Fever Season (2 page)

A glimpse from the corner of his eye as he dodged across Jackson Street among the ambulance wagons, the produce carts, the drays of sugar and indigo on their way to the levee from the inland plantations along the lake. A horse lurched to a stop, tossed its head with an angry snort. A driver cursed in Spanish. Steps away, Freret Street lay deserted under the hot weight of brazen sky, but January knew he wasn’t alone. He quickened his stride.

If he walked down Canal Street, among the hip-high weeds, strewn garbage, and dead dogs of what French and Americans alike called the “neutral ground,” he would be spared at least some of the stenches of the cemeteries. There seething corpses lined the walls three-deep, like bales on the levee, waiting for tomb space and the men to bear them in. But though he was an accredited member of the Paris College of Surgeons who had practiced at the Hôtel Dieu in that city for six years, January was perfectly well aware that he looked like a field hand: six feet, three inches tall, powerfully built despite the dust of gray that now powdered his short-cropped hair, his skin as glossy black as his African father’s had been. That was one reason why it was only in the fever season that he practiced medicine. The rest of the year he played piano to earn his bread. It was an injustice he’d accepted, upon his return to New Orleans from Paris, nearly a year ago.

And things had changed in the city since his departure in 1817.

So he followed Rue Villere downstream, past shabby cottages and grubby shacks in rank jungles of weed, the stench of untended privies, of gutters uncleaned for weeks, and of sties and coops, neglected by their owners, thick as
fog around him. An unpaved path, mucky from the morning’s rainstorm, led him toward the river.

He was definitely being followed. He didn’t want to look back; he couldn’t tell by whom.

Rue Douane, the first street of the French town itself, was usually alive with cart and foot traffic. Today, there were only two women in the faded calico of poverty, hurrying with bowed heads. Those, and the dead-carts that lurched toward the cemeteries with their stiffened cargoes wrapped in cheap Osnaburg sheets and their throbbing armies of attendant flies. Like the Americans uptown, the householders here burned piles of hair and hooves from the slaughteryards or smudges made up with gunpowder, to clear the disease-ridden miasma from the air. The smell was foul—charnel house and battlefield rolled into one. The Four Horsemen, January thought, coughing, would bear that smell on their wake when they reaped the plain of Armageddon with their swords.

He cut across Rue Douane midway between two streets, mud sucking his boots. Just before he sprang across the gutter he glanced back. He saw no one.

What do I do?
he wondered.
What do I do?

The houses on the other side of Basin Street were mostly small, but built better than those that bordered the swampy town pastures. Neat cottages of plaster and brick lined Rue des Ramparts and Rue Burgundy, pale yellows and celery greens, pinks and sky blues under the savage light. For years, wealthy bankers and planters and brokers had been buying their quadroon and mulatto mistresses dwellings like these, along the back edge of the old town. These days just as many belonged to respectable craftsmen and artisans, clerks and tailors, whose wives and families turned their eyes from their sisters and cousins and neighbors of the demimonde.

His mother’s protector had bought her such a house, when January was eight and his full-sister, six. The daughter his mother had subsequently borne to St. Denis Janvier had recently been given the deed to such a house herself, by a fat, indolent Creole named Viellard.

Most stood empty now, shuttered tight in the hot glare of morning. When Bronze John came calling, a lot of people, no matter how strait their circumstances, came up with the money to remove for the summer to one of the hotels or cottages on the shores of the lake, where the air was cleaner, in Milneburgh or Mandeville or Spanish Fort. Those who hadn’t done so from fear of the fever, which came nearly every year—or from the horrible combination of summer decay and summer insects—reconsidered the matter when the first cases of the cholera were diagnosed.

