Fever Season (40 page)

It only remained to be seen what, if anything, Dunk would do now.

Since the Reverend almost certainly had an evening
performance as well as a matinee, January made his way through the pine copses to Catherine Clisson’s locked-up cottage on London Street. There, settling himself on the gallery, he produced a spyglass from his pocket. Through this he watched the hotel, especially the white shell path that ran between the main block and the stables, until it grew too dark to see.

More women arrived; those on the gallery returned inside for another session. Lights blossomed behind the curtains with the evening’s approach. Now and then, when the wind set right, he could hear the faint echo of wailing, the only enjoyment, he reflected, that the majority of the American women allowed themselves.

The moon was in its first quarter, already westering; not a night, he thought, that would permit carriages to be abroad late. At the dinner hour the building disgorged women again, some of them to carriages drawn up before the steps, others onto the galleries, where they talked and ate sandwiches and eventually moved off in twos and threes into the thickening dark.

But if the Reverend Micajah Dunk were discomposed or startled by the return of the Redfern pearls, or the news that someone might have spoken to Cora Chouteau, he did not hasten to break the news to Emily Redfern.

January took the last steam rail-car into town. The only other occupant of the colored car was a single elderly woman who cradled a small dog in her arms, and crooned it lullabies all the way back:

It was one of the few lullabies January could recall his mother singing to him, her body silhouetted against the lighter darkness of the slave-cabin’s door. He tried to recall whether his father had been there then, but had no memory one way or the other. Only the rocking of the steam-train, and the creaking of the spring’s first frogs, and the disembodied murmur of those nonsense words, like a voice from some other world speaking to him in the falling dusk.

January set down the paper, his hand shaking, and met his mother’s eyes.

Livia Levesque was an early riser. The
Bee
had been lying, folded open to Barnard’s letter, beside his coffee cup when her son entered her small dining parlor.

Her deep, smoky voice was dry. “I’d like to know what that’s about, Ben,” she said.

Anger rose in him, a fever-scald of rage. He wasn’t even sure for a moment whether it was directed at Barnard or at her. “So would I.”

“Well, everyone’s going to be asking me about it,” she said. “I have to tell them something. Really, Ben, I knew
you’d gotten too free in your speech when you went to Paris.…”

“You really think I’m stupid enough to—to ‘offer intolerable insult to a lady of quality’? To make ‘indecent remarks’ to her face? Excuse me, her
very
face, as he puts it.”

“You changed in Paris.” Livia’s great, dark eyes were calmly cold.

“I didn’t change that much! You raised me better than to do any such thing!” He saw her mouth soften, just a bit, and added, “I’m surprised you believe what a rag like this prints.” In fact, the
Bee’s
stories were as a rule accurate, if overheated; but his mother never could let pass a chance to attack anything.

“Well, you’re certainly right about that,” she agreed. “They’ll print any damn lie that’s sent them, and that’s for certain. Madame,” she added, raising her voice without turning her head, “I hope you’re not looking at the top of that table?”

The fatter of the two yellow cats sat down where she was and began to wash in an elaborate display of innocence.

“But Ben,” Livia added, and there was now real concern in her eyes, “who was she?”

“I don’t know!” He slapped the paper down on the table, feeling as if he were about to explode. “Aside from the stupidity of the thing, you know I’m not that rude. Have you
ever
heard me be rude to a lady?”

“Well.” Her mouth primed tight again. “You certainly could watch your speech a little more around gentlemen. Especially those who stand in a position to do you good. I always told Monsieur Janvier that it was a mistake to send you to Paris.”

As far as January remembered, she had told St. Denis
Janvier nothing of the kind. In fact she’d been all for getting him away from New Orleans and out of the public view, if he was going to be something as low-class as a hired musician. But he wasn’t about to be drawn into a discussion of his mother’s version of the past. Instead he got to his feet, picked up the scarf of green silk Catherine Clisson had knitted him for Christmas—for the morning was bitterly cold—and shoved the folded sheets of the
Bee
into the pocket of his rough corduroy jacket.

“And you’re not going out dressed like that,” Livia added sharply, tonguing a chunk of brown sugar into her coffee. “You look like a street sweeper. People see you dressed like that, of course they’ll think anything that paper says of you is true.”

“All right, Mother,” said January patiently. “I’ll go change.”

She nodded to herself and went back to her perusal of the
Louisiana Gazette
—January didn’t even want to ask if Barnard’s letter had been printed there as well. He stepped through the French doors back into the yard, turned immediately left, secure in the knowledge that she had ceased to notice him the moment he’d agreed with her, and made his way down the pass-through to Rue Burgundy, in quest of whatever Madame Redfern’s servants had to tell.

