02 Fever Season bj-2

by Barbara Hambly

  The room was empty, but beyond the shut door at its far side, someone groaned.

  I don't want to do this. I don't want to do this. The words gyred stupidly through his mind as he crossed the tiny room, hoping weirdly that the door on the other side would be locked. Hoping like a child in a nightmare that he wouldn't have to see what he knew he was going to see. At first they didn't look human, or anyway not like living men who had once walked the levee, sang to ladies, maybe eaten mangoes with the juice running down their chins. The way their arms were chained-elbows together above and behind the head, wrists together in a travesty of an upside-down L, ankles locked to the bands around their waists-it took January a few moments to understand that they were men at all, and not misshapen fetishes carved out of knobbed brown-black oak. Unable to move, they knelt in their own waste, on the other side of a table where a whalebone riding whip and a cat-o'-nine-tails lay with items only barely guessed at. Starvation had rendered them almost unrecognizable as men. It was only when the thing hanging on the wall moved and tried to make noise that he realized that it, too, was alive.

  It was Cora.

  He didn't know why he recognized her. Maybe by her size, rendered still more childlike by advanced emaciation. Her tiny feet, hanging ten or twelve inches above the floor in their heavy leg irons, looked no bigger than a turkey's claws. There was an iron gag in her mouth, the kind he'd seen in old museums labeled a Scold's Bridle, locked behind her head and forcing her mouth open. Flies crawled in and out, over a thin, constant stream of drool.

  January's mind stalled, blocked by what he was seeing. He realized he hadn't the faintest idea what he should do. These people obviously couldn't walk, couldn't make it down two flights of stairs. He had heard the phrase, ran screaming-he hadn't known what it had meant, he realized. All he wanted to do was flee, shrieking, down Rue de levee, blotting this sight from his mind forever... His hand shaking so badly he could barely manipulate the latches, he unfastened the iron cage around Cora's head, pulled it off as gently as he could. The girl made a horrible noise in her throat, then spat out maggots. "Gervase."

  She nodded to the room's inner door.

  It was locked. January set his candle on the table, looked among the horrors there for a piece of thin wire that he could use to work the pawls-theoretically, at least. He'd never picked a lock in his life, though Hannibal had assured him it wasn't difficult. In the watery uncertainty of the single flame the tools were terrible, each a silent word of pain: levered clamps, intricate mechanisms of screw and strap, something like a half-unfurled speculum mounted on a screw. Ants and roaches crept over the laked blood. From among them he picked a vicious little hook, turned back to the door. There was a dim scraping behind him, one of the chained men trying to wriggle across the floor. January brought the candle close to the lock, bent to work the hook.

  He heard Cora scream and started to straighten up, his head moving straight into the numbing blow from behind. His body hit the wall. He had a brief glimpse of Bastien raising an iron crowbar for another blow, and remembered nothing more.

  Twenty-Two

  Pain brought him to, unbelievable pain in his neck, back, shoulders. He thought someone must surely have run iron needles under the scapula, through the cervical joints, into his ribs, everywhere, but in the utter dark, the abyssal stench and heat, he couldn't tell. He couldn't move, was too disoriented to even judge in what position his body was pinned. He threw up, the spasms rending his shoulders like the rack, and the vomit ran warm down his naked chest and belly. Blinding pain drilled through his skull, enough to stop his breath.

  He passed out.

  He came to from the pain of being moved. Even the light of the branch of candles near the door was pain, gouging through his eyes to his brain. He threw up again, doubled over this time, his wrists manacled behind him, being drawn steadily up. He tried to straighten, tried to move to lessen the agony in his shoulders, but the rope or chain on the manacles kept pulling up toward the ceiling, dragging his arms up behind him. Hannibal had spoken once of his lunatic uncle, fixated on the Spanish Inquisition, and January recognized what this had to be, from old woodcuts: a ceiling pulley, a set of wrist-chains, a rope, and a demon to pull on it until the victim's feet lifted from the floor and his arms were wrenched from their sockets. The light was like an ax in his skull.

  "Did you tell anyone?"

