Fever Season (6 page)

She made a quick gesture with her small hands and faced back around. Beyond the shade of the gallery the sun smote the yard like a brass hammer. The dead-carts had finished their morning rounds, and the voice of a man or a woman in the street, or the creak of a wagon, fell singly into the hush.

“You know how they do,” Cora said. “She tried to get me sent out to the fields, he said I was to work in the house. She said if I worked the house I’d do the chambers and the lamps. He said no, I had to do something genteel, like sewing. Me, I’d rather have cut cane than be under the same roof with her all day. She puts me hemming sheets and then makes me pick out every stitch ’cos the hem’s too wide, she says. And then he says, to
me
he says, ‘Don’t rub up against her, don’t be always givin’ her trouble, can’t you see what you do’ll come back on me?’ What I do comes back on
him?”

She drew another breath, anger narrowing her dark eyes. “I never killed him. I ran away. I had to run away. It’s her that was out to kill
me.”

January raised his eyebrows. “If every woman killed every wench her husband had, there’d be dead women lying like a carpet from here to the Moon.”

“Yeah.” Cora’s mouth quirked with a kind of grim humor. “But I heard them fighting. I heard her say, ‘You sell that slut of yours if we’re so hard up for money from your gambling’—and he was a terrible gambler, Michie Redfern was. And Michie Redfern says, ‘You’re not telling me what to do, woman, and if you take and sell her I swear to you I’ll find her again and it’ll be the worse for you.’ Not that he cared about
me
, Michie Janvier. But M’am Redfern is an overbearing woman, a Boston Yankee woman, always on about how much money her daddy had had, and Michie Redfern wasn’t going to take anything off her. You known men like that.”

January had known men like that.

“That’s still a long way from her killing you.”

“Michie Janvier, I swear what I’m telling you is true.” She came back and sat on the end of the bench that was drawn up near the stairs where he stood. She wore a green dress today, though she still had on the red-and-black shoes. The skirt’s folds hung limp, for it had been cut to accommodate several more petticoats than she was wearing; cut to accommodate a corset, too, as the red dress had been. No servant wore corsets, and Cora was not wearing one now.

Where had she gotten those?
he wondered. And the soap and water to wash her face this morning. Not in the Swamp, the squalid agglomeration of grogshops and brothels that festered a few unpaved streets behind the Charity Hospital: that was the place most runaways went. But hers weren’t dresses that could be acquired, or kept in good condition, in that maze of mud-sinks and cribs. He remembered the woman Nanié two nights ago, looking for
her Virgil among the sick. Her stained dirty clothes had the stink of sweat ground into them, not because she was a particularly unclean woman but because spare labor and time and the fuel to heat water were luxuries among the poor, and their clothes went a long time between washings. Neatness of appearance was something that could be maintained only with great care and with a certain minimum of money.

His own coat and waistcoat, folded tidily over the rail of the stairs behind him with the cravat tucked into a pocket, were one badge of his freedom. Even more than the papers the law demanded he carry—and as much as the well-bred French his tutors and his mother had hammered into him as a child—they said, This is a free man of color, not somebody’s property to be bought and sold.

A woman dressed like a slave on the streets would be noticed, especially by someone looking for a runaway.

The dress was a disguise.

The cleanliness was a disguise.

Both depended on money and a place to stay.

After a long time of silence, Cora said, “Me and Gervase, we used to meet over by Black Oak. That’s the place next up the river from Spanish Bayou—Michie Redfern’s plantation just south of Twelve-Mile Point. Black Oak isn’t hardly a plantation, just a little bit of land, but M’am Redfern’s pa bought it for her when she came down from Boston to marry Michie Redfern. At least that’s what Leonide told me, Michie Redfern’s cook. They was gonna go to business together, M’am Redfern’s pa and Michie Redfern, only he died. Michie Kendal, I mean.”

She took a deep breath, not meeting his eyes, folding carefully the pleats of her green cotton sleeve where they ran into the wristband. There was a thin line of tatted cotton lace there, pale ecru, the kind schoolgirls produced
by the yard while their governesses read to them from edifying books.