Unlike the walled compounds of the old French town, the houses of the American faubourgs north of Canal Street were set, for the most part, in wide yards and scattered outbuildings and, in consequence, were easy to approach. Clothed in his shabby brown corduroy and a soft hat, January fell into step with Madame Redfern’s housemaid—Claire, he had heard her called on the night of the ball—by the simple expedient of putting two or three reales in
an old purse of Bella’s, and calling out, “Miss Claire, Miss Claire, you drop this?”

They walked down Felicity Street and to the grocery-stalls by the batture at the foot of Market Street, together. Miss Claire was probably in her late thirties and had three children, a calm and matter-of-fact woman without inclination to flirt, but January didn’t try to flirt with her: only talked, of this and that, mostly of her children—whom Emily Redfern had refused to purchase along with her—and the places she’d been.

“I understand what that Mr. Fraikes of hers says, that she can’t afford to buy nor raise no little ones,” said the slave, shifting her market basket on her hip as she moved from stand to stand of winter fruit. There were blood oranges from Mexico, and early strawberries; new lettuces now, and asparagus from Jefferson Parish; a glory of greens and flame-bright colors against the gray of the morning. “But rice is only a couple reales a peck, and you can buy three oranges for an English shilling—how much would it have cost her, to feed two little boys and a girl? She’s a mighty hard woman, Mr. Levesque.…” She shook her head—January had taken some care never to use the same name twice among these people. “A mighty hard woman.”

So it did not take much to learn whether Rose Vitrac had come to the Redfern home making awkward enquiries as to the possible fate of Cora Chouteau.

If she had, Claire Brunet knew nothing of the matter.

And what, precisely, he wondered, as he made his way back along Tchapitoulas Street toward the Cabildo once more,
did
he think had become of Cora? What did he think Emily Redfern’s reaction would have been, had Rose Vitrac appeared one morning on her doorstep saying,
I have proof that you poisoned your husband for five thousand dollars, and cast the blame on his unwilling mistress?

What proof could Rose have had?

Emily Redfern had certainly murdered her husband. No matter who had stowed the monkshood up Emily Redfern’s bedroom chimney, if the boat that had brought her—along with Reverend Dunk and Mr. Bailey’s white horses—to New Orleans had departed from the landing at Spanish Bayou “after breakfast,” there was no way Cora Chouteau could have placed so fast-acting a substance as monkshood in her master’s food.

Emily Redfern had certainly tricked the Reverend Dunk—if Dunk had been tricked—into taking the five thousand dollars Hubert Granville had brought out to the house so it would not be found by her husband’s creditors. She had tricked her creditors as well, selling her slaves to the Reverend Dunk at half their value with the proceeds of the Musicale, so that she could pay off her creditors at a fraction of the debt, while he resold them and invested the profit.

But all that being so, what did he think Madame Redfern had done to Rose? Struck her over the head with slung-shot?

When? Where? For all her slim gawkiness Rose Vitrac was strong, and it was unthinkable that a colored woman would have been seated in the presence of a white woman who was not. Given Emily Redfern’s lack of inches, the physical logistics of a blow over the head—or any sort of violence—became laughable.

And where did that leave him?

With a perfectly worked-out case clearing a woman who had vanished into thin air. Clearing a woman who had only slavery to return to, acquitted or not. Whose life was forfeit, not to the hangman but to the auctioneer’s gavel.

And Cora could have met anyone as she left Madame
Lalaurie’s house that night, from the enigmatic Mamzelle Marie to Hog-Nose Billy to the vindictive and slightly cracked Monsieur Montreuil to Bronze John himself.

The fact was that she was gone, as Rose was gone.

January had the sense of having read down to the bottom of a sheet of paper, reaching the same conclusion, the same result, each time.

Cora was gone.

Rose was gone.

Weaving his way among the traffic of whores and roustabouts, of cotton bales and hogsheads of sugar, of pigs and pianos and oysters and silk, it occurred to him that Madame Redfern, had she dealt with Rose at all, would have been far likelier to settle the matter financially. Having ruined her, La Redfern would not need any such melodramatic expedient of a blow over the head and unceremonious burial in the nearest well. A five-dollar ticket on the next New York packet would do the trick as well.

Better, in fact.

She’d have taken her books
.

A vision of hope, of Rose teaching at some comfortable girls’ school in New York, somewhere that would properly value her erudition, crumbled like a sugar palace in rain. The image of Rose sharpening a quill in the bar of cold pale New York sunlight.…

Monsieur Janvier, I take pen in hand at last.…

Nothing can come between true friends
.