Fever Season (41 page)

But according to Miss Claire, Rose never went to Redfern’s at all.

She has no one in New York. No one anywhere. At least when my life fell to pieces in my hand I could come home. I could come here
.

Even in defeat, Rose Vitrac had a kind of clear, cool courage that could go to an unfamiliar city and start anew.
But she had no money to get there. If she hadn’t gotten passage-money from La Redfern.…

Memory touched him as he walked on toward the brick-arcaded shadows of the market, the tall iron-crowned towers of the steamboat stacks: the memory of a dream, of shadows on a hallway wall. A tall man’s and a tiny, slender girl’s.
You’re her father
, the girl was saying.
You’re her father.…

Rose had never spoken of her home.

But once, on their first meeting, Cora had.

It was three days’ voyage to Grand Isle in the Barataria country. Froissart having canceled January’s engagement to play at the Orleans Ballroom’s Mardi Gras Ball, January would have left that day, had any boat been departing on the eve of the feast. As it was, he fumed and fretted and cursed the revelers who jammed every street and filled the endless night hours with riot. The moment
“Ite missa est”
was out of the priest’s mouth at the first Ash Wednesday Mass, January was out the Cathedral door and on his way to the levee.

Natchez Jim followed the still, green reaches of Bayou Dauphine to Lake Catahouatehe, motionless in fringes of cypress and reed, rowing or poling where there wasn’t wind to fill the lugger’s sail. January, helping on the oars or leaning on the long oak poles, watched the few houses on the banks grow more primitive with distance from the city, until they were little more than a couple of post-and-daub rooms circled by a gallery, presiding over a few arpents of indigo or rice. Now and then they’d pass the shack of a trapper or fisherman, perched on sandbars and
chênières
, but even these grew far between. They both slept with knives and pistols beneath the wadded-up jackets that
served them for pillows, and never at the same time, for the Barataría had been the sole province of slave smugglers and outlaws until very recently. There was no telling who or what might lurk in the spiderweb mazes of bayou and marsh. Still, the green-gray aisles of water hickory and tupelo, bald cypress and palmetto were hushed, save for the slap of the water on the lugger’s sides. Wind murmured among the endless reeds, and once, somewhere far off, they heard the rattle of African drums.

From Catahouatehe they entered Lake Salvator, and after that the world known as the
prairie tremblant
, the quaking lands: salt marsh, reeds, birds, February sky. Natchez Jim pointed out the salt grass that would tell a man where solid ground lay, the cattails that spoke of mud too soft to carry weight: “Even those who are born in these lands sometimes make mistakes about the walking prairie and are never seen again.” An alligator slid down the trunk of a dying cypress, gray as the fading roots left out in sun and wind.

They came ashore on Grand Isle in midmorning, at a sort of settlement of oyster fishers and trappers on the landward side of the island. The night’s fog still hung on, cottony and tasting of salt. The silence that had seemed menacing in the bayou country was calming here. Though the world slept its winter sleep still, all was lush with green.

“I’ll be here two days, maybe three.” Natchez Jim unshipped the packages he’d brought from town, tossed them on the crude plank wharf: calico, needles, coffee, a little nest of iron pans. Black-eyed women, swart-skinned men emerged from the straggle of huts and cottages among the stands of palmetto and Spanish dagger, and hastened down the path. Children darted around them like birds. From one of these January learned that the plantation
of Aramis Vitrac lay on the other side of the island, “just down that road there.” Their French was better than he’d feared it might be, though old-fashioned and strangely pronounced:
ch’min
for
chemin; l’
for
le
. Grimy, exhausted, aching in every bone and limb, he climbed the low hogback of tawny sand, through palmetto, fern, and creeper, cypress and oleander already putting forth the whites and crimsons of tropic glory. Green flats of rice bent to salt wind. On the other side of the path a work gang hacked at the ditches for next month’s sugar crop. From the top of the path he heard the surf.

He half-expected to find Rose sitting on the gallery of the three-room, post-and-daub plantation house, reading Babbage’s
Reflections on the Decline of Science in England
. Part of him, the part that had died in Paris, half-expected not to find her at all.

