Fever Season (8 page)

Jean Blanque, January recalled, in addition to running one of the largest banks in the city, had had connections with half the smugglers who brought illegal slaves and
other goods into the city. It was to Blanque that Jean Laffite had come to begin negotiations with the Americans in the face of the British invasion. Discreet indeed!

“I trust I shall be able to rely upon your discretion in the future?” She made as if to go, then hesitated, her hand going to the reticule on her belt. After a pause she opened it and withdrew a smaller purse that clinked heavily in her hand. “Please give her this.”

“I don’t know who you mean, Madame.”

Her smile widened, the twinkle brightening in her dark eyes. “Ah. Very well, then.” She opened her hand and let the purse fall to the planks of the gallery and, with the toe of her slipper, nudged it into the shadows next to the door.

January saw her to the street. Bastien waited with the black-lacquered carriage and the four-in-hand of black English geldings that were the admiration and envy of Creole and American society alike. A long cardboard dress box lay on the driver’s seat—Madame had changed her clothes before coming, then. The coachman sprang from the box to help her inside, with a combination of obsequiousness and tenderness; and as he shut the door, Madame Lalaurie smiled her thanks.

The grimy lantern light of the Hospital’s porch glinted on harness brasses, polished like gold, and they were gone.

Emil Barnard straightened up quickly from the corpses by the gate as January came back through and yanked the sheets into place before hurrying away. Flies roared up in a cloud. Sickened, January didn’t even look this time. When he climbed the stairs and passed through the ward he saw that Soublet, his servant, and their apparatus for the straightening of the skeleton and the limbs
were all gone: Hèlier the water seller, with his crooked spine and uneven shoulders, was gone, too.

He stepped out onto the gallery again and retrieved the purse from the shadows. It contained ten Mexican silver dollars and assorted cut bits.

For the next thirty hours January felt like a fugitive, as if Madame Lalaurie’s money glowed in the dark and could be seen by all through his pocket.

Slave stealing
was what white law called assisting blacks to steal themselves from those who’d paid hard money for their bodies.

And to that was added
Accessory After the Fact
.

Through the remainder of the long night in the Hospital, and walking home between houses shuttered and mostly empty in the blinding light of morning—climbing the garçonnière stairs to his bed and later waking and walking over to his sister Olympe’s house on Rue Douane for dinner—he felt as if at any moment Lieutenant Shaw would step out from between the houses and say in that mild, scratchy voice, “I’d like a word with you, Maestro.”

“Why would she do a thing like that?” Olympe Corbier took a pan of bread pudding from the brick-and-clay oven and set it under a little tent of newspaper to keep the flies off.

“Do what?” Straddling the kitchen’s single wooden chair, January sat up a little straighter. “Give her money?”

“Help her at all.” His middle sister turned from the hearth, tall for a woman and thin, her face like a coal black
marsh spirit’s in the furled fantasia of a blue-and-pink tignon. Olympia Snakebones, she was called among the voodoos: his true sister, his mother’s child by that father who had never emerged from the darkness of St. Denis Janvier’s yard. “Bernard de McCarty’s daughter? Mama-in-law to one of the descended-from-God Forstalls? Jean Blanque smuggled in slaves by the boatload from Cuba.”

“Why would she risk her life to mop some sailor’s vomit off a hospital floor?” countered January. “You work in the clinics—if helping out other folks isn’t enough for you—in order to give your work up to God, to school your pride. Who knows what she thought about what Jean Blanque did? The money may have been part of that.” He shrugged, seeing the disdain in his sister’s eyes, as it had been from childhood every time St. Denis Janvier’s name was mentioned. “She may just have wanted to score points off Emily Redfern.”

It surprised Olympe into grinning, something she’d never have let herself do as a girl, and she dropped him a curtsy. “I concede you a point, Brother. You ever met Emily Redfern?”

He shook his head.

