02 Fever Season

Twenty

To the Editors of the New Orleans Bee, and to all concerned citizens of this town: To say that justice has been miscarried would be too feeble, too passive, too weak-kneed a description of the vile horror perpetrated yesterday on the bludgeoned sensibilities of a bereaved family and on the populace and good name of our fair city. Saturday night judge J. F. Canvnge permitted a murderer to walk free, a charlatan as black of heart as of hide. A week ago Wednesday, at the Orleans Ballroom, this self-styled doctor, Benjamin Janvier, in reality a voodoo practitioner and pander to the lusts of his fellow Ethiopes, prevented me by invective and threats of violence from bringing aid and succor to M. Jean Brinvilliers, who had been slightly wounded in an affair of honor in the lobby. When I attempted to remonstrate with Janvier he thrust me bodily back from his victim, and only after he had been forcibly removed from the scene by M. Froissart, the ballroom's manager, was I able to bring the light of medical science to bear. Alas, too late! As the result of the delay in treatment, M. Brinvilliers succumbed, not so much to his wounds, as to the rough and superstitious treatment meted out to him by this Janvier. It has come to my knowledge today, from the distraught Brinvilliers family, that this murderer was allowed to walk free.

Shame on you, Judge Canonge! This Janvier is a man well known for his libertinage, most recently and notoriously for the intolerable insult he has of fered to a lady of quality. Not content with making the most indecent possible remarks to her very face, he has shamelessly spread lies and calumny about her through the coarsest strata of society.

It has lately been remarked that everything that we, the inhabitants of this beautiful city, hold dear is in danger fiom the sewage of depravity being dumped in upon us from outside forces. How much more disgrace is there in those officials who, for their own profit, foster and coddle the degenerates against whom we look to them for protection. -Dr. Emil Barnard January set down the paper, his hand shaking, and met his mother's eyes.

Livia Levesque was an early riser. The Bee had been lying, folded open to Barnard's letter, beside his coffee cup when her son entered her small dining parlor.

Her deep, smoky voice was dry. "I'd like to know what that's about, Ben," she said.

Anger rose in him, a fever-scald of rage. He wasn't even sure for a moment whether it was directed at Barnard or at her. "So would I."

"Well, everyone's going to be asking me about it," she said. "I have to tell them something. Really, Ben, I knew you'd gotten too free in your speech when you went to Paris..."

"You really think I'm stupid enough to-to `offer intolerable insult to a lady of quality'? To make `indecent remarks' to her face? Excuse me, her very face, as he puts it."

"You changed in Paris." Livia's great, dark eyes were calmly cold.

"I didn't change that much! You raised me better than to do any such thing!" He saw her mouth soften, just a bit, and added, "I'm surprised you believe what a rag like this prints." In fact, the Bee's stories were as a rule accurate, if overheated; but his mother never could let pass a chance to attack anything.

"Well, you're certainly right about that," she agreed. "They'll print any damn lie that's sent them, and that's for certain. Madame," she added, raising her voice without turning her head, "I hope you're not looking at the top of that table?"

The fatter of the two yellow cats sat down where she was and began to wash in an elaborate display of innocence.

"But Ben," Livia added, and there was now real concern in her eyes, "who was she?"

"I don't know!" He slapped the paper down on the table, feeling as if he were about to explode. "Aside from the stupidity of the thing, you know I'm not that rude. Have you ever heard me be rude to a lady?"

"Well." Her mouth primed tight again. "You certainly could watch your speech a little more around gentlemen. Especially those who stand in a position to do you good. I always told Monsieur Janvier that it was a mistake to send you to Paris."

As far as January remembered, she had told St. Denis Janvier nothing of the kind. In fact she'd been all for getting him away from New Orleans and out of the public view, if he was going to be something as low-class as a hired musician. But he wasn't about to be drawn into a discussion of his mother's version of the past. Instead he got to his feet, picked up the scarf of green silk Catherine Clisson had knitted him for Christmas-for the morning was bitterly cold-and shoved the folded sheets of the Bee into the pocket of his rough corduroy jacket.