In fact she was working in the garden behind the house, a half-wild riot of dark-leaved azaleas, spinaches, and young peas. The rabbitty young woman who came out onto the gallery, led by what January guessed to be the single house servant, pointed her out to him. “This isn’t about that school in the city, is it? Truly, what happened there was not her fault. I know my husband’s sister, M’sieu. She is impetuous, but her heart is pure, like glass, like steel. She would give everything she owns to those she loves, or those in her care.” Her quick grin showed two teeth lost to childbearing, and she added, “Except perhaps her books.”

“I’m not from the school.” January looked gently down into the narrow, anxious face. “I’m only a friend.”

Rose sat back on her heels at the sound of the voices on the gallery. So she was watching him as he came down the gallery steps and through the neat dirt paths of the rambling garden. She pushed her spectacles straight on her
nose, and he knew by the attitude of her back, by the angle of her straight square shoulders, that she recognized him instantly. She settled back, her hands folded in her lap, until he came near.

“Ben.” She was trying to hide it, but there was deep joy in her face, her voice.

“Rose.”

Joy sprang to her face, but when he helped her to her feet she took her hand out of his at once, closing it up on itself—her lips closed, too. He saw her at war with old hurts and old fears, thinking about what she ought to say.

“I’m not here to ask anything of you,” he said. “I just wanted to see if you were all right.”

Three days’ journey down the bayous?
He could almost hear the words as they went through her mind, and he smiled at the absurdity of his own assertion.

“Well, from what you told me of your brother I knew I couldn’t write.”

It surprised her into laughter, like sunlight on the waning sea.

“I brought you some books.” He held out to her the parcel he’d carried down from town: a volume of Sappho he’d found at a Customshouse sale; Hamilton’s
Theory of Systems and Rays
from the same source; Lyell’s
Principles of Geology;
and a wonderfully hair-raising English novel by the poet Shelley’s wife. “If you weren’t here, at least I could have asked your family of you. Your sister-in-law seems a nice woman.”

“Alice is a darling. Of course Aramis—my brother—half-brother—is a complete illiterate and she’s not much better—why is it Creoles never educate their daughters?—but Alice is like Cora: willing to accept that that’s the way I am.” Her face lost the sparkle of her smile. “Did you ever find out what happened to Cora?”

January shook his head. “We caught the men who were taking people off the streets. They’d been kidnapping them out of their homes, too, some of them, and out of the sheds in the Swamp where slaves sleep out if their masters let them. Hèlier the water seller was trading the information to a tavern-keeper for a cut of the profits, when they sold them to cotton planters in the Missouri Territory.”

He saw the fragile jaw set hard and wished there were an easier way to say it, or something better to say. “I’ve been writing to brokers and authorities in Arkansas and Missouri and anywhere else we can trace the ring’s contacts. But, of course, no one’s going to admit they were buying kidnapped free men.”

She drew in breath, hard. For a time she looked genuinely sick. But all she said was, “I never thought it would be Hèlier. He was always so friendly.”

“It surprised me, too. And, of course, it was to his profit to be friendly. Maybe I should have seen it. I would have thought …” He shook his head. “He had a grievance against the entire world, larger than anything he could have felt for any individual’s rights.” He was silent for a time, plucking a long stem of the jasmine that grew up the nearby fence and turning the small gold blossoms over in his hand. Then he said, “For a time I was afraid you’d been kidnapped, too.”

“I’m sorry about that.” She answered the thought that he did not speak aloud:
Why didn’t you let me know?
“It wasn’t completely shame—well, not after the first day or two. I know how rumors operate. I’ve seen how vicious they can be, especially about women. You’ve seen it, too. Half the women in the market seem to believe Delphine Lalaurie is the Devil’s sister.”

(From the beginning again, please …)
January shook the thought away.

Rose’s mouth tightened. “People believe what they want to believe. And I … it seemed to me so deliberate. So planned. Aimed, like a gun. And like me, you’re a teacher. You depend on the goodwill of those around you for your daily bread.”

January said nothing, looking down into her eyes. Even here on the island, the old laws against women of color uncovering their hair seemed to hold, or maybe it was just the habit she’d had in the city. Like the women of color he’d seen by the wharf, she wore a tignon, white and soft and clean as it had been in the city. Her complexion had darkened with the sun of the island sunlight, matte velvet the color of cocoa.