As he walked along Rue Burgundy, January counted off houses. After sixteen years’ absence he was just coming to know these people again. The yellow cottage belonged to his mother’s dressmaker; the two-and-a-half-story town house occupied by Dr. LaPlante and his family (currently residing at his cottage in Milneburgh); the pink cottage owned by the perfumer Crowdie Passebon. The planks that ordinarily bridged the deep gutter from the unpaved street to the brick banquette were one and all propped beside the high brick steps. If anyone was home, no one was receiving visitors. Narrow spaces gapped between house and house, pass-throughs, leading back to the yards behind where slant-roofed outbuildings, of a sort January had never seen in any other city, housed kitchens, laundries, storerooms at ground level and slave quarters above. Each house, even the cottages, was an enclave; each a little fortress walled into itself. In New Orleans there was no such tangle of alleys as had cut and twisted through the
inner arrondissements of Paris, enabling a man to duck inconspicuously from one street to the next.

But January had been brought up on this street and knew the quirks and features of any number of those hidden courts. As he approached the pale green cottage belonging to his mother’s bosom-bow Agnes Pellicot, he found his muscles growing tense.

Agnes and her daughters had departed, like January’s mother, when the first cases of cholera were rumored in June. But the cottage, given to Agnes by her protector—with a sizable annuity—when they had terminated their relationship upon the occasion of his second marriage, had undergone a number of remodelings in the years before Agnes owned it. One of these had included the erection of an outside stairway up the rear wall of the building and the enlargement of one of the attic gable windows to form a door.

That door was kept firmly locked, but the window of the gable beside it had only a catch. He might be perilously close to his forty-first birthday, but January was fairly sure he could make the short scramble across the roof to effect an entrance.

Whether he could do so with sufficient speed to trap his pursuer was, of course, another question.

He counted steps in his mind, tallied details. The possibility that whoever dogged him might be armed tugged uncomfortably; so did the thought that there might be more than one of them.

He carried his medical bag, part of his persona as surgeon, like the tall-crowned beaver hat or the threadbare black wool coat that became a portable bake oven in heat like this. Casually he brought the bag up under his arm and fumbled at the catch like an absentminded man trying
to open it while pondering something else, just as he turned into the pass-through that led to the Pellicot yard.

The moment he was out of sight of the street he bolted down the narrow space like a spurred horse, tearing off his hat as he ran, clutching the black leather satchel tight. He whipped through the wooden gate and shucked his coat as he darted across the dusty yard, flung himself up the outside stairs as though the Platt-Eye Devil of childhood legends ran behind. At the top he paused only long enough to find his longest-bladed scalpel, then tossed bag and hat and coat on the topmost step to make the quick, careful scramble across twenty feet of roof to the other gable.

With the back edge of the scalpel it was ridiculously easy to flip the window catch. All these cottages were built the same, and he knew the layout of the Pellicot attic was identical to that of his mother’s home. Two chambers and a perilously steep wooden stairway that led down through the
cabinet
tacked onto the back of the house, a little pantry-cum-warming room opening in its turn into the rear parlor, which served as a dining room. Within moments January crossed through the dining room, through the archway to the front parlor, and flipped the catch on the shutters of the tall French doors that looked onto the street. Stepping out, he closed the shutters silently behind him and rounded the corner of the house into the pass-through again.

“You wanted to have a word with me?”

The woman—girl—who stood peeking cautiously through the gate into the yard spun, her hand flying to her mouth. She blundered back against the fence, catching the gate for support. January said, “There’s no way out, that way.”

He walked down the passage, more wary that she’d try
to bolt past him or that someone else might come in behind, than from any fear that she might be armed. As he got close he saw that her clothing was plain but very well cut. The dark red cotton gown, high waisted and with narrow sleeves made down to the wrists, was the kind a young girl of good family might wear. By the fit of the bust, it hadn’t been made for her. The headcloth mandated by law for all black or colored women was dark red too, but tied as a servant, or a country-bred slave, would tie it. His younger sister Dominique had tried to initiate him into the intricacies of the proper tying of tignons into fanciful, seductive, or outrageous styles in defiance of the law, but without much success. January knew a confection when he saw one, though, and this wasn’t a confection. It was a headcloth, the mark of a slave’s humility.

“Why did you follow me?”

“Are you M’sieu Benjamin Janvier?” The girl spoke the sloppy Creole French of the plantations, more than half African. Any town mother would have whaled the life out of a girl who used
vo
for
vous
, at least any mother who’d have been able to afford that dress.