"And you're not going out dressed like that," Livia added sharply, tonguing a chunk of brown sugar into her coffee. "You look like a street sweeper. People see you dressed like that, of course they'll think anything that paper says of you is true."

"All right, Mother," said January patiently. "I'll go change."

She nodded to herself and went back to her perusal of the Louisiana Gazette-January didn't even want to ask if Barnard's letter had been printed there as well. He stepped through the French doors back into the yard, turned immediately left, secure in the knowledge that she had ceased to notice him the moment he'd agreed with her, and made his way down the pass-through to Rue Burgundy, in quest of whatever Madame Redfern's servants had to tell.

Unlike the walled compounds of the old French town, the houses of the American faubourgs north of Canal Street were set, for the most part, in wide yards and scattered outbuildings and, in consequence, were easy to approach. Clothed in his shabby brown corduroy and a soft hat, January fell into step with Madame Redfern's housemaid-Claire, he had heard her called on the night of the ball-by the simple expedient of putting two or three reales in an old purse of Bella's, and calling out, "Miss Claire, Miss Claire, you drop this?"

They walked down Felicity Street and to the grocery stalls by the batture at the foot of Market Street, together. Miss Claire was probably in her late thirties and had three children, a calm and matter-of-fact woman without inclination to flirt, but January didn't try to flirt with her: only talked, of this and that, mostly of her children-whom Emily Redfern had refused to purchase along with her-and the places she'd been.

"I understand what that Mr. Fraikes of hers says, that she can't afford to buy nor raise no little ones," said the slave, shifting her market basket on her hip as she moved from stand to stand of winter fruit. There were blood oranges from Mexico, and early strawberries; new lettuces now, and asparagus from Jefferson Parish; a glory of greens and flame-bright colors against the gray of the morning: "But rice is only a couple reales a peck, and you can buy three oranges for an English shilling-how much would it have cost her, to feed two little boys and a girl? She's a mighty hard woman, Mr. Levesque..." She shook her head January had taken some care never to use the same name twice among these people. "A mighty hard woman."

So it did not take much to learn whether Rose Vitrac had come to the Redfern home making awkward enquiries as to the possible fate of Cora Chouteau.

If she had, Claire Brunet knew nothing of the matter. And what, precisely, he wondered, as he made his way back along Tchapitoulas Street toward the Cabildo once more, did he think had become of Cora?

What did he think Emily Redfern's reaction would have been, had Rose Vitrac appeared one morning on her doorstep saying, I have proof that you poisoned your husband for five thousand dollars, and cast the blame on his unwilling mistress?

What proof could Rose have had?

Emily Redfern had certainly murdered her husband. No matter who had stowed the monkshood up Emily Redfern's bedroom chimney, if the boat that had brought her-along with Reverend Dunk and Mr. Bailey's white horses-to New Orleans had departed from the landing at Spanish Bayou "after breakfast," there was no way Cora Chouteau could have placed so fast-acting a substance as monkshood in her master's food.

Emily Redfern had certainly tricked the Reverend Dunk-if Dunk had been tricked-into taking the five thousand dollars Hubert Granville had brought out to the house so it would not be found by her husband's creditors. She had tricked her creditors as well, selling her slaves to the Reverend Dunk at half their value with the proceeds of the Musicale, so that she could pay off her creditors at a fraction of the debt, while he resold them and invested the profit.

But all that being so, what did he think Madame Redfern had done to Rose? Struck her over the head with slung-shot?

When? Where? For all her slim gawkiness Rose Vitrac was strong, and it was unthinkable that a colored woman would have been seated in the presence of a white woman who was not. Given Emily Redfern's lack of inches, the physical logistics of a blow over the head-or any sort of violence-became laughable.

And where did that leave him?

With a perfectly worked-out case clearing a woman who had vanished into thin air. Clearing a woman who had only slavery to return to, acquitted or not. Whose life was forfeit, not to the hangman but to the auctioneer's gavel.

And Cora could have met anyone as she left Madame Lalaurie's house that night, from the enigmatic Mamzelle Marie to Hog-Nose Billy to the vindictive and slightly cracked Monsieur Montreuil to Bronze John himself.

