02 Fever Season

Eighteen

As if to mock January's conviction that he would never work in New Orleans again, the following week brought a note in English from a Mr. Wallace Fraikes, business manager for Mrs. Emily Redfern. Mr.

Fraikes requested his services as a musician at a St. Valentine's Day ball to be given that Friday in Mrs.

Redfern's new home.

"Ruling her out, I suppose, as the source of the libels against you," remarked Hannibal, who was the first person January saw when shown into the tiny and barren chamber where the musicians were given leave to rest for precisely five minutes every other hour through the evening.

"I don't see how she could have been the source of the campaign against me in any case." January spoke quietly, though the footfalls of the polite, livery-clad majordomo were fading down the two flights of rear stairs up which January had been shown. The room lay at the back of the enormous yellow house in the American faubourg, overlooking the yard.

"Madame Redfern left town before the campaign against me started." The penitential chamber had probably been designed for a governess, its wallpaper cheap and faded, its minuscule pine table chipped and battered. A shabby screen concealed a chamber pot. From the single tiny window January could just see down into the yard, where household slaves carried dishes across from the kitchen building: he counted two men, two women, and a young boy. The males all wore what looked like new livery.

"Never underestimate the power of the truly vindictive. I had a London aunt-Lady Elliswrode, her name was-who could slaughter, joint, dress, and smoke a repu tation in a week from a hundred miles away.

She had a truly vicious turn of phrase, and you could float a ship of the line in her inkwell. I thought you said La Redfern was destitute."

"She was." January poured a little of the liquid from the pottery jug on the table. It was beer-watered.

There was bread, thin as a communion wafer and nearly as flavorless. "Although she can't have been that destitute," he added thoughtfully, "if she was willing to whistle a pearl necklace and a hundred and ninety dollars down the wind."

"And you're sure that was her necklace?"

"What other one would Cora have?"

A man came into the yard through the tradesman's gate, and spoke to the majordomo who came out to meet him. January winced. "Wonderful. It's our privilege to have Phiiippe deCoudreau and his clarionet confusing people all evening about what tune we're playing. Who do we get on viol-Pylade Vassage?

The Deaf Fiddler of the Faubourg Tr?m?"

"Don't laugh." Hannibal took a careful swig of opium from one hip-flask and followed it with a sip of rum from another. "That's exactly who we have to work with. And Laurent Lamartine on flute. It may be coincidence, but I doubt it. The moment La Redfern set the date for tonight's entertainment, Delphine Lalaurie moved up her ball..."

"Not again!"

"And this time, Madame managed to bag the best musicians-all the best musicians. She must have ten of them tonight, everybody who wasn't already playing at Caldwell's Theatre. The only reason I'm not there too is because one of Big Annie's girls-did I tell you I'm living in the shed behind Big Annie's these days?-cut up her note and used it for curling-papers before I got it. God knows how many others have gone the same way this month." He coughed and took another sip of the opium tincture. "At least they don't steal my violin."

January stood still, hearing the far-off pressure of the door opening, closing; the muffled voice of the worst musician in Louisiana trying to cadge supper off Madame Redfern's majordomo. For all the good that's likely to do him.

He hurt inside, like a child left out of a party, and knew that his hurt was childish. "Hannibal, what's going on? What is this? I'm better than that. I know I am. Who could get to Madame Lalaurie? Tell her not to hire me? She's above pettiness like that, she does what she pleases and be damned. I taught her daughters..."

He hesitated, the ugliness of that hellish session returning to him. From the beginning again, please...

And the hatred and terror in Pauline Blanque's eyes.

There was a woman who kept her two nieces chained in acellar...

One's always hearing about domestic tyrants... No one dares speak of it... They know it'll do them no good. Was this all because he'd seen her do that to her daughters?

"Damn it, the woman gave me money to help a runaway slave!"

Hannibal gave up looking around for another lamp-the one on the table gave barely more light than a candle-and opened his violin case. "They wouldn't have to tell her not to hire you," he pointed out. "Just tell her that you were an atheist, or a bigamist. Or that you helped Rose kill those three girls so she wouldn't have to feed them."

January felt his skin prickle with rage. "Is that what they're saying?"

"Ben, I don't know what they're saying. I don't move in those circles. Madame Lalaurie-or any of them-doesn't even have to believe you actually did anything. Just that your presence will offend someone who'll be there. They're all connected: the Prieurs, the McCartys, the Forstalls, the Blanques, the d'Aunoys... They've all got daughters to marry off."

