02 Fever Season

Eight

At any other time, it would have been ridiculous to suppose that an event that took place late Friday night could have left signs still readable on Monday afternoon. The sheer volume of foot traffic along the banquettes-marketwomen, flatboatmen from the nearby levee, children rolling hoops, ladies out for a stroll, sellers of everything from pralines to shoe pattens-precluded so much as a dropped cigar stub from remaining in the same place or state for more than ten minutes, much less the marks of some unspecified conflict, meeting, or event.

At any other time.

But as he walked along Rue de l'H?pital to Rue St. Claude on the upriver side of the street, then back on the downriver side; as he repeated the process on Rue des Ursulines, up and back, then Rue St.

Philippe, January saw only one market-woman in a tignon, hastening head-down in the direction of the river, and, on Rue St. Philippe, a drunken, bewhiskered American, staggering along the banquette, pounding on the shutters of the houses he passed and shouting, "'Sa matter with this town? Can't a man find a hoor fr'is natural needs?"

Even such life as still beat in the town-the fashionable shops, the gambling houses that ran full-blast as if Death were not waiting like a coachman at the curb, the cafes and taverns along Bourbon and Chartres and Royale were farther over toward the center of the old French town or closer to the river.

Here the tall town houses, the pink and green and yellow cottages were closed tight against the creeping advent of evening. The invisible plague rode the deepening twilight with the humming of the mosquitoes and the cemetery stink.

January quartered the streets between the Lalaurie house and Mademoiselle Vitrac's school until it grew too dark to see. He studied doorways, walls, the brick of the banquette underfoot and the very ooze of crap and vegetable-parings in the gutters. It had rained at least three times since Friday, and he wasn't even certain exactly what he sought, and in any case he didn't find anything particularly interesting: a certain amount of spat tobacco, indicating the recent passage of American males; crumpled newspapers; three dogs and four rats in advanced states of decay; innumerable roaches; celery leaves; garbage. No pools of blood conveniently sheltered from the rain. No knives driven into doorposts. No headscarves or golden rings or pulled-loose necklaces so beloved of sensational novelists, no half-scribbled letters of enigmatic names.

He passed the house of the Perret family on Rue St. Philippe, and wondered whether they had, in fact, taken refuge on the floor of Uncle Louis's porch within breath ing distance of the lake or whether they might by some chance have remained home Friday night and seen something of Cora's disappearance.

The house was the last of a line of artisans' cottages, backed up against the side of a modest town house; it, and about half the houses of the row, were shuttered and lightless. January hopped the gutter-for as Gabriel had said, their plank was taken up-and rapped sharply on the shutter.

But there was no sound within the Perret house, and no light gleamed out through the jalousies. He was late already to the Hospital. He made his way there through thick hot gathering twilight, trouble and defeat in his heart.

Early the following afternoon he told Rose Vitrac what he had heard, what he had sought, and what he had not found. "I picked up this morning's Gazette," he added. "Madame Redfern is still advertising for her recapture, so Cora hasn't been caught yet."

Mademoiselle Vitrac sat on the corner of Antoinette's bed, next to his hard wooden chair. She pushed her spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of her nose, and read past his shoulder the few lines printed next to the standard slug of a negress running:

Ran away-Cora Aged about twenty-five, a skilled house servant and cook. Of medium height and very dark, with a black birthmark upon her left shoulder. Speaks both French and English, thought to be going to New Orleans. Stole $5000 upon her departure.

"If that's the best description of her Madame Redfern can come up with," remarked Mademoiselle Vitrac, "Cora's quite safe, wherever she is. `Medium height?' "

"Have you seen La Redfern?" Hannibal Sefton emerged from the small door at the top of the steps. He carried a pitcher of lemonade, the result of a windfall heap of lemons on the levee, and his dark hair hung over his shoulders and down his back. "I could eat sandwiches off the top of her head."

