Fever Season (23 page)

“I’ll have Trudi send one of the girls over with your breakfast.”

Cursing, the doctor pushed through the door, jostling January as he passed, so heavily that January was thrown up against the framing. January watched him stomp through the mud, pausing to finish his bottle with another long pull, then send it spinning away above the barrelhouse roof.

“Ye’ll have to excuse him.” Liam Roarke guided January out into the doubtful shelter of the porch that ran around three sides of the building. “Settin’ up a fever hospital in that old warehouse of his was the one decent act the man’s ever done, and without help nor even a relief that can be counted on, the rage of it and the helplessness get to him. And he’s bone weary.”

As he had been even in the dead of night in the Charity Hospital, Roarke’s chin was cleanly shaven between the golden wings of his side-whiskers and his linen was spotless, his coat pressed. “As who is not?” January said. “Did you find your friend?”

Roarke hesitated, some thought passing fast behind the pale eyes. Then he said, “That I did not. I fear the fever’s took him, poor fellow. And yoursel, sir? You’re one of the surgeons at the Hospital, are you not? And no man’s bhoy?”

“That’s true, yes, sir,” said January. “I looked in, searching for a friend who’s taken ill, no one knows where. I suppose I should only be glad this part of town has someone willing to run a hospital, with the Charity and the regular clinics overflowing.”

“He’s a good man in his heart, you know.” Roarke
gazed sadly in the direction of the shambling labyrinth that was St. Gertrude’s. “I’ve never been one as has a spark in his throat, as they say, but I can pity a man who has. You say you’re after searchin’ for a friend? It’s turn and turn about, then. Come over there wi’ me. I’ll make him take you round, never fear.”

“I’ve had a look already. I’d best be on my way.” The rain had ceased, the day’s heat redoubled. January, still in the black coat and white shirt of his medical office, felt himself more and more acutely a target in a hostile land. Exhaustion descended on him, the endless night and the day that had gone before it crushing him like seven hundredweight of chain.

“Come back, then, when you’ve a chance.” Roarke smiled in the shadows of the porch. “The fact is, Gerald needs a surgeon in the place, and it might so be he’d pay you better than the Charity folk do.”

And what makes you think I can get to the clinic and back alive? Even if I didn’t mind being belabored with a cane if I should happen to forget to call that drunken lout “sir”?

Nevertheless January thanked him and left, to make his way along Rue des Ramparts. At St. Anthony’s Chapel he stopped, and in its silent dimness knelt for a time, glad only for the silence and the peace, telling over the prayers of the rosary in the dark.

Praying that he would survive the fever season.

Praying that he would not come one day to Olympe’s house to find her, and Paul, and the children dead with blackened faces in puddles of their own bile.

Praying that he would not receive today, or tomorrow, a letter from Milneburgh informing him that his mother, or Dominique, or her child, had succumbed.

Praying that he would not be left to face the remainder of his life utterly alone.

It was the second of October. Only a few weeks, he thought, until the summer broke. Until the fever broke.

When he emerged from the chapel, he knew that he ought to go to Mademoiselle Vitrac’s, to relieve her for a time of her nursing duties, as Hannibal had done. But he went home instead. He stripped and bathed in tepid rainwater from the cistern and for a long time lay on his bed, the heat of the day on him like a soaked blanket. Remembering Ayasha. Trying to remember his father’s face. Seeing in his mind the straight slim figure of Cora Chouteau, walking up Rue de l’Hôpital in the dark.

Through the open windows he smelled the smoke of burning, and he slept at last in the terrible silence of Bronze John’s domination of the town.

He reached the school a few hours before sunset the following day and related to Mademoiselle Vitrac all that had befallen him since leaving Charity Hospital and all he had learned or guessed. “Not that the Guards will do a thing about it,” he concluded bitterly. He tilted the veilleuse, carried the cup of tisane to Geneviève’s bed.

The girl was dying. January could see it in her face. There was little more to her than a skeleton, her exquisite complexion livid orange with the mask of fever. Yesterday Mademoiselle Vitrac had cropped the girl’s long black hair, which tangled and knotted with Geneviève’s helpless thrashing. January had suggested it, a few days ago; now he was sorry, knowing she would be buried thus. She looked like one of the dried Indian mummies that trappers found sometimes in the mounds and caves upriver.

