Fever Season (14 page)

Something must have happened, he thought uneasily, and occupied his mind through the short train journey with appalling scenarios of what he would find when he reached Olympe’s house.

What he found, of course, was young Gabriel competently making a roux in the kitchen for that evening’s gumbo, while Ti-Paul gravely spun pots on the kitchen floor. “Mama, she’s on her way out there now,” the boy reported to January. “Juliette Gallier’s son was took bad with fever yesterday, so Mama figured Aunt Minou would be all right, with all her friends there that’ve had babies, and you, and Grand-mère, even if a message didn’t get to you in time. She left ’bout an hour ago.”

January nodded. “Did Nicole Perret and her husband stay in town for some reason?”

The boy frowned. “I don’t know,” he said. “I know they were getting ready Thursday night—they sent their heavy stuff that Zizi-Marie and I packed—and they were going to go Friday morning first thing. I walked past there today and the place is all locked and the plank up.” He set the skillet on the back of the stove and gathered the assortment of bowls from the table in which sausage, onion, celery, and peppers had already been neatly chopped. “You care to come back here for supper before you go on to the Hospital, Uncle Ben? I’m making
callas.”

“You got a deal there.” Young as he was, Gabriel made the best deep-fried rice-balls January had ever tasted.

After checking on his brother-in-law’s progress—scarcely necessary, since Paul Corbier had never developed the jaundice stage of the fever and was well on his way to recovery—exhausted as he was, January made his way down Rue Toulouse to the Cathedral to hear Mass and
light candles for the safe recovery of Minou, and the safe passage of little Charles-Henri through the coming weeks. It was difficult to find a space unoccupied before the Virgin’s altar to set the two new votives. You would need a forest fire of lights, he thought, gazing at the soft-glowing holocaust of yellow wax, to safeguard all who stand in need of it now.

He set up a candle for Cora Chouteau as well.

Returning home in the smoky glare of sunset he kept glancing behind him, certain that Shaw was watching the place, positive that he was again being followed. He checked the garçonnière thoroughly—or as thoroughly as his fatigue would let him—for signs that it had been entered, then lay for a long time listening to the distant rattle of drums from the direction of Congo Square. He wondered whether Cora had succeeded in getting herself caught for urging Gervase to escape and if she had given his name to the City Guards.

The worst of it was that he didn’t know. He didn’t know how he could find out, either.

He could only wait for the trap to close.

He slept, but not well.

The specter of arrest followed him through the streets to Olympe’s house after dark, and from there to the Hospital, to be obliterated only by blind weariness, heat, and stench. Following Soublet with his leeches and his cupping-glasses among the bodies of the sick, still he felt a kind of weary anger at the bright silken figures sipping negus on the galleries of the Hotel St. Clair, in the ballroom of the Washington Hotel.
How dare they
, he thought,
fight their trivial battles over which musicians would play at whose ball, when four miles away men and women were struggling for their lives against an invisible
slayer and the air dripped with the stink of corpses, smoke, and death?

Unreasonable, he knew. If you have the money to flee, why picnic in the garden of the Angel of Death? His mother’s presence in the city, or Minou’s, or that horrible iron-voiced Madame Redfern’s, wouldn’t lessen the suffering of Hèlier or that poor Italian, since beyond doubt they would only lock themselves behind their shutters and smudges as everyone else in town was doing.

Except people like Olympe.

And Marie Laveau.

And Delphine Lalaurie.

And Rose Vitrac.

He returned to the house on the Rue Burgundy through morning heat that he knew was already too overwhelming to permit sleep. Gabriel had sent a jar of ginger-water home with him yesterday afternoon. He was sitting on the steps drinking the last of it—and reading an editorial in the
Gazette
that claimed all reports of fever in the city were the base falsifications of alarmists—when the gate to the yard opened, and Rose Vitrac stepped through.