“There’s a woman,” his sister said, “wants to be Delphine Lalaurie when she grows up. Fetch me the blue bowl there behind you, would you, Brother?”

She ladled jambalaya from the iron pot that hung above the coals. Even with all its shutters thrown wide—opening the whole side of the little room to the yard—the kitchen was baking hot, though with the sinking of the sun below the roofs of the American faubourg a little breeze flowed up Rue Douane. The houses on either side of Olympe’s were empty, shuttered fast; traffic in the street had ended with the coming of evening; and the oppressive silence, broken only by the far-off whistle of a steamboat,
breathed with the presence of Bronze John. He waited out there in the darkness. When Gabriel, Olympe’s eleven-year-old son, came darting across the yard to the kitchen from the lighted house, January had to suppress the urge to tell the boy to stay indoors where it was safe.

Nowhere was safe.

“Delphine Lalaurie, she has the best of everything.” Olympe muffled her hand in her bright-colored skirts, to keep from her skin the heat of the iron hook with which she rearranged tripods and pots above the fire. Her sloppy,
mo kiri mo vini
French reminded January of Cora’s. It was the French of Africans who’d made the language their own as they’d made what they could of the land. Their mother would faint to hear her—but then, Livia Levesque had not heard her daughter’s voice for nearly twenty years.

“When a boat comes in from France with the latest shade of silk, or some kind of bonnet they’re all wearing in Paris, Delphine Lalaurie’s got it. Either for her or for her daughters, for all it’s said she don’t let those poor girls eat enough to keep a cat alive. When Michie Davis brought in those French singers for his Opera, Delphine Lalaurie had them to her parties, to sing for her guests, before anyone else in town; and when she gives a ball, no other lady in town dare hold any kind of party that night, knowing it won’t be no use.”

She wiped her face with one of the threadbare linen towels. “Hell.” She chuckled. “I bet if Delphine Lalaurie were caught red-handed taking runaways out of town by the coffle there’d be folks falling over themselves to say it wasn’t so. She does what she pleases. And that’s what just about rots Emily Redfern’s heart.”

She scooped greens from a cauldron at the back of the hearth, handed the white porcelain bowl of them to her son to carry back to the house, and shifted the coffeepot a
little farther to one side, where it would warm without boiling. “The voodoos know everything that goes on in this town, Brother,” Olympe said. “Emily Redfern wants to have that same power Delphine Lalaurie has. Wants to have it with everyone, not just with the Americans. That’s what ate her about her husband’s gambling. Not that it might lose them their home—that little place at Black Oak was
hers
, not his, and couldn’t be took for his debts. But his gambling took away from what she could spend on having the best in town, on being the best.”

“Ate her enough to poison him?”

Olympia Snakebones’s dark eyes slid toward her young son, but the boy was already out of the kitchen, skipping across the dark yard to the house with his bowl of greens. “The voodoos know everything in this town,” she said again, her face enigmatic. “But sometimes we don’t tell even each other what we know. Tell your little Cora to be careful, dealing with that white woman, with any white woman. And you, Brother—you watch yourself too. You get yourself mixed up with the whites, French or American, and you’ll be hurtin’, too.”

They crossed the yard together, Olympe taking off her apron, leaving it on the kitchen table. The smell of burning was thick in their nostrils.

“Tell her there’s a man name of Natchez Jim down by Rue du Levee.” They paused in the molten light from the dining-room door. “She’ll find him near the coffee stand under the arcade of the vegetable market, when he’s not out freighting firewood in his boat. He’ll get her up the river safe. Tell him I said it’s a favor to me.”

Dinner was a lively meal, with Gabriel and thirteen-year-old Zizi-Marie up and down, back and forth to the front bedroom where their father, Paul Corbier, was slowly convalescing from a brush with the fever. While listening
to Zizi-Marie’s account of how she’d done the finishwork on Monsieur Marigny’s yellow silk chairs while her father was ill and thus helped rescue the family finances—which turned out to be quite true, for she was a good upholsterer already—and explaining correlations to Gabriel between Olympe’s herbal remedies and his own medical training, it was difficult for January to remember his own worries or to feel anything but joy in the warm haven of that little house. Halfway through the meal there was a knock at the door, a woman from the shacks out toward the swamps, asking Olympe’s help with her children taking sick; Olympe said, “I’ll have to go.”