The door opened. Philippe deCoudreau entered, laughing and shaking his head, a slim young dandy with skin as fair as H?lier Lapatie's had been and a marvelous and unfounded conceit of himself.

"You know as well as I do they can't take risks about not being invited to the right parties."

"And isn't it just the right party tonight?" deCoudreau laughed, picking up the beer pitcher and sniffing it.

"For a woman paying off her creditors at a shilling on the pound five months ago, Our Hostess sure found some money someplace." He nudged January in the ribs. "Think Madame Redfern found a wealthy widower to set her up? Did you take a look at that buffet she's laying down? Boeuf a la mode and wine jellies-we're in for some of that I don't think."

DeCoudreau laughed again. He had bright blue eyes and the sort of laugh described by popular novelists as "infectious," though January personally considered it in the same category with some of the other infectious complaints available in New Orleans. The thought of trying to play the piano under and around and through the man's aberrant sense of timing all night made his teeth ache. As he descended to the ballroom January thought, I'm doing it, too. Accepting that the Lalaurie party is the only place to be seen tonight. That everything else is second rate. No wonder the McCartys and the Bringiers and the Lafr?nni?re found it so easy to manipulate those around them.

Unfortunately, all the evening's events bore out that judgment. The only Creoles present were the minor, onthe-make skirmishers on the fringes of society and political power. Everyone with money or influence was at the Lalaurie ball. As the evening progressed, these quarreled repeatedly and violently with the American lawyers, brokers, and real-estate speculators present. January recognized at least two of the slave brokers who had been at Madame Redfern's Washington Hotel affair that summer, and could not rid himself of the sensation of being priced by the pound: Americans always made him uneasy. If nothing else, the volume of tobacco expectorated was enough to pollute the room with its stench. Madame Redfern, still in deep mourning, circulated among her guests with the vulpine Fraikes in attendance, and January could not but note the fashionable lines of her dress and the quantities of black lace and jet jewelry festooning her stubby person.

"It's a terrible city, terrible city," he heard a man say in English, over the general babble of talk between sets of polka and waltz. "Did you hear about poor Yates and his family? Found them all together in his wife's bedroom, all dead of the cholera... But opportunities?" The man, a thick-set Philadelphian-at least January thought the accent was Philadelphian-kissed his hand. "Speaking of opportunities, Gallagher, I've been meaning to ask you about renting slaves for the mill..."

"I think you have been very, very brave," a woman was saying, taking Emily Redfern's black-mitted hands in her own. A number of women, January noted, were still in mourning, but fewer than he'd seen at Creole functions last winter. The Americans tended to have more money, and to flee earlier; their relatives were in New York or Washington or Boston, not in New Orleans itself.

"I was lucky." Madame Redfern was not veiled now, and her square face assumed an expression of pious martyrdom. "My poor Otis! I will always blame myself for not being more insistent that he get rid of that wicked girl! Because, of course, I saw from the beginning what she was. But he never would." She sighed, a world of carefully manipulated wistfulness in her eyes, as if it was her belief that the lamented Otis had been too good-hearted to think ill of anyone.

"Did they ever catch her?"

The widow shook her head. "Poor soul. I can only pray that she will one day realize the error of her ways." She still had a voice like scale weights clacking in a pan: A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny... "I suppose I should hire men to pursue her wherever she flees, for, of course, her theft left me destitute; but I don't do badly now. Because of the way Papa tied it up in trust, at least they weren't able to distrain Black Oak. And the sale of the other slaves let me discharge Otis's debts at some percentage of their value. And Mr. Fraikes assures me that..."

They moved off, Madame Redfern relating yet again how Mr. Fraikes had made sure she would be no longer liable for the remaining seventy-five percent of her late husband's debt. January wondered how many people she had told this to. Still, given the quality of the chicken croquettes, quiche lorraine, bombe glacee, and eclairs ranged along the buffet table, and the obvious promise of money in the new red velvet side chairs and heavily gilded picture frames, everyone seemed more than willing to listen a second or third (or sixth) time.

"... wicked girl, to do that to poor Emily, who had been so good to her:..."

"... died in absolute agony..."

"... Mr. Fraikes simply told Fazende that he'd signed the paper expressing complete satisfaction with the discharge at the time..."

"... a trust fund in perpetuity, and not actually hers -and therefore not his to sell for debt, thank God-at all.

Mr. Bailey walked by, deep in conversation with a planter's son. The Magistrate glanced curiously at January, as if trying to recall his face, but failed and walked on.

A polka. A schottische. Flouncing laces and swirling silk. The memory of that small determined face under the red headscarf -You know how they do.