  That mellow golden contralto: Begin again. The rope twisted up a few more inches and he cried out.

  Thin and flexible, the whalebone training-whip tore the backs of his naked thighs.

  "Did you tell anyone?"

  "No."

  A cut across his belly. He felt blood. How he knew what she wanted he didn't know. Maybe because she was white.

  "No, m'am."

  It was hard to look at her, hard to make his eyes focus. She wore a ball dress of turquoise silk with what they called a Mary Stuart bodice, the candlelight salting her black lace with gold. Queenly, gracious, lovely as she had been that afternoon, apologizing for what Emil Barnard had written. Black-lace mitts on her hands. On the floor beyond her skirts another woman lay with arms and legs folded into an iron contraption that locked between her ankles; January could just see this slave woman's eyes, brown and huge, staring incomprehendingly at him.

  Delphine Lalaurie beat him until he fainted again, beat him without a word or a sound and without change of expression on her face. The agony in his shoulders brought him to twice, when he slumped; he wasn't sure when he woke up the third time if it was true consciousness. He only knew that his ankles and wrists were being locked together behind his back, and that her skirts were close enough to his head to smell the patchouli in their folds.

  He thought she said-if he wasn't dreaming-"You say Suzette must have seen him come in?"

  "She must have, Madame. The kitchen door was open."

  "And, of course, she didn't bother to tell you about it.

  "No, Madame."

  Hallucinatory in the candlelight, he saw Bastien put a shawl around her shoulders. Sweat bathed her face and made black circles in the armpits of her gown, and she'd taken her hair down, as a woman does for her husband. In the leaping shadows the gray did not show; it hung crow black below her hips. The few pins still snagged in it winked like rats' eyes.

  She put out her hand, resting it on Bastien's shoulder. No expression changed her face, but she closed her eyes. Straight and cold, for a moment it seemed to January that Delphine Lalaurie was strapped into the self-shouldered bonds of her own perfection, like one of her husband's infernal posture-correction devices. In the silence he heard her draw breath and release it, like a woman convincing herself that she has to be strong. Whatever the cost, she must go on, to some end known only to herself.

  "After all I have done for her," she said. "After all I have done."

  "Yes, Madame."

  "For the girls. For Nicolas." Had she been anyone but Delphine Lalaurie she would have trembled. In her face was the echo of that yearning ecstasy it had worn in the fever wards, as she held a young man dead in her arms. "Not one of them knows how much."

  Then she opened her eyes, calm and reasonable and flawless once more. In utter control, obeyed in all things. "I'll have to speak to her."

  She picked up the whip from the table and went out. He was dead.

  He was dead and in hell. Though Bastien had taken the candles-as if suspended in space somewhere above the yard January could see the two of them, descend ing the square-angled spiral of the outside stair-he could see also, clearly, Liam Roarke sitting slumped against the wall near the door, the contents of his opened veins a black slow-spreading ocean around his thighs and his bright blue eyes fixed on January.

  "You know you didn't have to tell your smelly friend Shaw, Soublet's name," Roarke said, with an evil smile. "You'd told him it before. He knew."

  January couldn't argue with him.

  There were other people in the room. Sometimes he could only hear them, twisting and gro
aning softly in the darkness: could smell the blood and filth, and hear the scrape of metal, and the sobbing of the woman on the floor. Sometimes in spite of the darkness he could see them, by the light of red flame whose heat consumed them all: his father, Rose, Ayasha. Ayasha, lying on the bed, raised her blackening face and shook back the long coil of her hair, and said, "You didn't come. And now you're chasing some other girl. You didn't come because you were lying with Rose." Then she threw up all her intestines, and the child she carried inside her, and died again, her hand reaching for the pitcher of water.

  January tried to say, "I'm sorry," but only the serpents of hell crawled from his mouth.

  Ants covered him in a gnawing wave, eating his flesh to the bones.

  Distantly, Hannibal played the violin, a jig that had been popular in Paris two summers ago, before the cholera came.

  If he could only get to his Rosary, thought January, he'd be safe, he'd be all right. The Virgin Mary would get him out of this.