January recalled that stout tiny figure in widow's black, and laughed. He'd been a little surprised to arrive at the school and find his friend there, but only a little. Hannibal had known Rose Vitrac, it transpired, since they'd been the only two patrons of a job-lot sale at the Customhouse to be looking at the books rather than bolts of silk or boxes of lace fans from Paris at fifty cents the dozen. In the ten months since then, she had occasionally bought books from him when he was particularly hard up for opium or medicine or had given him a place to sleep when he'd been turned out of whatever whorehouse attic he'd been occupying that week.

Now he set the pitcher down on the dresser and poured a cup for Victorine, who though weak and wasted sat propped among her pillows, and held it for her while she drank. Her fever had broken the previous night, Mademoiselle Vitrac had told January on his arrival. A dozen years seemed to have been erased from the schoolmistress's face.

"Something clearly prevented Cora from coming back," January said thoughtfully. "Either physically, or she saw something or someone that frightened her so badly she fled. If she was arrested, Shaw would have spoken to me by this time. Was anything happening in town Friday night? Or has there been anything taking place at nights?"

The drunken American returned to his mind, staggering along the banquette, banging on the shutters.

With Gallatin Street so close and every gaming hall in town open nearly all night it was possible that two or three such men might have encountered the frail, tiny woman walking alone...

"I was out of town that night and I've been in the Hospital every night for weeks. Hannibal?"

"Insensible of mortality, yet desperately mortal... Bar the occasional straying inebriate there's been nothing I've heard of. Though of course with so many people out of town there's always some who'll risk the night air, in order to help themselves to unguarded plate or trinkets-and it would take a fine, strong febrile miasma indeed to penetrate the alcoholic fog that surrounds some of our bold American boys.

Have you thought that Cora might simply be living in one of the houses you passed?"

Mademoiselle Vitrac laughed, "That's ridiculous. Isn't it?" She looked hesitantly at January.

"What's ridiculous about it?" demanded Hannibal indignantly. "I've been living in the town house of one Eustace Dolier and his family since July, which is cheaper than paying rent to Willie the Fish over on Perdidio Street. Quieter, too, and it isn't as if I'm taking anything from the family. How could anyone tell?"

How indeed? January remembered the shuttered doorways, the silent houses along every street in the town. "Why?" he asked. "Why not come back for the money?"

Hannibal shrugged. "She may have thought she was being followed. She may have actually been followed-it happens, to women walking alone that time of night. Or she may have met some friend of Otis Redfern's, someone who could peach on her. For all we know, her Gervase may have lied to Madame Lalaurie about what Cora told him. Cora may be hiding somewhere in town waiting her chance to get him away."

"Reasoning that he needed to be rescued at once from a woman who tortures her slaves to the sound of screams and clanking chains," finished January dryly.

Mademoiselle Vitrac, who had gone to the end of the empty bed where she'd left the armload of clean linen she'd brought up, straightened and turned as if burned. "What?"

"According to Madame Lalaurie's neighbor, cries and groans issue from the house on a regular basis."

"And I suppose according to this man," and the twist of her voice made the word the most venomous of insults, "Madame Lalaurie also entertains a regiment of lovers, like the Empress Catherine of Russia? Or practices poisoning slaves for the entertainment of watching them die, like Cleopatra? Or threw that little girl off the roof last year, the way the Americans claimed she did? Or any of those other things that men put about concerning any woman who's competent in business, beautiful, wealthy, and socially more prominent than they are? Any woman who doesn't need a man around to run her life?"

She caught up the basket and strode from the attic, jaw set with rage. Hannibal and January exchanged a startled look; then January rose and straightened the sheet over Antoinette. He caught up with the schoolmistress in the yard, where she was running water from the cistern into a tin tub for the sheets to soak.

"I'm sorry." He bent to pick up the heavy tub. "I made you angry, and I didn't-"

"No, no." She shook her head, dried her hands on her apron-she continued the motion long after they were dry, her eyes avoiding his. "I'm sorry," she said at last. "That was uncalled for. It was a long time ago..."

"What was?"

"Nothing." For a moment he thought she would walk away, into the kitchen or back to the main house, anywhere so long as it was away from him. But she remained where she stood, though she wouldn't face him. Her lips were set, as a man will hold still after he's been hurt, knowing he'll hurt more if he moves.