“I can’t believe they could be just—just selling them.” Mademoiselle Vitrac’s voice was shaky, as she bent over Victorine, sponging the girl’s thin body. “I mean, the first
time this Madame Perret, or the woman Lu, could slip away, couldn’t they go to—Well, not the local magistrate, but someone … and say,
I was kidnapped
? Their free status is on public record here.…”

“And who’s going to check?” said January softly, when she failed to finish her sentence. “These are people who have no family in town. People who mostly don’t even speak English. And what white man is going to run the risk of alienating all his neighbors, whose help he depends on, for the sake of a man or a woman who’s probably lying? On the frontier, where people must have each other’s help at picking time and planting? Men don’t need to be evil, Mademoiselle. They just have to be bad enough to say,
There’s nothing I can do.”
He straightened up. “How well is this place locked and bolted at night?”

“Pretty well.” She picked up her bowl of vinegar-water and brought it to the dying girl’s bed. “And Madame Deslormes at the grocery on the corner and the Widow Lyons across the way both see me every day.”

January nodded. Still he felt uneasy, but knew a part of that uneasiness was less for her than for Olympe and her husband, for young Gabriel and Zizi-Marie. These marauders did not content themselves with taking people whom no one would miss from their homes or from the tiny rooms they’d rented in the back streets of the town.
Three or four of them, wandering the streets with clubs
. The men who’d tried to abduct him.

The men who’d taken Cora Chouteau off the banquette.

Mademoiselle Vitrac bent over Geneviève’s bed and sponged the girl’s heat-blotched face and body. “She was the most beautiful of them, you know,” she said, keeping her voice matter-of-fact; a line of concentration marked her fine-drawn brows, as if she were doing accounts or
grinding up mineral salts for a chemical experiment. “Her mother was just waiting for her to finish ‘this nonsense’ as she called it, and start going to the Blue Ribbon Balls. She seemed to take it as a personal insult that Geneviève wouldn’t consent to be the most beautiful girl there, so that
she
could be the mother of the most beautiful girl.” She shook her head. “We—Geneviève and I—had one quarrel with her already, at the beginning of this year. She was so afraid of it,” she added softly. “Geneviève.”

I’m not very good at this
, she had said to him once, and she still wasn’t. Spilled water blotted her dress and soaked her sleeves, dribbling black patterns on the floor all around. She’d pulled off her tignon in the heat, and her dark hair, drawn back in a clumsy knot, was beaded with sweat, long curly tendrils of it escaping to drift around her face. Her hands were blistered with the unaccustomed work, and January saw how achingly she moved.

“It’s funny,” she went on, more softly. “Because when it came to chemical experiments, to fire and explosions, she was—not even
brave
is the word, she simply didn’t think about fear. She even learned how to make bombs, stuffing gunpowder in the bottom of a clay jar and packing it in with cotton, and sawdust to take fire in the explosion and make the explosion seem bigger—I remember her timing how long it took a fuse to burn. The other girls were terrified.”

Her mouth curved, cherishing the memory, bright as a stand of daffodils that catches sunlight before the engulfing shadow of storm.

In time Geneviève’s feeble movements ceased and she lay with shut eyes, beaten. Mademoiselle Vitrac got quickly to her feet and went from the room, leaving the vinegar-water where it was. Leadenly weary, January finished dosing Antoinette and went to Geneviève, but the
girl still breathed, though barely. He wrung out the sponge, finished neatly the job Mademoiselle Vitrac had abandoned, and dressed the girl again—it was like dressing a stick-puppet—in one of the nightgowns that he, or Hannibal, or Mademoiselle Vitrac endlessly boiled and washed.

Some said the clothing and bedding of fever victims ought to be burned. With only a few paying pupils, Rose Vitrac could barely afford to put food on the table, much less buy new sheets and nightclothes, or even pay a laundress to do them. More than anything in the world he wanted to go down after her, to comfort her in the face of the approaching death of the girl who had been her pupil and her friend.

But all he could see in his mind was Ayasha with her lifeless fingers stretched toward the water pitcher, and there were no words in his mind to say. And in any case he would not leave the dying girl alone.

