Fever Season (15 page)

January nodded. He looked inside, and saw that it still contained the ten Mexican dollars it had originally held. Then he undid the handkerchief and counted what was in it. There were a few English guinea pieces and a number of Bavarian thalers, four American double eagles, and the rest in Mexican dollars—a hundred and eighty dollars all told. Nowhere near the five thousand Madame Redfern claimed had been taken.

Levelly, expecting a fight, Mademoiselle Vitrac said, “I
still refuse to believe that Cora harmed a hair of Otis Redfern’s head.”

“This was all you found?”

“Yes. When she didn’t come back Friday night I looked in her room Saturday.”

Silence returned to the yard, broken by the creak of a wheel in the Rue Burgundy and a woman’s voice saying impatiently, “Hurry, would you?” to some unknown servant or child.

“Well,” January mused, “if she’d spent four thousand eight hundred and twenty dollars between Twelve-Mile Point and the levee, she’d have been wearing something better than that red dress.”

“I gave her the dress,” said Mademoiselle Vitrac, but he saw her mouth relax and the strain ease from her shoulders, not so much at his jest itself as at the fact that he was joking instead of accusing. “And the shoes. They were Geneviève’s when she came to the school, and she outgrew them. The thing is, M’sieu Janvier … if Cora fled, even if she got Gervase to flee with her, why didn’t she come back for the money? The pearls I can understand, if she realized they were being looked for. But the money was the only thing that guaranteed her she wouldn’t have to go back to Madame Redfern.”

January turned the necklace over in his hands. He’d seen enough pearls close up, between his mother and her friends, and Ayasha’s customers, to see that these were medium to high grade, lustrous, evenly sized and closely matched.

“What can I do?” Mademoiselle Vitrac asked.

He folded the necklace together into the palm of one big hand. “What we can’t do,” he replied, “is go to the police. You know that.”

“I know that.”

“I don’t know what the penalty is for aiding and abetting a murder—even if you know and I know that it was Emily Redfern and not Cora who put that monkshood into Otis Redfern’s soup—but at the very least I think we’d both be cleaning out the municipal gutters for a long time.”

Her mouth twitched a little in a smile, in spite of herself, and she averted her face as if she had been punished as a child for laughing when adults thought she should be having the vapors.

He held out the pearls. “Get rid of these. Throw them in the river, but make sure nobody sees you do it.” When he saw her hesitate—no woman throws pearls away lightly—he added, “If you’re caught with them on you, I can guarantee you you’ll lose everything you’ve worked for so hard.”

“Yes.” She took them from his hand. “Yes, I see that.”

“We need to check the fever wards,” said January. “Yellow Jack hits quick. If Cora started with a headache on her way home Friday night, with chills and pain and cramps, she might have been too disoriented to find her way up from Rue Royale to your school.”

“I can do that,” said Mademoiselle Vitrac. “There’s an emergency fever ward at Davidson’s Clinic on Circus Street and another one at Campbell’s.
Damn
the newspapers for not publishing where these things are. Didn’t the Ursulines set up a ward in their old convent? The one the legislature has been using now?”

January nodded. “I think so. Soublet has fever patients at his private clinic on Bourbon, though God help her if she was taken there. And the first thing to do,” he added, rising as she rose, “is to talk to Madame Lalaurie herself.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I don’t want you to be connected with Cora in any way.” He handed her her reticule, and the plush purse. “Madame Lalaurie knows at least that I’ve spoken to her.”

Her smile was rueful as she shook out her petticoats. She wore a little gold cross around her neck, and tiny gold studs, like beads, in her earlobes. “I see I wouldn’t make a particularly good desperado.”

“Want of practice.” He returned her smile, and she laughed.

“Ah. So I can look forward to getting better at skulduggery with time. Cora would be proud of me.”

“I’ll let you know what I find out.” He walked with her to the pass-through, opened the gate, and followed her to the street. The only movement there was a woman in a red headscarf selling kerchiefs and pins door to door and the flies that swarmed around a dead dog.

“But I think the first thing we need to do is ascertain whether Cora made it to Madame Lalaurie’s house that night at all.”