The fact was that she was gone, as Rose was gone. January had the sense of having read down to the bottom of a sheet of paper, reaching the same conclusion, the same result, each time.

Cora was gone. Rose was gone.

Weaving his way among the traffic of whores and roustabouts, of cotton bales and hogsheads of sugar, of pigs and pianos and oysters and silk, it occurred to him that Madame Redfern, had she dealt with Rose at all, would have been far likelier to settle the matter financially. Having ruined her, La Redfern would not need any such melodramatic expedient of a blow over the head and unceremonious burial in the nearest well. A five-dollar ticket on the next New York packet would do the trick as well. Better, in fact.

She'd have taken her books.

A vision of hope, of Rose teaching at some comfortable girls' school in New York, somewhere that would properly value her erudition, crumbled like a sugar palace in rain. The image of Rose sharpening a quill in the bar of cold pale New York sunlight...

Monsieur Janvier, I take pen in hand at last... Nothing can come between true friends.

But according to Miss Claire, Rose never went to Redfern's at all.

She has no one in New York. No one anywhere. At least when my life fell to pieces in my hand I could come home. I could come here.

Even in defeat, Rose Vitrac had a kind of clear, cool courage that could go to an unfamiliar city and start anew.

But she had no money to get there. If she hadn't gotten passage-money from La Redfern...

Memory touched him as he walked on toward the brick-arcaded shadows of the market, the tall iron-crowned towers of the steamboat stacks: the memory of a dream, of shadows on a hallway wall. A tall man's and a tiny, slender girl's. You're her father, the girl was saying. You're her father...

Rose had never spoken of her home.

But once, on their first meeting, Cora had.

It was three days' voyage to Grand Isle in the Barataria country. Froissart having canceled January's engagement to play at the Orleans Ballroom's Mardi Gras Ball, January would have left that day, had any boat been departing on the eve of the feast. As it was, he fumed and fretted and cursed the revelers who jammed every street and filled the endless night hours with riot. The moment "Ite missa est" was out of the priest's mouth at the first Ash Wednesday Mass, January was out the Cathedral door and on his way to the levee.

Natchez Jim followed the still, green reaches of Bayou Dauphine to Lake Catahouatehe, motionless in fringes of cypress and reed, rowing or poling where there wasn't wind to fill the lugger's sail. January, helping on the oars or leaning on the long oak poles, watched the few houses on the banks grow more primitive with distance from the city, until they were little more than a couple of post-and-daub rooms circled by a gallery, presiding over a few arpents of indigo or rice. Now and then they'd pass the shack of a trapper or fisherman, perched on sandbars and chenieres but even these grew far between. They both slept with knives and pistols beneath the wadded-up jackets that served them for pillows, and never at the same time, for the Barataria had been the sole province of slave smugglers and outlaws until very recently. There was no telling who or what might lurk in the spiderweb mazes of bayou and marsh. Still, the green-gray aisles of water hickory and tupelo, bald cypress and palmetto were hushed, save for the slap of the water on the lugger's sides. Wind murmured among the endless reeds, and once, somewhere far off, they heard the rattle of African drums.

From Catahouatehe they entered Lake Salvator, and after that the world known as the prairie tremblant, the quaking lands: salt marsh, reeds, birds, February sky. Natchez Jim pointed out the salt grass that would tell a man where solid ground lay, the cattails that spoke of mud too soft to carry weight: "Even those who are born in these lands sometimes make mistakes about the walking prairie and are never seen again." An alligator slid down the trunk of a dying cypress, gray as the fading roots left out in sun and wind.

They came ashore on Grand Isle in midmorning, at a sort of settlement of oyster fishers and trappers on the landward side of the island. The night's fog still hung on, cottony and tasting of salt. The silence that had seemed menacing in the bayou country was calming here. Though the world slept its winter sleep still, all was lush with green.

