Fever Season (4 page)

“Can I come upstairs and look?” she asked January when he went to her. “I’m lookin’ for a man name of Virgil, big man, but not so big as you?” She put an inflection of query in her voice. By her clothing she was either a slave or one of the dirt-poor freedwomen trying to make a living in the shanties at the ends of Girod or Perdido Streets, maybe a prostitute or maybe just a laundress. “Virgil, he slave to Michie Bringier over by Rue Bourbon, but he sleep out and work the levee. He pay Michie Bringier his cost, pay him good. He didn’t come to the shed he rent behind Puy’s Grocery, not night before last, not last night …”

She nodded down at the dead around her feet. “These folks all white.”

Though Bronze John’s hand touched everyone, white, black, and colored, it was mostly the whites who died of it and, of them, more often the whites who’d flocked into New Orleans from the United States—the
rest
of the United States, January corrected himself—or from Europe.

In Europe, January had known dozens of men whose aim was to come here and make fortunes impossible to
find in the overtaxed, overcrowded, politically watchful lands of Germany, Italy, and France. They’d meet and read
The Last of the Mohicans
together or New York newspapers a year old. And there were fortunes to be made, in sugar, in trade, in the new, phenomenally profitable cotton.

But there was a price.

And with the coming of the cholera, even the blacks and the colored found no immunity, no recovery, no hope.

January led the woman up to the ward, as he had led so many since June. The arrival of the ambulances called him away: those who had been found, as this woman feared her friend had been found, in the shacks or attics or on street corners where they had fallen. One of those carried in was Hèlier the water seller, who raised a shaky hand and whispered, “Hey, piano teacher,” as he was borne past. In a different voice he murmured, “Mamzelle Marie,” to the woman who had cleaned the floor. And, “Hey, Nanié,” to the ragged woman … Even
in extremis
, the man knew everyone in town.

“You seen Virgil?” she said. “He sleep out, you know, alone in that shack …”

The water seller shook his head. He was fine boned and older than he looked, the creamy lightness of his skin marred by a clotted blurring of freckles. His shoulders, though broad and strong, were uneven with the S-shaped curvature of his spine. Now his face was engorged with the fever jaundice. Dark in the glower of the oil lamps, he trembled, and there was black vomit down the front of his shirt.

“I ask around,” the water seller whispered, as they bore him away.

When January went down to the court again he saw
Emil Barnard crouched over the bodies of the dead. Barnard heard the creak of his weight on the steps and straightened quickly, jerked the sheet back into place, and shoved something up under his coat. “I saw a … a black man come in just now.” Barnard pointed accusingly out the courtyard gate. “He was doing something with the bodies, but I didn’t see what. I must go and report it at once.” He almost ran, not up the steps to where Soublet would be, but through a door into the lower floor of the Hospital, where those unafflicted with the fever were cramped together in emergency quarters.

January pulled back the sheet. The Russian’s boots were gone. So were his teeth. His jaw gaped, sticky with gummed blood; little clots of it daubed his pale beard stubble, the front of his shirt. January whipped aside the other sheets and saw that all the corpses had been so treated. One woman’s lips were all but severed, bloodless flaps of flesh. Ants crept across her face. Both women had been clipped nearly bald.

January stood up as if he’d been jabbed with a goad, so angry he trembled.

A hand touched his arm. He whirled and found himself looking into Mamzelle Marie’s dark eyes.

“Don’t matter no more to them, Michie Janvier.”

Wheels creaked in the ooze of Common Street outside, harness jangling as the horses strained against the muck. The dead-cart.

“It matters to me.”

Mamzelle Marie said nothing. Where the orange light brushed a greasy finger her earrings had the gleam of real gold, the dark gems on the crucifix suspended from her neck a true sapphire glint. “It’s nowhere near so bad as it was last year.”

And that’s supposed to comfort me?
“No.”

Last year
.

It had been almost exactly a year.

