Fever Season (47 page)

He felt strange inside, hollow; empty of everything that had shaped his life for months. But she hadn’t moved away from him, or made even the show, as another woman might, of protecting her dress from the muck that covered him. Her hand, resting lightly where his shoulder muscles met his neck, was cool in the spring morning heat.

“What did she say,” he asked after a time, “when they brought her in? Madame Delphine?”

Rose’s mouth folded tight, and for the first time he saw a flash of anger behind those round spectacle-lenses.

“They haven’t brought her in,” she said.

Rose would not leave Cora, and told him not to be stupid. Hannibal, who was still with Cora when Rose and January returned to her, told him not to be stupid as well. “I can stand,” said January doggedly.

“So does my violin bow, if I prop it up very, very carefully.”

In the end Hannibal and Paul Corbier walked with him down Rue Chartres, to the big green house on Rue Royale.

The doors and the carriage gate were shut. Men and women, several hundred strong, were gathered outside in Rue de l’Hôpital and the Rue Royale, muttering among themselves, little gusts of sound, like the wind a coming storm makes in trees. About half seemed to be idlers from the levee, Kaintucks and whores from Gallatin Street, people who ordinarily would have stepped over the body of a dying black in the gutter, or at most paused to check his pockets. But the lure of scandal was strong. Self-righteousness is a heady drug.

Mixed with them were the folk of the market, vendors and farmers and shopkeepers; colored stevedores and Irish workmen and householders, catchoupines and chacalatas, their anger and outrage the summer pulse of bees. Though the fire had been doused, the smell of smoke hung heavy on the air, like the stench of the fever season. The smell of lies and rumors, hearsay and the assurances that everything is fine.

Through the windows January could see into the second-floor parlor, where he had taught piano. Delphine Lalaurie was pointing out to a couple of men—Creoles, friends of hers, January thought, by their dress, people who probably never would believe their lovely friend guilty of anything—where to replace a marble-topped table. She went herself to position a gold-veined vase on its top.

In any crowd January was the tallest person present, with one exception, and that exception he saw at the fringe of the mob, near the carriage gate.

“What are you waiting for?” he asked, when he’d made his way over.

The lanky Kentuckian regarded him with deceptive mildness in his cold gray eyes. “Judgment Day, belike,” Shaw said. And then, when January frowned uncomprehendingly, he added, “What she done weren’t a crime, Ben.”

“What?”

“Well, misdemeanor mistreatment of her slaves, maybe.” Shaw spat in the general direction of the gutter. “Last time there was a complaint she just got a fine for it.”

“I
,” said January, his voice icy with rage, “am not her slave.”

“Maybe,” agreed Shaw placidly. “But she’s related to every member of the City Council from Mr. Prieur on down, and to every banker in the city to boot. She holds mortgages on half the property in this city. And those she don’t hold mortgages on need her to invite their daughters to the right parties so they can catch husbands.”

For some reason January thought of Roarke’s attorney Mr. Loudermilk, buying free drinks among the keelboatmen and riverrats of the wharves, trying to organize a jail delivery. Of whatever threat it had been, that had decided
the kidnapped Grille brothers and their sister not to testify against Roarke after all.

There was not so very much difference between Rue Royale and Gallatin Street. Only that Roarke’s crimes had been, at least, comprehensible.

“So you’re telling me the police are going to sit back and do nothing.”

“I’m telling you,” said Shaw softly, “that in ten years, this won’t have happened.” His eyes swept back to the tall house, the lace curtains moving in the windows, the walls like a self-enclosing fortress, only slightly streaked with smoke. “Nice lady like that?
They
didn’t see nuthin’.”

“Well, I sure saw somethin’, me!” A heavyset countryman pushed close to Shaw. “Me, I been to the Cabildo. What you sayin’, she gonna get away with what she done?”

“What you say?” Kentucky Williams jostled up behind the man. “That French cow-whore gonna get
away
with that?”

She had a voice like an iron gong, and the murmur rose around them, angry, disbelieving. Someone got a brick from the building site where January had blown up his bomb, and lobbed it through the window on the ground floor; someone else shrieked, “Monster! Murderess!” in English that grated like a saw.

Fists began to pound on the gate. Around the corner on Rue Royale others hammered at the door. More bricks were hurled at the house; there was a tinkling smash of glass. “Now see what you done started?” murmured Shaw mildly and put a surprisingly gentle hand on January’s arm to draw him back.

Hannibal asked, “I take it you’re not on duty,” and Shaw looked down at the fiddler in a kind of surprise.

“I been told off special by Chief Tremouille not to cross the Lalaurie threshold,” he said. “So I guess I won’t.”

A couple of Gallatin Street toughs and an Ohio boatman got a cypress beam from the construction and began to smash at the gates with it like a ram. The voice of the mob rose to an angry baying, French and English—
“Like the howling of Irish wolves against the moon,”
Hannibal murmured. More bricks were thrown, and a dead rat from the gutter. Men appeared from the levee as if drawn by the noise or by the sudden, whiffed promise of loot.

Shaw checked the pistols at his belt. “I ain’t seen the daughters all mornin’. I been watchin’. But I can’t stand by if they offer her harm.”

“Let them,” said January coldly. His brother-in-law had lent him a jacket, too short in the sleeves, sticking to his back from the scabbed welts left by the whip, and had had to put it on him. He still could not move his arms. The mob thrust them back, pushing at the gate, and Shaw snaked his lean body forward, working his way to the front.

