Fever Season (17 page)

Even such life as still beat in the town—the fashionable shops, the gambling houses that ran full-blast as if
Death were not waiting like a coachman at the curb, the cafés and taverns along Bourbon and Chartres and Royale—were farther over toward the center of the old French town or closer to the river.

Here the tall town houses, the pink and green and yellow cottages were closed tight against the creeping advent of evening. The invisible plague rode the deepening twilight with the humming of the mosquitoes and the cemetery stink.

January quartered the streets between the Lalaurie house and Mademoiselle Vitrac’s school until it grew too dark to see. He studied doorways, walls, the brick of the banquette underfoot and the very ooze of crap and vegetable-parings in the gutters. It had rained at least three times since Friday, and he wasn’t even certain exactly what he sought, and in any case he didn’t find anything particularly interesting: a certain amount of spat tobacco, indicating the recent passage of American males; crumpled newspapers; three dogs and four rats in advanced states of decay; innumerable roaches; celery leaves; garbage. No pools of blood conveniently sheltered from the rain. No knives driven into doorposts. No headscarves or golden rings or pulled-loose necklaces so beloved of sensational novelists, no half-scribbled letters of enigmatic names.

He passed the house of the Perret family on Rue St. Philippe, and wondered whether they had, in fact, taken refuge on the floor of Uncle Louis’s porch within breathing distance of the lake or whether they might by some chance have remained home Friday night and seen something of Cora’s disappearance. The house was the last of a line of artisans’ cottages, backed up against the side of a modest town house; it, and about half the houses of the row, were shuttered and lightless. January hopped the gutter—for
as Gabriel had said, their plank was taken up—and rapped sharply on the shutter.

But there was no sound within the Perret house, and no light gleamed out through the jalousies. He was late already to the Hospital. He made his way there through thick hot gathering twilight, trouble and defeat in his heart.

Early the following afternoon he told Rose Vitrac what he had heard, what he had sought, and what he had not found. “I picked up this morning’s
Gazette,”
he added. “Madame Redfern is still advertising for her recapture, so Cora hasn’t been caught yet.”

Mademoiselle Vitrac sat on the corner of Antoinette’s bed, next to his hard wooden chair. She pushed her spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of her nose, and read past his shoulder the few lines printed next to the standard slug of a negress running:

“If that’s the best description of her Madame Redfern can come up with,” remarked Mademoiselle Vitrac, “Cora’s quite safe, wherever she is. ‘Medium height?’ ”

“Have you seen La Redfern?” Hannibal Sefton emerged from the small door at the top of the steps. He carried a pitcher of lemonade, the result of a windfall heap of lemons on the levee, and his dark hair hung over his shoulders and down his back. “I could eat sandwiches off the top of her head.”

January recalled that stout tiny figure in widow’s
black, and laughed. He’d been a little surprised to arrive at the school and find his friend there, but only a little. Hannibal had known Rose Vitrac, it transpired, since they’d been the only two patrons of a job-lot sale at the Customhouse to be looking at the books rather than bolts of silk or boxes of lace fans from Paris at fifty cents the dozen. In the ten months since then, she had occasionally bought books from him when he was particularly hard up for opium or medicine or had given him a place to sleep when he’d been turned out of whatever whorehouse attic he’d been occupying that week.

Now he set the pitcher down on the dresser and poured a cup for Victorine, who though weak and wasted sat propped among her pillows, and held it for her while she drank. Her fever had broken the previous night, Mademoiselle Vitrac had told January on his arrival. A dozen years seemed to have been erased from the schoolmistress’s face.

“Something clearly prevented Cora from coming back,” January said thoughtfully. “Either physically, or she saw something or someone that frightened her so badly she fled. If she was arrested, Shaw would have spoken to me by this time. Was anything happening in town Friday night? Or has there been anything taking place at nights?”

The drunken American returned to his mind, staggering along the banquette, banging on the shutters. With Gallatin Street so close and every gaming hall in town open nearly all night it was possible that two or three such men might have encountered the frail, tiny woman walking alone.…

“I was out of town that night and I’ve been in the Hospital every night for weeks. Hannibal?”