Why hadn't Redfern claimed the pearls?

When the Reverend Micajah Dunk made his appearance he was surrounded at once by nearly every woman in the room, and for some thirty minutes held a species of court under the skeptical eyes of the disgruntled men. Served them right, thought January, with a wry inner grin. He'd seen too many of these men sneak away to the quadroon balls, leaving their wives, their fiancees, to "make a tapestry," as the saying went. About time they found themselves with their noses out of joint.

And the Reverend Dunk, he had to admit, had a good deal of the messianic magnetism that frequently clings to preachers, particularly when they are physically powerful men in their prime. Dunk had the gift of grave and complete attention, a way of looking at any woman with those curiously long-lashed brown eyes, that, January knew, drew women. Hannibal had it as well.

A surrogate lover? A cicisbeo, such as well-born Italian ladies kept about them, safe but titillating?

And clearly, though he gave every woman present the impression that she was the most important person in his life-or certainly the most important contributor toward the building of his new church-Dunk favored Mrs. Redfern. As she walked with him down the length of the double-parlor toward the door that led to hall and supper room, January saw the minister's gestures take in the new velvet furniture, the carved mantelpiece and the Austrian lusters of the gasolier overhead, congratulating and admonishing, but admonishing with a twinkle in his eyes.

"Now don't let me hear this new wealth has gone to your head, Madame." He had a voice trained to fill a church, and the conclusion of the contredanse "Tartan Plaid"-in which scarcely a handful of couples had participated due to the desertion of all the women-left a space of relative silence in which he could clearly be heard. "Would you believe it, ladies," he turned to take in the dozen or so who clustered at his heels,

"when I came down to the city last summer, at the very landing where I boarded they loaded a matched team of white horses whose cost alone could have provided a dozen beds for those wretched sufferers dying in the alleys of this city during the pestilence? It isn't God who sent the fever to punish mankind, ladies; it is Man who brought it upon himself, with sheer, greedy neglect of his fellow man."

"And I suppose," murmured Hannibal, plucking experimentally at a string, "that his idea of doing God's work was buying those slaves of La Redfern's at four hundred apiece and selling them the following day for nine fifty? She doesn't seem to notice that he scraped her for close to seven thousand dollars, 'doing God's work.' "

"I wonder." January blotted his forehead with a handkerchief. Though the windows to one side of the room stood open-American casements, not the French glazed doors-the place was stuffily hot, and in the hall outside he could hear voices raised:

"Sir, no man speaks ill of His Majesty while there is breath left in my body to defend him!"

Not again.

"You wonder if your services are going to be snubbed again in favor of a nice dose of calomel and citrus juice?"

"No." January turned to the next piece, a Mozart march, the last one of this set. His head ached. He felt slightly sick from the stench of tobacco soaking into wool carpets, from concentrating on the tempo above deCoudreau's constant efforts to speed it up, from remembering Cora and wondering where Rose might have gone. "I wonder what Micajah Dunk was doing at Spanish Bayou the day before Otis Redfern's death."

The men down on the engine deck pulled me up and hid me in the hay bales...

From his mother January had heard all about the white carriage team Laurence Jumon had bought, their cost to the penny, and the names of the other men who'd bid.

The horses at least stood a good chance of surviving the month of September, he thought, as he crossed the Place d'Armes in the predawn silence of bone-eating fog. Which was probably more than could have been said of the thick-crowded gaggle of Irish and Germans coming down from Ohio on the New Brunswick that Wednesday, to make their fortunes in New Orleans.

But opportunities? the Philadelphia guest had saidbroker or banker or one of those blackleg-lawyer-cumslave-dealers who haunted the saloons of Bourbon Street plotting the conquest of Mexico-and had kissed his hand like a connoisseur.

For some.

Micajah Dunk had been at Spanish Bayou on the morning before Otis Redfern died. It was in his honor, not Redfern's, that the ham and apple tarts had been laid on. It fit. Dunk looked like a man who had never missed a meal in his life.

Through the fog, the Cathedral was a blur of white, gradually resolving into twin, pointed towers, round window black as a watching eye. Men's voices chimed from the levee behind him, as they loaded wood onto the steamboat decks: the Amulet, the Missourian, the Baonslick, bound upriver for Natchez and St.

Louis as soon as the fog burned off and it got light enough, with cargoes of scythes and compasses, perfumes and coffee, and slaves for the plantations of the Missouri Territory. The smell of their smoke rasped in the cold air.