"I'll be here two days, maybe three." Natchez Jim unshipped the packages he'd brought from town, tossed them on the crude plank wharf calico, needles, coffee, a little nest of iron pans. Black-eyed women, swart-skinned men emerged from the straggle of huts and cottages among the stands of palmetto and Spanish dagger, and hastened down the path. Children darted around them like birds. From one of these January learned that the plantation of Aramis Vitrac lay on the other side of the island, "just down that road there." Their French was better than he'd feared it might be, though old-fashioned and strangely pronounced: ch'min for chemin; l' for le. Grimy, exhausted, aching in every bone and limb, he climbed the low hogback of tawny sand, through palmetto, fern, and creeper, cypress and oleander already putting forth the whites and crimsons of tropic glory. Green flats of rice bent to salt wind. On the other side of the path a work gang hacked at the ditches for next month's sugar crop. From the top of the path he heard the surf.

He half-expected to find Rose sitting on the gallery-of the three-room, post-and-daub plantation house, reading Babbage's Reflections on the Decline of Science in England. Part of him, the part that had died in Paris, half-expected not to find her at all.

In fact she was working in the garden behind the house, a half-wild riot of dark-leaved azaleas, spinaches, and young peas. The rabbitry young woman who came out onto the gallery, led by what January guessed to be the single house servant, pointed her out to him. "This isn't about that school in the city, is it? Truly, what happened there was not her fault. I know my husband's sister, M'sieu. She is impetuous, but her heart is pure, like glass, like steel. She would give everything she owns to those she loves, or those in her care." Her quick grin showed two teeth lost to childbearing, and she added,

"Except perhaps her books."

"I'm not from the school." January looked gently down into the narrow, anxious face. "I'm only a friend."

Rose sat back on her heels at the sound of the voices on the gallery. So she was watching him as he came down the gallery steps and through the neat dirt paths of the rambling garden. She pushed her spectacles straight on her nose, and he knew by the attitude of her back, by the angle of her straight square shoulders, that she recognized him instantly. She settled back, her hands folded in her lap, until he came near.

"Ben." She was trying to hide it, but there was deep joy in her face, her voice.

"Rose."

Joy sprang to her face, but when he helped her to her feet she took her hand out of his at once, closing it up on itself-her lips closed, too. He saw her at war with old hurts and old fears, thinking about what she ought to say. "I'm not here to ask anything of you," he said. "I just wanted to see if you were all right."

Three days' journey down the bayous? He could almost hear the words as they went through her mind, and he smiled at the absurdity of his own assertion.

"Well, from what you told me of your brother I knew I couldn't write."

It surprised her into laughter, like sunlight on the waning sea.

"I brought you some books." He held out to her the parcel he'd carried down from town: a volume of Sappho he'd found at a Customshouse sale; Hamilton's Theory of Systems and Rays from the same source; Lyell's Principles of Geology and a wonderfully hair-raising English novel by the poet Shelley's wife. "If you weren't here, at least I could have asked your family of you. Your sister-in-law seems a nice woman."

"Alice is a darling. Of course Aramis-my brother-half-brother-is a complete illiterate and she's not much better-why is it Creoles never educate their daughters? but Alice is like Cora: willing to accept that that's the way I am." Her face lost the sparkle of her smile. "Did you ever find out what happened to Cora?"

January shook his head. "We caught the men who were taking people off the streets. They'd been kidnapping them out of their homes, too, some of them, and out of the sheds in the Swamp where slaves sleep out if their masters let them. Hdier the water seller was trading the information to a tavern-keeper for a cut of the profits, when they sold them to cotton planters in the Missouri Territory."

He saw the fragile jaw set hard and wished there were an easier way to say it, or something better to say.

"I've been writing to brokers and authorities in Arkansas and Missouri and anywhere else we can trace the ring's contacts. But, of course, no one's going to admit they were buying kidnapped free men."

She drew in breath, hard. For a time she looked genuinely sick. But all she said was, "I never thought it would be H?lier. He was always so friendly."

"It surprised me, too. And, of course, it was to his profit to be friendly. Maybe I should have seen it. I would have thought..." He shook his head. "He had a grievance against the entire world, larger than anything he could have felt for any individual's rights." He was silent for a time, plucking a long stem of the jasmine that grew up the nearby fence and turning the small gold blossoms over in his hand. Then he said,

"For a time I was afraid you'd been kidnapped, too."