For all the strength of her firm mouth he saw how delicate the structure of her bones was, like a long-legged bird.

"It's nothing," she said again. He didn't reply.

"I just got-very tired of having to defend loving learning above liking boys. Men. Boys. I don't know if you understand."

"I understand." He wanted to touch her hand in comfort but sensed that to do so would turn her from him, perhaps forever. "At least in part. My mama thought I was insane, wanting to do nothing but play the piano." Other boys hadn't been particularly forgiving about it, either. Rose Vitrac nodded, but still didn't look at him. The rain that rolled in from the Gulf every afternoon was gathering fast overhead, the air thick with it, and with the whirring of cicadas in the trees that grew behind and around the kitchen.

"I didn't mind boys-men-when I was a girl. Around the plantation, I mean: I thought they were dull, was all. But they acted as if... as if my lack of interest in them made them furious. As if it were a deliberate insult, which it wasn't. I just wasn't stupid enough to think I could go away to school, and learn about what the world is, and how things are made, and about steam and metals and the mountains at the bottom of the sea, if I bore some man a child. And I wanted to go away, to learn, more than anything.

More than life."

She raised her eyes then, smoky green, like leaves just before they turn in autumn, fierce and intent behind the heavy cut slabs of glass.

"It was so disproportionate," she said, wondering at it still, after all the years. "Not just the dirty names, but them lying in wait for me. I never understood why they couldn't just leave me alone."

Because they were boys, thought January, to whom the answer was obvious, if not explicable. He understood without being able to explain how it is with boys, who cannot endure being ignored by a woman, any woman. And he knew from his own dealings with the quadroon and octoroon boys in his own schooldays as the darkest boy in the little academy as well as the biggest-boys as fair as H?lier and as proud of their fairness-that boys egg each other on.

No wonder Montreuil's rumormongering touched her on the raw.

But all he could say was, "I'm sorry." He carried the tin tub to the table by the kitchen's open door, where the inevitable gallery overhead would protect it from the coming downpour. "Did you sleep last night? Then lie down for a few hours now. I don't have to be at the Hospital until eight."

"You don't have to, Monsieur Janvier."

"No," he agreed, and smiled. "And you can make that Ben, if you want."

She hesitated a long time, looking up again into his face. Then she said, very softly, "Thank you.

Monsieur Janvier."

She walked back to the house, and this time he did not follow, only waited until she had gone inside before he climbed the stairs to the attic himself.

January heard the violin as he climbed, entered that long, low room dense with heat. Hannibal was playing to the girls, frail airs from the west of Ireland, gentle and sad. When he came in, the fiddler reeled the music to its close, but January held up his hand and signed him to play on. Genevi?ve murmured in her pain-racked sleep, nearly hidden behind the white gauze of the mosquito-bar around her bed;

Victorine and Antoinette rested easily. Marie-Neige, who had come up with vinegar-water to help wash the girls, had lain down too on one of the other beds and slept as well, even her plumpness seeming somehow fragile in repose. Of Isabel there was as usual nothing to be seen.

January scratched a lucifer to light the candle under the veilleuse, and checked the round china pot for water. He dug from his satchel the red-and-gold tin of willow bark and borage, and stood for a moment holding it near the votive light, swamped with thoughts he did not care to think.

"How do they look?" Hannibal set his fiddle aside. He'd borrowed a couple of tortoiseshell combs from Genevi?ve, and knotted up his long hair like a woman's on his head.

"Better." January put the tin and his speculations aside. He looped back the mosquito-bar around Victorine's bed to feel her forehead, then her pulse. He was coming to know these girls a little, mostly from what Mademoiselle Vitrac said of them: Victorine's hotheaded stubbornness, Antoinette's day-long silences in which she'd raptly figure geometric proofs, the half-embarrassed streak of Genevi?ve's sensationalism that drew that deceptively lovely girl to the gorier chapters of Roman history and the fascinated study of poisons, explosives, catapults, and mummies.

