Fever Season (25 page)

“I might be thinking of someone else.”

“I’d say you are, my friend.” Davis shook his head. “Otis Redfern, God rest his soul, couldn’t raise three thousand dollars to pay his debts here, let alone buy a coachman and a cook. He had a cook, anyway, the best in town; that wife of his saw to that. She asked around for months, and nothing was good enough for her; in the end she paid twice what he was worth for that stuck-up yellow fussbudget who used to cook for Bernard Marigny. And for all that the man ended up sold to that church fellow for six hundred dollars—money he probably took straight out of the profits of that silly Musicale those American ladies held for him out in Milneburgh last week. Now, that’s gratitude for you!” he concluded sarcastically. “At least he could have paid her a decent price.”

January remembered the Reverend Micajah Dunk bargaining in the Exchange: nine hundred, nine hundred fifty dollars for men who would be sold for over a thousand in Missouri next week. He wondered if one of them had been the Marigny cook.

He said, “Tcha!” and related, with libelous embellishments, the tale of the musicians’ contracts for the Musicale, something Davis had heard secondhand or thirdhand already, but listened to avidly again.

“Well, for all her airs she’s having the plantation sold out from under her,” Davis remarked, after a fairly derogatory discussion of Emily Redfern’s pretensions. “It went under seal by the bank today; Granville’s going to auction it at Maspero’s Monday. I never knew the lady well, but a harder, more grasping woman I have yet to meet. It must
have driven her insane, the way that poor man let the ready slide through his fingers—and he was about the most inept gambler I’ve seen,” he added, shaking his head. “Otis Redfern was one of those poor souls who couldn’t let it alone, not even against plain common sense. He’d bet on anything, for the thrill of it. Last week—Wednesday, it would have been—when everyone in town knew he was over his ears in debt, he came in here playing roulette.…
Roulette
, like a fool!”

“Wednesday?” said January, startled.

Davis’s gray brows raised politely; January said, “A friend of mine tried to reach him Wednesday and was told he was indisposed.”

Davis shook his head. “The small hours of Wednesday morning it was—Redfern came in here around midnight or one, and gambled until just after sunrise. God knows what he said to his wife when he reached home.”

He gestured with his glass toward the door and the gambling room beyond. “Liam Roarke, that slick Irishman who runs some dive by the Basin, came in at four with a couple of his bravos, and braced the man over money he’d lost to
them
, five thousand dollars two days before.
Two days before
, with Fazende and Calder ready to go to law over what Redfern owed them from last year’s crop coming in poorly because of the cholera, and him selling up his slaves to cover the debt. And after they left, what does the poor fool do but go back to the tables.”

He sipped his whisky and shook his head again at the marvel of human conduct. Through the floor January heard voices rise in sudden fury, the stamp of feet and shouting: a fight downstairs, inevitable in gatherings of Creoles and Americans. He heard something that sounded like “species of American!” and “Consarn if I’ll take that
from any man!” Davis tilted his head a little, ready to rise, but the noises died away.

The entrepreneur sighed, and his stout shoulders eased in their bottle green superfine. “I’ve been a player all my life, you know, Ben. I’ve seen enough money won and lost, here and in Paris and in Haiti, probably to buy back all of the Mississippi Valley from the Americans, with this city thrown in for lagniappe. I know these men who gamble everything, who can’t stop gaming any more than a drunkard can stop drinking; who ruin themselves at the tables—I understand what they’ll do, how they’ll react, how they’ll lay their bets. I can read these men like books. But I don’t understand them. I don’t understand why.”

The door behind January opened upon a gentle knock. Placide looked in, caught Davis’s eye: “I think they need you downstairs, sir.”

“Ah.” Davis sighed and stood. “My apologies, Ben …”

“None needed, sir. It’s your job.”

“For my sins.” He gave a wry grin.

“Perhaps for your virtues.” January picked up his hat.

“About your mother’s friend’s money.” Davis waited until the waiter was gone. “I haven’t seen anyone in here.… How to say this? Spending money it doesn’t appear they should have. It’s been quiet. Mostly what you have here these days are the local men, the ones who come in all the time—the ones who stay in town, like fools, to gamble. And here I am like a fool catering to them, but there! In a year or two I’ll open that place in Spanish Fort that I’ve been looking at, and then you’ll see something like!”

