Fever Season (7 page)

He thought again about poor Anne Montalban, trying to convince her neighbors, and later the police and the press, that Brother Jean, professor of law and pillar of the community, had raped both her and her daughter (and possibly three other local girls who could not be brought to testify) and was in the habit of keeping his niece locked in her room for weeks on end “for the good of her soul.”

Lying naked on his bed in the heat, hearing the roaring of afternoon rain on the slates, he tried to sleep, and his mind returned to the small, taut face, the wary eyes, of Cora Chouteau.

If you don’t fight it’s not really rape
.

According to Shaw, the Redfern cook had seen Cora slip back into the house, some time after she was supposed to have run away. How long after? In the twilight, Shaw had said.
I slept out in the swamp
.

Then after supper Wednesday night Otis Redfern had stumbled against the wall, trying to get outside to the outhouse, gasping and crying with a mouth half-paralyzed, pleading in the heat that there was ice water in his veins. Madame Redfern was found sick in her room only half an hour later, having collapsed from dizziness, too weak to call for help.

Had Cora returned only to steal five thousand dollars and her mistress’s pearls? What the hell was five thousand dollars doing lying around the house? Money and credit were impossibly tight this year (his mother had investments, and he’d been hearing about the tightness of money at great length for months). Most plantations dealt in letters of credit. In the best of times it was rare that even the richest of the planters, the Destrehans or the McCartys, had a thousand dollars cash money readily available.

Or had she gone back to slip powdered monkshood into whatever was being prepared for that evening’s meal?

Shaw had made no mention of the candy tin. January wondered if he knew about it. He could not imagine a Boston-raised merchant’s daughter knowing how to identify monkshood in the woods, much less how to cull and dry it. If Cora didn’t prepare the stuff herself, Emily Redfern would have to have acquired it somewhere.

And after all that, were Cora to testify that Emily Redfern kept powdered monkshood in the locked cupboard on her own property, and her case failed, she would be in serious trouble indeed.

He closed his eyes. The rain eased off, and a breeze walked across his bare belly and thighs. Why Cora Chouteau concerned him he didn’t know. It was madness, insanely risky. He’d learn what he could, but there were things he simply could not do.

At least it was better than lying here obsessively inventorying his own body: did his head ache?
(That’s just lack of sleep.)
Was he thirsty?
(That’s nothing. It’s hot. No worse than yesterday.)
Were his joints sore? Nausea? Belly cramps?

Was he hot with fever or was it just hotter today?

There had been a time when he’d wanted to die, wanted some shining angel from his childhood catechism to appear and tell him he didn’t have to be in pain anymore, didn’t have to deal with loss and grief and wondering why. But the only psychopomp in town these days was old Bronze John. At the memory of those bloated orange faces, the protruding tongues, the horrible feeble picking of the hands on the coverlets, he’d grope his cheap blue glass rosary from beneath the pillow and whisper, “Be mindful, Oh Lord, of Thy covenant, and say to the destroying Angel, Now hold thy hand …”

Like the choir at Mass the dreary voice of the dead-cart man replied from the street, “Bring out yo’ dead!”

January rose, and washed, and made his way through streets stinking of summer heat to the Charity Hospital as it was growing dark. The ward was like the waiting room in hell. By lamp glare the color of the fever itself, Dr. Sanchez, another of the physicians volunteering his services, mopped down a withered shop-woman with cold vinegar and niter, the smell of it acrid in the murky dark. There were slices of onion placed under every bed.

Dark forms fidgeted like ghosts, conferring in a corner; and coming close January saw it was Dr. Soublet and Dr. Ker, the former British Army surgeon who over the
protests of the Creole community had been given the post of Director of the Hospital. “I don’t see that,” Soublet was saying, voice rising with anger. “I don’t see that at all.” He spoke French, being one of those Creoles who not only had refused to learn English with the advent of the Americans but had deliberately expunged from his memory any English he had ever known.

His servant stood beside him, holding open a box the size of a child’s coffin. In it January could see an apparatus of braces and straps, ratcheted wheels and metal splints. Equipment from Soublet’s clinic. He’d seen the like in every medical journal for the past dozen years, accompanied by long articles about scientific advances in realigning the bones.

