Fever Season (43 page)

“What do you think of her?” he asked.

“I think,” said Paul Corbier, glancing along the table at the four pairs of voracious eyes consuming the conversation
as if it were a rare and ravishing dessert, “that little pitchers have big ears.”

Olympe’s face softened, like a black Benin sculpture melting into a thousand smiling wrinkles. “So they do.” But the seeress, the Pythoness, remained in her eyes as they met January’s again. “Truth usually lies somewhere in the middle,” she said. “But I think Madame Lalaurie’s one to stay away from.”

Walking back along the Rue Burgundy after depositing Minou at her door—and being asked inside for a placatory cup of coffee—January felt again the stirring of weary anger, the bitter irony that while
his
lies or alleged lies were denounced,
hers
were overlooked, even by his own family. He felt, too, a backtaste of disappointment in his mouth, a grief—when he analyzed it—that stemmed from realizing that the woman who labored so selflessly among the horrors of the fever season was not, in fact, a good person. He had wanted very much to know that there was good in the world.

But what was
good?
Those whose lives she saved or whose ends she had made more comfortable didn’t care whether Madame Lalaurie kept her slaves chained up or ruled her daughters with an iron hand. They didn’t care that the domineering nature that so completely discounted danger of the plague would also react with single-minded venom against what it perceived as betrayal. Betrayal being, reflected January wryly, anything or anyone that didn’t accept Delphine Lalaurie’s arrangements of how the world should be.

It came to him then—and with no great feeling of surprise or discovery—that it wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that Cora had, in fact, not left Madame Lalaurie’s house that Friday night. If that formidable Creole lady had been listening to the conversation in the
courtyard and had heard Cora urge Gervase to run away—if Gervase had agreed—a quiet word to Bastien would have served to close the carriage gates. Madame would know that Cora couldn’t protest that she belonged to a third party. And Madame would have had no difficulty whatsoever in finding a buyer for the girl within days. If she kept her slaves chained—and January knew of townsfolk who did—the girl might well have had no opportunity to either effect an escape or get a message out before the brokers took her away.

The Lalauries were rich, of course, and didn’t need the money. But for a woman who would punish not only her betrayer but all who had assisted her, money was not the object. Cora had accepted her help, then tried to take one of her own slaves—her property—from her. Madame had championed Rose to the bankers, and Rose had repaid that help by harboring Cora. It would not have taken much for Madame to learn that from Cora herself.

If that were indeed what had taken place. He shook his head—he was getting as bad as Monsieur Montreuil. There had to be some way to find out.…

Motion caught his eye. Someone had stepped quickly out of one of the passways between the cottages and as quickly stepped back. He thought that whoever it was, had a club.

Déjà vu clutched him for a panic moment:
Roarke
.

No. Brinvilliers
.

He canvassed in his mind the other houses on Rue Burgundy, then walked back two or three cottages and crossed the street, and knocked on the door of a modest pink dwelling. “It’s Ben January,” he called to the muffled query from inside.

It was good, he thought, to have neighbors.

“Ben!” Crowdie Passebon was a perfumer, a rotund
and jolly man with a carefully tended mustache and black pomaded ringlets that glistened in the dim candlelight within. His wife had been given the cottage years ago, when her white protector had paid her off. January could see her over Crowdie’s shoulder, presiding over the table in the rear parlor, playing cards with an assortment of brothers, sisters, and in-laws. Once a woman mended her ways and married respectably, all but the most repressive were willing to forgive.

“Come in, come in! You’re out late—nothing amiss with your mother, I hope?”

“Not with my mother, no,” said January. “It’s just that there’s a crowd of toughs lying in wait for me, by her house. I think they’re connected with this stupidity Barnard and Louis Brinvilliers have been putting in the papers.”

“T’cha!” The perfumer drew him inside. “People don’t care what they print, nor what they believe, either. Dirty Americans.” He looked around the neat, sparsely furnished front parlor, and picked up a log of firewood as big around as January’s biceps. Most of the male relatives at the table were putting on their coats and selecting makeshift armament, too.

“Be careful!” warned Helaine Passebon. “You can be—”

“We can always say we didn’t see who they were in the dark, my love, can’t we? With those kidnappers operating last summer, surely we can be excused for taking precautions when we go strolling? Let’s go.”