“That’s me.” He kept his voice as unalarming as possible. At his size, he was aware that he was alarming enough. “And I have the honor of addressing …?”

She straightened her shoulders in her red dress, a little slip of a thing, with a round defiant chin and a trace of hardness in her eyes that may have been fear.
Pretty
, January thought. He could have picked her up in one hand.

“I’m Cora …” She hesitated, fishing, then went on with just a touch of defiance, “…  LaFayette. Cora LaFayette. I needed to speak with you, Michie Janvier. Are you a music teacher?”

“I am that,” he sighed.

After ten years he still didn’t know whether to feel
amused or angry about having to work as a musician. There were free men of color who made a living—and a good living—as physicians and surgeons in New Orleans, but they were without exception light of skin. Quadroon or octoroon, they were for the most part offspring of white men and the women for whom they bought these pastel houses along this street.

In his way, St. Denis Janvier had been as much an optimist as his mulatto plaçée’s son had been, concerning the chances a man with three African grandparents would have of earning his living in medicine in New Orleans or elsewhere, Paris training or no Paris training.

Cora LaFayette looked down, small face a careful blank, rallying her words, desperate to get them right. January relaxed a little and smiled, folding his big arms in their sweat-damp muslin sleeves. “You followed me all the way from Charity Hospital to ask what I charge for lessons?”

Her head came up, like a deer startled in the woods, and she saw the gentle teasing in his eyes. Something eased, very slightly, in the corners of that expressionless little mouth.

But she did not smile. She dwelled in a country where smiles had been forgotten years ago. “Do you teach the daughters of a lady name Lalaurie? Great big green house on Rue Royale?”

January nodded again. He glanced around him at the narrow tunnel they stood in, between Agnes Pellicot’s house and that of Guillaume Morisset the tailor, also out of town. The slot of shadow stank of mud and sewage where mosquito-wrigglers flickered among the scum. “You want to go somewhere a little more comfortable, Mademoiselle LaFayette? The town’s half closed up, but at
Breyard’s Grocery over on Rue Toulouse I can get you a lemonade.”

Eyes that seemed too big for that pointed, delicate face raised quickly and as quickly darted away. She shook her head, a tiny gesture, and January stepped past her, still cautiously, to push open the gate that led into the Pellicot yard. The French doors into the house were shuttered, as were the doors of the service building at the back of the yard. The brick-flagged porch below the slave quarters’ gallery was a slab of blue-black velvet. January led the girl to the plank bench outside the kitchen where Agnes’s cook Elvire would sit to shell peas or pluck fowl, and said, “Wait here a minute for me, if you would, Mamzelle.”

She stiffened, panic in her eyes.

“I’m just going around to latch the door. I’ll be back.”

He was conscious of her, bolt upright and motionless as a scared cat, on the bench as he crossed through the yard again, down the blue tunnel of passway, and out to Rue Burgundy. He stepped back through the French doors into Agnes Pellicot’s parlor and latched them; and on the way through the
cabinet
pantry to the stairs, he found a cheap horn cup on a shelf beside the French china dinner service. This he carried in his waistcoat pocket up the stairs, through the attic, out the window, across the roof, and down the outside stairs, marveling that he’d made that circuit earlier at a dead run. It was a wonder what you could do with a good scare in you.

When he returned to the yard Cora LaFayette was gone. He saw her a moment later just within the gate to the pass-through out to the street, poised to run.

He waited in the middle of the yard, as he’d have waited not to startle a deer in the cypress swamps behind the plantation where he’d been born. In time she came
away from the gate and hurried to the bench again, keeping close to the wall.

Runaway
, he thought. And making more of it than she needed to. Did she really think that with the fever and the cholera stalking the streets, with the town half-empty and fear like the stench of the smoke in the air, that anybody would be chasing a runaway slave?

He filled the horn cup from the coopered cistern in the corner of the yard and held it out to her. Cora drank thirstily, and he sat on the other end of the bench, laying coat, hat, and satchel down beside him. Aside from her dress, which was not a countrywoman’s dress, her hands and face were clean. She’d been in town a little time.