She looked around the yard, shielding her eyes. January recalled telling her he lived in the garçonnière behind his mother’s house, but didn’t remember whether he’d described the house or said what street it was on. He must have, he thought, ducking back into his room to catch up his waistcoat and put it on. He was buttoning it—and his shirt—as he clattered down the wooden steps.

She looked up, tension and uncertainty leaving her face like shadow before light. “I’m sorry to trouble you like this, M’sieu Janvier.”

“My fault.” He led her into the shadows under the gallery, and brought up one of the wooden chairs there. “I meant to come check on your girls Saturday, but I was
called out to Milneburgh to care for my sister. She’s not ill,” he added, seeing the flash of genuine concern on Rose Vitrac’s face. “She was brought to bed, safely delivered of a son. I did see Marie-Neige’s mother for just a moment—she’s a friend of my mother—but with everything happening I wasn’t able to speak to her.”

Mademoiselle Vitrac shook her head. “It isn’t the girls,” she told him. “Though Antoinette is still a bad case; the others seem a little better. It’s Cora Chouteau. She never came back Friday night, and I’m afraid some harm has befallen her.”

He was so tired it took a moment for the pieces to drop into place in his mind. “Cora?”

A dusky flush bloomed under Mademoiselle Vitrac’s freckles. “I didn’t know it was you she’d gone to for help until after you left,” she said. “She was helping me look after the girls. She saw you through the attic window and was afraid you’d tracked her to my school, and that I would get into trouble for harboring her.”

January held her chair for her to sit, then dashed upstairs again and fetched a couple of lemons he’d set to ripen on the windowsill, a spare cup, and the pitcher of water. When he came down again she was sitting with her brow resting on the knuckle of her forefinger, her spectacles lying on the table beside her. The lids of her shut eyes were bruised looking.

“Are you all right?”

She raised her head quickly and retrieved the spectacles, settling the light frame of gold and glass into place as the brief smile flashed into life again. “Well enough. Nursing takes it out of one so.” In contrast to her haggard face her frock of blue-and-white-striped cambric was clean and pressed, the wide white collar spotless and bright with starch.

“Where did you know Cora?” He set down the pitcher, drew his pocketknife, and cut and squeezed the lemons. “It’s not very cool, I’m afraid.”

“No, thank you, it’s exactly what I needed. Only a little,” she added, as he ducked through the kitchen doors and came out with Bella’s blue pottery sugar jar. “I’ve never really liked sweet things.” She drank gratefully, straightened her shoulders, and put on an expression of calm competence the way another woman would don a bonnet, because it was the proper thing to wear in the presence of a stranger.

“Cora is the daughter of my stepmother’s maid. Mother died when I was very small, as I said, and Father brought me down to Chouteau to raise. Chouteau was his father-in-law’s name, the original owner of the plantation. Father’s wife treated me very well until she had her own child. Then things were different. Not through her intention, you understand,” Rose Vitrac added quickly, “but because that’s what happens when a woman has a child of her own.”

Something altered in her eyes, though. A thought or memory intruded that she swiftly pushed aside. She took another sip of the lemonade. “For a long time Grand-père Chouteau’s books were my only friends. Later, Cora and I were fast friends, though I was much older. We were like sisters, despite the fact that she never could understand why I wanted to know about people who were dead and what rocks are made of.”

She smiled, as if she saw that scrappy dark slip of a girl again; perhaps seeing a gawky know-all bluestocking as well. “I remember trying to explain Plato’s Cave to her, and she dragged me out into the woods and taught me how to set a trapline. She said the next time I was contemplating shadows thrown by a fire on a cave wall at least I’d
have something to cook over that fire. When I was sick …” She paused, her mouth growing tight; and behind the spectacles her eyes flicked away again.

Silence lay on the sun-smitten yard; unsaid things hovered near enough to touch. Then, a little shakily, she went on, “In any case, Cora thought I was a lunatic. Well, everyone did. But she accepted that that was the way I was. That’s important, when you’re seventeen.”

