical stain turning the color of water."
02 Fever Season bj-2 Page 30