The parry had ended at two. Late for Americans, but as January and Hannibal and DeCoudreau (who had invited himself along to late supper at one of the cafes in the Market) had made their way up Rue Chartres they'd passed half a dozen lighted windows where the Creoles still danced, gambled, gossiped, the custom of the country in Carnival season, January's second since his return from Paris.

Madame Redfern's provision for the comfort of her musicians had been decidedly lacking, and by the time the three musicians (Laurent Lamartine of the tin ear and squeaky flute said his wife would worry if he stayed out) had finished oysters, crawfish jambalaya, coffee, and beignets; the black river fog had rinsed to opal gray.

Micajah Dunk at Spanish Bayou. Micajah Dunk kissing Emily Redfern's hands. It was quite clear to January that the five thousand dollars Cora was supposed to have stolen had left the Redfern plantation somehow: the creditors had searched the place fairly thoroughly, and Emily Redfern had been flat on her back in bed. In bed, and loudly proclaiming in that clanking voice that she had been poisoned and robbed. And the minute they were out the door she had taken steps to close off her husband's debts for whatever the creditors would take.

It explained, he thought, why she hadn't claimed the pearls.

To do so would have led to the questioning of someone who had actually spoken to Cora. Someone who might cause Cora to be found. True, a slave could not testify against her mistress, but there were those who would listen to Cora and ask questions of their own. January shivered and glanced over his shoulder at the dew-netted grass, the sleeping dark of the trees. He had never gotten over his uneasiness, born in the fever season, about being followed, had never lost the fear of being watched and stalked.

Helier Lapatie and Liam Roarke were both in their graves, but the knowledge that anyone else could work a kidnapping-and get away with it-lay like a chip of metal embedded in the back of his brain. It was too easy for a free man of color-a free woman of colormerely to drop out of sight.

Easier still, for an escaping slave. No one would ask.

Had Rose guessed? Had Cora told Rose things she hadn't mentioned to him, things that Rose hadn't even recalled until she saw the Redfern woman at the Cabildo? Things that would cause her to guess why Madame Redfern could not afford to have Cora found. It returned to him that Madame Redfern had left Milneburgh within a day or two of seeing, perhaps speaking to, Rose.

The thought tormented him as he edged down the narrow walkway between his mother's house and the cottage next door, as he crossed the silent yard to the gar?onni?re stairs. Hannibal slept once again among the bravos and whores of Girod Street. Rose's books-Anacreon, Plato, and Kant, Dalton's New System of Chemical Philosophy, and Agnesi's Analytical Institutions-still stacked the wall of January's room and the attic above it like bricks.

He passed his hand over them as he entered, the way he had touched the silks and wools folded everywhere in the Paris rooms once upon a time, seeking to feel in them the warmth of the woman whose hands had made them magic.

We have her books, Hannibal had said. We'll be seeing her again.

Rose had no fear. Rose would have gone to speak with La Redfern.

He glanced outside as he shut the door, his heart beating slow but uncomfortably heavy in his chest.

Just light. Too early to amble over to Nyades Street and ask casual questions of the Redfern cook on her way to the market. An hour, he decided and lay down, fully clothed, on the bed.

He had plenty of time. With the epidemics over, he no longer served at the Hospital, but neither was his schedule overburdened with pupils. Did Madame Redfern know of his connection with Rose Vitrac?

Had someone at the Cabildo told her something that had caused her to guess? Was she, in fact, behind the effort to put him out of business, run him out of town, as she had run Rose? But in that case, why hire him to play?

He seemed to be standing at the gateway of the cemetery on Rue des Ramparts, watching a man lead two women away among the tombs. For a moment he thought it was Reverend Dunk and his little court of females, but he realized in the next moment that the man was enormous and powerful and black.

Bronze John the dead-cart man. January could see only the women's backs, but he saw that one of them walked like a jockey or a dancer, her witch-black hair unbound to her hips, and the other wore a neat white tignon, a simple green wool skirt. The women held hands, like sisters or friends. He cried out their names, and the shock of trying to do so, trying to run to catch up with them, was like falling.

It was fully light. Someone was knocking at the door. January stumbled across and opened the shutters.

"I purely hate to be always comin' up on you this way." Abishag Shaw shoved aside his disreputable hat to finger-comb his long hair. His thin, rather creaky tenor was carefully neutral. "But I got orders to put you under arrest."

"Arrest?" January glanced past him toward the house. The rear door was shuttered fast. If his mother knew of Shaw's presence, which she surely must, she was having nothing to do with it.

All he could think of was Mrs. Redfern. "Arrest for what?"

Shaw spit a line of tobacco to the gallery boards by his feet. "Murder."