There was, of course, no one in the passageway when January and an escort of eight or ten Passebons, Lamothes, and Savarys reached his mother’s cottage. He thanked them all, and invited them in for coffee: “Now I feel like a fool.”

“Better a fool with a whole head than a hero with a broken one,” replied Passebon cheerily, and kissed Livia’s hand—she had been sewing in her dressing-gown and was not pleased at the sudden intrusion. The following morning January went to the passway by the cottage and found the tracks of seven or eight men in boots, and the marks where they had leaned canes, clubs, and sword-sticks on the ground.

Rose Vitrac returned to New Orleans a few days after Easter.

January had written her whenever he could find a boat bound for the Barataria, sending her books, and news of the town. No real post existed, so he had not heard from her for nearly ten days, when he got a note telling him that she’d procured lodging in a cheap room on Victory Street, near the wharves. Not the best neighborhood in the city, but certainly just down the street from some of them, and at least none of the riverfront gangs was headquartered there. He and Hannibal borrowed a wheelbarrow from Odile Gignac’s brother and trundled her books down to her, load after load of them in the hot bright April sun. They bought jambalaya from the woman who sold it off a cart for a picayune a plate and ate it sitting on the steps up to the gallery outside Rose’s room, drank lemonade, and devoured Mexican mangoes bought on the wharf, like three children with the juice running down their chins. The local streetwalkers called greetings to Hannibal on their way down to the wharves—he knew them all by name—and January played the guitar, and Hannibal the fiddle, by the light of a couple of tallow candles far into the warm spring darkness.

“Monsieur Lyons, who runs the bookshop on the Rue
Esplanade, is paying me two dollars a volume to translate Aeschylus and Euripides,” said Rose, leaning back against the gallery post and setting aside her plate. “This place is fifty cents a week; he says there’ll be more. And Monsieur Damas on Rue Marigny said he’d pay me a little to help him read the boys’ Greek and Latin—he runs the school at the corner of the Avenue of Good Children. And more will come.”

Another boarder came up the outside stairs, a young man in clothing stiff with smeared plaster; he smiled at her as he passed and said, “Good evening, Madame Trevigne.”

January raised his eyebrows; Rose averted her face a little, said, “Don’t say it. I know. I should have more courage but … I’m still tender, as if I’ve had a bruising.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” said January. “I just wondered how you came by papers in another name.”

“You wound me,” Hannibal lowered his violin from his chin and coughed heavily. “You cut me to the quick. I’d have had our Glauk-Opis”—Rose slapped at him, laughing, at being called by the goddess Athene’s appellation—“in town sooner if those last few trading-boats to Grande Isle had been quicker—her letter to me asking for papers, and my papers, distinguishable only by their superior spelling from the illiterate scrawls turned out by city authorities for respectable free persons of color, going back the other way.”

January laughed, too, and leaned back against the other post, his arm looped over the waist of the old guitar. He wondered how long it would be before he’d have to change his name, wondered whether he would be able to work in New Orleans again. Wondered what else might be in store for him, by way of dirty tricks from Madame Lalaurie and her friends.…

A week later he saw her, as he walked down Rue de l’Hôpital toward the market: the black-lacquered carriage drawn up before the great door on Rue Royale, the matched black horses tossing their silkily groomed manes. Bastien was helping her to the banquette, her gown of plum-colored taffeta a somber note against the bright heat of the spring afternoon. Beautiful and flawless, like a queen.

On impulse, January leapt over the gutter and crossed the mud of the street. “Madame …”

Bastien, at the top of the steps already, with the door open for her, stopped and opened his mouth to make some haughty dismissal, but Madame Lalaurie’s face warmed with a smile. “M’sieu Janvier.” She held out her hand, her friendliness as gracious as a bright-lit window seen through rain. “It has been a long time.”

“Too long.” January bowed, taken aback as the image of her shadow in the corridor, of Mademoiselle Pauline’s haunted eyes and the dim shape of men with clubs and swords, melted away, suddenly ridiculous, as fevered as Montreuil’s dreams. He found himself saying, “I trust the young ladies are well?” as if Emil Barnard had never written all those letters. As if Cora had never disappeared.