Shutters tightly closed and latched, curtains drawn to exclude any possibility of fevered air, the small ward on the ground floor of the yellow stucco building on Rue Bourbon was like those ovens in which Persian monarchs had had their enemies immured to roast. But there was no flame here. Only darkness, and the bleared glare of the jaundiced lamps; the smell of human waste, medicine, and blood, solid enough to cut. For a few moments January only stood looking down the ward, with its double row of makeshift pine-pole beds, bare for the most part of any semblance of mosquito-bars—most without sheets as well. The air was a low thick mutter of delirium and panting breath.

No nurse was to be seen. January made his way between the beds—not more than twenty could be crammed into what was usually a shop selling coffee and tobacco—to the shut and curtained door at the rear. In the courtyard behind, the air grated with the smoke of burning gunpowder. The kitchen building was nearly invisible through its cinder gray screen. A wooden stairway ascended to a gallery, and as he put his foot to the lowest step, January heard a woman groan.

“That’s good, that’s good!” cried Dr. Soublet’s voice, enthusiasm bordering on delight. “The ligaments and bones are accommodating themselves to the pressure of the apparatus!”

There were three rooms upstairs. One seemed to be a sort of office, tucked in a corner where the gallery ran around to join the slave quarters, and unoccupied. In the second, several beds had been set up in the shrouded gloom. These were farther apart than those in the shop, and equipped with mosquito-bars. Small tables between them bore slop-jars and bleeding-bowls. Their contents crept with flies. The candlelit darkness reeked of opium.

In each bed a sufferer lay, invisible behind white clouds of gauze and murmuring in narcotic dream. January stopped beside the first bed, put aside the netting, and looked down into the face of Hèlier the water seller. The young man was strapped into an iron apparatus like Torquemada’s nightmare, over head, shoulders, and back. In spite of the netting, flies swarmed on the sores that the straps had worn in the flesh of his splayed-out arms, and crawled over his unprotected eyes and mouth.

Angrily, January leaned down and unbuckled the straps.
To hell with the “process of the cure
,” he thought. It was one thing to joke with Mademoiselle Vitrac about that obscene iron maiden in the school; this was quite another.
In all his years of witnessing “infallible machines” invented by one physician or another, he’d never seen one with his own eyes that worked.

Could a man of color be arrested in this town for interfering with a white physician’s patient?

These days it wouldn’t surprise him.

“Get up,” he said softly. “Get out of here while you can.”

But the water seller only rolled his head and stared at him with drugged turquoise eyes. “Get out?” he asked, and giggled. “All this opium and you tell me, ‘Get out’? Who’re you to tell me anything, nigger man? Who’re you to tell a white man—a white man …” He groped about for the end of his sentence.

January took him by the arm and sat him up. “You’re not a white man,” he said. “And if you stay here …”

Hèlier dragged his arm free, lips drawn back in an ugly rage. “Don’t you tell me I’m not a white man, you black nigger.” He crawled to his feet, and grabbed the end of the bed with a gasp of agony. “Don’t you tell me
anything
. Why ain’t I a white man, eh?
Why ain’t I?
Look at that!” He held out his arm. “You ever see whiter?”

Then the drug sponged the anger from his face. He gestured around him at the ward, and giggled again. “I’m in a white man’s hospital, ain’t I? Serves me right, eh? Serves me right.”

Hunched and crablike, Hèlier staggered away between the beds, as if his curved spine and the additional pain of what he had been through were burdens that bent him to the ground. From the gallery January watched him descend the stairs and disappear into the shadows of the carriageway, clinging to the pale stucco of the walls.

January drew a deep breath.

The third room was Dr. Soublet’s clinic per se.

“Don’t want it,” muttered a woman’s voice in German.
“Friedrich—wo ist Friedrich?
Hurts … God, it hurts!”

Soublet and a small, slender man of about thirty whom January vaguely recognized bent over a leather-topped table on which lay the German woman Soublet had been talking to at Charity only a few nights ago. She was nude but for a dirty shift pulled up to her belly. An enormous brace or bracket of iron and leather was strapped to her waist, thigh, knee, and down to the deformed foot. It was she whom January had heard groaning, as Soublet readjusted the straps. The slim little man held a spouted china cup to her lips, but his silent dark eyes watched Soublet’s face with a disturbing cold intensity.