“This man came to this Hospital because he wished to be treated
gratis
, with the skills we have worked to acquire and the medicaments purchased by the city. He owes us something.” On the bed between them, Hèlier the water seller moved his head vaguely. His eyes glimmered horribly bright between bloated lids. January guessed that the sick man had only the dimmest notion of what was going on. “Moreover, such an experiment can only be beneficial to him! I have had nearly miraculous results from the use of scientifically applied force in the realignment of the skeleton and limbs.”

“This is a hospital, man,” retorted Ker, in excellent French, “not the headquarters of the Spanish Inquisition! Take that thing away!
Charity
means ‘out of love,’ not ‘for the sake of finding some poor soul to test your theories on.’ ”

“Theories, sir!” Soublet drew himself up, a tall man with a sort of coarse sturdiness to him and skin like a very bad road surface in the jumpy light. “I do not deal in
theories! My work is soundly based on observation, facts, and the latest findings of the medical fraternity—”

He stopped, his attention arrested by someone at the door of the ward. Turning, January saw Madame Delphine Lalaurie.

The first thing that anyone ever said of her—the thing that most of Marie Delphine de McCarty Blanque Lalaurie’s admirers always mentioned—was that she glowed. With energy, with intelligence, with strength. There were other beautiful women in the city, possibly others more beautiful by conventional standards, but had she been plain, Delphine Lalaurie would still have drawn all eyes. January had never figured out how some people could do that.

She was a tall woman, imperially straight; and though nearly every Creole woman of her age had surrendered to rich food and
embonpoint
, she retained the slim figure of a girl. She was clothed in a plain gown of black merino, such as wealthy women wore to nurse in, spotlessly clean even to its hem, as far as he could tell in this light, and unobtrusively on the leading edge of Paris fashion. The linen apron pinned over it, and the linen veil that covered her lustrous dark hair, gave her a nunlike air, as if a queen had taken vows.

Soublet and Ker immediately went to greet her, but before they could reach her she turned, hastening to the bedside of a delirious, bewhiskered young sailor who had begun to struggle and shout. A harassed nurse was trying to calm him, but he flung her back, eyes staring in horror and agony. Madame Lalaurie caught his shoulders, pressed him back to the bed with surprising strength, whispering to him, gentle words, soothing words. After a moment’s desperate thrashing the man settled back, gasping, then turned and began to vomit. Madame Lalaurie and the
nurse held him, and in the livid lamp glare January saw the expression of Madame’s face: a deep intense pity, mingled with something else. An inward look, yearning, longing, ecstasy, as if she knelt in meditation at the Stations of the Cross.

The man collapsed, sobbing, exhausted. Madame and the nurse wrung rags in a basin of grimy water, sponged his fouled and tear-streaked face.
“Kösönöm,”
the man whispered, or something like it, a language January did not know.
“Kösönöm.”

“It’s all right,” she breathed, and stroked the crawling hair, “you’ll be all right.”

Then in a whisper of petticoats she rose, greeted Soublet with a warm smile and turned her back on Ker without a word. But she did not stop to speak with her husband’s partner, crossing instead to where January stood.

“M’sieu Janvier?” Her voice was a lovely mezzo-soprano. He had heard that she sang like an angel. Like her daughter Pauline, her eyes were large, coffee dark, and brilliant. Like Pauline she seemed to burn with energy; but instead of the girl’s restless, dissipated resentment, hers was a focused vigor that seemed to fill the room. “I realize it’s an imposition, with as much as you have to do here,” she said, “but might we speak?” Without seeming to, she glanced back at Dr. Soublet and Emil Barnard, hovering just out of earshot, and lowered her voice. “It concerns my houseman, Gervase.”

There was little space in the Hospital that wasn’t chockablock with the dying. January unlatched the long windows that led to the gallery. “Shut those!” roared Soublet. “Do you wish to kill all these people?”

You should talk of killing all those people
, thought January dourly. Nevertheless, he closed the shutters behind
them quickly as he and Madame stepped into the steamy rankness of the night.

“I’m sorry to have to bring you out here, Madame.”

