Fever Season (37 page)

One’s always hearing about domestic tyrants.… No one dares speak of it.… They know it’ll do them no good
.

Was this all because he’d seen her do that to her daughters?

“Damn it, the woman gave me money to help a runaway slave!”

Hannibal gave up looking around for another lamp—
the one on the table gave barely more light than a candle—and opened his violin case. “They wouldn’t have to tell her not to hire you,” he pointed out. “Just tell her that you were an atheist, or a bigamist. Or that you helped Rose kill those three girls so she wouldn’t have to feed them.”

January felt his skin prickle with rage. “Is that what they’re saying?”

“Ben, I don’t know what they’re saying. I don’t move in those circles. Madame Lalaurie—or any of them—doesn’t even have to believe you actually did anything. Just that your presence will offend someone who’ll be there. They’re all connected: the Prieurs, the McCartys, the Forstalls, the Blanques, the d’Aunoys.… They’ve all got daughters to marry off.”

The door opened. Philippe deCoudreau entered, laughing and shaking his head, a slim young dandy with skin as fair as Hèlier Lapatie’s had been and a marvelous and unfounded conceit of himself.

“You know as well as I do they can’t take risks about not being invited to the right parties.”

“And isn’t it just the right party tonight?” deCoudreau laughed, picking up the beer pitcher and sniffing it. “For a woman paying off her creditors at a shilling on the pound five months ago, Our Hostess sure found some money someplace.” He nudged January in the ribs. “Think Madame Redfern found a wealthy widower to set her up? Did you take a look at that buffet she’s laying down? Boeuf à la mode and wine jellies—we’re in for some of that I
don’t
think.”

DeCoudreau laughed again. He had bright blue eyes and the sort of laugh described by popular novelists as “infectious,” though January personally considered it in the same category with some of the other infectious complaints available in New Orleans. The thought of trying to
play the piano under and around and through the man’s aberrant sense of timing all night made his teeth ache.

As he descended to the ballroom January thought,
I’m doing it, too. Accepting that the Lalaurie party is the only place to be seen tonight. That everything else is second rate
.

No wonder the McCartys and the Bringiers and the Lafrènniéres found it so easy to manipulate those around them.

Unfortunately, all the evening’s events bore out that judgment. The only Creoles present were the minor, on-the-make skirmishers on the fringes of society and political power. Everyone with money or influence was at the Lalaurie ball. As the evening progressed, these quarreled repeatedly and violently with the American lawyers, brokers, and real-estate speculators present. January recognized at least two of the slave brokers who had been at Madame Redfern’s Washington Hotel affair that summer, and could not rid himself of the sensation of being priced by the pound: Americans always made him uneasy. If nothing else, the volume of tobacco expectorated was enough to pollute the room with its stench. Madame Redfern, still in deep mourning, circulated among her guests with the vulpine Fraikes in attendance, and January could not but note the fashionable lines of her dress and the quantities of black lace and jet jewelry festooning her stubby person.

“It’s a terrible city, terrible city,” he heard a man say in English, over the general babble of talk between sets of polka and waltz. “Did you hear about poor Yates and his family? Found them all together in his wife’s bedroom, all dead of the cholera.… But opportunities?” The man, a thick-set Philadelphian—at least January thought the accent was Philadelphian—kissed his hand. “Speaking of opportunities,
Gallagher, I’ve been meaning to ask you about renting slaves for the mill.…”

“I think you have been very, very brave,” a woman was saying, taking Emily Redfern’s black-mitted hands in her own. A number of women, January noted, were still in mourning, but fewer than he’d seen at Creole functions last winter. The Americans tended to have more money, and to flee earlier; their relatives were in New York or Washington or Boston, not in New Orleans itself.

“I was lucky.” Madame Redfern was not veiled now, and her square face assumed an expression of pious martyrdom. “My poor Otis! I will always blame myself for not being more insistent that he get rid of that wicked girl! Because, of course, I saw from the beginning what she was. But he never would.” She sighed, a world of carefully manipulated wistfulness in her eyes, as if it was her belief that the lamented Otis had been too good-hearted to think ill of anyone.

“Did they ever catch her?”