He was still sitting by Geneviève’s bed, holding her burning hand, when he heard the stairs creak, and the rustle of skirts.

“I’m sorry. That was inexcusable of me.”

In the dimness of the attic he could see that she’d slopped water on her face to take down the swelling of tears.

“I was here. And she wouldn’t have known.”

“They do know.” She crossed from the door and sat on the bed next to Geneviève’s pillow, stroked the hacked bristle of hair. “At least I did.”

“Did you have the fever?”

She shook her head. “I …” She hesitated for a long time. Then, very carefully, “I was sick. Eight, nine years ago, just before I went away to school in New York. Father told me later I didn’t know one person from another, but that isn’t how I remember it. Cora …”

She broke off again, wrapped her arms around herself, though the attic was sweltering. Looked down into the face of the dying girl.

Her words came slowly: “I don’t know whether this really happened or not. But I remember one night when Cora heard my father pass the door. She went out into the hall and told him, ‘The least you could do is go in there and hold on to her hand.’ ”

“Did he?” He saw it in his mind, as he saw Cora’s small straight shadow disappearing in the darkness of the street: the shadow of the dark girl on the wall, tiny before the tall white man. Arms folded, looking up at him the way she’d looked up at January under the shadows of the Pellicots’ kitchen gallery.

“His wife told him not to.” Mademoiselle Vitrac sounded resigned about it, accepting that such was how things were.

“Were you contagious?”

It’s not bad if you don’t fight.…

He knew Rose had not been contagious.

She was silent for perhaps a minute. Then, “I wasn’t an easy child to have in the house.” She touched Geneviève’s hand, her own cut and bandaged fingers rendered exquisite and alien, like intricately jointed bamboo, by the knife of sunlight that fell across them. “Like Geneviève. And Victorine, and Isabel, and some of the others. The ones who can’t be what their mothers were, or want them to be. The ones who see too clearly, and speak too frankly. The ones who … who damage themselves and their position in the house every time they open their mouths, but can’t keep from doing so.”

He saw in the long oval bones of her face the face of a proud, gawky child: erudite, stuck-up, above herself and
everyone around her. As she would have been to him, he realized, had they not met as they had.

A shudder went through her, tears suppressed as they had always been suppressed. “She never had a chance.”

January gathered her against him as he would have gathered one of his sisters, had she been in pain, and felt the woman’s body stiffen like wood. He released her, stepped back the instant before she wrenched herself from him.…

“Don’t …”

He stood back helplessly, his hands at his sides.

She was trembling, looking away from him. “I …”

There wasn’t a thing she could say without saying everything. He could feel the knot of it, wringing tighter and tighter, like a noose of pain.

To sever it he said, “She had what no one else could have given her: the assurance that there was a path for her, even if it was narrow and lonely.” What he wanted to say was not that: what he wanted to say was,
Don’t turn away! I wasn’t the one who hurt you!
But he knew that did not matter, against the touch and the strength of a man’s hands, and the smell of a man’s sweat. Some women never recovered.

If you don’t struggle it’s not so bad
.

He forced himself to speak of this dying girl, whom he had never truly known, instead of to the bitter, struggling adolescent trapped within the schoolmistress’s brittle calm.

“At least she knew someone else had walked that way before her.”

The schoolmistress fought for a moment more to steady her breath, to regain her composure. To pretend she hadn’t cried out, and pulled herself from what she knew was offered only in comfort and in love. Then she turned
her face toward him again, and said, “I’m sorry. It’s … she was the oldest of them, and the closest to me.”

She looked down at Geneviève’s face again, and from being, a moment ago, a shield against him, the girl became again a friend in her own right, a loved friend with one foot in Charon’s boat.

“I tried. I did try. If she hadn’t been so bright—if she hadn’t been so cutting about everything she saw and heard—her mother would have been gladder to have her with her in Mandeville.”

“We can’t know that,” said January steadily, his eyes meeting hers. Her trembling ceased, and there was only grief, and no more vile memory, in her face. “We can’t know what would or would not have befallen her, if she’d gone with her mother out of town. I suspect she was happier here, without her mother on her to put up her hair and go to the balls.”