She chuckled softly. “We walk back and forth through the night miasma coming here, M’sieu. If it’s the night air that causes the fever at all, a little more can scarcely harm us.” She coughed with the smoke of the smudges burning in the courtyard below them and waved her hand. Her gloves were French kid at fifty cents the pair, as immaculate as her apron when she had come in. Having seen the promptness with which she attended the delirious sailor, January couldn’t imagine this woman going through a shift at wherever she nursed without getting as fouled as he was—apron, dress, and gloves were now spotted with water and filth. She must have changed the entire outfit before coming here.

“Sometimes I don’t think doctors know anything. One can only care for the sick, and pray for their poor disobedient souls.” She crossed herself; January did, too. Her one ornament was a gold crucifix on a slender chain around her neck. “I take it the girl Cora came to ask your help?”

“I know no one by that name, Madame.” So that sleek bastard Bastien had told her. “It was on another matter that I wished to speak with Gervase. He’s a friend of my sister Olympe. And it wasn’t important. I’m sorry that you were troubled.”

“M’sieu …” The twinkle in her dark eyes mocked him gently. “The boy’s never been in this city in his life before I purchased him. And I happen to know that spiteful harpy Emily Redfern is looking all over the Parish for someone to blame for her husband’s death besides her own parsimony in keeping her meat hanging too long in the summer. I gather she’s talked her Yankee compatriots in
the City Guard into wasting their time and citizens’ money in pursuit of some poor child who had no more to do with Otis Redfern’s death than you did—and paying off old scores onto her.”

Regarding her, January guessed there wasn’t a great deal about the personal lives of anyone in New Orleans society that Delphine Lalaurie didn’t know. Related to everyone of wealth and breeding, she was in a position to hear everything. Still he said nothing. In the courtyard below them, Emil Barnard emerged from the Hospital, made his way toward the piled bodies near the gate, then stopped and glanced up to see January standing on the gallery. Barnard coughed self-consciously, shoved the empty flour sack he carried into his pocket, and strolled casually away.

January was aware of the woman’s eyes on his face. Under the rouge and powder that all Creole women wore, the torchlight showed up lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes, fine lines gouged deep, more than simple weariness could account for. Juxtaposed with that slender figure, those brilliant eyes, they were almost shocking. Was it so hard, then, to carry the burden of a crippled daughter, to deal with whatever illness made Pauline so wasted and thin? Did it tell on one so terribly, to rule the household with such exactness and splendor? To be so perfect oneself, beyond weeping or fear or regret?

“I know that you can’t admit to having spoken to the girl.” Her voice was soft but brisk, matter-of-fact, and the lines in her face were suddenly only the marks of fatigue again. “Bastien tells me he turned you away. Very properly, of course. One can’t have one’s people interrupted in their work. That kind of thing upsets the other servants, as I’m sure you know; and any little disruption in the routine spreads like a mildew, until it’s nearly impossible to bring
everyone back up to their best. But as I’m sure you’ve also guessed, my Bastien is officious. He wants only the good of the household, but there! What can one do? I’ve spoken to him about telling that lout of a Guard that Cora came asking after poor Gervase. He will mind his tongue hereafter.”

Still January made no reply.

“One cannot approve, of course, under most circumstances, of runaways,” Madame Lalaurie went on. A mosquito hummed in the torchlight, close to her face, but such was her breeding that she didn’t flinch, let alone swipe at it with her gloved hand. “But sheerly as a human being one cannot but feel for anyone who lives under the heel of a woman like Emily Redfern.”

“I know nothing of her, Madame.”

“Pray God you never have the occasion to learn, M’sieu.” She sighed, as if about to add something else, then changed her mind and put the remark aside. “Be that as it may, M’sieu, Friday night I will order Bastien to leave the carriage gate open—though he will naturally be watching for thieves—from eleven o’clock until midnight. Gervase will be in the yard. I don’t wish to know anything further.”

January inclined his head. “Of course, it’s your own business whether the gate is open or closed, Madame.”

Wry amusement pulled at the corner of her lips. “I like a man who’s discreet. Monsieur Blanque was like that. I don’t believe, in all the years we were married, that he ever said, ‘I am going to play cards with so-and-so.’ Only, ‘I am going out.’ ”