02 Fever Season

Eleven

St. Gertrude's Clinic was completely unattended. A ramshackle building or collection of buildings that had once been a warehouse, it was nearly windowless, its roof leaked in a dozen places, and the smell would have nauseated Satan. As his eyes struggled to adapt to the grimy light admitted by a few high-up squares of oiled linen, January heard the scuttle and swish of rats in the darkness around the walls, and the hard whirring flight of a palmetto bug. Somewhere a man sobbed. When his eyes did adjust, he saw some twenty men and women lying on the floor on straw mattresses, tossing and shuddering with fever.

None of them was anyone that he knew. Seven were dead, three clearly dying. Along the wall two corpses, wrapped roughly for the dead-cart man, were already the target of long ribbons of ants. January steeled himself to pull the sheets from their faces.

Both were naked, and had been harvested of their teeth, the white man of his hair. The other, either a slave mulatto or a man of color, was far older than any of the men who had disappeared. January would have scrupulously avoided most of the sick men in the clinic had he encountered them on the streets: sailors, vagrants, upriver Kaintucks or Irish laborers, bewhiskered, gasping obscenities in barely comprehensible English.

But seeing them lying in a thin soup of rainwater and their own filth, January felt a blaze of anger go through him. Even Saublet's hellish premises didn't enrage him like this. At least the man had a dedication, and kept the place reasonably clean. People might be objects to Soublet, but he had the decency not to relieve them of their teeth when they died.

He left the clinic, and sloshed through the mire to the doors of the Jolly Boatman.

The black-coated, top-hatted man who'd emerged from the Clinic sat on one of the rude benches that flanked both sides of the big room, consuming a plate of crawfish and rice with a brown bottle of whisky at his side. Rather unusually for the district the place had a floor, wrought of used flatboat planks like the walls. With every other saloon in the Swamp awash in seepage the investrnent must pay off on rainy days.

Two tables stood in the center of the room, under soot-blackened lamps suspended from the low ceiling; at one of them a broad-shouldered, fair-haired man in a tobacco-colored coat played solitaire. Behind a plank bar another man, heavily mustachioed and with one pale blue eye bearing all the signs of an old gouging-it tended out, the torn muscles having never recovered-dipped a brownish liquor from a barrel on the floor beside him into a tin funnel, refilling the bottles of his stock. Past him two doors sported tattered curtains. A couple of men leaned on the bar itself, hard-bitten roughnecks of the sort who reluctantly ended up joining the crack-brained military adventures launched from New Orleans from time to time against the Spanish or the French. It was one of them who looked up as January's shadow darkened the door.

"Don't you know better than to come in here, boy?" He shoved himself away from the bar and crossed to January, rapidly, to block his way.

"Is there something you're after, my friend?" The card-player rose from the table with no appearance of, hurry, but he was between them with surprising quickness nevertheless.

January recognized him as the fair-haired Irishman who'd searched through the ward of the Charity Hospital the night Mademoiselle Vitrac had come to ask his help for her girls.

"I'm looking for the man in charge of St. Gertrude's Clinic." It was an effort to keep his voice steady, let alone affect the soft-spoken subservience white men expected of those darker than themselves. January had no clear idea of what he was going to say, or how he would phrase it. His one desire was to drive his fist into the jaw of the man who slouched on the bench, sucking his bottle when men wept and pleaded for water next door.

"Furness," the gambler called out gently. And, to the mercenary beside him, "That'll do, Hog-Nose, thank'ee." The black-coated man took another pull on his whisky, and sulkily came to the door, bottle still in hand. "This bhoy has a word for you."

"What you want, boy?" Close up, Dr. Furness's face was unshaven, mouth embedded in a brown smear of tobacco stains, nose and eyes alike red veined. His breath was a lifetime of alcohol and uncleanness.

"I just wanted to let you know you've got about seven dead in your clinic, sir, and water coming in through the roof so they're lying in puddles on the floor."