“It is indeed.” January remembered the Austrian music-master who had never questioned what drove him to seek perfection in his art but had only shown him the stony, solitary path to that perfection. “More important than anything else, maybe.”

Mademoiselle Vitrac shook her head. “I thought so once.” She passed a hand over her forehead. “But eating is more important. And having a safe place to sleep. But it’s right up there with them, especially when the people around you—the only people you know—are all trying to get you to say you like taking care of children, and scouring pots until they shine, and sewing fine, straight seams and buttonholes so perfect they’re the talk of the neighborhood.” Her voice took on another inflection there, gently mocking other voices heard in her childhood and youth. She added reflectively, “I suppose there are people who really enjoy those things.”

“There are.” January smiled. “The seams and buttonholes part, anyway. I was married to her.”

The cloudy-bright sunflash smile appeared again—vanished. “Well, I left Chouteau when I was twenty. Cora was almost thirteen. I didn’t see her again until she knocked at my door a week ago Wednesday night. She told me about Gervase; told me she was afraid her mistress was going to try to poison her, because her master wouldn’t let her be sold. She insisted she only wanted to
see Gervase again, to see if there was something that could be worked out. She was … Cora was desperate, M’sieu Janvier. She was afraid the City Guards were after her—which is ridiculous on the face of it, with the epidemic going on—and she was terrified that her master would come after her.”

“Was she?” asked January thoughtfully.

Mademoiselle Vitrac met his eyes with cool challenge in hers. “Yes. But that isn’t the reason I believe she didn’t put monkshood in his soup as a
congé
. Cora—Cora
wouldn’t
, M’sieu Janvier. She has her faults, but she isn’t vindictive.”

“Not even to a man who raped her?”

Her eyes turned away from his, and he saw the generous square of her lower lip tuck a little, drawn between her teeth. After a long time she looked back at him, carefully covering what had flickered across her eyes. “I don’t think so. Cora—Cora doesn’t regard rape the way a … a free woman might. A woman who didn’t—didn’t expect it. I don’t say she wouldn’t have avenged it under certain circumstances, but … I don’t think she did in this case.”

She finished her lemonade quickly and turned the horn cup in both hands on the plank table, still avoiding his eyes. “Well, to make a long story short, she told me last Friday afternoon that she was going to Madame Lalaurie’s that night—”

“That’s all she said? Just that she was going?”

Mademoiselle Vitrac nodded.

“Nothing about the gate being left open? Or Madame Lalaurie giving her money?”

“Giving her money?” She looked up in surprise. “She did that? Then …” She thought again about what she was going to say, and stopped herself. “No. She didn’t say anything about that.”

“I don’t know why it’s easier for people to believe Madame Lalaurie would help Cora out of spite against Madame Redfern, rather than out of a desire to help her,” he said. “And maybe it is only spite. Emily Redfern has certainly gone out of her way to make herself obnoxious to the Creole families in town. She’s selling up her slaves to pay her husband’s creditors—Madame Redfern is—and the loss of one of them is going to put her in an extremely embarrassing position.”

Mademoiselle Vitrac chuckled, suddenly amused. “It’s always nice if you can pay off an old score and get credit for being saintly while you’re doing it: like finding a coin on the banquette. And I wouldn’t put it past Madame Lalaurie. But she’s a law unto herself, you know. That’s why she stirs up so much envy. How much money did she give Cora, do you know?”

“Twelve dollars or so, mostly in Mexican silver.”

“Oh,” she said softly, and then sighed. “Oh, well.” With a deep breath, steeling herself, she took from her belt a reticule of cardboard faced with blue silk and opened it. She withdrew a man’s linen handkerchief knotted around a heavy mass of metal that clinked, a double-strand of slightly golden pearls, and Madame Lalaurie’s small plush purse. This last she pushed toward him across the table. “That would be this, wouldn’t it?”