Fever Season (9 page)

“Salts of mercury mixed with turpentine have been shown to be of sovereign benefit—sovereign, sir!—in cases of fever!” Sanchez retorted. “But the dosage must be heroic! Nothing is of any benefit unless the patient’s gums bleed.…”

Balderdash?
wondered January, as he lifted the half-dead Italian, waxen with phlebotomy, to sponge him clean. The heartbreaking, terrifying thing about the fever was that he didn’t know. Nobody knew. Maybe Soublet and Sanchez were right.

On the bed next to the Italian’s a dead woman lay. Her face was covered with a sheet, but her hair, long and black, hung to brush the reeking floor, and the sight of it
cut his heart. Had he returned soon enough to find Ayasha still alive, could he have saved her by bleeding? By forcing calomel and turpentine down her throat until her gums bled?

Why did one person recover, and another succumb? Might Monsieur A have recovered without the remedy, and did Madame B perish in its despite?

“Stick to surgery, my son,” Dr. Gomez had said to him, all those years ago. “These physicians, they know nothing but calomel and opium, the clyster and the knife. When a man breaks a bone, by God, you know what you’ve got.”

What you had, of course, thought January, as he was summoned to hold down a laborer who wept and fought and cursed at them in Gaelic, was a mechanic of the body’s armature who had to sit by while a man he was certain was an imbecile opened the patient’s veins for the fifth time in as many days.

Rain began to fall: hard, steady, drenching rain that abated not an atom of the suffocating heat. Ants crawled steadily up the walls and over the floor, in spite of the red pepper sprinkled along every baseboard. A man came in, his coat of fine tobacco-colored wool sticking to his broad shoulders with wet and his fair hair and extravagant side-whiskers dripping on his shoulders, and searched among the sick, as the woman Nanié had searched a few nights ago. Handsome face impassive, he passed once through the ward and then made a second circuit, as if not believing the one he sought was not there. January saw that it was the men of color he went to, lifting the sheets over the faces of the dead, looking down at them for a few minutes before moving on.

“Can I help you, sir?”

The man turned, and met his eyes with eyes of bright
Irish blue. “Thank you kindly, no.” His voice had the soft lilt of the well-bred Irish gentry, like that of January’s friend Hannibal the fiddler when Hannibal was more than usually drunk. “Just seekin’ after a friend.”

There was a jewel in his stickpin the size of little Ti-Paul’s fingernail—what kind, it was too dark to tell—and except for the soak of the rain his linen was clean and very fine. His coat, with its wasp waist and lavishly wadded shoulders, was too flashy for a broker’s or a planter’s. A gambler, January guessed, or someone in the theater.

“Does he have a name, if they bring him in after you’ve gone?”

The man hesitated, then shook his head. “I’ll be back,” he said.

There were many people who came in, seeking those they knew among the dying or the dead. Later in the night January thought he saw the woman Nanié return, but through the grind of exhaustion and the haze of smoke could not be sure. He himself studied the faces of the patients, asked the names of those still conscious enough to reply, searching for Robois Roque, as his brother-in-law had requested. When the ambulance came in, toward midnight, he looked again. There was no one he sought, but there was an elderly German woman with a withered and shortened leg, and Soublet descended upon her at once, rubbing his thick-muscled hands.

“Would you like to have the affliction of your limb cured?” the doctor murmured—he had a beautiful voice when he chose to soften it—and the woman thrashed her head giddily and muttered something in her own tongue. January saw Soublet look around quickly for Ker, and then wave his servant over. “If you consent to come to my clinic, you can be better cared for there, and not only will
you be cured of the fever but full use of the limb will be restored to you within a matter of weeks.”

January shuddered, but knew if he interfered he might be put out of the Hospital altogether. It was not for surgeons to question the work of actual doctors, and certainly not for a black man to question the opinion of a white. He looked around for Ker, as Soublet had done, but the Englishman was not to be seen.

“M’sieur?”

A woman had been standing beside him for some time, a wet cloak hanging from her square, slender shoulders and a look of sickened horror on her face. And well she might look so, thought January, seeing anew the smoky hell of the long room, roaches rattling ferociously around the lamps, the dying laid on pallets along the wall for lack of beds. Barnard crouched beside one old man and shoved what looked like garlic tops into his ears while Soublet and his servant hovered like a pair of sable-cloaked vultures above the delirious German woman. “Do you need help, Madame?”