"I'm sorry about that." She answered the thought that he did not speak aloud: Why didn't you let me know? "It wasn't completely shame-well, not after the first day or two. I know how rumors operate. I've seen how vicious they can be, especially about women. You've seen it, too. Half the women in the market seem to believe Delphine Lalaurie is the Devil's sister." (From the beginning again, please...) January shook the thought away.

Rose's mouth tightened. "People believe what they want to believe. And I... it seemed to me so deliberate. So planned. Aimed, like a gun. And like me, you're a teacher. You depend on the goodwill of those around you for your daily bread."

January said nothing, looking down into her eyes. Even here on the island, the old laws against women of color uncovering their hair seemed to hold, or maybe it was just the habit she'd had in the city. Like the women of color he'd seen by the wharf, she wore a tignon, white and soft and clean as it had been in the city. Her complexion had darkened with the sun of the island sunlight, matte velvet the color of cocoa.

She saw his thought, the way he'd seen hers, and her eyes fell. He felt her move away from him, not physically, but in thought. Her fingers caressed the leather of the books. "I'm sorry," she murmured.

"I meant it when I said I didn't come here to ask you anything, only to see that you were well. Sometimes friends do that. I've missed you, Rose."

He hadn't known how badly, until they sat on the gallery after supper-which they ate with the house girl and the cook-watching the last color stain the clouds over the Gulf and talking about Mardi Gras, and the ending of the fever, and the spectacular change in the fortunes of Emily Redfern.

"Good for her," said Rose bluntly. And then, "I shouldn't say that, because she sounds like a horrible woman. But Monsieur Redfern sounded like a horrible man. And in fact I wondered once or twice about whether Madame Redfern really wanted Cora found."

She sat forward in her rough-made chair of bent willow, leaned bare forearms on the gallery rail, and frowned in the direction of the darkening sea. "When I read that second advertisement in the paper, the one that spoke of the five thousand dollars... The name was the same, but the description was all wrong. Madame Redfern had to advertise for Cora's capture, to look good to her creditors, but she did it in such a way that Cora would have every chance of escape.

"I think..." She drew in her breath again, and let it out, trying to speak calmly of the ruin of her dreams.

"I think she must have been behind the rumors about the school somehow, trying to drive me out of town.

She must have been horrified when I was actually arrested, and might be questioned. But I don't see... she doesn't have influence with those people. Certainly not with my investors."

"Who were your investors?"

"Armand d'Aunoy, Placide Forstall, Edmond Dufossat, Pierre Tricou, and the Lalauries," replied Rose promptly. "All of them old Creoles, you see. It was through Delphine Lalaurie's kindness that the loan was forthcoming at all. Emily Redfern's pretensions would be anathema to them."

January nodded. "True. Even after Lieutenant Shaw mentioned that it was one of your investors-who could have been given the hint by anybody, of course-I thought it still might be Madame Redfern. But she was the only person to hire me for a private ball in all of the Mardi Gras season." He withdrew Monday's Bee from his coat, and laid it, folded to the place, on the railing of the gallery.

" `Murderer?' " Rose took off her spectacles, held the newspaper close to the window, where the light from inside could fall on it, peering with her shortsighted eyes.

" `Intolerable insult offered to a lady of quality.. '? What lady of quality? `Spread lies and calumny...'?

This person"-she glanced at the bottom of the letter-"This Dr. Barnard has his nerve, talking of lies and calumny. What is this?"

"This," said January, "is the reason the trip down here left me penniless-and in debt to Hannibal, which has to be the greatest joke of the decade. I have exactly two pupils left and have barely worked all winter. It's the same person," he said, "spreading the rumors. I know it."

She sank down in her chair with a whisper of heavy skirts. Like countrywomen or servants, she had dispensed with the multiple petticoats of fashionable wear. The dark, thick twill, dusty from the garden's earth, became her. In the open neck of her countrywoman's waist a small gold cross glinted, fire on the dusky skin.

"Emil Barnard," she said. "That's a French name."

"He's a Thompsonian charlatan who worked around the Charity Hospital during the epidemic," said January. "By his accent he's from Pau or the Languedoc, coincidentally the same part of France Nicolas Lalaurie comes from. Lalaurie's recently taken him on as a partner."

