Fever Season (44 page)

“What nuns?” asked January, bewildered.

The pralinniere stared at him as if it should be obvious. “The Ursulines, fool! What other nuns are there?”

She snatched up her basket, turned on her naked pink heel, and was gone, muttering to herself, “What nuns, indeed?”

Still holding the shoes in his hands, very like the idiot the old woman had called him, January started along Rue du Levee at a run.

Rose wasn’t in her room on Victory Street. “I think she gone out,” called the girl who worked at the grocery, coming into the yard while January stood irresolute in front of the crudely latched shutters of Rose’s door. “That lock don’t work, you can probably go right on in.”

And remind me never to put YOU in charge of my belongings
, thought January wryly. But he’d seen the girl—her name was Marie-Philomène—a number of times in the past week, and she knew him to be Rose’s friend.

“Did you see her go?”

Marie-Philomène nodded. “She went out to market this morning, then ’bout three, four hours ago she come runnin’ back here, and change into her nice dress, the pretty blue one with the white collar.” It was the dress Rose had worn to impress her backers at the school—merino wool, a little worn but neat and businesslike. “Gloves and everything. I think she might have been goin’ to that school she works at; she had a book with her, anyway.”

Like a Dutch still life, January saw in his mind the mended gloves, the
Conversations in Chemistry More Especially for the Female Sex
on the corner of the hall table.…

She’d gone to Madame Lalaurie’s.

Everything they had spoken of concerning that lady rushed back to him in a scalding flood: her vindictiveness, her connections with slave-dealers, her power. Her ability to seem like the kind of person who could not possibly do ill. He’d been a fool to believe her, to accept her graciousness and charm.…

Rose had recognized Geneviève’s shoes, and had learned from the pralinniere that they’d come from the charity bin of the Ursuline Order. And the only way they would have gotten there, he now knew, was through Madame Lalaurie.

Rose had gone to Madame Lalaurie’s.

And like Cora, she hadn’t come back.

•   •   •

Lieutenant Shaw was out. “Captain Tremouille got a bee up his behind again about the blacks sleeping out.” Sergeant deMezieres, on duty at the desk, shook his head. “I don’t see what business it is of anybody where they sleep, but seems a couple of those Americans whose boys were kidnapped last fall have taken it in their heads to sue the city over it. No, I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

January knew a handful of the Guards from a couple of encounters during the past year, but knew also that none of them would back him if he tried to tell them he thought a colored woman was being held prisoner by one of the town’s most prominent society matrons, particularly not in the face of Barnard’s newspaper campaign. More than likely Captain Tremouille, who was connected to three-quarters of Creole society himself, would simply ask Madame Lalaurie about it, get a startled and indignant no, and that would be that.

He said, “Thank you, sir,” and took his leave.

The sun was sinking over the glittering river, the new moon following it like a lovelorn suitor, pale and thin. The day had been a clear one, spring heat melting already into the promise of summer. Another fever season on its way. Whatever the Lalauries intended to do to keep Rose quiet—and surely she knew too much English, and too much about her own rights, to sell even to the crookedest broker—they’d do so at night.

Hannibal wasn’t at his last known lodging, the shed behind Big Annie’s house of assignation near the Basin. The cook there directed January to the establishment of Kentucky Williams, on Perdidio Street. By the time he reached there the river’s long curve was a bed of fire, the mucky gulch of Perdidio Street blue with shadow among its weeds and sheds. Few lamps were lit, and drunken, louse-ridden bravos jostled from tavern to tavern; January
nearly trod on a flatboatman who came flying out of the Cairo Saloon and plowed into the mud almost under his feet.

In a two-room shed built of old flatboat planks, January found Kentucky Williams, as tall as some men and with arms like a keelboat’s tiller, dispensing
something
from a barrel with a tin cup. January mused a little that in her five-word inquiry as to the nature of his business, three of those words were obscenities. She was already dippering up liquor for him, though. A few feet away the woman Railspike was engaged in a screaming quarrel with a prospective customer.
How do these girls ever make any money?

“He’s gone out,” said Williams. When January indicated he wasn’t interested in drinking she shifted her cigar to the corner of her mouth, took a swig from the tin cup herself, then dumped the rest of its contents back into the barrel. “You a pal of his?”