Rose's pupils. Rose's life.

"We're holding them. The fever should run its course soon."

Hannibal turned away to cough. Strangely enough with the onset of the summer fever his own consumption had gone into one of its periodic abeyances: "Just my luck," he had remarked to January on Saturday night, "with everyone out of town and nobody hiring." Now he said, "I met her here once or twice. Cora. I didn't know who she was, of course."

"The damn thing is," said January, returning to the wooden chair, "that anything could have happened to her. The city's no Peaceable Kingdom at the best of times, and with the streets empty and the City Guards afraid to go outside at night themselves-and small blame to themanything could have happened. A young girl like that, wandering the streets at that hour of the night..."

He paused. He remembered Alphonse Montreuil's ferrety face and the way his thin white hands had picked and fidgeted with his cuffs. "What do you know about Montreuil?" he asked. Voodoos-and Marie Laveau-were not the only ones who knew everything in the town. "Alphonse Montreuil, Madame Lalaurie's neighbor? If he was up at that hour, watching her house..."

"You mean, is he dangerous?"

"Not dangerous, but..." January thought again. "Yes. Is he dangerous?"

Hannibal settled his back to the rail of the empty bed's footboard, folded small white hands, delicate as a woman's, around his bony knees. "I don't think so," he said, after long consideration. "But he's certainly cracked where Madame L is concerned. He's a cousin of sorts to the Montreuils who own that plantation downriver. It seems Alphonse's brother married a woman named Manette McCarry, who's some kind of cousin to Madame. Now, when Alphonse and Albert's father died, he left his money, not to his deserving sons, but to his widow. She in turn, when she was gathered to the reward of all good Creole matrons, passed along the money and a substantial hunk of property to brother Albert's children by means of an unbreakably airtight will. Don't ask me why she bypassed Alphonse. Maybe she didn't like him very much."

"I can understand her sentiments."

Hannibal coughed, a brief line of pain appearing between his dark brows, and he fished in his pocket for the opium tincture that suppressed both coughing and pain. He took a tiny, judicious swig. "I suspect he's even more unpleasant on close contact. God knows how his wife... well. In any case, the brother's children, instead of sharing some of the proceeds with Uncle Alphonse, as he probably hoped they would, turned the real estate by an Act of Procuration over to their mother-who, as you recall, is Madame L's cousin, Creole society being stiff with McCartys. The Act of Procuration was handled by the Louisiana State Bank Jean Blanque's old outfit-and since Madame is widely known to keep all her business affairs in her own hands rather than let Nicolas Lalaurie lay a finger on them, Montreuil assumed that she was behind the plot."

"Was she?" January got to his feet to light a pair of candles, for with the thunder of rain overhead the afternoon had gone pitchy dark.

"Who knows? Most of the McCartys go to her for business advice, or for money to float investments.

She bankrolled this school, I know that. I don't know whether she advised Cousin Manette or not. But Montreuil's never forgiven her." Hannibal picked up his violin again, sketching threads and bones and shadows of airs while he spoke, as another man might have drawn boxes and diamonds on the margin of a paper while speaking, or made knots in string. "Then when the Ursuline Sisters put their land along Rue de l'Hopital up for sale, Montreuil wanted to buy the lot next to his house, except he didn't have the cash-videlicet Act of Procuration, above. Madame bought the lot-and the unfinished house-out from under him.

"Since that time he's been telling everyone who'll listen that she's a monster. His wife claims she saw her chase a little Negro girl off the roof with a cowhide whip-though how she could have seen that I can't imagine, since the Montreuil house is a full story shorter than the Lalaurie-and reported her to the police for it. The girl had actually died of a fall, and Madame was fined, so it isn't really surprising that Madame is pretty careful these days to keep her servants behind walls and away from anyone who might talk to any of Montreuil's people. You grew up in this town. You know the kind of things that get printed in the papers, and talked around the markets, and believed."