  Delphine Lalaurie would be returning. From his vantage point above the courtyard he could see her, gathering up her heavy skirts to climb the stairs. Her husband Nicolas was with her this time, a sheaf of notes tucked under one arm and one of his experimental postural correction devices in his hands.

  Virgin Mary, get me out of this.

  Heat consumed January, smoke rising through the floor to suffocate his lungs. The building was on fire, plunging down like an avalanche to Hell.

  The building was on fire. He woke and knew it.

  There was a little light, coming in through the cracks in the barred shutters that led out onto the gallery, enough to let him know that it was day. Smoke was pouring up through the cracks in the floor.

  The woman on the floor, skeletal with prolonged starvation, began to writhe in her shackles, her breath coming in little puffs of pain. One of the men on the beds-there were two beds in the room, he now saw, the manacles dangling from the ceiling pulley between them-stirred and groaned, then lay still again. The man wore an iron collar around his neck, and some kind of iron contraption on one or maybe both of his legs. January's own shoulders were lost in a maze of pain. Agony shot up through his leg muscles, his back, from every welted, bloody inch of his skin.

  In the smoke that filtered up through the room the flies were humming wildly around the ceiling, their drone a frantic bass note to Cora's voice-it had to be Cora's making inarticulate shrill grunts beyond the thin wall. January tried to move and was instantly sorry, his head throbbing, so dizzy he nearly fainted again.

  But he had to get out. He had to get out. They'd all burn...

  Somewhere he heard shouting, a yammer of voices below. "Sir, I'll thank you to mind your own business," came the yapping tenor of Nicolas Lalaurie's voice, and a deeper voice, harsh but familiar-Judge Canonge's?-replied.

  "It's a grave allegation and I think it needs to be looked into."

  "Do you call me a liar? I'll have my friends call on you in the morning, sir."

  "You have your friends do whatever you want, sir, but I'm going to have a look upstairs."

  "This man would say or do anything to discredit me and my wife, sir. For years he's spread rumors..."

  "You can't tell me that child didn't fall off the roof, two months after you moved into this place!" That was Montreuil's voice. Behind it there was a clashing, a distant thump of feet. January squirmed, gasping in an ocean of heat. If he cried out-maybe if he cried out they'd hear him...

  "Judge!" called someone else. "Here, sir! Here's where it started!"

  Inarticulate sounds, a woman's voice; then, louder, "I couldn't bear more, sir. I couldn't bear more. After last night..."

  "She's been beaten, sir. Severely, it looks like."

  "And you're going to punish me," demanded Dr. Lalaurie furiously, "because this slut tried to avenge herself after correction-well deserved, I might add-by firing my house?"

  "They're in the attic," persisted Montreuil's voice.

  "They're in the attic, sir, chained up and tortured. Sometimes at night I hear them scream!"

  Shut up, thought January dully. Shut up, you whining little toad! They're never going to believe you!

  "The woman is a fiend incarnate, I tell you! A devil! A female Nero! She..."

  January recalled the little man's bulging eyes, his rank breath and nervous hands, and his heart sank. A fanatic with a grudge, and a well-known grudge. And, if Dominique's casual remarks were anything to go by, Madame Lalaurie had evidently taken pains to discredit him by gossip as well. Whispers of opium addiction and Montreuil's half-crazy hatred were Madame's best defense: that, and the people who would never admit that their sons and cousins had married into the family of a madwoman. Who did not have the imagination to completely comprehend the word fa?ade.

  "I think maybe you'd better hand over those keys." January felt the swaying weight of many men ascending the outside stairs. He gritted his teeth in rage, tried desperately to cry out again-his tongue so swollen with thirst he could barely make a sound-when they went through the long, obligatory delay of searching the second floor. The attic, you idiots! Didn't you hear Montreuil say "attic"?

  Axes crashed on the outer door. Evidently Dr. Lalaurie hadn't handed over the keys after all. Then the stunned silence, the appalled whispers, as even through the choke of the smoke the stench of the place came to them.