She saw his thought, the way he’d seen hers, and her eyes fell. He felt her move away from him, not physically, but in thought. Her fingers caressed the leather of the books. “I’m sorry,” she murmured.

“I meant it when I said I didn’t come here to ask you anything, only to see that you were well. Sometimes friends do that. I’ve missed you, Rose.”

He hadn’t known how badly, until they sat on the gallery after supper—which they ate with the house girl and the cook—watching the last color stain the clouds over the Gulf and talking about Mardi Gras, and the ending of the fever, and the spectacular change in the fortunes of Emily Redfern.

“Good for her,” said Rose bluntly. And then, “I shouldn’t say that, because she sounds like a horrible woman. But Monsieur Redfern sounded like a horrible man. And in fact I wondered once or twice about whether Madame Redfern really wanted Cora found.”

She sat forward in her rough-made chair of bent willow,
leaned bare forearms on the gallery rail, and frowned in the direction of the darkening sea. “When I read that second advertisement in the paper, the one that spoke of the five thousand dollars … The name was the same, but the description was all wrong. Madame Redfern had to advertise for Cora’s capture, to look good to her creditors, but she did it in such a way that Cora would have every chance of escape.

“I think …” She drew in her breath again, and let it out, trying to speak calmly of the ruin of her dreams. “I think she must have been behind the rumors about the school somehow, trying to drive me out of town. She must have been horrified when I was actually arrested, and might be questioned. But I don’t see … she doesn’t have influence with those people. Certainly not with my investors.”

“Who were your investors?”

“Armand d’Aunoy, Placide Forstall, Edmond Dufossat, Pierre Tricou, and the Lalauries,” replied Rose promptly. “All of them old Creoles, you see. It was through Delphine Lalaurie’s kindness that the loan was forthcoming at all. Emily Redfern’s pretensions would be anathema to them.”

January nodded. “True. Even after Lieutenant Shaw mentioned that it was one of your investors—who could have been given the hint by anybody, of course—I thought it still might be Madame Redfern. But she was the only person to hire me for a private ball in all of the Mardi Gras season.” He withdrew Monday’s
Bee
from his coat, and laid it, folded to the place, on the railing of the gallery.

“ ‘Murderer?’ ” Rose took off her spectacles, held the newspaper close to the window, where the light from inside could fall on it, peering with her shortsighted eyes.
“ ‘Intolerable insult offered to a lady of quality …’?
What
lady of quality? ‘Spread lies and calumny …’? This person”—she glanced at the bottom of the letter—“This Dr. Barnard has his nerve, talking of lies and calumny. What
is
this?”

“This,” said January, “is the reason the trip down here left me penniless—and in debt to Hannibal, which has to be the greatest joke of the decade. I have exactly two pupils left and have barely worked all winter. It’s the same person,” he said, “spreading the rumors. I know it.”

She sank down in her chair with a whisper of heavy skirts. Like countrywomen or servants, she had dispensed with the multiple petticoats of fashionable wear. The dark, thick twill, dusty from the garden’s earth, became her. In the open neck of her countrywoman’s waist a small gold cross glinted, fire on the dusky skin.

“Emil Barnard,” she said. “That’s a French name.”

“He’s a Thompsonian charlatan who worked around the Charity Hospital during the epidemic,” said January. “By his accent he’s from Pau or the Languedoc, coincidentally the same part of France Nicolas Lalaurie comes from. Lalaurie’s recently taken him on as a partner.”

“I don’t …” Rose left her sentence unfinished, sat for a time running the folded paper through her fingers, as he’d seen her run the ribbons with which she’d tied back the sick girls’ hair. Then her eyes met his.

“Why?”

January slowly shook his head.

“Placide Forstall is Delphine Lalaurie’s son-in-law, you see,” Rose went on, speaking as if to herself, trying to fit pieces together. Trying to align the woman whose reputation she’d so furiously defended with the one who would so casually and so thoroughly destroy all she, Rose, had worked to create. “D’Aunoy’s her cousin. Jean Blanque
was on the board of the Louisiana State Bank; Madame knew everyone there. That’s how she influenced them to lend me the money to start the school. It has to be her. But I don’t understand why.”