Fever Season (38 page)

The thought tormented him as he edged down the narrow walkway between his mother’s house and the cottage next door, as he crossed the silent yard to the garçonnière stairs. Hannibal slept once again among the bravos and whores of Girod Street. Rose’s books—Anacreon, Plato, and Kant, Dalton’s
New System of Chemical Philosophy
, and Agnesi’s
Analytical Institutions
—still stacked the wall of January’s room and the attic above it like bricks.

He passed his hand over them as he entered, the way he had touched the silks and wools folded everywhere in the Paris rooms once upon a time, seeking to feel in them the warmth of the woman whose hands had made them magic.

We have her books
, Hannibal had said.
We’ll be seeing her again
.

Rose had no fear. Rose would have gone to speak with La Redfern.

He glanced outside as he shut the door, his heart beating slow but uncomfortably heavy in his chest.

Just light. Too early to amble over to Nyades Street and ask casual questions of the Redfern cook on her way to the market. An hour, he decided and lay down, fully clothed, on the bed.

He had plenty of time. With the epidemics over, he no longer served at the Hospital, but neither was his schedule overburdened with pupils. Did Madame Redfern know of his connection with Rose Vitrac? Had someone at the Cabildo told her something that had caused her to
guess? Was she, in fact, behind the effort to put him out of business, run him out of town, as she had run Rose?

But in that case, why hire him to play?

He seemed to be standing at the gateway of the cemetery on Rue des Ramparts, watching a man lead two women away among the tombs. For a moment he thought it was Reverend Dunk and his little court of females, but he realized in the next moment that the man was enormous and powerful and black: Bronze John the dead-cart man. January could see only the women’s backs, but he saw that one of them walked like a jockey or a dancer, her witch-black hair unbound to her hips, and the other wore a neat white tignon, a simple green wool skirt. The women held hands, like sisters or friends. He cried out their names, and the shock of trying to do so, trying to run to catch up with them, was like falling.

It was fully light. Someone was knocking at the door.

January stumbled across and opened the shutters.

“I purely hate to be always comin’ up on you this way.” Abishag Shaw shoved aside his disreputable hat to finger-comb his long hair. His thin, rather creaky tenor was carefully neutral. “But I got orders to put you under arrest.”

“Arrest?” January glanced past him toward the house. The rear door was shuttered fast. If his mother knew of Shaw’s presence, which she surely must, she was having nothing to do with it.

All he could think of was Mrs. Redfern.

“Arrest for what?”

Shaw spit a line of tobacco to the gallery boards by his feet. “Murder.”

“This is ridiculous.” Judge J. F. Canonge slapped the warrant on his desk. “Who swore this out? Who’s behind this?”

January opened his mouth to remark that he had wondered about that himself, but decided against it. He folded his manacled hands and forced himself to look at the floor until he had his face under control.

He knew he should be afraid, but all he felt was the trapped, blind rage of a baited bull and an overwhelming desire to break somebody’s neck.

“Louis Brinvilliers is the brother of Jean Brinvilliers,” said Shaw, in his mild voice, “who—”

“I know who Jean Brinvilliers was,” snapped Canonge. His craggy face was that of a man who has packed life with everything that it will hold, in great careless handfuls: burnt brown, deep-lined, dark eyes impatient and intolerant of fools. There was a story that he’d once sworn out a warrant on all five State Supreme Court Justices rather than change his conduct of a case. Looking at him now January believed it. The Judge’s English was pure as an upper-class Londoner’s, his deep voice wrought gold. “The whole concept of a medical man’s being held liable for a patient’s death in these circumstances is absurd.
That’s like hanging me along with a thief if I failed to get him acquitted.”

It was dark outside. Saturday night; Canonge was probably the only justice of the Criminal Court who’d have come in late rather than let a man spend the night in a cell, waiting for the Recorders’ Court to reopen. With the part of him that wasn’t seething with rage January felt grateful. The day had been a profoundly awful one.

