Fever Season (10 page)

She bent to her task, mopping down the girl Antoinette’s thin body, gently, slopped water dripping onto the sheets. “Every penny I own is tied up in this building, and these girls.… Their parents mostly wanted to know they’re ‘in good hands.’ Being educated, and out of their way. You know what it costs to leave the city in the summer, to take a room in anything like a decent hotel or boardinghouse in Milneburgh or Mandeville.”

A trace of bitterness crept into her voice. “Antoinette is a day student. Her mother asked me to board her here while
she
left the city, when she heard I was going to stay.”

January thought about his mother. When Olympe was sixteen years old she had run away from home. His mother had made no effort to learn where she had gone.

Rather wistfully, Mademoiselle Vitrac added, “These are mostly not girls whose parents understand them or know what it is they want out of life.”

“Did yours?”

She hesitated, looking across at him as he tipped the herb tea into a spouted invalid’s cup. Then she shook her head, briefly, and rearranged Antoinette’s nightdress so
that he could half-lift her and force her to drink. “What is it?” she asked.

“Borage and willow bark. My sister’s remedy for fevers. It works, too.”

“She’s a follower of Dr. Thompson’s theories?”

“She’s a voodooienne.”

“Ah.” Mademoiselle Vitrac didn’t appear shocked, a little surprising considering her prim appearance. “Myself, I’d trust a voodoo as much as I’d trust some of the doctors I’ve met. One of them’s one of my financial backers—a doctor, I mean. He insisted I accept a ‘Postural Remediant’ that reminds me of nothing so much as woodcuts I’ve seen of the Iron Maiden. It’s downstairs. I’ll show it to you—I have to keep it out because he sometimes comes by.”

She smiled faintly, looking down into Antoinette’s flushed, wasted face. “I’m always threatening to lock the girls into it for punishment—as a joke, you understand. We made games of what kinds of crimes merit imprisonment. I think the longest was five years for poisoning Monsieur Heymann, that tenor at the Opera the girls are all in love with. Poisoning the Pope was good for three years, as I recall.”

The muscle of her jaw stood out again, fighting the knowledge of how close death stood to those giggling schoolgirl games. She propped her spectacles again and went on calmly, “It’s supposed to force one into a correct posture while writing, but I can’t imagine it doing anything except making one never wish to touch a pen again.”

She followed him to Geneviève’s bed, holding the girl, who was very restless, while he dosed her with the herbal tea, then sponging her down with vinegar-water while January went on to dose Victorine, who looked, he thought, far too young to be sent away to school.

“Give them this three or four times a day,” he told Madamoiselle Vitrac, digging in the half-darkness of his medical bag for the linen packet of herbs, which he set on the dresser top next to the veilleuse. “Made up in tea, as I’ve done, medium-dark. The disease is going to take as long as it takes, to pass through them. All we can do is keep it from killing them on the way.”

She drew up the sheets over the girls’ bodies, and rearranged the mosquito-bars, then followed him down the black ladder of the stairs.

Full daylight leaked through cracks in the shutters and partings in the curtains that covered the tall French doors onto the gallery. It showed January again the books shelved floor to ceiling in the schoolroom and in a corner, as promised, the Postural Remediant, an elaborate cage of metal, straps, and delicate boxwood rollers designed to force a girl to sit upright with her wrist properly raised to the task of writing.

“Five years for poisoning Heymann, at the very least,” he agreed judiciously, pausing to study the thing. “Odd,” he added, “one never sees boys forced to sit and write a certain way. Only girls.”

“You notice,” replied Mademoiselle Vitrac, with a touch of astringency in her voice, “which sex wears the corsets.” She crossed to the divan set at right angles to the desk, where two girls slept in a mussy, crook-necked heap: Marie-Neige and a delicately pretty adolescent who was presumably the truant Isabel. The schoolmistress bent and brushed aside a strand of Isabel’s coarse black hair, which, unbound and uncovered, had caught in the corner of her rosebud mouth. Both children looked desperately young.