“I’m Ben January. He might have spoken of me.”

She smiled, her pockmarked face transforming, like a good-natured bulldog. “You’re Ben? Pleased to meet you.” She held out a dripping hand. “There’s some fandango tonight, they’re payin’ him to play at. Don’t he play a treat, though? Last night, with that little thing he plays—da-da-deeee-da”—she made a stab at getting the tune known as “The Beggar Boy”—“he made old Railspike cry.”

Railspike kicked her suitor—a bearded Irish bargee—bloody-mouthed into the street. She began picking up teeth from the dirt floor and pitching them after him, screaming curses all the while.

“Hannibal’s the best fiddler I’ve ever heard,” said January truthfully. “Paris, Italy, anyplace. You happen to know where he might be playing?”

“Some bunch of rich stinkards.” She spit into a corner.
“Pigs, all of ’em. Sure you don’t want a drink? You can have one free, ’cause you’re his friend.”

“Thank you, m’am,” said January, “but I need to find him fast, and I got no head for liquor, not even a tiny bit. Another time.”

She winked. “Another time, then.”

Blue shadows, and the day’s heat dense and stinking around the makeshift buildings. Another corpse—or maybe it was only a drunk—had materialized on the ground outside the Tom and Jerry. January stopped back by the Cabildo, but Shaw was still gone.

Did he
really
, he wondered as he walked up Rue St. Peter, think that Delphine Lalaurie had Rose locked in an attic someplace, waiting for dark to turn her over to the slave brokers? For a moment he felt as he had back in September, when he’d realized he was ready to bolt for the swamp at the shadow of Henri Viellard’s groom. Rose on the Lalaurie doorstep saying, I
know you sold Cora Chouteau into slavery
. And then what? “Oh, Bastien, could you please come in here and knock this girl over the head and lock her in the attic?”

Ridiculous. The woman who held the dying against her breast with that look of holy ecstasy in her face? The woman who’d reacted with such embarrassed horror at what Dr. Barnard had written? Who’d held out her hand with a twinkling smile?

And yet, January thought, wasn’t that her entire defense? That “a woman like her wouldn’t do such a thing”? A woman like her wouldn’t force her daughters to go through that scene at the piano, either—and he remembered, again, the look of terror in Pauline’s eye.

Why terror?

Jean Montalban came back to his mind, professor of law and pillar of his Paris neighborhood. Hannibal’s voice
saying,
One’s always hearing about domestic tyrants.… No one in the family dares speak of it.…
And Rose:
I don’t want a woman I’ve looked up to, as I’ve looked up to her, to be vindictive. But I don’t know
.

And he could not help remembering that Delphine Lalaurie’s house was closed in, a walled enclave—a fortress, he remembered thinking. No word of anything that happened there would ever get out.

Absurd
, he thought.
Absurd
. But it was the memory of Pauline’s fear, as well as of the book on the table, that turned his steps back to his mother’s house.

Once there, January carried a pottery jar from the kitchen up to his room, and from beneath the mattress took the powder-bottle he’d acquired from the late Mr. Gotch. He emptied its contents in the bottom of the jar, ran a fuse into it, packed the rest tight with hair and feathers from Bella’s store of fever smudges, then added as much sawdust as he could gather—Rose had mentioned it made for a more impressive explosion—from the bottom of the kindling bin. With this under his arm, he made his way down Rue St. Peter again, and along the levee to the market.

“You men want to earn half a dollar?”

It was nearly the last of his meager savings. The two carters sitting by their mule conferred, and accepted. January spent another five cents on an empty packing crate labeled
TREVELYAN BROTHERS—ST. LOUIS
, scooped it full of dockside garbage to give it weight, and pounded shut the nails on it again. “When the man comes to the gate, you keep him talking,” instructed January. “Ask for money. Tell him this was ordered for that address, but say you don’t know who at that address.”

The men exchanged a glance, and one of them bit the fifty-cent piece he’d given them. If they had any concern
about the possible legal repercussions of what they were being asked to perform, the silver content of the coin allayed them. “You got yourself a argument, brother,” said one. “But if the Guards shows up, we gone.”