The doctor stared at him open-mouthed. "Who the hell you think you are, boy, coming here telling me how to run my business? You get the hell outa here! Goddamn uppity..."

January inclined his head and stepped back, trembling with rage. Everything he would have said to the man had he been in France How dare you set yourself up as a healer, you incompetent drunkard? Who put you in charge of a clinic, even in times such as these? died in his mouth, with the knowledge that to speak-even to raise his eyes-would only earn him a beating from the military filibusters and maybe the gambler as well. But he was so angry that all he could see were the toes of his own boots, and the tips of Dr. Furness's, mud-soaked and dripping on the dirty boards of the floor.

Thus he didn't even see the blow Furness aimed at him, until the gambler moved and caught the drunken man's arm. January looked up and saw the cane in the doctor's hand.

"Leave it," warned the gambler softly. Furness made an effort to jerk his arm free for another strike. The cane was teak with a head of brass, and by the way Furness handled it, he'd used it as a weapon before.

"Boy got no goddamn business telling me how to run my hospital!" he screamed, angry-drunk. He wrenched his arm again but the gambler's grip was strong.

"The bhoy has a point, Gerald." The mellow voice was as mild as that of a governess. But in the tanned face the blue eyes were pale steel. " 'Tis true ye've no business bein' away from the place, and anyone walkin' in off the street. I think it best ye'd be gettin' back."

"I'm not going back because no buck nigger comes here all high and mighty and tells me-"

"You're not. You're goin' because Liam Roarke's tellin' You." Furness's jaw jutted so far he seemed in danger of dislocating it, but his bloodshot gaze couldn't endure the cold pale blue. He yanked his arm a third time, and this time the gambler released him, making him stagger.

"I'll have Trudi send one of the girls over with your breakfast."

Cursing, the doctor pushed through the door, jostling January as he passed, so heavily that January was thrown up against the framing. January watched him stomp through the mud, pausing to finish his bottle with another long pull, then send it spinning away above the barrelhouse roof.

"Ye'll have to excuse him." Liam Roarke guided January out into the doubtful shelter of the porch that ran around three sides of the building. "Settin' up a fever hospital in that old warehouse of his was the one decent act the man's ever done, and without help nor even a relief that can be counted on, the rage of it and the helplessness get to him. And he's bone weary."

As he had been even in the dead of night in the Charity Hospital, Roarke's chin was cleanly shaven between the l golden wings of his side-whiskers and his linen was spotless, his coat pressed. "As who is not?" January said. "Did you find your friend?"

Roarke hesitated, some thought passing fast behind the pale eyes. Then he said, "That I did not. I fear the fever's took him, poor fellow. And yoursel', sir? You're one of the surgeons at the Hospital, are you not?

And no man's bhoy?"

"That's true, yes, sir," said January. "I looked in, searching for a friend who's taken ill, no one knows where. I suppose I should only be glad this part of town has someone willing to run a hospital, with the Charity and the regular clinics overflowing."

"He's a good man in his heart, you know." Roarke gazed sadly in the direction of the shambling labyrinth that was St. Gertrude's. "I've never been one as has a spark in his throat, as they say, but I can pity a man who has. You say you're after searchin' for a friend? It's turn and turn about, then. Come over there wi' me. I'll make him take you round, never fear."

"I've had a look already. I'd best be on my way." The rain had ceased, the day's heat redoubled.

January, still in the black coat and white shirt of his medical office, felt himself more and more acutely a target in a hostile land. Exhaustion descended on him, the endless night and the day that had gone before it crushing him like seven hundredweight of chain.

"Come back, then, when you've a chance." Roarke smiled in the shadows of the porch. "The fact is, Gerald needs a surgeon in the place, and it might so be he'd pay you better than the Charity folk do."

And what makes you think I can get to the clinic and back alive? Even if I didn't mind being belabored with a cane if I should happen to forget to call that drunken lout "sir"?

Nevertheless January thanked him and left, to make his way along Rue des Ramparts. At St. Anthony's Chapel lie stopped, and in its silent dimness knelt for a time, glad only for the silence and the peace, telling over the prayers of the rosary in the dark.