“It must be very difficult for them,” January said softly. “Coming here. Choosing this road.”

“It is,” she replied. “I hope at least that I’ve given
them somewhere to come. Let them know that there
is
a different road to choose. It isn’t an easy road. No one I’ve ever met seems to believe that a woman can want anything more than some man and children of her own to make her blissfully happy.” There was bitterness in her voice again, the utter weariness of a warrior who has gone into battle every day of her life, in the knowledge that she will have to fight and refight for the same few feet of ground each day until she dies.

He wanted to ask her how she had come to it, how she had won the right to pursue her own strange dream of knowledge for its own sake. He had met women intellectuals in Paris and knew their path was difficult enough. What it must be for a woman here, and a woman of color at that, was almost beyond imagining.

But weariness overwhelmed him, and he guessed that she, too, was close to the edge of collapse. So he only asked, “Will you be all right?”

“Oh, yes. Marie-Neige and Isabel help me—I have other friends, too, who come in to nurse. But nursing isn’t the same as having someone who knows what he’s doing look at them.” She held out her hand, long-fingered and slim, but large of bone, strong to grip. “Thank you,” Rose Vitrac said. “Beyond words, thank you. The medicine you gave me—will that be enough?”

“I think so.” January set his satchel on the gallery rail again, tilted it to the daylight. “My sister said she’d give me more of them …”

He paused, bringing out the tin of herbs in his hand. It was easy to recognize, for it was the one thing he hadn’t put into the bag himself: it had to have been placed there by Olympe. And opening it, he smelled the comforting familiarity of the fever remedy.

It was the tin itself that caught his eye: bright red and gold, new and shiny, with
WILLET’S BOILED SWEETS
inscribed on its lid.

And remarkably similar to the tin Cora Chouteau had described as containing Emily Redfern’s stock of poison.

It didn’t mean anything of itself, of course.

The Willet’s Company of England must export thousands of those little red-and-gold tins every year, and they were precisely the right size to put things in. Everyone in New Orleans from the Ursuline Sisters to the gamblers in the Swamp must have little red-and-gold candy tins in their houses, full of coffee beans, sugar, pins, and blotting sand. It didn’t mean Olympe was a poisoner. It just meant that Olympe had four children.

He intended to go to her house immediately, to ask her whether her practice of voodoo included selling powdered monkshood, but exhaustion draped him in chains as he traversed the rough planks that served as a banquette along the Rue des Ramparts; and in the end he turned left, toward home. In his dream he found himself again on the gallery outside the garçonnière, staring out into the pitchy darkness of those hot, silent, heavy summer nights, listening to the baying of dogs in the swamp.

In his dream he ran down the steps, bare boards splintery as they always had been beneath his bare feet. Ran into the house, where his mother sat at the open front window, sewing on a man’s white shirt. She had work candles behind her, the smell of burning tallow strong. She
didn’t look up from her work. In here the baying sounded louder, and January saw that outside the windows lay, not Rue Burgundy, but the crisscross maze of swamp and bayou, trailing moss and cypress knees, and he knew his father was out there, running toward the light of the house, running with dogs on his track.

In his mind he heard the words of the old song about St. Mâlo, the rebel slave.

He saw him in the darkness. Saw the tribal scars on his face, the whip marks on his sides and back. Saw also the face of the man who ran behind the dogs, and recognized the long jaw and pale glitter of beard stubble as Lieutenant Shaw’s.

He ran to the window, called out, “Father! Here!”

But his mother—and she was as he first remembered her, as he always saw her in his dreams, slim and fragile, young and breathtakingly beautiful—rose from her chair with the slow languor she had affected then, laid aside her sewing, and closed the shutters fast. “It’s time to come to bed, Ben,” she said, and took his hand. “It’s time to come to bed.”

He wrenched his hand from her—he was only eight—and flung himself against the shutter, trying to wrestle
loose the heavy latch. “Father!” he shouted again. “Father, here! I’m here! Come and get me!”