Canonge turned the warrant over, looking for signatures. “Whose idea was this? Louis Brinvilliers doesn’t have the brains to read a contract. Jonchere signed the warrant.” He glared across at January, eyes piercing under graying brows. “You run yourself foul of one of Brinvilliers’s friends, boy?”

“I don’t know,” answered January, and remembered to add, “sir.” His knuckles smarted from an altercation with another prisoner—Tuesday would be Mardi Gras and every drunken keelboat hand, every argumentative Napoleoniste, every filibuster in the city, it seemed, had been in the jail cheek-by-jowl and looking for a fight. January’s head ached from the constant thump and howl of brass bands and revelers in the street, and from the yammering of a madman in the cell next door. One of the men in his own cell had been far gone in delirium tremens. January felt like he’d never be clean again.

“I wouldn’t know Jean Brinvilliers from President Jackson, sir. He was bleeding, he needed a doctor. I was a surgeon for six years at the Hôtel Dieu in Paris. Next time I see a man bleeding—” He bit the words off. One had to be careful with whites.

The first time he’d been locked in the Cabildo, almost exactly a year ago, he had been consumed by fear that he’d be sold into slavery by venal officials or simply from carelessness. Now he was sufficiently sure of his own position
in the free colored community—and sufficiently confident that people, including Lieutenant Shaw, would vouch for him as a free man—that he had not suffered the same sleepless anxiety through the day, but still the experience had not been pleasant. All morning he’d listened to the whippings being administered in the courtyard, some to thieves and prostitutes for petty crimes, others to slaves sent in by their owners, at twenty-five cents a stroke.

Once he thought he’d seen Mamzelle Marie pass the door of the cell, on her way to comfort some other prisoner or perhaps for some other reason.

In a calmer voice, he went on, “For about two months it’s been clear to me—and my friends will bear me out—that someone has been spreading rumors about me, trying to ruin me, for reasons of which I am ignorant. I don’t know whether this is connected to those efforts or not.”

Canonge tossed the warrant down among the neat stacks of papers that almost solidly covered his desk: dockets, journals, correspondence in English, Spanish, and French. In addition to being a Judge of the Criminal Court, Canonge and his law partner still handled the affairs and estates of half a dozen of the most prominent Creole families in town, disposed of estates and executed escrows and wills. The whole of his book-lined office on the Cabildo’s upper floor smelled of beeswax and stale coffee—like most Creoles, Canonge seemed to prefer candles to lamps—and those from the clerk’s empty desk had been transferred to his own when the man had gone home at six.

“It says the warrant was sworn out on the advice of a Dr. Emil Barnard.” Canonge tapped with a skeletal forefinger at the notes written on the back of the warrant. “Barnard was the fellow took over from you at the ballroom that night, wasn’t he? Took over the case. A regular
doctor, not a surgeon. He seems to think—or he’s gotten Brinvilliers to think—that your delaying of his treatment was what cost Brinvilliers’s brother his life.”

“Emil Barnard …” January began, then closed his mouth again. White men as a rule did not like to hear other white men insulted by colored.

“I hear tell,” said Shaw mildly, “sir, that this Emil Barnard is a charlatan. He don’t have a regular license, mostly got his doctorin’ out of books. Ker over to Charity’ll tell you. Somehow Barnard got took as a junior partner by Dr. Lalaurie. He works with Dr. Soublet at that clinic he’s got on Bourbon Street.”

“Hmph.” Canonge scribbled a note to himself, then raised a dark impatient eye. “And Lalaurie will tell you Ker is a charlatan, and Sanchez over on Poydras Street will tell you Lalaurie doesn’t know a clavicle from a clavichord, and Lemonier on Royal Street got into a duel a month ago with Sanchez over the use of lunar caustic and Velno’s Vegetable Syrup. Have you ever read the letters Soublet exchanged with Dr. Connaud, on St. Louis Street, about ‘stretching bones and reaccommodating the ligaments of the body’? It’s enough to make you lock your doors and die. Take those things off that man.”