“It only hurts because it’s improving,” replied Soublet bracingly. “Nicolas, for God’s sake if the woman won’t take the laudanum, hold her nose as you pour! I can’t have her jiggling about so. What do
you
want?” He looked up irritably as the light from the outside fell through upon them with January’s lifting aside of the curtain over the door. “And close that door, man! This woman has recently recovered from the fever! Do you want to provoke a relapse?”

January stepped in and closed the door of the ward behind him. The woman, whose arms were strapped to the table, wriggled and began to cry.
“Hilf mir
,” she muttered,
“hilf mir
 … Oh, Friedrich!”

“May I speak for a moment with Dr. Lalaurie?” January looked carefully aside so they would not see the sickened rage in his eyes.

The small man set down the cup and stepped forward. His pointed, waxy face was polite, but there was something in the way he looked at him that reminded January of the American businessman in the ballroom at the Washington
Hotel: a calculation of value, an estimate of what he, Benjamin January, could be used for or sold for. “I am Dr. Lalaurie.”

“Please excuse the familiarity of my seeking you out, sir.” January bowed. “My name is Benjamin January; I work at the Charity Hospital.”

“I know who you are,” broke in Soublet. “You’re one of the servants there.”

“I’m a surgeon, actually, sir,” said January, in his most neutral voice. He turned back to Lalaurie. “I’m looking for Madame Lalaurie, sir. I know she nurses. I thought I might find her here. I have a few questions I need to ask her about a mutual acquaintance who may have been taken ill with fever.”

“My wife nurses at the ward set up in the old Convent of the Ursulines,” Lalaurie said. About twenty years younger than his wife, he was slender and small and, January guessed, handsome in a sleek-haired, wiry way. The sleeves of his shirt were linen and very fine, his boots expensive kid, his silk waistcoat embroidered with red and golden birds, nearly hidden under the spotless white apron. His mustache and the tiny arrowhead of a Vandyke lay on the pale face as precisely as if painted. “She should be there this afternoon.”

“Really, Nicolas.” January heard Soublet’s voice as he lifted the heavy double-layer of curtain, stepped through the door to the opium of the ward again. “We can’t allow these interruptions. Now bring me the lancets, and the clyster as well. This woman has far too much of the fiery humors in her to permit the submissive state required for proper mollification of the bones.”

•   •   •

There were few Sisters in the ward set up in what had been the hospital operated by the Ursuline nuns, before the convent had been moved to larger quarters nine years ago. This building, a long, low room of many windows, had returned to its original use for a time, and that may have accounted for the uncrowded look of the room, the impression of air that could be breathed. The smell here was less foul, and daylight filtered through the windows looking onto the old convent’s central courtyard. On pallets, on cots, on two or three old and battered cypress beds donated by the charitable, men and women gasped in the heat, or wept with pain.

From the doorway January saw Madame Lalaurie, clothed in black as she had been Wednesday night and severely neat as ever. She held the hands of a man who was clearly dying, not of the fever but of the cholera: drawn, ghastly, his bedding sodden and stinking.

A priest stood by, reading the offices for the dying. January crossed himself as the Host was elevated and murmured his own prayer for the stranger’s comfort and salvation. The priest, January noticed, stood at a safe distance, or as safe as one could be around the cholera. Madame Lalaurie, however, sat on the edge of the bed; and what arrested January again was the expression on her face, the intense, almost holy pain of a contemplative martyr, as if she herself were dying with her eyes upon the Cross. It was an unnerving sight, so at odds with her controlled strength, and shocking in its way, as intimate as if he watched her face while she submitted to the act of love. Her body swayed as the priest recited the words:

“May you never know the terror of darkness, the gnashing of teeth in the flames, the agonies of torment …”

The dying man retched. Madame Lalaurie quickly and competently turned him, reached down for a basin while
he vomited, and held him as he went into convulsions; the priest backed hastily away. She wiped the man’s face, and wiped it again when he vomited again, all with that expression of desperate longing, of pain shared and gladly absorbed into her heart. She had lost a child, January remembered; her only son. She lived daily with her crippled daughter’s pain. Was that in some way the source of that glow, that expression almost of exultation?