Praying that he would survive the fever season. Praying that he would not come one day to Olympe's house to find her, and Paul, and the children dead with blackened faces in puddles of their own bile.

Praying that he would not receive today, or tomorrow, a letter from Milneburgh informing him that his mother, or Dominique, or her child, had succumbed.

Praying that he would not be left to face the remainder of his life utterly alone.

It was the second of October. Only a few weeks, he thought, until the summer broke. Until the fever broke. When he emerged from the chapel, he knew that he ought to go to Mademoiselle Vitrac's, to relieve her for a time of her nursing duties, as Hannibal had done. But he went home instead. He stripped and bathed in tepid rainwater from the cistern and for a long time lay on his bed, the heat of the day on him like a soaked blanket. Remembering Ayasha. Trying to remember his father's face. Seeing in his mind the straight slim figure of Cora Chouteau, walking up Rue de l'Hopital in the dark.

Through the open windows he smelled the smoke of burning, and he slept at last in the terrible silence of Bronze John's domination of the town.

He reached the school a few hours before sunset the following day and related to Mademoiselle Vitrac all that had befallen him since leaving Charity Hospital and all he had learned or guessed. "Not that the Guards will do a thing about it," he concluded bitterly. He tilted the veilleuse, carried the cup of tisane to Genevi?ve's bed.

The girl was dying. January could see it in her face. There was little more to her than a skeleton, her exquisite complexion livid orange with the mask of fever. Yesterday Mademoiselle Vitrac had cropped the girl's long black hair, which tangled and knotted with Genevi?ve's helpless thrashing. January had suggested it, a few days ago; now he was sorry, knowing she would be buried thus. She looked like one of the dried Indian mummies that trappers found sometimes in the mounds and caves upriver.

"I can't believe they could be just-just selling them." Mademoiselle Vitrac's voice was shaky, as she bent over Victorine, sponging the girl's thin body. "I mean, the first time this Madame Perret, or the woman Lu, could slip away, couldn't they go to-Well, not the local magistrate, but someone... and say, I was kidnapped? Their free status is on public record here..."

"And who's going to check?" said January softly, when she failed to finish her sentence. "These are people who have no family in town. People who mostly don't even speak English. And what white man is going to run the risk of alienating all his neighbors, whose help he depends on, for the sake of a man or a woman who's probably lying? On the frontier, where people must have each other's help at picking time and planting? Men don't need to be evil, Mademoiselle. They just have to be bad enough to say, There's nothing I can do." He straightened up. "How well is this place locked and bolted at night?"

"Pretty well." She picked up her bowl of vinegar-water and brought it to the dying girl's bed. "And Madame Deslormes at the grocery on the corner and the Widow Lyons across the way both see me every day."

January nodded. Still he felt uneasy, but knew a part of that uneasiness was less for her than for Olympe and her husband, for young Gabriel and Zizi-Marie. These marauders did not content themselves with taking people whom no one would miss from their homes or from the tiny rooms they'd rented in the back streets of the town. Three or four of them, wandering the streets with clubs. The men who'd tried to abduct him.

The men who'd taken Cora Chouteau off the banquette.

Mademoiselle Vitrac bent over Genevi?ve's bed and spunged the girl's heat-blotched face and body.

"She was the most beautiful of them, you know," she said, keeping her voice matter-of-fact; a line of concentration marked her fine-drawn brows, as if she were doing accounts or grinding up mineral salts for a chemical experiment. "Her mother was just waiting for her to finish `this nonsense' as she called it, and start going to the Blue Ribbon Balls. She seemed to take it as a personal insult that Genevi?ve wouldn't consent to be the most beautiful girl there, so that she could be the mother of the most beautiful girl." She shook her head. "We-Genevi?ve and I-had one quarrel with her already, at the beginning of this year. She was so afraid of it," she added softly. "Genevi?ve."