“Quite well, thank you.” Behind her, Bastien still stood in the half-open door. Through it January could see a corner of a hall table, cypress wood waxed to a mirror shine, a dark-covered book and a pair of mended gloves. “And all is well with you?”

So caught was he by that generous charm, that January almost said,
Yes, perfectly well, thank you
.… In a way, it was as if she would not permit any answer but that. As if no other possible answer existed in the world she created.

Instead he said, his eyes properly cast down, “In fact it
isn’t, Madame.” It cost him an effort to speak the words. “And if you’ve read the letter columns of the newspapers you would know something of it.”

His eyes went to her face as he said it, and saw there the frown of puzzlement, the inquiring look in those dark eyes.… “Oh, good Lord, don’t tell me Dr. Barnard still carries his grudge!” She leaned forward a little, and touched his wrist lightly with one gloved hand. “I was appalled, just appalled, when someone spoke to me of that letter.”

“He wrote eight of them, Madame,” said January. “Eight that I know of. Please,” he went on, as she opened her mouth to speak again. “If I have offended you in any way, if there is the smallest basis for what he says about offering you insult or betrayal—”

She held up her hand. “No, no, Monsieur. It is I who should ask
your
pardon, for not looking into the matter immediately. My husband’s partner is a hot-headed man, a man who nurses the most foolish grievances. And if you must know,” she added, dropping her voice, a sudden twinkle in her eye, “Barnard’s a most abominable little pest. I will speak to him of the matter.”

Bastien held the door a little wider, as if to remind Madame of her obligations; January saw that the book on the table was Mercer’s
Conversations in Chemistry More Especially for the Female Sex
. Rose had that one, too. It surprised him that Madame Lalaurie would share her interest.

“I am truly sorry to impose, Madame,” he said. “But I apologize.…”

“No,” interrupted Madame firmly. “No, I will hear no apology. It is I who should apologize, for not taking steps to keep that dreadful man in proper bounds. And I will do so, M’sieu, believe me. Yes, Bastien,” she added,
with her quick, beautiful smile, “I am now done.” She caught January’s eye, as if to say,
What can one do?
and ascended the steps into the house.

The carved door closed.

Was it that simple?
January resumed his way down Rue de l’Hôpital, shaking his head. He had built her into a monster in his mind, he thought, a malevolent ghost of the fever season. And like a ghost, she had melted, when confronted, into something else.

If she was telling the truth
, whispered the voice in his mind.

If she had any intention of doing as she said.

Did her desire for perfection run so deep, that she had to be seen as saintly even by her enemies? Or was the wall so high, that divided the gracious queen from …

From what?

(From the beginning, please.…)

He stopped at the flash of something black-and-red in the corner of his eye and, turning, saw an old pralinniere go past him with a willow tray of her wares on her head and Geneviève’s old shoes on her feet.

The shoes that Rose had passed on to Cora.

He felt as if he’d tripped over something in the road; the momentary sensation of not quite knowing how to react. He’d been watching so long for either the shoes or the dress that he doubted for a moment they were the same. But there was no mistaking the scarred leather on the left toe, the fading lampblack dye, the white laces.

“Madame!” He rounded the corner, pushed through the crowd of the Rue du Levee. “Madame!”

She turned, weathered walnut face puckered with annoyance. She was shorter even than Cora, her headscarf frayed and faded but tied into a fantastic arrangement of
points that stuck out in all directions under the weight of the tray.

“What?”

“Your shoes.…”

To his surprise she whipped the tray from her head, set it down on the nearest cotton bale, and balancing gamely, pulled off each shoe in turn and slapped them into his hands. “You want the shoes, you take them! I’m tired of all this concern over a simple pair of shoes!”

She turned to go.

“Wait! No!” He stood foolishly, with the frivolous shoes like flat little pressed flowers in his hands. “Please.…”

“ ‘Where had you those shoes?’ And ‘Did the nuns say where they got them?’ They’re just
shoes!
And a hussy’s shoes, by the look of them. I should never have taken them. It’ll be summer soon, and what good are shoes in summer?”