Paris in the cholera. January felt again the dreadful stillness of those suffocating August days, the empty streets and shuttered windows. Though he’d been working then for ten years as a musician, he’d gone back to the Hôtel Dieu to nurse, to do what he could, knowing full well he could do nothing. That epidemic had recalled to him all the memories of fever seasons past: the families of the poor brought in from the attics where two or three or seven had died already, the stench and the sense of helpless dread. Whenever he’d stepped outside he had been astonished to see the jostling mansard roofs, the chestnut trees, and gray stone walls of Paris, instead of the low, pastel houses of the town where he had been raised.

One day he’d walked back to the two rooms he and his wife shared in the tangle of streets between the old Cluny convent and the river, to find them stinking like a plague ward of the wastes Ayasha had been unable to contain when the weakness, the shivering, the fever had struck her. To find Ayasha herself on the bed in the midst of that humiliating horror, a rag doll wrung and twisted and left to dry, the black ocean of her hair trailing down over the edge of the bed to brush the floor.

Death had spared her nothing. She had died alone.

“No.” Though January had never spoken of this memory to his sister—who he knew was a disciple of Mamzelle Marie—or to anyone else, he thought he saw her knowledge of the scene in this woman’s serpent eyes. Maybe she really did read people’s dreams. “No, it’s not so bad as last year,” agreed January again, softly.

•   •   •

January didn’t really expect to be allowed to speak to the houseman Gervase. His query met a bland, sleek smile and a murmured “Oh, Gervase is at his work right now. Madame doesn’t hold with servants leaving their work.”

He’d never liked the Lalaurie coachman, Bastien. The round-faced, smooth-haired quadroon had a smug insolence to him, a self-satisfaction that boded ill for the other servants of the Lalaurie household, despite all that Madame herself might try to do.

Born a slave and raised in slavery until the age of eight, January had always found it curious that colored masters so frequently worked their slaves hard and treated them cruelly, even if they had once been slaves themselves. Given a chance, he suspected that Bastien would have been such a master, exercising petty power where he could. He knew the coachman had been with Madame Lalaurie a long time, perhaps longer than Dr. Nicolas Lalaurie himself. Upon those occasions when he’d seen them together, it was clear to January that the face Bastien showed his mistress was not the face his fellow slaves saw.

The two Blanque girls—daughters of Delphine Lalaurie by her second husband, the late banker Jean Blanque—were older than one usually found still unmarried Creole belles of good family. Though they were soft-spoken and polite, as Creole girls must be, January liked neither of them. Even Louise Marie, the cripple, for whom he had expected to develop sympathy when first he had been introduced to the household last spring, made him uneasy. She was clinging and self-pitying, constantly referring to her twisted back and misaligned pelvis.

“I do my best,” she said with a sigh, blinking her large hazel eyes up at him from the piano stool. “But as you see, I’m no more a musician than I am a matrimonial catch.” Her lace-mitted hand, thin to the point of boniness,
strayed for the thousandth time to the bunches of fashionable curls that hung over her ears, readjusting the ribbons and the multifarious lappets of point d’esprit. Louise Marie was dressed as always in the height of Paris fashion, the bell-shaped skirt of girlish yellow jaconet trimmed with blond lace, flounces, and far too many silk roses. The bodice was specially cut, and the skirt specially hemmed, to accommodate the twist of her spine and the uneven length of her legs.

“As long as you do your best, Mademoiselle Blanque,” replied January, with the patient friendliness he had long cultivated to deal with pupils he didn’t much care for personally, “you’ll make progress. This isn’t a race,” he added, with a smile. “It’s not like you have to be ready to open in
Le Mariage de Figaro
at Christmas.”

“Well, that’s a blessing,” muttered Pauline, prowling from the shuttered windows of the second-floor front parlor where the piano stood. The younger sister slapped her fan on the piano’s shining rosewood top, then a moment later caught it up and beat the air with it again, as if the necessity to do so were unjust penance imposed upon her alone. Though he had bathed before coming here, January felt the stickiness of sweat on his face and under his shirt and coat.

In April or October, all the long windows onto the gallery would have been thrown wide at this time of day to catch the breezes of coming evening. But now that was a luxury that could not be risked. Fever rode the night air, invisible and deadly—that was all that anybody knew of it.