I'm not very good at this, she had said to him once, and she still wasn't. Spilled water blotted her dress and soaked her sleeves, dribbling black patterns on the floor all around. She'd pulled off her tignon in the heat, and her dark hair, drawn back in a clumsy knot, was beaded with sweat, long curly tendrils of it escaping to drift around her face. Her hands were blistered with the unaccustomed work, and January saw how achingly she moved.

"It's funny," she went on, more softly. "Because when it came to chemical experiments, to fire and explosions, she was-not even brave is the word, she simply didn't think about fear. She even learned how to make bombs, stuffing gunpowder in the bottom of a clay jar and packing it in with cotton, and sawdust to take fire in the explosion and make the explosion seem bigger-I remember her timing how long it took a fuse to burn. The other girls were terrified."

Her mouth curved, cherishing the memory, bright as a stand of daffodils that catches sunlight before the engulfing shadow of storm.

In time Genevi?ve's feeble movements ceased and she lay with shut eyes, beaten. Mademoiselle Vitrac got quickly to her feet and went from the room, leaving the vinegar-water where it was. Leadenly weary, January finished dosing Antoinette and went to Genevi?ve, but the girl still breathed, though barely. He wrung out the sponge, finished neatly the job Mademoiselle Vitrac had abandoned, and dressed the girl again-it was like dressing a stick-puppet-in one of the nightgowns that he, or Hannibal, or Mademoiselle Vitrac endlessly boiled and washed.

Some said the clothing and bedding of fever victims ought to be burned. With only a few paying pupils, Rose Vitrac could barely afford to put food on the table, much less buy new sheets and nightclothes, or even pay a laundress to do them. More than anything in the world he wanted to go down after her, to comfort her in the face of the approaching death of the girl who had been her pupil and her friend.

But all he could see in his mind was Ayasha with her lifeless fingers stretched toward the water pitcher, and there were no words in his mind to say. And in any case he would not leave the dying girl alone.

He was still sitting by Genevi?ve's bed, holding her burning hand, when he heard the stairs creak, and the rustle of skirts.

"I'm sorry. That was inexcusable of me."

In the dimness of the attic he could see that she'd slopped water on her face to take down the swelling of tears.

"I was here. And she wouldn't have known."

"They do know." She crossed from the door and sat on the bed next to Genevi?ve's pillow, stroked the hacked bristle of hair. "At least I did."

"Did you have the fever?"

She shook her head. "I..." She hesitated for a long time. Then, very carefully, "I was sick. Eight, nine years ago, just before I went away to school in New York. Father told me later I didn't know one person from another, but that isn't how I remember it. Cora..."

She broke off again, wrapped her arms around herself, though the attic was sweltering. Looked down into the face of the dying girl.

Her words came slowly, "I don't know whether this really happened or not. But I remember one night when Cora heard my father pass the door. She went out into the hall and told him, `The least you could do is go in there and hold on to her hand.' "

"Did he?" He saw it in his mind, as he saw Cora's small straight shadow disappearing in the darkness of the street: the shadow of the dark girl on the wall, tiny before the tall white man. Arms folded, looking up at him the way she'd looked up at January under the shadows of the Pellicots' kitchen gallery.

"His wife told him not to." Mademoiselle Vitrac sounded resigned about it, accepting that such was how things were.

"Were you contagious?"

It's not bad if you don't fight...

He knew Rose had not been contagious.

She was silent for perhaps a minute. Then, "I wasn't an easy child to have in the house." She touched Genevi?ve's hand, her own cut and bandaged fingers rendered exquisite and alien, like intricately jointed bamboo, by the knife of sunlight that fell across them. "Like Genevi?ve. And Victorine, and Isabel, and some of the others. The ones who can't be what their mothers were, or want them to be. The ones who see too clearly, and speak too frankly. The ones who... who damage themselves and their position in the house every time they open their mouths, but can't keep from doing so."

He saw in the long oval bones of her face the face of a proud, gawky child: erudite, stuck-up, above herself and everyone around her. As she would have been to him, he realized, had they not met as they had.