The widow shook her head. “Poor soul. I can only pray that she will one day realize the error of her ways.” She still had a voice like scale weights clacking in a pan:
A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny
.… “I suppose I should hire men to pursue her wherever she flees, for, of course, her theft left me destitute; but I don’t do badly now. Because of the way Papa tied it up in trust, at least they weren’t able to distrain Black Oak. And the sale of the other slaves let me discharge Otis’s debts at some percentage of their value. And Mr. Fraikes assures me that …”

They moved off, Madame Redfern relating yet again how Mr. Fraikes had made sure she would be no longer liable for the remaining seventy-five percent of her late husband’s debt. January wondered how many people she
had told this to. Still, given the quality of the chicken croquettes, quiche lorraine, bombe glacée, and éclairs ranged along the buffet table, and the obvious promise of money in the new red velvet side chairs and heavily gilded picture frames, everyone seemed more than willing to listen a second or third (or sixth) time.

“…  wicked girl, to do that to poor Emily, who had been so good to her.…”

“…  died in absolute agony.…”

“…  Mr. Fraikes simply told Fazende that he’d signed the paper expressing complete satisfaction with the discharge at the time.…”

“…  a trust fund in perpetuity, and not actually hers—and therefore not his to sell for debt, thank God—at all.”

Mr. Bailey walked by, deep in conversation with a planter’s son. The Magistrate glanced curiously at January, as if trying to recall his face, but failed and walked on.

A polka. A schottische. Flouncing laces and swirling silk. The memory of that small determined face under the red headscarf:
You know how they do
.

Why hadn’t Redfern claimed the pearls?

When the Reverend Micajah Dunk made his appearance he was surrounded at once by nearly every woman in the room, and for some thirty minutes held a species of court under the skeptical eyes of the disgruntled men. Served them right, thought January, with a wry inner grin. He’d seen too many of these men sneak away to the quadroon balls, leaving their wives, their fiancées, to “make a tapestry,” as the saying went. About time they found themselves with their noses out of joint.

And the Reverend Dunk, he had to admit, had a good deal of the messianic magnetism that frequently clings to preachers, particularly when they are physically powerful
men in their prime. Dunk had the gift of grave and complete attention, a way of looking at any woman with those curiously long-lashed brown eyes, that, January knew, drew women. Hannibal had it as well.

A surrogate lover? A cicisbeo, such as well-born Italian ladies kept about them, safe but titillating?

And clearly, though he gave every woman present the impression that she was the most important person in his life—or certainly the most important contributor toward the building of his new church—Dunk favored Mrs. Redfern. As she walked with him down the length of the double-parlor toward the door that led to hall and supper room, January saw the minister’s gestures take in the new velvet furniture, the carved mantelpiece and the Austrian lusters of the gasolier overhead, congratulating and admonishing, but admonishing with a twinkle in his eyes.

“Now don’t let me hear this new wealth has gone to your head, Madame.” He had a voice trained to fill a church, and the conclusion of the contredanse “Tartan Plaid”—in which scarcely a handful of couples had participated due to the desertion of all the women—left a space of relative silence in which he could clearly be heard. “Would you believe it, ladies,” he turned to take in the dozen or so who clustered at his heels, “when I came down to the city last summer, at the very landing where I boarded they loaded a matched team of white horses whose cost alone could have provided a dozen beds for those wretched sufferers dying in the alleys of this city during the pestilence? It isn’t God who sent the fever to punish mankind, ladies; it is Man who brought it upon himself, with sheer, greedy neglect of his fellow man.”

“And I suppose,” murmured Hannibal, plucking experimentally at a string, “that his idea of doing God’s work was buying those slaves of La Redfern’s at four hundred
apiece and selling them the following day for nine fifty? She doesn’t seem to notice that he scraped her for close to seven thousand dollars, ‘doing God’s work.’ ”

“I wonder.” January blotted his forehead with a handkerchief. Though the windows to one side of the room stood open—American casements, not the French glazed doors—the place was stuffily hot, and in the hall outside he could hear voices raised:

“Sir, no man speaks ill of His Majesty while there is breath left in my body to defend him!”

Not again
.