“That’s where Gervase and I went, after Michie Redfern told him and the others—Laurent, and Randall, and Marcel, and Hermes, and Sally—that he was selling them on account of what he owed Michie Calder and Michie Fazende. Michie Redfern, he found us there. He sent Gervase back to the house and he hit me a couple times, then he had me, like your policeman said; though what that was supposed to prove I don’t know. That a big man can stick it into a little girl my size when he can have her whipped if she don’t let him? We both of us knew
that.”

Contempt blazed in her eyes.

“A couple days later he takes Gervase and the others on into town. Gervase told me he’d been sold to M’am Lalaurie, on Rue Royale—the others was gonna go to the Bank of Louisiana, and be sold up north in Missouri and Arkansas Territories, where they need cotton hands something bad. M’am Redfern, she doesn’t say much to me, but she looks at me like the Devil looks at a little child out lost in the swamp. I slip out of the house and walk over by Black Oak again in the afternoon. I’m feeling bad, missing Gervase and wondering if I can get away long enough to come down to New Orleans and see him now and then, or he can come back maybe and see me.

“It’s hot, and I start lookin’ around the house for a cup or something to get me some water.”

The look of calculation had disappeared from her face, replaced by a pucker in her brow as she called back the events to her mind. She was no longer thinking, January thought, about her story, no longer tailoring it for what she thought he wanted to hear.

“Black Oak’s a little house,” she went on after a time. “All the furniture and dishes and that been cleaned out a
long time ago, but I thought there might be something. Mostly Gervase and I just layed in the bedroom, where it’s cool, and didn’t go in the other two rooms. But there’s this cupboard in the parlor by the fireplace, that’s always locked with a key. Only this time when I went in it wasn’t locked, and inside I found this tin jar, like they sell candy in. It was new—it wasn’t rusty nor chipped nor nothing—but when I opened it, there was a little sort of bag inside, made out of black flannel, full of crushed-up dry leaves and some seeds. I knowed the smell of it, ’cos one of the women on Grand Isle where I grew up was a conjure, and she told all us children what to stay away from in the woods. It was monkshood, and poison, and I knew then it had to be M’am Redfern that hid it there, in the little house where she had the key to, to keep it away from her husband finding it. I remembered how M’am Redfern had looked at me, all day, when her husband was gone.”

She looked down again, tugging the ruffle of her sleeve.

“And what did you do?”

“I was scared.” Cora raised those great dark eyes, under a fringe of thick-curled lashes. “I slept out in the swamp that night, and in the morning I hid in the trees near the steamboat landing by Spanish Bayou. They’d said there was a boat coming in that day—Michie Bailey had said, that rode over the day before because he was bringin’ down these horses of his to sell in town. When the boat came in, I slipped in the water and swam around the far side of it. The men down on the engine deck pulled me up and hid me in the hay bales, for Michie Bailey’s white horses. And, Lordy, you’d have thought they’d give those horses feather beds, the fuss they made over ’em.”

January studied that guarded face. Wondering how much of what she told him was truth.

“And you didn’t go back to the house for anything before you went down to the boat?”

She shook her head vehemently. “I didn’t steal no money. Nor no pearls. Michie Redfern, he probably took them pearls himself and sold them for gambling money or to pay off some more money he owed. He owed everybody in the Parish. That’s what probably happened. And I sure didn’t kill anybody. But I had to run away, Michie Janvier. She’d have killed me. I know she would have. I had to find Gervase …”

“And what?” asked January softly. “Get him to run away, too?”

Her eyes remained on her sleeve ruffle, which she stroked and smoothed, stroked and smoothed with her tiny, work-roughened fingers. “I don’t know. Maybe we can—can find some way to make us some money. To buy him free. Sometimes white folks lets their servants work out—sleep out, too, long as they come back and pays ’em. But I just want to see him. To talk to him.”

For a time January said nothing. Madame Lalaurie was an astute businesswoman, and it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that she’d let a slave operate independently, though not, probably, a trained houseman. But looking at that down-turned little face, the careful deliberation of those little fingers tracing the folds of the cloth, he knew those were not Cora’s thoughts.