“Go with my blessings,” said January. Two minutes later, walking up Rue de l’Hôpital in the thick hot twilight, he thought,
Idiot. You shouldn’t have paid them in advance
.

The tract of land on which the Lalaurie house was built had only been sold off by the Ursuline nuns a few years ago, and though fewer than five streets separated it from the noise and taverns of the levee, it was an area attractive to the wealthy in quest of lots on which to build houses larger than those close to the center of the old town. Several houses were in various stages of construction on the opposite side of the street in the direction of the levee, heaps of bricks and timber lying between the half-erected walls.

The builders’ men had gone for the day. January picked his way through the tangle of beams and potholes to the rear wall of the next-door quarters, moved forward until the high wall of the Lalaurie compound was in view, and waited, the pottery jug at his feet.

A little to his surprise, the two carters did exactly as he had asked them. The shorter and darker man pounded on the gate while his gangly, saddle-colored partner held the mule’s head. Below the bed of the wagon January could see the bottom of the carriage gate, the gate through which he had been admitted dozens of times last spring and summer, to give lessons to Louise Marie and Pauline. As he sat waiting a thought crossed his mind, detached and abstract: he had never seen pets in the Lalaurie house. None at all.

The moment he saw the gate open, and saw the polished pumps that had to be Bastien’s, he scratched a lucifer
match on the brick wall beside him, lit the fuse, left the makeshift bomb
(Thank you, Rose—Thank you, Geneviève)
where it lay, and walked quickly up the downstream side of the street, counting off seconds in his mind.

The carters could have played in Shakespeare at Caldwell’s Theatre. Bastien tried to shut the gates; the shorter man held it, arguing volubly. January crossed the street, came down along the wall on the upstream side, inconspicuous in the near-darkness in his rough clothing, seeing now Bastien’s sleek black curls, his plump, muscular back in that neat violet livery.

“Now I been told to get the money for this here lime from you, ’cause I paid for it at the dock,” the carter was saying, throwing just the slightest hint of inebriated drawl in his voice.

“I’m terribly sorry you were such a fool as to do so ill-judged a thing,” retorted Bastien, “but this is not my affair and Madame has placed no such order.”

“Oh, Madame tells you all about every order she place, does she?” put in the taller carter sarcastically.

“In fact, Madame does.” Bastien drew himself up, stung. “I realize it’s inconceivable to someone of your sort that—”

At that point, January’s homemade bomb went off. There was a crack like a cannon-shot, and a great gout of stinking smoke and burning sawdust bellied forth from behind the wall. To his credit, Bastien jerked the gate shut behind him before running toward the place, only steps behind the shorter carter and any number of idlers from Gallatin Street and the wharves who came pouring up the street at a run. The taller carter was hanging on to the mule’s head for dear life as the animal reared and snorted, and as January slipped through the gate and
closed it behind him, the man winked and signed him good luck.

The house was tall. Both the main block and the kitchen wing towered three floors, the galleries impenetrable shadow. Lights on the ground floor of the main house, glowing slits through shutters already bolted; none above. If there was a fandango somewhere tonight it was a good guess Madame and her husband were in attendance. Either that or they were out looking up some of Jean Blanque’s old slave-trade contacts to dispose of Rose.

Over the wall he could hear men’s voices, rough nasal American. Of course at the slightest promise of trouble every drunk filibuster and out-of-work roustabout on Gallatin Street would materialize in minutes, eager for loot or diversion or whatever the confusion might bring.

Keeping under the shelter of the kitchen gallery, January headed for the stairs.

The kitchen, as usual, was shut and locked, but the dimmest suggestion of redness outlined the louvers; and as he passed its door he felt the glow of the stove’s heat within. As warm as the day had been it must have been like an Indian sweat-bath in there. Foolish to keep it closed up, even if no supper were being cooked tonight. The rooms above it would be ovens.…

He heard the soft clink of chain on bricks within.

No supper, if they were at this fandango tonight. No one in the kitchen.
Not the attic, the kitchen …

He pushed open the door, and, conscious of Bastien’s imminent return, stepped through and closed it swiftly behind him.