Without comment, Shaw produced a key and removed the manacles from January’s wrists. The iron had galled the flesh even in the short walk from his cell down to the courtyard and up the stairs; January made a mental resolve to douse the raw flesh with alcohol the minute he could. After being in the cell since nine that morning he was convinced his clothing harbored quarts of roaches and maggots, and he knew excruciatingly well that it harbored fleas.

“I’ll deal with Jonchere when I see him. I’m surprised at him for even signing this. You, boy.” Canonge jabbed a
quill at January. “You be more careful whose bad side you get on, you hear? We can’t afford to waste our time on foolery like this. Not at Carnival, with half the population trying to kill the other half in gambling brawls. Stick to what you know best.”

Eyes on his boot toes again, January replied, “I will, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“Give him his papers back and get him out of here.” Canonge had already pulled another page of notes from the several neat piles on his desk. “Town’s swarming with murderers and they pull in some damfool Good Samaritan.…”

In the main booking room downstairs, the Guards had just brought in Kentucky Williams, drunk, screaming, and fighting like a netted tigress against the four men it took to contain her. In this the whore was ably assisted by her sisters-in-crime, a trio of harridans known as Railspike, Maggie Fury, and Kate the Gouger. Shaw muttered, “Lordy,” as Railspike produced a slungshot from her ample and unfettered bosom and began cracking heads: “You bide a spell, Maestro, if you would. If they kill me don’t tell nobody how it happened. It ain’t somethin’ I want on my tombstone.”

Shaw waded into the maelstrom of bare legs, thrashing breasts, yellowed petticoats and blue uniforms, dodging a swat with the slung-shot that cracked audibly on the point of his shoulder, and assisted Boechter—who was about half Williams’s weight—and the others in dragging the Girod Street Harpies away from their manacled partner and thrusting them, screeching and cursing, out the door. January remained against the wall until the fighting was over, then came forward without a word and helped bandage up LaBranche, who’d taken a bad cut on the forearm from somebody’s knife: “Don’t let anyone arrest me if he
dies,” he remarked sourly, when Shaw came over to hand the hurt man a tin cup of whisky.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Lieutenant, I’ll sooner fight one of their men anytime!” The man gulped it down.

“She’s a she-steamboat and no mistake.” Shaw helped him to his feet and supported him into the little infirmary cupboard where, four months previously, January had examined the Grille brothers after the fight on Bayou St. John.

“Now, that warrant was the silliest damn thing I ever heard of,” said the Kentuckian when he returned, still rubbing his shoulder. “I thought Canonge ought to hear about it. He’s a sensible fella.”

“Thank you.” January sighed, knowing that, even with the long day in the cells taken into account, things could have been far worse. “Thank you very much. I take it none of my family came to make my bail?” As he’d been led out of the yard past his mother’s house she hadn’t even so much as opened the shutters. Nothing to do with
her
. January didn’t know whether to be bitter or amused.

“Your sister came by.” Shaw pulled a kerchief from his pocket and wiped the last stray drops and smears of blood from the bench where January had made the injured LaBranche sit. “Mrs. Corbier, that is. Said Mamzelle Marie mentioned to her as how you was here. She asked if there was anything she could do, but seein’ as the charge was murder, silly or not, there wasn’t no bail.” He fished January’s papers from his desk and handed them over, official recognition that he was a free man.

January checked them and slid them into his jacket pocket. They were actually a copy of the original papers, the signatures carefully forged. He had six or seven such copies cached in his room and at the houses of both his sisters, just in case of mishap. It cost him an effort to say,
“Thank you.” Not to think about the fact that he had not needed such things in France. “And please thank Judge Canonge again for coming in and saving me two nights in the cells. I am very grateful for his trouble.”

When Shaw returned to his desk January followed, hands behind his back. “What became of Mrs. Redfern’s pearls?”

The Kentuckian didn’t look up from trimming the candles. “Mrs. Redfern’s pearls that allegedly ain’t really her pearls?”