  More crashing, purposeful as they cut through the second door. The smoke was already lessening, though the heat remained unbearable. The fire brigade must have come swiftly. Where was Madame Lalaurie this morning? Then men were in the room, white men and colored, kneeling beside him, unlocking the manacles from his ankles and wrists. Murmuring in shock and horror at what they saw on the beds, on the floor, on the wall, on the table. In the background Montreuil hopped up and down, shrieking, "I told you so! I told you so! I told you so!" January wanted to slap him.

  The courtyard was jammed with people. Black and white and colored, French and American. All fell back, silent with shock, as the first of the men were brought down the stairs, carried by Canonge and Montreuil and a handful of others. January stumbled, not able to walk, supported by a couple of hairy Kaintucks from Gallatin Street and blind in the mid-morning glare. He had a jumbled awareness of the others being brought down behind him, but the wound in his head was making him dizzy and sick, and it wasn't until many days later that he was able to put his recollection of images, voices, events into anything like order. One of the emaciated slaves kept gasping "Food! Food!" and he saw a number of the market-women press forward to give it to them, the bony hands grasping and snatching.

  He reeled and staggered, and someone caught him, lifted him up. As he was carried through the gate he saw Nicolas Lalaurie, small. and dapper, standing by the second-floor parlor window of the house, looking expressionlessly out. Beside him, for a moment, Madame Lalaurie appeared, clothed as she had been at the Ursulines' during the plague, in a plain but devastatingly fashionable dark dress. Calm as always. Perfect as always, as if none of this had anything to do with her. Then she turned away. He saw her through a window, directing the maids in replacing the furniture that the firemen had overturned.

  His mind didn't fully clear until sometime later, when he and the others were sitting or lying in the courtyard of the Cabildo, and people were filing past. Now and then officials would emerge; January guessed from the mutter of their voices that they didn't know exactly where to take the victims or what should be done with them. Marketwomen, brokers, and dealers from the businesses on Rue Chartres and Canal Street came by, stevedores from the levee, planters, dressmakers, artisans. Their faces formed a blur in January's mind as they stared disbelieving at the mutilated bodies of the men and women on the cots and chairs set in the court, and at the implements that covered the whole of a long table set near the brass fountain in the courtyard's center. How many of them were having second thoughts about the power a master could have over a slave, January wondered. How many were simply taking mental notes o
f things to be used should they need a little more domestic discipline at some time in the future?

  A splotch of black caught his eye. Emily Redfern, leaning on the arm of the Reverend Micajah Dunk, in front of the makeshift cot where Cora Chouteau lay. The bulging blue eyes widened with recognition, and Madame's lace-mitted hand went to her throat, where lay a double-line of moon-gold pearls.

  January said to a man near him, "Help me up." He'd guessed Mamzelle Marie would be in the crowded courtyard somewhere, and so she was. It was easy to find her, once he was standing, by the seven points of her orange-and-red tignon. He made his way unsteadily through the press, and when she saw him coming toward her she stood up-she was washing the wounds of the woman who'd been in the iron spancel-and swiftly closed the distance between them.

  "You should sit. I'll get to you."

  "I don't need to be got to," said January. But he allowed her to lead him to the stairs that went up to the galleries where the cells were, and by the time they reached them he was out of breath and trembling, his head still pounding from the daylight. "I need to talk to you."

  She folded her hands before her and stood looking down at him, bronze face calm.

  "I know you gave Madame Redfern the poison she used to murder her husband." He spoke softly. There was so much noise around them that there was little danger of being overheard. "I have what's left of the poison, and the tin. I found them in her room at Spanish Bayou. And you were seen, by her house at Black Oak, where the tin was hidden."

  "Only by a slave girl." She didn't seem in the least surprised or discomposed. "Her word is no good in a court of law."

  "A slave girl who's just come back from death and Purgatory," he said. "Who's going to be a nine days' wonder with the newspapers. And who's now going to be arrested for a crime you know and I know she didn't commit. She couldn't have, she was gone from Spanish Bayou hours before the poison could have been administered; gone by the same boat that took Reverend Dunk away with the five thousand dollars on him that Madame Redfern wanted to keep, out of all the wreckage of her life."