A shudder went through her, tears suppressed as they had always been suppressed. "She never had a chance." January gathered her against him as he would have gathered one of his sisters, had she been in pain, and felt the woman's body stiffen like wood. He released her, stepped back the instant before she wrenched herself from him...

"Don't..."

He stood back helplessly, his hands at his sides.

She was trembling, looking away from him. "I..." There wasn't a thing she could say without saying everything. He could feel the knot of it, wringing tighter and tighter, like a noose of pain.

To sever it he said, "She had what no one else could have given her: the assurance that there was a path for her, even if it was narrow and lonely." What he wanted to say was not that: what he wanted to say was, Don't turn away! I wasn't the one who hurt you! But he knew that did not matter, against the touch and the strength of a man's hands, and the smell of a man's sweat. Some women never recovered.

If you don't struggle it's not so bad.

He forced himself to speak of this dying girl, whom he had never truly known, instead of to the bitter, struggling adolescent trapped within the schoolmistress's brittle calm.

"At least she knew someone else had walked that way before her."

The schoolmistress fought for a moment more to steady her breath, to regain her composure. To pretend she hadn't cried out, and pulled herself from what she knew was offered only in comfort and in love.

Then she turned her face toward him again, and said, "I'm sorry. It's... she was the oldest of them, and the closest to me."

She looked down at Genevi?ve's face again, and from being, a moment ago, a shield against him, the girl became again a friend in her own right, a loved friend with one foot in Charon's boat.

"I tried. I did try. If she hadn't been so bright-if she hadn't been so cutting about everything she saw and heard-her mother would have been gladder to have her with her in Mandeville."

"We can't know that," said January steadily, his eyes meeting hers. Her trembling ceased, and there was only grief, and no more vile memory, in her face. "We can't know what would or would not have befallen her, if she'd gone with her mother out of town. I suspect she was happier here, without her mother on her to put up her hair and go to the balls."

The sensitive mouth flinched. He saw old memory flit across the back of her eyes, trailing a silvery wake of pain. "That's true," Rose Vitrac said. "Her mother..." She made a small gesture, and ceased.

"If we start to make up those stories in our heads, about would-have and might-have and if-only-we-hadn't, we'll go mad," said January softly. "You know that."

"I know... You're seeing me at a bad time, M'sieu Janvier. I'm not usually this... this ticklish."

He met the green-gray eyes again, and smiled. "Well, Mademoiselle Vitrac, since you're the only woman of my entire acquaintance to ever be brought down by the death of those she loves, the fear of the plague, and the sheer exhaustion of a hero's work in nursing, I'll have to give it some thought before I forgive you."

She gave a swift, tiny spurt of laughter, clapped behind her hand again before sheer fatigue could turn it into tears, and her eyes sparkled quick gratitude into his. "Dum spiro spero; where there's life there's hope."

"And as a doctor I can tell you," he replied, "that where there's hope, there's often life."

"And where there's a will," added Hannibal, climbing up the last few boards of the stairway with his arms full of rough-dried sheets, "there's a relative, and I've found a most curious thing in the newspaper."

"What?" January turned, grateful for the diversion. "An admission there's an epidemic on?"

Mademoiselle Vitrac flung up her hands like a comic servant in a play. "An epidemic? Really?"

"Heaven forfend. Nothing so custard-livered and contrary to the principles upon which Our Great Nation was founded, whatever those are." Hannibal dumped the sheets on one of the unoccupied beds, and from the rear pocket of his trousers produced a folded page of the New Orleans Abeille. He was in shirtsleeves, the shirt itself stained with soap and blotched with water, his long brown hair wound up in a knot on the top of his head scarcely dissimilar to Mademoiselle Vitrac's makeshift coiffure. Like hers, his small, pale hands were blistered and burned. Perching tailor-fashion on the end of the bed beside the sheets, he unfolded the paper.