January nodded. He was on his way to the Hospital himself. Even this haven, he thought, looking around the candlelit parlor, was not safe. It could be taken away at any time, as Ayasha had been taken.

“I’ll put up extra for you, borage and willow bark,” Olympe said, going into the parlor where the shelves were that contained the potions of the voodoo: brick dust and graveyard dust, the dried bones of chickens and the heads of mice, little squares of red flannel and black flannel, colored candles and dishes of blue glass beads.

“We can’t stay, either,” Gabriel announced, as Chouchou gathered the dishes to carry back to the kitchen with the solemn care of an eight-year-old, and Olympe lifted Ti-Paul down from the box on the chair seat that raised him up to the level of the table. “Zizi and I, we got to help Nicole Perret and her husband pack up. Would you know it, Uncle Ben? Uncle Louis says now his cook and yard man gone over to Mobile, Nicole and Jacques can stay on the porch of his house out by Milneburgh, that he rent for the summer, and work for him. Now the fever here’s so bad, Nicole and Jacques will do that just to be away from town.”

He pulled on his jacket, ran quick fingers over his close-cropped hair, a tall, gangly boy, like January had been, but with the promise of the gentle handsomeness still visible in Paul Corbier’s face. “I ain’t scared of no fever, me. Just it’s so hot here I wish we could go, too. You think Grand-mère might let us, just for a while?”

January couldn’t imagine his mother inconveniencing herself to the extent of giving her elder daughter floor space in her lovely rented room at the Milneburgh Hotel—let alone her elder daughter’s decidedly working-class husband and four children—to save her had Attila the Hun been on the point of sacking the town. “Stranger things have happened,” he told his nephew.

But probably not since the Resurrection of Christ
.

“Take a smudge with you,” he cautioned, as Zizi-Marie came out of the bedroom with her jacket, her father leaning on her shoulder. “And a cloth soaked in vinegar.” He tried to think of anything that actually seemed to have some effect in deflecting the fever, the poisons that seemed to ride the stinking, mosquito-humming darkness.

Slices of onion?

Get out of this town
, he thought despairingly.
Get out of this town
.

“You could do us a favor, if you would, Ben.” Paul Corbier sat carefully on the parlor divan. He was breathing hard just from the effort of coming out to bid his brother-in-law good night. “Alys Roque was here this afternoon, Olympe’s friend. She says her husband, Robois, didn’t come in last night from working the levee. She’s already been to Charity, and the Orleans Infirmary, and Dr. Campbell’s, and that clinic the Ursulines have set up where the convent used to be, but … it strikes so fast, sometimes. And if it’s the cholera, it’s all the worse. Me, I was shaping an arm cushion one minute and the next
thing I knew I was lying on the floor, without the strength to so much as call out.”

He shook his head. His face, round when January had first met him in the spring, had thinned with the effects of the disease; and it would be some time before he’d recover the lost flesh. By the look of him he had a good deal of African blood, which had probably been the saving of him. The lighter-skinned colored, quadroons and octoroons, suffered more with the fever. The exquisitely pale musterfinos and mamaloques were as susceptible to its effects as the whites.

“You were lucky,” said January softly.
Not least
, he added to himself,
in having a wife who knew about herbs and healing and wouldn’t call in some sanguinary lunatic like Soublet to bleed you to death
.

Soublet was at the top of his form that night when January returned to the hospital, opening veins and applying leeches with the pious confidence of a vampire. “Balderdash, sir,” January overheard him saying to Dr. Sanchez. “Salts of mercury are all very well in their place, but fever resides in the blood, not in the nervous system.”