She raised her eyes to his. Not far—she was a tall woman. Her eyes seemed dark in the shadows, behind thick slabs of gold-rimmed spectacle lenses, but when she turned toward the lamps, they showed their true color, cindery gray flecked with green.

“I need a doctor,” she said. She wore a free woman’s tignon, and in the dusky half-light she had a free woman’s complexion. Her face was a long oval with a mouth too prim and a chin too pronounced for real beauty. All arms and legs, she moved as if she were always going to trip, but never did.

January glanced back at Soublet and the beggar woman. “I’m a doctor.” He went to fetch his satchel from behind the door.

The rain had eased to a patter, but the air outside smelled thick of it. It was only a break in the storm. An electric wild warmth charged the night, monstrous clouds advancing over the lake like the siege engines of some unimaginable army. He wondered where the girl Cora Chouteau was tonight, and if she was sleeping dry.

“Three of my girls are down sick.” The wind caught the woman’s cloak, whirled it like a great cracking wing. “I’m sorry,” she added, as they passed through the gate of the Hospital courtyard, and he handed her across the gutter and into the morass of Common Street. “You’ve got as much as you can do here, I know. But I’ve done everything I can, everything I know how to do. I’m not … I’m not very good with the sick.”

She had a small school on Rue St. Claude, not far from the Bayou Road. Her name, she said, was Rose Vitrac.

“Sometimes this past year I’ve felt like a peddler trying to sell Sèvres teacups to the Comanche,” she remarked ruefully, taking off her spectacles to wipe rain from the lenses. Away from the Hospital she seemed to gain back some of her poise, to be less like a very young egret trying to balance on its long legs. There was a wry little fold in the corner of her mouth and, even in this time, a dry capacity for amusement. “It’s difficult enough to find Creole girls, let alone girls of color, whose parents are willing to pay for them to learn Latin—or proper French, for that matter, much less, God help us, natural philosophy. But there have to be a few Comanche warriors out there who like …” She hesitated, fishing for exactly the proper word, and January smiled and suggested.

“Tea?”

Rose Vitrac chuckled. “Beautiful things, I was going to say.” She put the spectacles back on. “Learning for its
own sake, for the joy of knowing how the universe is put together. Things that have nothing to do with hunting buffalo or scalping people.”

“You’re probably in the wrong town for that,” he said, still smiling.

The face she turned to him, as they stopped before a crumbling, galleried Spanish house, post-and-brick raised high off the ground, was suddenly serious again. Quiet intensity illuminated her eyes. “No,” she said. “I’m in the right town for that. If you’re a colored boy—if your father is a rich white man—he’ll see to your education if you say you want to study Hebrew, or optics, or how logarithms unfold invisible universes that you never even suspected. But if you’re a girl? If you’re hungry to know, to learn? To see the magic in cosines and radii, to learn how to call lightning out of water and steel and copper wire? This is the only town where that fulfillment is even possible.”

“You teach all that?”

“If they want to learn, I find a way to teach it.” She looked away from him, suddenly embarrassed, and drew a key from the reticule at her belt. Dawn was just coming, down the river and above the clouds, enough light to show him the freckles that dusted her nose and cheekbones, and to turn the oil lamps in their iron brackets along the wall to fey shreds of torn silk. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m lecturing again. It’s a noxious habit.”

January shook his head, recalling Dr. Gomez’s quiet study, with its glistening jars of specimens preserved in brandy or honey, its worn medical books and ferocious-looking galvanic battery. He climbed the tall steps beside her to the gallery, the warm damp wind smiting them again as he scraped the mud from his boots, and she unlocked the door. “And did you find buyers for your philosophic tea sets?”

She glanced up at him, the fear that had come into her eyes with the touch of the door handle leaving them for a moment. She smiled. “A few.”

The smell of fever and sickness flowed from the black dark of the house, vile and frightening. Just enough light trickled in from outside to show up a branch of candles on a table just beside the door. Mademoiselle Vitrac kicked her feet out of the wooden patterns that guarded her shoes, took a match from her reticule, scratched it on the match-paper. By the growing light January was just able to discern looming bookcases, a blackboard, a globe, and a couple of straight-backed chairs. Saw, too, the knot of fear bunch at the corner of the schoolmistress’s jaw. He remembered coming into a house in Paris, smelling that smell as he ascended the stairs.

“It will be all right.” He took the candelabra from her unsteady hand.