“You wonder if your services are going to be snubbed again in favor of a nice dose of calomel and citrus juice?”

“No.” January turned to the next piece, a Mozart march, the last one of this set. His head ached. He felt slightly sick from the stench of tobacco soaking into wool carpets, from concentrating on the tempo above deCoudreau’s constant efforts to speed it up, from remembering Cora and wondering where Rose might have gone.

“I wonder what Micajah Dunk was doing at Spanish Bayou the day before Otis Redfern’s death.”

The men down on the engine deck pulled me up and hid me in the hay bales.…

From his mother January had heard all about the white carriage team Laurence Jumon had bought, their cost to the penny, and the names of the other men who’d bid.

The horses at least stood a good chance of surviving the month of September, he thought, as he crossed the Place d’Armes in the predawn silence of bone-eating fog. Which was probably more than could have been said of the thick-crowded gaggle of Irish and Germans coming
down from Ohio on the
New Brunswick
that Wednesday, to make their fortunes in New Orleans.

But opportunities?
the Philadelphia guest had said—broker or banker or one of those blackleg-lawyer-cum-slave-dealers who haunted the saloons of Bourbon Street plotting the conquest of Mexico—and had kissed his hand like a connoisseur.

For some.

Micajah Dunk had been at Spanish Bayou on the morning before Otis Redfern died. It was in
his
honor, not Redfern’s, that the ham and apple tarts had been laid on. It fit. Dunk looked like a man who had never missed a meal in his life.

Through the fog, the Cathedral was a blur of white, gradually resolving into twin, pointed towers, round window black as a watching eye. Men’s voices chimed from the levee behind him, as they loaded wood onto the steamboat decks: the
Amulet
, the
Missourian
, the
Boonslick
, bound upriver for Natchez and St. Louis as soon as the fog burned off and it got light enough, with cargoes of scythes and compasses, perfumes and coffee, and slaves for the plantations of the Missouri Territory. The smell of their smoke rasped in the cold air.

The party had ended at two. Late for Americans, but as January and Hannibal and DeCoudreau (who had invited himself along to late supper at one of the cafés in the Market) had made their way up Rue Chartres they’d passed half a dozen lighted windows where the Creoles still danced, gambled, gossiped, the custom of the country in Carnival season, January’s second since his return from Paris.

Madame Redfern’s provision for the comfort of her musicians had been decidedly lacking, and by the time the three musicians (Laurent Lamartine of the tin ear and
squeaky flute said his wife would worry if he stayed out) had finished oysters, crawfish jambalaya, coffee, and beignets, the black river fog had rinsed to opal gray.

Micajah Dunk at Spanish Bayou. Micajah Dunk kissing Emily Redfern’s hands. It was quite clear to January that the five thousand dollars Cora was supposed to have stolen had left the Redfern plantation somehow: the creditors had searched the place fairly thoroughly, and Emily Redfern had been flat on her back in bed. In bed, and loudly proclaiming in that clanking voice that she had been poisoned and robbed. And the minute they were out the door she had taken steps to close off her husband’s debts for whatever the creditors would take.

It explained, he thought, why she hadn’t claimed the pearls.

To do so would have led to the questioning of someone who had actually spoken to Cora. Someone who might cause Cora to be found. True, a slave could not testify against her mistress, but there were those who would listen to Cora and ask questions of their own.

January shivered and glanced over his shoulder at the dew-netted grass, the sleeping dark of the trees. He had never gotten over his uneasiness, born in the fever season, about being followed, had never lost the fear of being watched and stalked. Hèlier Lapatie and Liam Roarke were both in their graves, but the knowledge that anyone else could work a kidnapping—and get away with it—lay like a chip of metal embedded in the back of his brain. It was too easy for a free man of color—a free woman of color—merely to drop out of sight.

Easier still, for an escaping slave.

No one would ask.

Had Rose guessed? Had Cora told Rose things she hadn’t mentioned to him, things that Rose hadn’t even
recalled until she saw the Redfern woman at the Cabildo? Things that would cause her to guess why Madame Redfern could not afford to have Cora found. It returned to him that Madame Redlern had left Milneburgh within a day or two of seeing, perhaps speaking to, Rose.