January was silent for a time, listening to the rain and remembering the fury in Mademoiselle Vitrac's voice, the bitterness in her gray eyes. "I take it Mademoiselle Vitrac knows Madame Lalaurie? If Madame helped finance the school?"

"Rose knew the wife of one of Madame's McCarty cousins she'd gone to school with her in New York. The banks were less than eager to lend Rose money once they found out there was no Monsieur Vitrac. I gather someone made the mistake of remarking to Madame Lalaurie how one couldn't really expect a mere woman to manage a business-some people have no sense of self-preservation." The violin shaped a phrase of notes, as clear and mocking as the ironic lift of an eyebrow: were it not for consumption, and pain, and the twin nepenthes of alcohol and opium into which that pain had driven him, Hannibal would have been the greatest at his art. He was still one of the finest violinists January had encountered, in New Orleans or in Paris. As he played, his eyelids had a crumpled look, lined and discolored, but the dark eyes themselves were dreamy, lost in the music and the rain. Every penny I own is tied up in this building... January thought of his sister, and of the child she had just borne. Of Agnes Pellicot, and of his mother. Men routinely gifted their pla??es with money or property as a congi when they put them aside; it was, he knew, one reason why many women of color crossed over the line of respectability and allowed white protectors to take them. With even a little money, it was possible to start a business, to buy a boardinghouse or rental property, to invest in steamship stocks or sugar futures. Men would start a pla??e's son in business, but rarely her daughter. "What do you think of Cora?" he asked. "You met her. Do you think she'd have done murder?" Hannibal considered for a time, tatting his bits of Rossini and Vivaldi into a glittering lacework in the dimness. "I think she could have," he said at last. "She's hard-but then most women are harder than one thinks. Even our Athene." He nodded toward the house below them, where Rose Vitrac would be lying, sleeping, January hoped. Alone as she had always been alone. "Whether she would have is another question. The problem could have been solved fairly simply by her running away-if she hadn't decided to take the money and the pearls with her-and of course as a house servant she'd have known where to find them. Myself, I wouldn't have taken the whole five thousand dollars, let alone the pearls, because the theft would be a guarantee of pursuit. But it may be she wasn't thinking very clearly." Beside him, the girl Genevi?ve turned in her sleep, and whispered something, despairing. Hannibal leaned close, but the girl fell silent again. The sound of the rain seemed very loud.

"I know Cora did tell Rose not to seek out or try to speak to Madame Lalaurie for her, not that Rose has more than a bowing acquaintance with Madame. It's hard to tell how people will react to things, and Cora didn't want to jeopardize her friend's position. Which doesn't mean she didn't dose Otis Redfern's souffle for him: a woman can treat those she cares for with kindness and still be an ogre to her enemies, the same way a man can manumit a loved and loyal slave on the same day he whales the living tar out of another slave for putting too much sugar in his tea. People have surprisingly hermetic minds." "Do you think Emily Redfern poisoned her husband? If the mistress was gone beforehand, the wife would have no cause to do it; if it was before Cora left, would she have done herself out of six or seven hundred dollars by poisoning her?"

"Don't ask me." Hannibal wrapped his fiddle in its holed and faded silk scarves, and stowed it carefully in its case. "It's hard to believe La Redfern would pass up a chance at the money, but one can't tell. Maybe not even the servants in the household could tell. In Dublin when I was growing up there was a woman who kept her two nieces chained in a cellar for five years so she could go on lending their inheritance money out at four and a half percent. One's always hearing about domestic tyrants who beat or mistreat their wives and children, and no one in the family dares speak of it because they know it'll do them no good. There may have been things going on in that household we'll never know about-which may be one reason why our Emily is trying so hard to retrieve her runaway property."

The rain was lightening. Pale daylight leaking through the cracks in the shutters struggled against the candle glow, then slowly bested it. Hannibal gathered up his fiddle case to go.

"One thing I do know, though," he added, pausing in the door. "And I think you know this, too, if you talked to her even for a short time. Cora isn't one to give up. I don't think she'd have left New Orleans without Gervase. And given her circumstances, I don't think she'd walk out either on that money, or on Rose."