Fever Season (31 page)

Another Guard pushed through the doors from the Place d’Armes, called out, “Lieutenant? Trouble at Kentucky
Williams’s.” Blood streamed from the man’s nose, mixing with the sweat on his face to accomplish a truly sanguinary effect.

“Lordy, those girls of hers got energy.” Shaw got to his feet, and fished his disreputable hat from the floor. “I’m purely sorry, Maestro. I know what you’re thinkin’—that this Redfern bissom started them rumors to run Miss Vitrac out of town to punish her for harborin’ Miss Chouteau and shut her up into the bargain. But it don’t fit. If Miz Redfern wanted to punish Miss Vitrac, she had her in her hand Sunday, and she let her go.”

“And made it impossible for her to remain in New Orleans.”

“We don’t know that.” He studied the inside of the battered hat for a moment, then retrieved a flea and crushed it between his thumbnails. “If so be I hear anythin’, you know I’ll tell you, first thing.”

“I know.”

From the stone arcade before the Cabildo’s doors, January watched the tall Kentuckian and his little escort of Guards disappear around the corner into Rue St. Pierre.

No
, he thought.
No
. There seemed to be nothing in his heart but a kind of strange stunned disbelieving blankness.
No
.

She has to have gone somewhere
.

And he went out into the streets to search.

Throughout the day, under the sickly blanket of the growing storm heat, he paced the streets of the town. At the grocery on the corner opposite the boarded-up Spanish building on Rue St. Claude, he spoke to the woman behind the counter.

“It’s a crime,” she said, shaking her head. “A crime. Never will I believe Mademoiselle Vitrac stole that money.
After I’ve seen her work so hard to make that school, coming down here after she had to let her cook-woman go—I cooked for her many nights, you know.” The woman nodded, a withered walnut face within the startlingly gaudy blue-and-yellow tignon’s folds. “I never thought it right, her teaching all that Latin and Greek and silliness, but she was a good sort, once you got to know her, for all her top-lofty airs. She could have come here. I’d have got my man to let her have a bed in the attic.”

“But she didn’t.”

The woman shook her head again and ran her dustrag over the already spotless planks.

“Did she have family? Any other friends?”

But Rose was not the sort of woman who easily makes friends. The woman did not even know where Rose’s home had been.

Even in the dead, ghastly stillness of the fever season, it was surprising how many people could be found in a neighborhood, once January started to look. Unobtrusive people, little more than the furniture of the street. A woman selling soap from a willow basket. A man hawking pokers. Women peddling pralines and needles. A pharmacist’s assistant, fishing for leeches in the gutter. Hèlier the water seller, far out of his own territory but willing to gossip as always. The boy who worked at the livery stable around the corner. The cook and the housemaid for a lawyer named Guttman in the yellow cottage that backed onto the school.

“It is a terrible shame.…”

“No, Mademoiselle had no family that I heard of.”

“Imagine, her taking all that money and living like a pauper—and making those poor girls live that way, too.”

“Stuck-up yellow bitch.” Hèlier’s voice was bitter. He
was clearly struggling to balance his yoke and buckets at the new angle across his shoulders necessitated by the damage Soublet’s “mollification of the bones” had done to his back. His fair, handsome face was drawn with exhaustion and pain. “Like all the colored, thinks herself better than everyone around her.”

Including you, my friend
, thought January, remembering the water seller’s drugged tirade in the clinic.
And all the white fathers in the world won’t make you white
.

Or straight-backed
, he thought, suddenly ashamed.

He thanked him, and walked on, turning back to see the twisted form staggering crablike along the banquette with his yoke and his cane, water slopping from the buckets and dribbling around his feet.

“I never held with education for girls,” declared an Italian woman who kept a shop down the street. “Look what it led to, eh?”

“Is it true she starved them to death?”

Calumny
, Beaumarchais had written sixty years ago.
You don’t know what you are disdaining when you disdain that.… There is no false report however crude, no abomination, no ridiculous falsehood which the idlers in a great city cannot, if they take the trouble, make universally believed
.

And Rose’s education, her reserve, her strength had made her a target. No wonder she’d lashed out at him when he’d mentioned Alphonse Montreuil’s jealous fantasies about Madame Lalaurie torturing her slaves. In her own way, Rose, like that beautiful Creole matriarch, was everything a woman should not be.

And she was gone.

He was obsessed with the thought that, returning from the Cabildo, she had been snatched from the sidewalk by the same men who had tried to kidnap him, who
had abducted Cora on the threshold of her freedom. Remembering Hannibal’s earlier living arrangements, he slipped through the pass-throughs along the sides of houses shuttered tight, looking for signs of occupation.

He found none. But he did find, in two other houses, broken hasps on the rear shutters, bedclothes rumpled, the signs of swift and unwilling departure. In neither house—and in a shed where he found a little heap of clothes and the tin badge of a slave who earned his own keep—was there evidence of children. In all three cases, the houses on either side were closed and empty.

Rain began to fall, wild and blowing and bathwater warm. Lightning cut the darkness, not bolts and spears but sheets of whiteness, prodigal and terrible, leaving denser dark behind. January, who by three in the afternoon had made a circuit of every cheap lodging house in the city, took the steam-cars to Milneburgh again, to be greeted by the news that the Widow Redfern had departed for the remainder of the fever season. Stopping at Minou’s house cost him more time; and the returning train was overtaken by the storm, the branches lashing frenziedly in the gloom of the swampy woods on either side of the tracks and the dark, near-empty cars shaking with the blasts of the wind.

By the time he walked back from the terminus to his mother’s house it was nearly ten, lightless as the Pit save where the wildly swaying street lamps flung ragged flares of red across the intersections, the blowing rain transformed to bloody jewels.

