Fever Season (11 page)

It could have been Mamzelle Marie in the first place, he thought, who’d asked Olympe to ask him to look for Robois Roque at the hospital, weaving him into the web as well.

“They could have run,” said January. Past her shoulder he, too, was watching the street—for Cora or for Shaw.

“Why?” Marie Laveau shook her head. “These men were saving for their freedom. They knew their masters here; they had work, on the levee or at the cotton press. Their friends were here. If a man’s set free he has to leave the state. They had no call to run. It might be the sickness took them far from home, but … I don’t like it. There
is that about it that—” She made a gesture, like a woman testing the hand of silk for slubs, and she shook her head again. “Speak to me if you hear anything, M’sieu Janvier, if you would be so kind.”

Cora was waiting for him in the Pellicots’ yard. At first he didn’t see her; then she emerged from behind the banana plants that grew around and behind the cistern, and her eyes were scared. “Who was that woman?” She whispered the words as if she feared they’d be heard from the street. “The one in the yellow tignon, that you were talking to?”

“That’s Marie Laveau. She’s the Queen of the Voodoos,” he added, seeing the incomprehension in the girl’s eyes.

She crossed herself quickly.

“She was at Black Oak,” said Cora. “In the evening, when I went out there once to meet Gervase. She was waiting on the porch, in the twilight. I ran back and Gervase and I, we went elsewhere, but it was her.”

“Marie Laveau? You’re sure?”

“I saw her close. She had her tignon like that, in seven points. I never saw nobody wore it with so many before.”

“They don’t,” said January. “That’s something only the Queen Voodoo in New Orleans is allowed to do. Marie Laveau.” His mind was racing. Not Olympe. Mamzelle Marie herself. “Did she see you?”

Cora nodded.

“Here, or there?”

“Both,” the girl said, despair and panic in her voice. “I mean, she saw me when I came out of the woods—I didn’t see her till I got right up close to the porch—then I turned and ran, since I wasn’t supposed to be at Black Oak, ever. None of us was. And just now, I was crossing the street to come here, and she saw me, stopped to watch
me pass. I didn’t see it was her till I was close. She knows I’m in town.”

“And probably doesn’t think a thing of it,” said January soothingly. “I don’t think she’d even recognize you.” He remembered how she’d looked back over her shoulder, scanning the street, and knew perfectly well that Mamzelle Marie recognized anything or anyone she’d seen once, however briefly, before. Most of the voodoos did.

“Then it wasn’t me she spoke of?”

He shook his head. “She works with me at the Hospital. It’s nothing to worry about. I spoke to Madame Lalaurie.”

Cora’s eyes, wide already, stretched farther with alarm.

He took from his pocket the little purse of silver and put it in her hand. “Madame Lalaurie sends you this,” he told her.

Suspicion leapt into the girl’s eyes, but her small hands closed tight on the little oval of plush. It was an expensive purse, with a line of jet beading along its bottom and a tassel, but someone had dripped grease on it. A tiny spot, and easily hidden if a woman carried it with the spot turned toward her skirts, but enough, evidently, for Madame Lalaurie to want it out of her house.

“Why? Why’d she do a thing like that?”

January sighed inwardly. “I think she’s got a score to settle with Madame Redfern,” he said, reflecting that it was a sorry state of affairs when a woman’s good deed was more easily explained by spite than by generosity. “She’s got to know Madame Redfern’s hard up for cash and will be selling up her slaves soon. She gets you out of town, she’s picking her enemy’s pocket six hundred dollars’ worth.”

The thought, or perhaps the irony, made Cora grin, a quick smile quickly put away.

January continued, “My sister said for you to speak to a man named Natchez Jim, who has a firewood boat on the river. He’ll take you out of town, after you’ve seen Gervase.”

“Madame’ll let me see Gervase?”