"I don't..." Rose left her sentence unfinished, sat for a time running the folded paper through her fingers, as he'd seen her run the ribbons with which she'd tied back the sick girls' hair. Then her eyes met his.

January slowly shook his head.

"Placide Forstall is Delphine Lalaurie's son-in-law, you see," Rose went on, speaking as if to herself, trying to fit pieces together. Trying to align the woman whose reputation she'd so furiously defended with the one who would so casually and so thoroughly destroy all she, Rose, had worked to create.

"D'Aunoy's her cousin. Jean Blanque was on the board of the Louisiana State Bank; Madame knew everyone there. That's how she influenced them to lend me the money to start the school. It has to be her.

But I don't understand why."

"I'm only guessing," said January. The shadow in the doorway returned to him again, the voice like a golden whip, the silvery rustle of petticoats. The absolute fear in Pauline Blanque's eyes. "And I can't know, not knowing Madame. I'm beginning to wonder if anyone really knows her."

He frowned, as the woman's face came back to him,the desperate, yearning expression in her beautiful eyes as she sponged the bodies of the dying. "I think now that Cora must have tried to get Gervase to run away with her. And either Madame overheard them, or quite possibly Gervase actually made the attempt to leave, later that night or the following day. I never actually saw Gervase; Madame sent him out of town very soon thereafter. But I'm almost certain she'd see the attempt as betrayal, after all she did, for whatever reasons of her own, to make things easy for Cora. And that she would not forgive."

In the silence, the boom of the surf sounded very loud.

"I can't believe that she'd be that vindictive." Rose's hand sketched a gesture of denial in the air, but turned, folding in on itself with the refusal only half made. Her profile was only a shape of darkness now against the fading light. "To do this to me only for harboring Cora, to you for helping her..."

"I think it made it worse," said January. "She helped you, and you conspired to betray her, too."

"How would she know? I can't imagine her eavesdropping. But, of course, Bastien would have. Or even Dr. Lalaurie. I never liked him." She shivered. "He crept so, and he was always asking if he could do `tests' on the girls. He was the one who invented those postural contraptions I showed you. I never understood how a woman of her-her excellence-could love a man so wormy."

"One thing I've learned," January said with a smile, "love is beyond comprehension. Anyone can love anyone. It's like the cholera."

Rose laughed, spectacles flashing in the reflected lampIiKht. "Very like the cholera," she agreed, and he heard the jest in her voice, and laughed too, at himself, and the ridiculousness of his love.

"But just saying that," said Rose at length, "makes me realize: it's true. I don't know that much about Madame Lalaurie. She might be an habitual eavesdropper, for all I know. I was thinking, `She isn't a vindictive woman,' but I don't know that. I've never seen her be vindictive. I don't want a woman I've looked up to, as I've looked up to her, to be vindictive. But I don't know. How vindictive is she?"

"I don't know either." January rose, and took her hand to bid farewell before seeking the room alotted him above the kitchen. "I think I'm going to find out."

He remained on Grand Isle another day, going to Mass in the island's tiny wooden Church. Later, despite the fact that it was Lent, he tuned up and played the old guitar owned by Aramis Vitrac-there wasn't a piano on the island-and sang ballads and arias from the operas popular in Paris two seasons ago, to the delight of his hosts and the dozen or so neighbors who walked that night from all over the island to dinner. Alice Vitrac joined in gamely on a flute while Natchez Jim rattled spoons and bones and tambourine. "It's George Washington's birthday," reasoned the island's black-eyed priest. "Well, near enough, anyway."

The women brought cakes and scuppernong wine, the men brandy from the smuggler boats that still plied the Gulf.

By day he walked with Rose on the beaches, both bundled alike in rough jackets, the sand chilly between his toes above the tangled chevaux-de frise of driftwood along the shore. It was difficult not to reach across and touch her hand, her face. Yet in some ways it was easier than he had feared it would be. If a friend was all she could bring herself to be, he thought, he would accept her on those terms; on any terms that would let him continue the quick-sparkle entertainment of her conversation, the rare chance to speak of other things besides the day-to-day commonplaces of life in a small French provincial town.

Early on Monday morning January walked to the beach alone, to watch the waves roll in from the Gulf.