He made his way across the yard by memory in the dark, groped for the rail of the stairs. No light shone from behind Bella’s shutters. It was logical that were Hannibal making a little money playing in a tavern somewhere, he would stay rather than soak himself walking home. Still,
January felt his way along between wall and gallery railing, and passed his hands over the latch of the shutters.

They were bolted from the outside. Hannibal had not returned. January was turning back to the door of his own room when a white flare of lightning illuminated the length of the gallery. It showed him two men just clambering up the stairway, knives in their hands.

Blindness returned the next second, but January had seen in their faces their surprise that he hadn’t gone into his own room. With the noise of the storm, he’d never have heard them till it was too late. Even the thunder of their boots on the gallery, running toward him, was drowned. He caught the railing in both hands, swung himself over, felt their bodies blunder and slam against the rail as he let go and dropped.

He heard one say “Tarnation!” in a heavy Irish brogue, as he ducked through the kitchen door and by touch in the dark found where Bella kept the iron spits, and the woodbox with its short, heavy logs. There was no time to search for anything more—Bella’s knives were in a drawer someplace, but the building was already shaking with the descending boots, and he knew he had to take them when they came off the stairs, when they’d still be single file.

He made it, barely, driving the spit in pure darkness out of the abyssal night beneath the gallery, hearing and smelling the assassin as he reached the bottom of the stairs and knowing by touch, because he had ascended those stairs himself a thousand thousand times, where the man had to be. He felt the sharpened end of the iron plow into meat; he heard the man scream, a dreadful animal sound.

Feet blundered, then more shrieking as the second man fell over the first. January swung his makeshift club like Samson smiting the Philistines and felt it connect with
something, but a hand grabbed his arm, and he twisted out of the way of the foot-long knife he’d glimpsed on the gallery. The blade opened his sleeve and the arm beneath in a long mouth of shocking pain. He grabbed where he guessed the man’s head had to be and drove his knee up hard. Metal rattled on the brick underfoot, then the two of them fell outward, landing in the oozing muck and sluicing rain of the yard.

Hands groped and fumbled at his throat. He saw the silvery flash of eyes. With his forearm he smashed away the man’s hands, grabbed for him again and dragged him bodily up to slam him into one of the gallery posts, but the marauder slithered free. An instant later, above the hammering of the rain, January heard the yard-gate rumble as heavy weight clambered over it.

He turned back, flung himself into the kitchen again and grabbed another spit, then, when there was no pursuit, groped, shivering and dripping, for the tinderbox and striker always kept in a tin holder above it, Bella not holding with new-fangled stinking lucifers in
her
kitchen.

Wedged into a corner, listening with what felt like his entire body and unable to hear a thing over the rain, January kindled the tinder. By the flickery light, he found candles and a lamp.

The man he’d stabbed with the spit lay facedown in the mud of the yard. The metal had pierced the thorax just under the rib cage. January suspected, by the strong smell of the blood as he dragged him back under the shelter of the gallery, that he’d gone into shock and subsequently drowned and suffocated in ooze. In addition to the skinning knife he found at the foot of the steps—and the one the second man had dropped in the gallery—the first man had a slung-shot—a lump of lead on the end of a leather
thong—at his belt, and a pistol wrapped in greased leather under his shirt.

January brought the lamp close, and dipped a cup of rainwater from the nearby barrel to wash off the man’s face.

It was the gotch-eyed bartender from the Jolly Boatman Saloon.

The Jolly Boatman’s lights burned through the rain like a scattering of rusty jackstraws. From the weed-grown alley January listened. The bass rumble of men’s voices carried easily through the thin plank walls. The shutters were closed against the storm, and here in the Swamp no street lamps burned. In his rough corduroy jacket and dark trousers, January blended with the night.

Curiously, though it was past curfew, he felt safe. The City Guards avoided the Swamp. Should he be attacked or murdered himself, he could look for neither protection nor vengeance, but he was too angry now for that to matter, and in any case he was coming to understand that the Swamp was not the only place where that was true. In his belt, against every law of the state of Louisiana, he wore both knives he’d taken from his would-be killers. He carried the dead man’s slungshot rolled up in his pocket. The only reason he hadn’t added the pistol to his arsenal was because the lock had been drenched in the puddles of his mother’s yard, and there was no time to dry it. The weapon and its attendant powder-bottle now reposed under his mattress.

Ten, maybe eleven buildings backed up against the turning basin—it was difficult to tell where St. Gertrude’s
Clinic started and ended. January memorized rooflines as well as he could against the pitchy dark of the sky, then moved along the wall through the weeds and muck.

Listening. Listening.

“Hell with ’er, I ain’t goin’ out in this,” said a man’s voice, so close January nearly jumped. Jaundiced lantern-light sprayed the rain around a door in the shack on the Boatman’s riverward side. Forms jostled in the opening. By daylight January would have been visible. He doubted he was so now, even had the two men emerging into the weedy yard been sober.

They weren’t, however. A narrow strip of yard backed the shack, and the grimy waters of the canal lay beyond, the view broken by a small and mangy outhouse.

Both men turned their backs on the canal, and urinated against the wall of the house. Rain running down his hair and under the collar band of his calico shirt, January had to agree with their sentiments.

When the men had gone in again he continued his wary circuit of the building. He’d brought a small bull’s-eye lantern, and with the slide closed nearly completely and the dark side of the lantern turned toward the building, he doubted he could be seen even had anyone next door taken his attention from his cards long enough to look. The Jolly Boatman ran down almost to the waters of the canal, separated only by a sodden yard that quite obviously doubled as a general privy.