He was thus almost knocked to the banquette a moment later when the heavy black gates flew open. Black horses reared and plunged in the archway, eyes rolling in terror; January saw Bastien on the box, wielding a whip in all directions. The mob fell back before the plunging hooves, maybe thinking the coachman was taking his moment to escape. Only when the carriage lunged forward did January see the woman inside, dark-veiled, calm, unbreakably perfect, gazing out over the heads of the rabble. Bastien cracked the whip again and the horses threw themselves forward. Someone shrieked a curse, and the mob surged after the carriage. But the horses were swift. The carriage rocked and swayed as it picked up speed, up Rue de l’Hôpital to the Bayou Road, and out toward the lake.

Some of the mob ran after it, hurling bricks and cursing. The rest turned back, pouring through the open gates, into the wealthy house, and began to loot.

January felt a touch on his side. Looking down he saw that Rose had joined him. There was a crash as someone hurled the gold-veined vase down from the second-floor parlor, men scattering and laughing at the sound of the stone shattering. Someone else yelled in English, “Watch out below!” and the piano was thrust over the edge of the gallery, squashing like a melon as it hit the banquette. Bodies jostled January from all sides, crowding to be in at the carnival of destruction and theft.

January sighed, and with the effort of his lifetime put his arm around Rose’s shoulders. She hesitated, then leaned very gently into his side.

“Let’s go home.”

It’s always difficult to write a fictional account of a historical crime, particularly in cases where the writer has to make a judgment about whether any crime was committed or not.

Newspaper accounts of events in New Orleans in the 1830s could be exaggerated, libelous, poisonous, self-serving, or misleading—all uniformly refused to acknowledge epidemics of yellow fever until hundreds died, for instance—but the April 10, 1834, editions of the
Gazette
and (more significant to my mind) both the English and the French editions of the
Bee
contain accounts of the fire at the Lalaurie mansion, the discovery of the seven mutilated slaves in the attic, and the subsequent mobbing and sacking of the house. The
Bee
also contains the deposition of Judge Canonge, one of the most notable local jurists, as to the finding of the slaves. Barely two years after the events, Harriet Martineau, an Englishwoman passing through New Orleans, spoke to numerous eyewitnesses and attests that the debris from the Lalaurie house blocked the street for some time. George Washington Cable and his two assistants, and later Henry Castellanos—who was born and raised in New Orleans—had ample opportunity
to speak to firsthand witnesses as well as to examine documents: neither of them appears to have had any doubts that the events did take place.

In 1934, one hundred years after the event, New Orleans journalist Meigs Frost printed a “vindication” of Marie Delphine de McCarty Blanque Lalaurie, claiming that the story could not be true on the grounds that the Lalaurie house on Rue Royale itself was clearly undamaged. Frost also claimed that the house dated from the late eighteenth century—which was completely untrue—and neglected to mention that the structure was substantially rebuilt by one Pierre Trastour in the late 1830s, so badly damaged had it been. Since Frost’s account also contains a quaintly romantic, but provably untrue, legend about Madame Lalaurie as a young woman voyaging to Spain to plead for her first husband’s life with the Queen of Spain (Don Ramon de López y Angula was called back to “take his place at court” in full honor, but died in Havana). I found it difficult to place much credence in many of Frost’s assertions.

There are a number of possibilities and suppositions involved in the case, but in my judgment—and I thought long and hard about this before undertaking this project—the fact that Monsieur Montreuil next door had been done dirty by a member of Madame Lalaurie’s family does not outweigh the fact of Judge Canonge’s deposition or the fact that, when she and her husband fled New Orleans in 1834, Madame Lalaurie apparently made no attempt to deny the allegations made against her or to countersue Montreuil, Canonge, or anyone else. Most accounts state that thousands of people filed through the courtyard of the Cabildo that April afternoon in 1834 and saw not only the seven mutilated slaves, but implements of torture (unspecified) that “covered the top of a table.” At least one account
adds that two of the tortured slaves died from overeating immediately after their long period of starvation; others were so badly injured as to be pensioners of the city for the rest of their lives.

Following her escape from the house on Royal Street, Delphine Lalaurie crossed Lake Pontchartrain to Mandeville. There she stayed for some ten days, evidently hoping that the whole matter would blow over. When it did not, she and her husband signed over power of attorney to the husbands of her two married daughters (she had four in all) and took ship, first, it is said, for New York and then for Paris. There, some stories allege, Delphine Lalaurie lived out her days. One account says she died hunting boar in the Pyrenees.

However, notarial records exist stating that she was back living quietly in New Orleans by the late 1840s; for in 1849 she petitioned to manumit a middle-aged slave named Orestes. Every one of her detractors has made it clear that Delphine Lalaurie did have favorites among her slaves, notably the faithful coachman Bastien; and she is recorded to have manumitted another slave while living at the Royal Street house in 1832. Bastien the coachman was said to have been killed when, after driving Madame and her husband to safety at Lake Pontchartrain, he tried to return to the house and was torn apart by the mob. What Bastien thought of his mistress’s activities in the attic, and why he attempted to return to the house can, of course, only be conjectured.

Too many modern cases exist of men who imprisoned one or several youths or girls in their homes or in improvised dugout cellars, over periods of months, as sex slaves or for purposes of torture, before killing them, for me to believe that Madame Lalaurie “couldn’t” have done what it is alleged that she did.

Records from the 1840s also indicate that next door to the widow of N. L. Lalaurie in the Faubourg Marigny lived her two unmarried daughters. Most stories add that Madame Lalaurie was buried secretly in St. Louis #1 Cemetery, but no one knows the location of her grave.

Please remember, however, that this is a work of fiction, not a scholarly biography. I used the sources that were available to me and made the best decisions I could from what I read about what the situation and circumstances might have been like, if what the newspapers said was in fact true. If there is further information conclusively vindicating Delphine Lalaurie, I would be delighted to see it. I have tried above all to keep the flavor of place and time and not do violence to my source material.