There were eight beds in the long, low attic above the school’s three rooms. Three were occupied. A girl of thirteen—Zizi-Marie’s age—sat beside one of the beds, a china basin of water and a candle on the floor beside her. She turned, gratitude flooding her round, pug-nosed face as she heard the steps on the stairs, saw the light of the candles imperceptibly brighten the terrible blackness of the room.

“Mamzelle Vitrac, I think she’s worse.”

Mademoiselle Vitrac bent to hug her reassuringly before going to look at the girl on the bed.

“She’s thrown up twice,” the girl went on, fighting tears. “The second time I didn’t think she was ever going to stop. She’s so hot. Geneviève keeps thinking I’m her sister, and Victorine—I’ve checked a couple times to see if she’s still breathing, with a feather like you showed me, but she hasn’t moved or made any sound or anything. And
Isabel left and I don’t know where she went, but she said she wasn’t going to stay and catch the fever from the others.”

Her dark eyes begged for reassurance. “It isn’t catching, is it? Will I catch it from—from Geneviève and Victorine and Antoinette here, from staying and taking care of them?”

“No, you won’t, Mamzelle,” said January firmly. He set down his satchel beside the girl Antoinette’s bed. “I take care of people every day at the Hospital, and I haven’t got the fever yet.”

“And anyway, you don’t get fever from people who have fever, Marie-Neige.” Mademoiselle Vitrac gently took the sponge from the girl’s hand. “You get fever from swamp mist and night air, and you see we’ve got all the windows closed up tight. The fever can’t get in and get you. Marie-Neige, this is Dr. Janvier. He’s here to help us take care of the girls this morning.”

“M’sieu Janvier,” corrected January. “I’m just a surgeon, not a doctor … and I think Marie-Neige and I have met already, at her mother’s house. It is Marie-Neige Pellicot, isn’t it, Mamzelle?”

The youngest Pellicot daughter nodded. January calculated he’d probably climbed through the window of her attic bedroom last Saturday. He remembered Agnes Pellicot complaining to his mother, “What earthly use is it to educate a girl? It costs a fortune and in the end to whom is she going to speak in Greek or Italian or whatever it is?”

“Well, you can go find Isabel now,” said Mademoiselle Vitrac gently. “Tell her I’m not angry at her for leaving. And don’t you rip up at her for it, either, Marie-Neige, please. Everything turned out all right in the end. Is there anything you can do for them, M’sieu Janvier?” She
asked this as Marie-Neige took up her candle in one hand, gathered her voluminous petticoats in the other, and made her careful way down the ladderlike stairs.

“Only what you’ve been doing.” January walked to the pink-and-green china veilleuse that stood on one of the room’s plain cypresswood dressers, its candle providing the sole illumination in that corner of the long attic. He touched the backs of his fingers to the vessel’s smooth side, and found it warm. From his satchel he took the powdered willow bark and herbs Olympe had recommended, and poured the heated water over them in one of the bedroom pitchers.

“It’s all anyone can do,” he went on. “The fever is like a hurricane. It passes through the body, tearing up everything in its path, and it’s going to take as long as it takes to pass. All we can do is keep the girls alive, keep the fever down by whatever means we can: cool water on the skin, vinegar, herb draughts like this one, saline draughts. Nothing is going to rebalance the body’s humors or drive the fever out.”

He saw her relax, and nod. “Can I get you water?” she asked. Later, when she brought it, she said, “My mother died of fever, but she suffered cruelly at the hands of the doctors before she died. They bled her; and after they’d gone, my grandmother thought it would be a good idea to blister her, to ‘revive her,’ as she said. I was afraid …” She hesitated. “I was afraid that in not seeking a doctor yesterday, or the day before, I might have … have done them harm. As I said, I’m not very good with the sick. They seemed to be getting better yesterday.”

“That happens,” said January. Wind scratched at the dormer shutters, and the thunder of rain sounded very loud on the Spanish-tiled roof.

“I thought—I hoped—we actually could get through the summer here without anyone falling sick.” She propped her spectacles more firmly on her nose with her forefinger, then stripped back the sheets, and wrung a sponge in the vinegar-water she had brought. “We did last summer, four girls and I. Geneviève over there …” And there was in her eyes the special smile teachers have when they speak of pupils who have become their friends, “…  and Victorine were two of them. Looking back, I can’t imagine how we did it. But entire families survived, you know. And quite frankly,” she added, “I had nowhere else to go. Neither did most of the girls.”