His muffled cry woke him. He lay in the garçonnière where he had lain as a child and heard the voice of the dead-cart man: “Bring out yo’ dead!”

Afternoon sun glared through the jalousies. It must be close to three.

It was smotheringly hot outside, the air unstirring. He ran water from the cistern in the yard and sponged off in the kitchen, the silence of the town sawing at his nerves. When he’d returned from Rose Vitrac’s school that morning he had checked beneath the floorboard in his room for Madame Lalaurie’s purse of money, and he checked it again now; checked also the little chips of wood he’d placed just so on the edge of the loose floorboard, as if accidentally. They were in the same place. That didn’t mean Shaw hadn’t been in and seen them.

Slave stealing.

Accessory After the Fact.

Olympe putting a red-and-gold candy tin in his satchel.

His father running exhausted through the darkness to see his son.

Somehow he got through his lesson with the Lalaurie girls, who as usual hadn’t practiced and who as usual looked brittle and waifish as children off the wharves. Only Olympe, with her bone-deep mistrust of any white, let alone Jean Blanque’s widow, would have accused Madame Lalaurie of starving her own daughters.
Their mother doesn’t let them eat enough to keep a cat alive
.

Madame Lalaurie was renowned for setting the best and most lavish table in town.

But for all Delphine Lalaurie’s goodwill, January was under no illusion that she would take his part were he
caught helping an accused murderess and runaway slave. Nor would Madame have to do more than deny indignantly that she had anything to do with the matter, should he be so foolish as to accuse her of giving him the purse that seemed to be burning a hole in his clothing. Police Chief Tremouille was related to the Joncheres, who were related to the d’Aunoys, who were related to the McCartys—not to speak of having a daughter to marry off.

All the way up the Rue de l’Hôpital and along the Rue Burgundy, he kept glancing over his shoulder, expecting to see Lieutenant Shaw ambling with his loose-jointed walk, as if he simply chanced to be there, watching, waiting. But in fact the only person he saw was Mamzelle Marie, strolling along the banquette, remote and beautiful, her yellow seven-pointed tignon like a halo of flame.

“M’sieu Janvier.”

He tipped the beaver hat he wore. “Madame Pâris.”

She paused, and inclined her head. A smile touched the serpent eyes, that in the muck and stink of the charity wards were so calm and unpitying. “I haven’t gone by poor Pâris’s name for some years now,” she said. Her French was good, though her deep voice had a soft Creole burr to it. “You may make that Laveau, if you wish, or call me Mamzelle Marie, as your sister does. I take it your sister’s well?”

“As of last night.” It seemed a hundred years ago.
The voodoos know everything in this town.…
“Have you heard word about this Robois Roque, who vanished off the banquette? My sister asked me to watch for him.”

“And me.” For a moment he thought she’d been about to say something else, for she turned her head to sweep the street with those dark eyes. But whatever it was she put it aside, and looked back at him. Her strongly drawn brows pinched in a frown. “Now they’re—What?
The third or fourth people—who’ve asked me about someone who disappeared. Taken sick, they said, or thought.… Nobody knows for sure, because two of these people I’ve been asked of are slaves sleeping out. They didn’t go by their masters’ with the money from their work. I’ve prayed, and looked into the ink, and asked of other slaves and those who sell berries in the streets, and no one’s quite sure when they last were seen.”

January had heard of Mamzelle Marie’s network of spies and informers, a gossamer cobweb of words and conversations and bits of intelligence that covered the town like a mist, funneling information back to her house on Rue St. Ann.
The voodoos know everything:
Who hated their husbands or were waiting for their fathers to die, who had come into money lately and whose menses had stopped, who had spent what at the market or the silk shops, and what curious things had been found in the trash or the gutter or the river. Those who didn’t serve her from love did it from fear, bringing her sometimes the nails and hair of this person or that, and sometimes love letters extracted from their mistresses’ desks.