Coming back he encountered Alice Vitrac, with oysters she'd bought from one of the fisher-families, and took from her the rush basket to carry to the house.

"You're good for her," said Madame Vitrac. She looked up at him with her pale, lashless eyes, myopic as Rose, and smiled a little. "I'm glad you've come. I was worried for her. I'm sorry you weren't able to bring her any word of Cora..."

"Did you know Cora?"

"Oh, yes." Her voice grew less shy. "I grew up just over on P'tit Ch?ni?re. I've known Rose most of my life. Cora, too. They were inseparable."

January thought of those two girls, growing up in this world of driftwood and tawny sand.

"Cora told me she nursed Rose when she was sick." Alice glanced up at him, quickly, looking to see what and how much he might have guessed. They stood still for a moment, sea wind blowing cold over them and rippling the long grass; then she said, "Well, I've always thought Papa Vitrac... I think he was only trying to do right by Rose. By his own lights. The man who-who hurt her-was a neighbor of ours, a planter, a man of color like yourself. Much lighter than you, but big like you. He tried for years to get Rose to marry him, you see. I think he thought that by doing what he did, he would force her hand. Force her father's hand."

January said softly, "I see."

Something of his anger must have shown in his eyes, for Madame Vitrac went on, "Papa Vitrac wasn't the only one who thought it would be the thing. You know that generally if a man does ruin a girl, the first thing everyone thinks of is to have him marry her. So I suppose Mathieu can be excused for thinking it was a good idea." She shrugged. Her own opinion on the subject was plain in the sudden set of that soft mouth.

"And I take it," said January, resuming his way toward the house, "that Monsieur Vitrac thought so, too."

Madame Vitrac put up her hand to brush the fair strings of her hair out of her face, where the wind took them. "He told Rose that she would have to marry this man. I think he was only trying to get her established creditably and didn't want to have to look very far or very hard. The man did have quite a nice little plantation, over on Isle Derniere, though they said he was hard on his slaves. He later sold up and moved to the mainland, up in the Cane River country; Cora must have told Rose that, or she never would have returned. Because he-he came around. Trying to force her into saying yes. Afterward, I mean. That's when she became so ill."

January frowned. "You mean as a ruse? To get him to go away?"

"No." Madame Vitrac took back the rush basket from him with a brief smile of thanks as they reached the steps of the house. "I mean she went into the woods and ate nightshade. Cora and my mother were the ones who found her. I don't know, but I think that Cora-and my mother-were the ones who talked Papa Vitrac into giving her the money to go to New York to school."

Rose herself never spoke of the matter, and in her eyes January could see-or thought he could see-that whatever had happened in this place, she had made peace of a kind with it, and was content to be here.

They spoke of music, and the Opera in Paris and Rome; of Pakenham's invasion and the Chalmette battle; of steam engines and bombs and mummies and nesting birds. They built a fire of driftwood, bought oysters from the fisher-boys and ate them raw with the juice of limes, while the waves curled on the sand and a line of brown pelicans emerged silent as ghosts from the mists and, as silent, vanished.

They spoke of the epidemic, and of why the fever might come in the summertimes and not the winters, and why not every summer; of why sometimes cures seemed to work-even onions under the bed-and why sometimes they did not; of the white ghost-crabs that scurried in the retreating scrum of the surf, and of pirate treasure and hurricanes. "I've watched the winds and the clouds here," said Rose, "and the winds and air in the marsh. It feels different there, but I can't say why it's different, what is different about it. There has to be some way of identifying what it is. Everyone talks about the miasma of sickness, but it's only a guess, you know. There has to be a way of making it visible, like a chemical stain turning the color of water."

"Will you come back?" he asked her at last, when on the second evening it grew too dark and too damp to sit on the gallery longer. "This will blow past, like a hurricane. It always does."

"And like a hurricane," said Rose softly, "it will leave wreckage, and that long tedious season of rebuilding. But you're right," she added. "I can't stay here forever, with nothing to read but newspapers a year old, and no one but Alice to speak to. I don't know." She shook her head, and reached out, very quickly, to touch his hand in parting for the night. "I don't know."