January nodded. He hadn’t noticed any diminution of the establishment’s clientele, but then, Davis’s was not a place where he performed regularly. Maybe it
was
quiet.

“You’ll have better luck asking in the Swamp, and near the Basin, or down on Tchoupitoulas Street by the levee. But frankly, Ben, I wouldn’t advise you to go down there. Slaves are very high this year. I wouldn’t want to see you come to harm.”

So Otis Redfern had been in town all Tuesday night.

January turned the matter over in his mind as he walked to the Hospital, carefully choosing the most populated and best-lit streets.

Redfern would have ridden in Tuesday to post the runaway notice in the
Bee
—presumably before the loss of his five thousand dollars was discovered. And despite the debts that had forced the sale of Gervase and the others, he’d stayed on, his gambler’s logic telling him that this was the way to recoup his loss.

If Emily Redfern hadn’t already been planning to include her husband, as well as his mistress, in her plans for murder, thought January, shaking his head, that would have decided her.

Too little remained of his dwindling funds to hire a horse, so when he forced himself to wake next day in the heat of noon, he bathed and dressed and walked the six or seven streets to the levee. The
Missourian
had left that morning, bound on its usual run to St. Louis; the
Bonnets O’Blue
was just in and off-loading cotton and tobacco. The
Philadelphia
would leave sometime that afternoon for Natchez—“Or this evenin’, more like,” said its engineer, with whom January managed to get a quiet word in the arcades of the market, while the small white ship sat idle on its wharf and its crew of stevedores played monte in the shade. “That big mess of brandy that came in on the
Caledonia
yesterday ain’t yet been brought over here, and
it’ll be four hours loadin’ at the least. Mr. Graham—that’s our pilot—says we can make as far as Red Church, ’fore we’ll have to tie up for the night. You’ll be fine.”

So January booked deck passage as far as Twelve-Mile Point, all he could afford, and returning home, packed a small grip with a change of linen, a blue-and-red calico shirt, rough trousers, and a corduroy jacket. While he was doing so he heard sounds, first in the little room next door to which Hannibal had moved his books and clothing the previous afternoon, then out on the gallery. He deduced that his friend was at least out of bed, if not precisely awake.

He found him being thoroughly sick over the gallery railing. Considering the hour at which the fiddler had come in last night—well after January’s predawn return from the Hospital—he suspected this illness was the usual result of Hannibal’s drinking, but went to him nevertheless, and while steadying him, unobtrusively checked for fever.

“Non vinum virus moderari,”
whispered Hannibal at last, draped like a wet rag doll over the railing.
“Sed viri vino solent
. Have I died of the fever yet?” He was panting as if he had run a long distance.

“No,” replied January unfeelingly. Given the present possible fates of free colored who lived alone with no one in the houses on either side, he felt safer knowing there was another person on the premises, and he was genuinely fond of the fiddler, but sharing quarters with Hannibal Sefton did have its disadvantages. “It isn’t Bronze John—just your old friend John Barleycorn. And if you’d
moderari
your intake of
vinum
you wouldn’t be having this problem.”

“Ah, but think of the others that would be caused by worry in its place.” He wavered back into the dark little
chamber that had from time immemorial been occupied by the Widow Levesque’s cook Bella and, unequal to the task of fighting his way back through the mosquito-bar, simply collapsed on the floor with his back against the foot of the bed. “I’ll sleep here, thanks.”

January went into his own room and brought in the tub of water he’d drawn to sluice his head and arms before getting dressed for the Blanque girls’ piano lessons. Hannibal thrust his head into it as if he expected there to be a twenty-dollar gold piece on the bottom that he could pick up only with his teeth. He came up dripping and gasping, like a drowned elf.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Thank
you,”
replied January seriously. “The two young ladies who brought you home this morning told me you’d been making enquiries among their friends about people spending more money than is their wont to have. Did you learn anything?”
Anything you can remember?
he wanted to add, but didn’t. Hannibal was having enough problems this morning.

“Ah. The lovely Bridgit and the equally lovely Thalia. They did say that nobody’s showed up with five thousand all in a lump, but, of course, if Cora were abducted by a group the money would have been split. No one seems to have even been throwing around as much as a thousand. They did say that Roarke, the proprietor of the Jolly Boatman, had been expecting such a sum, that he’d won from one Otis Redfern, but nothing came of it: Roarke’s
inamorata du jour
, one Miss Trudi, abused the other girls for a week on the strength of the disappointment.”