“She’ll leave her gate open tonight,” January said. “Her coachman will be watching, so don’t try anything foolish, like getting Gervase to run away with you. That won’t work. I promise you you’ll be caught.”

Her face went expressionless, and January felt a sinking in his heart.

“Don’t go inside right away,” he cautioned. “Wait down the street and look real close in case there’s someone watching the gate. The police know about you and Gervase; they know that’s where you’re likely to go. And if you see someone waiting in the shadows, watching for you to go in,
walk away.”

Something changed in her expression. “All right,” she said.

“But whatever you do,
don’t try to get Gervase to leave with you
. If you get caught, I’ll get in trouble, too, bad trouble.” He didn’t even want to think about what he was risking, and the sight of the defiance flickering in her eyes was enough to scare him badly. “You can’t do it.”

She said nothing, stubborn. Clinging to the dream of freedom for them both.

“At least you’ll have seen him, Cora. Tell him I’ll be in touch with him. When you reach New York, or Philadelphia, or wherever you choose to go, you can get in touch with me and earn money to buy him free. But don’t try to get him to run away with you. Promise?”

The sullenness in her silence made his heart sink. There was a world of
You don’t understand
and
I’ll be quicker than that
in her averted face.

Dear God, what have I got myself into?

His silence made her look up at him, and for a moment their eyes met in understanding. She mumbled, “If I get caught I won’t say who helped me.”

“No. Not good enough.” He wanted to shake her. “Promise you won’t try.”

“I promise.”

She had no intention of keeping her word. He knew that as she slipped from him and fled up the passway to Rue Burgundy through the gathering dusk.

Damn it
, he thought.
Damn it, damn it, damn it
.

The night was endless. For hours at a time the demands of the sick, the fear of the disease, the sweltering heat and sickening stenches, buried his mind in the immediate and hellish present. He sponged down exhausted bodies, carried out the dead, followed Dr. Soublet on his sanguinary rounds. A family was brought in, mother, sons, granddaughter all suffering the cholera; they were isolated in a stuffy little chamber as far from the other patients as possible, with the nearly twenty other sufferers of the disease. January worked vainly to keep them at least clean and keep them from going into convulsions. Fear of contracting the disease was enough to keep his mind from Cora Chouteau’s defiant eyes, and the way she’d turned her face away as she’d said, “I promise.” She was going to try to get Gervase to flee with her.

And they’d be caught.

He’d
be caught.

I should never have helped her
, he thought. I
should never have helped her
.

Then the image of that little boy on the gallery of the garçonnière would come back, the boy who waited for his
father to come see him, the dream image of the man with the tribal scars on his face, pursued through the woods by dogs. And he didn’t know what to think or feel.

I couldn’t not
.

Would Shaw accept that as an argument?

It would be like Shaw
, he thought,
to watch Madame Lalaurie’s house if he could get the men for it
.

His only hope lay in proving that Emily Redfern had poisoned her husband, had attempted or intended to poison Cora, or at least given the girl reason to believe she so intended.… And how could he do that?

Ask Mamzelle Marie?

He looked across the ward at her, remembering her on the street that day. Now she held the hands of a laborer who gasped, wept, flopped like a landed fish, his body voiding the wastes that were the sign that the fever had broken, the disease had run its course. Her face was calm and distant as it was when she danced, an Adamless dark Eve, with the great snake Damballah in Congo Square.

She’d seen Cora.

Here, and at Black Oak.

It didn’t take a genius to guess that pasteboard coffins, black candles, and graveyard dust could be easily backed up with galerina mushroom or Christmas rose.

He’d confided everything in Olympe.
Sometimes we don’t tell even each other what we know
. Would his sister put his confidence above the woman who was her sworn Queen?

His head ached with heat and worry and sheer fatigue by the time he left the Hospital, well after dawn. Shaw was not waiting for him outside. So far, he thought bitterly, so good.