"This is Wednesday's," he announced. "The eighteenth of September. Runaway-Cora Age about twenty-one, housemaid. Small, mulatto, well set up, speaks both French and English. Stole $250 and a necklace of pearls from Mrs. Emily Redfern, thought to be going to New Orleans. Reward."

"Two hundred and fifty dollars?" said January, baffled. "What happened to the five thousand in cash Redfern got from Madame Lalaurie and the Bank of Louisiana? What happened to the birthmark on her shoulder?"

"Cora didn't have a birthmark on her shoulder." Mademoiselle Vitrac sat back down on the edge of Genevi?ve's bed, and took the wasted hand in hers. "At least not one that I ever saw, and we washed each other's hair a thousand times."

"The two hundred and fifty would be the original sum of that hundred and eighty you found, Rose," said Hannibal. "What did you do with that money, by the way?"

"It's in my desk." She looked slightly embarrassed. "I know it's stolen money, but... I'm keeping it for now, in case things get worse before the fever season ends. There's a hidden compartment, a false back behind the left-hand upper drawer. And I'd say it's fairly clear why the five thousand isn't mentioned. The advertisement must have been placed Tuesday. When did Otis Redfern come down sick, M'sieu Janvier?

Tuesday? Wednesday?"

"Wednesday night." January leaned over to take the paper from Hannibal. "When did Cora come to you?"

"Wednesday night, after the girls were asleep. It must have been ten or ten thirty."

"This would have been placed Tuesday. Cora told me she slept out in the Swamp the night before coming down here. Obviously whoever placed this didn't know yet that the five thousand dollars were missing."

"Do you think she took it?" asked Hannibal.

Rose Vitrac sighed again and sat for a time with folded arms, hands on shoulders as if instinctively protecting her breasts. Not wanting to be disloyal, thought January. But she knew Cora.

At length she sighed, surrendering one bastion of the fortress she could no longer defend. "I think she would have, if she'd known it was in the house," she admitted. "If both the Redferns were ill, and she saw her chance to get away in the confusion. But she didn't have it when she came to me. I know she didn't.

And if she'd taken it..." She had clearly been about to say, She would have told me, but the discovery of the hundred and eighty dollars, and the necklace of pearls, had proven that trust untrue.

"In any case," she finished, after that sentence had died untouched, "I know she wouldn't have done murder.

"She may not have," said January. He sorted two sheets from the pile and went over to one of the stripped beds; Hannibal went to help him. "But you're going to have a hard time proving she didn't. What I'm trying to figure out is why the money was in cash instead of a draft."

"Easy," said Hannibal. "If you were a gambling man yourself Benjamin, you wouldn't be asking a silly question like that. No, stay where you are, Athene, we don't want your help."

Rose smiled a little at the nickname and settled back on the edge of Genevi?ve's bed gathering the girl's hand again in hers. Grateful, January thought, to be still.

"It takes only an hour to come downriver from Twelve-Mile Point," said January thoughtfully. "Cora could have slipped back into the house Wednesday evening sometime..."

"Wouldn't she have known the Redferns were sick, then?"

He shook his head. "According to Shaw, at least, that didn't take place until after dinner." He didn't add that if Cora had slipped back into the Redfern house Wednesday evening she would have had access to the food, but he saw the searching look Mademoiselle Vitrac gave him. "Monkshood acts fast. The coroner would know what time, exactly, they started to show signs of illness. And he's the only one, now that the servants have all been sold off." He spread the clean sheet over the bed, and gently lifted the girl Victorine from her soiled, sweaty, wrinkled sheets to the clean ones, the endless, brutal labor of sick nursing.

After a time he went on, "If Cora took the five thousand dollars, it might explain why she left the hundred and eighty dollars here-a hundred and ninety, counting Madame Lalaurie's money-and the pearls. If she had the five thousand with her, in a pocket or a reticule, she might not feel she needed what was here. I certainly would think twice about trying to bribe Madame Lalaurie's coachman. But if the five thousand was on her when she was taken, it'll show up somewhere. And given human nature, I suspect I know where."