The winter curtains of velvet and tapestry had been exchanged for light chintz and gauze, but those were drawn closely over the tall French doors; and the light they admitted was wan and sickly gray. The woven straw mats underfoot, and the muslin covers masking the opulent furniture,
did little to lighten or cool the room. With its mirrors swathed in gauze, its ornaments veiled against fly-specks, the place had a shrouded atmosphere, tomblike and drained of color.

“Oh, darling, please …” Louise Marie made a feeble gesture toward her sister’s fan and produced another cataclysmic sigh. “If you would … The heat affects me so!”

Any other family would have been in Mandeville, where January knew Madame Lalaurie owned a summer cottage and a good deal of property. Nicolas Lalaurie was a doctor—a partner at Jules Soublet’s clinic on Rue Bourbon—but somehow January suspected the small, pale, silent Frenchman would have had no objection to leaving a town where only the poor remained to fall ill. But Madame Lalaurie, almost alone among the high Creole society, had chosen to remain in town and nurse the sick. January guessed that Dr. Lalaurie—not a native Creole himself—knew his reputation would never survive flight from a danger that his wife faced with such matter-of-fact calm.

He guessed, too, that one or the other of the Lalauries had decreed that the two girls should remain as well: the doctor out of wariness about how things looked, or Madame simply because the possibility of falling ill had never entered her mind.

Her face like bitter stone, Pauline slapped open the sandalwood sticks and began to fan her sister, while Louise Marie, a long-suffering smile of martyred gratitude and a gleam of satisfaction in her eye, jerked and hobbled through a Mozart contredanse in a fashion that amply demonstrated that she had done none of her appointed practice during the previous four days.

But January was used to pupils not practicing, and
there were things he could say to praise without condemnation, which he knew would do him no good. All girls of good family studied the piano from childhood, though few kept up lessons into their twenties. Madame Delphine Lalaurie, however, was as renowned for her piano playing as she was for her hospitality, for her business acumen, for her beauty and social connections, and it was unthinkable that her daughters should fall below the standard she set. Watching Louise Marie’s exaggerated winces at her mistakes—as if they were catastrophes imposed upon her by a spiteful Muse instead of the result of her own negligence about practice—January felt a pang of pity for them.

Madame’s very perfection was probably not easy to live up to.

“That was good, Mademoiselle Blanque. May I hear Mademoiselle Pauline on the Haydn now?” Their mother had been the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in New Orleans; Marie Delphine de McCarty’s first husband a city intendant, a Spanish hidalgo of great wealth, and her second, Jean Blanque, a banker whose signature underwrote nearly every property deed in the city. Their two older sisters were the wives of two of the most influential men in the parish. With the early death of their little brother these girls became heiresses to a sizable fortune in city rents and land; to an unshakable position in Creole society; and to this huge and almost oppressively opulent house, with its gilded ceilings and French furniture, its marble stairs and crystal lighting fixtures.

But as he watched the older girl—a young woman, in truth, in her early twenties—make an elaborate business of limping across the parlor to the most comfortable chair; clutching heavily on her sister’s arm; sending Pauline to fetch a fan, a cushion, a kerchief, to call for Babette to fetch some lemonade from the kitchen—summoning Pauline
back when she had gotten started on the Haydn march, because she suddenly felt faint and needed her vinaigrette—he knew Louise Marie would never marry.

And Pauline?

She was still what they would consider marriageable in any society, eighteen or nineteen, and would have been pretty had she not been so thin. Some wasting sickness there, thought January, studying her rigid profile with a physician’s eye. Not consumption. Her color looked good, and she seemed to have no trouble drawing breath. An inability to digest certain foods, perhaps? Her hands were stick thin, wrist bones like hazelnuts standing out under the gold of her bracelets; her whole body seemed brittle, stiff as wood as she played, mechanically and badly. Resentment rose off Pauline like steam from the mosquito-wriggling gutters.

At her sister? January had seen other households rendered twisted and tense by the manipulation of a chronic invalid, and Louise Marie certainly seemed to take delight in interrupting her sister’s practice. “Oh, here’s Babette; darling, will you bring the lemonade here?” Pauline must have had a lifetime of being admonished to obey her sister: she stopped playing immediately, stalked to the parlor door where an emaciated servant woman stood with a single German crystal goblet of lemonade on a tray. This Pauline snatched without so much as a word of thanks and brought it across to the invalid.