“That sounds genuine,” murmured January. He thought that one of the girls who’d greeted him in the yard in the small hours—an incapable Hannibal in tow—had looked vaguely familiar. She’d been dishing the crawfish
and rice yesterday, behind the gotch-eyed bartender’s back.

“Are you off to Mademoiselle Vitrac’s, when you’re feeling better? Then let her know I’ve gone up to Spanish Bayou, to have a look at the Redfern place. They’re auctioning it Monday. The slaves are gone; Madame Redfern herself is in Milneburgh; this is our last chance to see anything there that is to be seen. I should be back tomorrow, when the
Lancaster
makes her usual run down from Natchez. Copies of my papers are in my desk.”

Hannibal nodded. January scooped aside the mosquito-bar and helped him back into bed, exasperation and pity in his heart. January knew better than to remonstrate with a man whose illness and pain had led him into addiction. The road that led away from opium would lead only back to pain, and both had given Hannibal an uneradicable taste for oblivion. So he said only, “Will you be all right?”

“Eripere vitam nemo non homini potest, at nemo mortem; mille ad hanc aditus patent
. I’ll look after Athene of the Bright Eyes. You watch yourself, upriver.”

There wasn’t time to walk to the levee and check on the progress of the
Philadelphia
’s cargo; January could only hope it was delayed. Most steamboats left before noon, and with the waning moon rising late he guessed the captain of the vessel would be pressing the pilot and the engineer to be off as soon as could be. The next upriver boat was the
Lancaster
, early Sunday morning, and January did not like to count on the house at Spanish Bayou remaining empty for that long. As he walked the length of Rue Burgundy, and down Rue de l’Hôpital, he found himself listening for the groan of steamboat whistles that would tell
him he was too late and had lost his passage money; within the high walls of the Lalaurie house he strained his ears, and grudged the thick curtains that masked all noise from the streets.

The heavily decorated, ostentatious parlor was nearly dark, as usual; oven-hot, as usual; and neither Pauline nor Louise Marie had practiced, as usual. Pauline was peevish, caustic, and spiteful; Louise Marie sniveling with an exquisitely calculated appearance of martyrdom: “It’s only that my silly pain has made it so difficult for me to practice. The pain, and the heat, and one of my dizzy spells.” She raised a wraithlike hand to her forehead. “I have told you of my spells, have I not, M’sieu Janvier?”

January thought of Hannibal, weaving exquisite beauty through pain to earn enough to sleep under a roof. Of Rose Vitrac, sponging off the bodies of the dying in the heat.

“The heat?” Pauline laughed with a sound like breaking glass. “We’re like to die in the heat. It isn’t as if we didn’t have a house at the lake.”

“Oh, but you can’t expect Dr. Lalaurie to give up his work with Dr. Soublet, just for us.” Louise Marie lifted sunken eyes to meet her sister’s. January recalled what the market-women had said, when he’d asked them about Madame Lalaurie:
“She’s had enough to bear, with that poor girl of hers in and out of that clinic, but she never would have no truck with laudanum.…”

Soublet’s? Was that where Madame had met the suavely dandified Lalaurie?

“No more than she deserved,”
had grumbled another.
“I heard how she throwed a little pickaninny of hers off’n the roof …”

“I heard it was down a flight of stairs,”
had said someone else, and the discussion dissolved into an exchange of
rumor that would, January reflected angrily, have made Monsieur Montreuil proud.

“And with a doctor in the house, and Mama, you know we must be perfectly safe.” Louise Marie’s plaintive tones tugged back his thoughts. “We can survive the heat.” She sighed as she said it, to let everyone know she did not expect to. “I’m just so sorry, Monsieur Janvier, that I haven’t been able to learn my pieces better. I did try.”

Pauline’s mouth twisted, her sharp nostrils flaring with an unmade comment. Was this, January wondered, one of those girls of whom Mademoiselle Vitrac had spoken? The ones who were too bright, too sharp, for their own good? Delphine Lalaurie was the pinnacle of Creole womanhood: hostess, businesswoman, mother, manager of a household of twenty or more persons. What recourse had a daughter of this house, if that daughter’s goals and needs did not include a husband and children, Creole tradition, and Creole society?