He’d seen monkshood poisoning, in Paris, at the Hotel Dieu; a woman named Montalban had poisoned the brother with whom she lived. He thought about the agonies of vomiting and blindness, the sweating, convulsions, pain. Thought about Shaw sitting on the steps of his mother’s gallery, spitting tobacco and recounting the facts of the case without ever asking why or if January had made inquiries about the purported murderess’s lover scant days
after the woman herself had been seen at the Lalaurie house. Bastien the coachman would have reported her to Shaw, he thought. Would have reported, too, January’s request to speak to the young man.

It didn’t mean Shaw didn’t have other information, held back as a speculator holds sugar or cotton, against a rise in prices.

“Cora,” said January slowly, “whether or not you put poison into Otis Redfern’s supper, Madame Redfern thinks you did. The police think so, too. Now, I told them I hadn’t met you, hadn’t ever heard of you, and I implied I hadn’t ever been asked to take any kind of message from you to Gervase. At least when Lieutenant Shaw asked me to notify him if you did ask me, I said I would. All this is illegal. I could get into serious trouble for it.”

Cora licked her lips and folded her arms again, as if chilled despite the day’s burning heat. “You mean you can’t help me anymore.” It was not phrased as a question.

That’s what he meant.

And that, he thought later, should have been the end of it. For everyone’s good.

That’s when he should have walked away.

Last night he had dreamed about his father.

He didn’t often. His memories of his father—or the man he believed to have been his father—existed only in flashes, isolated incidents of time: being picked up, up and up and up at the end of those powerful arms, and the coal black face with the gray shellwork of tribal scars grinning joyfully below him, or walking along the edge of the bayou, listening to the deep bass voice hum-sing songs he barely recalled. He didn’t even know where his father had been when he was told that his mother was being sold to St. Denis Janvier, whether his father had still been on Bellefleur Plantation then or not.

But he did remember, hot summer nights, creeping out of his room to sit on the gallery of the garçonnière, waiting for his father to come for him.

That had to have been shortly after they’d moved into the pink cottage on Rue Burgundy. January was eight. His father wouldn’t let them leave him, he had told himself. He’d come slipping through the passway into the yard, to tap on his wife’s shutters, to stand below the gallery of the garçonnière, white teeth gleaming in the moonlight, waiting for his son to come running down to him and be lifted up in those powerful arms.

January had crept out of his room most nights for a year, he remembered—except those nights when St. Denis Janvier would come to visit his mother—to sit on the gallery in the darkness and wait. The town had been smaller then, with vacant land between the cottages on Rue Dauphine and Rue Burgundy, and between Rue Burgundy and the old town wall, rank marsh where moon-silvered water gleamed between forests of weeds. January had given names to the voices of the frogs crying in the darkness and made up words to the heavy, harsh drumming of the cicadas and the skreek of crickets; the drone of mosquitoes in the blackness. His sister Olympe jeered at him, but he’d waited nonetheless.

His father had never come.

“You have to lie low,” he said slowly. Cora looked up, startled, at the sound of his voice. “You have to stay quiet. You can’t even think about ‘making money somehow’ to help Gervase.” Even as the words came out of his mouth he couldn’t believe he was saying them.

“Slaves are just too expensive these days for them to let him go—or you either. They’re watching for you, Cora. You have to get out of New Orleans if you possibly can, and remember that even with the fever on they’ll be
watching the steamboats on the river and on the lake. You think you can do that?”

She made no reply, neither nodded nor shook her head. But trembling passed over her again, a long silvery shiver, like a horse at the starting line of a race, before they whip the flags down to let them run.

“You send me a note under another name,” said January. “Post it after you get to some other city. Set up some way for me to send a letter to you. Can you write?”

“A little,” Cora whispered. “My friend taught me.”

The girl who’d been raped?

“My next lesson with the Lalaurie girls is Friday. Can you be here Friday evening about sunset?” It meant going to the Hospital again without sleep, but these days that was common enough.

She nodded. Her lips formed the words
thank you
, without sound. She waited in the dark of the gallery while he slipped away up the pass-through between houses, still as a mouse waiting for the cat to go by.

Idle to suppose that a slave girl accused of murdering her master could turn the accusation on her master’s wife.