“Insensible of mortality, yet desperately mortal.…
Bar the occasional straying inebriate there’s been nothing
I’ve heard of. Though of course with so many people out of town there’s always some who’ll risk the night air, in order to help themselves to unguarded plate or trinkets—and it would take a fine, strong febrile miasma indeed to penetrate the alcoholic fog that surrounds some of our bold American boys. Have you thought that Cora might simply be living in one of the houses you passed?”

Mademoiselle Vitrac laughed, “That’s ridiculous. Isn’t it?” She looked hesitantly at January.

“What’s ridiculous about it?” demanded Hannibal indignantly. “I’ve been living in the town house of one Eustace Dèlier and his family since July, which is cheaper than paying rent to Willie the Fish over on Perdidio Street. Quieter, too, and it isn’t as if I’m taking anything from the family. How could anyone tell?”

How indeed?
January remembered the shuttered doorways, the silent houses along every street in the town.

“Why?” he asked. “Why not come back for the money?”

Hannibal shrugged. “She may have thought she was being followed. She may have actually
been
followed—it happens, to women walking alone that time of night. Or she may have met some friend of Otis Redfern’s, someone who could peach on her. For all we know, her Gervase may have lied to Madame Lalaurie about what Cora told him. Cora may be hiding somewhere in town waiting her chance to get him away.”

“Reasoning that he needed to be rescued at once from a woman who tortures her slaves to the sound of screams and clanking chains,” finished January dryly.

Mademoiselle Vitrac, who had gone to the end of the empty bed where she’d left the armload of clean linen she’d brought up, straightened and turned as if burned.
“What?”

“According to Madame Lalaurie’s neighbor, cries and groans issue from the house on a regular basis.”

“And I suppose according to this
man,”
and the twist of her voice made the word the most venomous of insults, “Madame Lalaurie also entertains a regiment of lovers, like the Empress Catherine of Russia? Or practices poisoning slaves for the entertainment of watching them die, like Cleopatra? Or threw that little girl off the roof last year, the way the Americans claimed she did? Or any of those other things that
men
put about concerning any woman who’s competent in business, beautiful, wealthy, and socially more prominent than they are? Any woman who doesn’t
need
a man around to run her life?”

She caught up the basket and strode from the attic, jaw set with rage. Hannibal and January exchanged a startled look; then January rose and straightened the sheet over Antoinette. He caught up with the schoolmistress in the yard, where she was running water from the cistern into a tin tub for the sheets to soak.

“I’m sorry.” He bent to pick up the heavy tub. “I made you angry, and I didn’t—”

“No, no.” She shook her head, dried her hands on her apron—she continued the motion long after they were dry, her eyes avoiding his. “I’m sorry,” she said at last. “That was uncalled for. It was a long time ago.…”

“What was?”

“Nothing.”
For a moment he thought she would walk away, into the kitchen or back to the main house, anywhere so long as it was away from him. But she remained where she stood, though she wouldn’t face him. Her lips were set, as a man will hold still after he’s been hurt, knowing he’ll hurt more if he moves. For all the strength of her firm mouth he saw how delicate the structure of her bones was, like a long-legged bird.

“It’s nothing,” she said again.

He didn’t reply.

“I just got—very tired of having to defend loving learning above liking boys. Men. Boys. I don’t know if you understand.”

“I understand.” He wanted to touch her hand in comfort but sensed that to do so would turn her from him, perhaps forever. “At least in part. My mama thought I was insane, wanting to do nothing but play the piano.” Other boys hadn’t been particularly forgiving about it, either.

Rose Vitrac nodded, but still didn’t look at him. The rain that rolled in from the Gulf every afternoon was gathering fast overhead, the air thick with it, and with the whirring of cicadas in the trees that grew behind and around the kitchen.

“I didn’t mind boys—men—when I was a girl. Around the plantation, I mean. I thought they were dull, was all. But they acted as if … as if my lack of interest in them made them furious. As if it were a deliberate insult, which it wasn’t. I just wasn’t stupid enough to think I could go away to school, and learn about what the world is, and how things are made, and about steam and metals and the mountains at the bottom of the sea, if I bore some man a child. And I wanted to go away, to learn, more than anything. More than life.”