He crossed Canal Street, with its usual rabble of drunken keelboatmen, carters cursing as they hauled firewood
and produce from the turning basin of the canal where they were unloaded. Dead dogs and garbage floated in the reeking gutters—gnats and mosquitoes whined about his ears. A few vendors moved along the streets by houses shuttered tight, or stopped to gossip at the rare doors that opened to them, hawking eggs or rat poison, asking after neighbors who were gone. His sister’s house was shuttered but the plank lay welcomingly across the gutter, so he assumed that things were as they should be there. His hand fumbled for the rosary in his pocket and he whispered a prayer,
Dear God, not them
.

Lying awake in the breathless heat of his room, he wondered if they’d heard word yet of Alys Roque’s missing husband. Wondered how Zizi-Marie and Gabriel had fared, packing up the indigent Perrets for their sojourn on Uncle Louis’s floor.

Wondered if he had gotten Ayasha out of Paris—if they’d had the money to go anywhere else—if she would have survived.

That way lay madness, and he shoved the images from his mind.

Tried to think instead of Cora Chouteau. The thought was scarcely more comforting. He felt a little embarrassed as he groped for his rosary again—
Dear God, don’t let her have got caught
—but he did it anyway. He remembered the night he’d spent in the Cabildo last spring, the prison hot as it was hot here, stinking of human waste and human fear. Remembered the voices of the jailers down in the courtyard in the morning, and the smack of the whip as slaves were disciplined.

Stupid
, he thought.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, to have let yourself help her …

Twenty years old, terrified, running away from a woman who would have killed her …

Presumably God knew whether he had done well or ill to help her.

Between fear and guilt he slid again into uneasy dreams, from which he was waked by the sound of footfalls on the gallery stairs.

Shaw
. Panic grabbed his heart. He could probably make it to the far end of the gallery, drop the twelve feet or so down to the yard, make it through the passway and out to Rue Burgundy before the Lieutenant could follow.…

And then what? Hide in the swamp for the rest of your days?

Why don’t you see who it is first before you decide to turn maroon at your time of life?

He got to his feet, put on his boots and a shirt. The room was still an oven, and another trail of ants had started along the wall, (
What, you boys like red pepper?)
but the light had changed. Long gold slats of it leaked through the jalousies before they were blotted by the shadow of a man.

“Hey inside?”

It wasn’t Shaw’s voice.

January shrugged his shirt straight and went to open the shutters.

The man who stood there wore the leather breeches of a groom, and a rough corduroy coat.

“Michie Janvier? Cyrus Viellard here, for Michie Henri Viellard.” The man bobbed a little bow, and took off his hat. “Michie Henri, he say bring you out to Milneburgh, if you please, sir. Your sister, Mamzelle Dominique, took in labor, and she wants you there.”

Milneburgh stood some four miles north of the city on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain. The elegant hotels, modest boardinghouses, and small wooden cottages sprinkled along the shallow beaches or sheltering in the pines presented a soothing contrast to the shut houses, reeking heat, and terrible silence of the city. The air here was sweet.

As January and Henri Viellard’s groom rode up the white shell road along the bayou, the sun was just setting, the golden peach of a full moon low in the east. Doorways and windows stood open to the fresh breezes. Lights from a thousand candles made glowing patchwork of the dove-colored gloam. Even the bathhouses of the two main hotels were illuminated, floating topaz reflections gemming the lake at the end of the long piers.

Impossible, thought January, that this could exist in the same world as the stricken city he had left. He’d passed through a fairy gate somewhere in the twilight swamps along the Bayou St. John and left the earth of plague and loss and stench and grief behind.

“Henri is an old lady.” Dominique held out her hands to him from her bed as he entered the bedroom of the cottage Henri Viellard had bought for her, three tiny rooms arranged one behind the other in a little stand of
red oak at the water’s very edge. The rear gallery perched on stilts in the lake itself; two chairs of white-painted willowwork were just visible through the open doors, and a cage of finches, fluffing their feathers for the night.