She raised her eyes then, smoky green, like leaves just before they turn in autumn, fierce and intent behind the heavy cut slabs of glass.

“It was so
disproportionate,”
she said, wondering at it still, after all the years. “Not just the dirty names, but them lying in wait for me. I never understood why they couldn’t just leave me alone.”

Because they were boys
, thought January, to whom the answer was obvious, if not explicable. He understood
without being able to explain how it is with boys, who cannot endure being ignored by a woman, any woman. And he knew from his own dealings with the quadroon and octoroon boys in his own schooldays as the darkest boy in the little academy as well as the biggest—boys as fair as Hèlier and as proud of their fairness—that boys egg each other on.

No wonder Montreuil’s rumormongering touched her on the raw.

But all he could say was, “I’m sorry.” He carried the tin tub to the table by the kitchen’s open door, where the inevitable gallery overhead would protect it from the coming downpour. “Did you sleep last night? Then lie down for a few hours now. I don’t have to be at the Hospital until eight.”

“You don’t have to, Monsieur Janvier.”

“No,” he agreed, and smiled. “And you can make that Ben, if you want.”

She hesitated a long time, looking up again into his face. Then she said, very softly, “Thank you. Monsieur Janvier.”

She walked back to the house, and this time he did not follow, only waited until she had gone inside before he climbed the stairs to the attic himself.

January heard the violin as he climbed, entered that long, low room dense with heat. Hannibal was playing to the girls, frail airs from the west of Ireland, gentle and sad. When he came in, the fiddler reeled the music to its close, but January held up his hand and signed him to play on.

Geneviève murmured in her pain-racked sleep, nearly hidden behind the white gauze of the mosquito-bar around her bed; Victorine and Antoinette rested easily. Marie-Neige, who had come up with vinegar-water to help wash the girls, had lain down too on one of the other beds
and slept as well, even her plumpness seeming somehow fragile in repose. Of Isabel there was as usual nothing to be seen.

January scratched a lucifer to light the candle under the veilleuse, and checked the round china pot for water. He dug from his satchel the red-and-gold tin of willow bark and borage, and stood for a moment holding it near the votive light, swamped with thoughts he did not care to think.

“How do they look?” Hannibal set his fiddle aside. He’d borrowed a couple of tortoiseshell combs from Geneviève, and knotted up his long hair like a woman’s on his head.

“Better.” January put the tin and his speculations aside. He looped back the mosquito-bar around Victorine’s bed to feel her forehead, then her pulse. He was coming to know these girls a little, mostly from what Mademoiselle Vitrac said of them: Victorine’s hotheaded stubbornness, Antoinette’s day-long silences in which she’d raptly figure geometric proofs, the half-embarrassed streak of Geneviève’s sensationalism that drew that deceptively lovely girl to the gorier chapters of Roman history and the fascinated study of poisons, explosives, catapults, and mummies.

Rose’s pupils. Rose’s life.

“We’re holding them. The fever should run its course soon.”

Hannibal turned away to cough. Strangely enough with the onset of the summer fever his own consumption had gone into one of its periodic abeyances: “Just my luck,” he had remarked to January on Saturday night, “with everyone out of town and nobody hiring.” Now he said, “I met her here once or twice. Cora. I didn’t know who she was, of course.”

“The damn thing is,” said January, returning to the wooden chair, “that anything could have happened to her. The city’s no Peaceable Kingdom at the best of times, and with the streets empty and the City Guards afraid to go outside at night themselves—and small blame to them—anything could have happened. A young girl like that, wandering the streets at that hour of the night.…”

He paused. He remembered Alphonse Montreuil’s ferrety face and the way his thin white hands had picked and fidgeted with his cuffs. “What do you know about Montreuil?” he asked. Voodoos—and Marie Laveau—were not the only ones who knew everything in the town. “Alphonse Montreuil, Madame Lalaurie’s neighbor? If he was up at that hour, watching her house …”