02 Fever Season

Twenty-Two

Pain brought him to, unbelievable pain in his neck, back, shoulders. He thought someone must surely have run iron needles under the scapula, through the cervical joints, into his ribs, everywhere, but in the utter dark, the abyssal stench and heat, he couldn't tell. He couldn't move, was too disoriented to even judge in what position his body was pinned. He threw up, the spasms rending his shoulders like the rack, and the vomit ran warm down his naked chest and belly. Blinding pain drilled through his skull, enough to stop his breath.

He passed out.

He came to from the pain of being moved. Even the light of the branch of candles near the door was pain, gouging through his eyes to his brain. He threw up again, doubled over this time, his wrists manacled behind him, being drawn steadily up. He tried to straighten, tried to move to lessen the agony in his shoulders, but the rope or chain on the manacles kept pulling up toward the ceiling, dragging his arms up behind him. Hannibal had spoken once of his lunatic uncle, fixated on the Spanish Inquisition, and January recognized what this had to be, from old woodcuts: a ceiling pulley, a set of wrist-chains, a rope, and a demon to pull on it until the victim's feet lifted from the floor and his arms were wrenched from their sockets. The light was like an ax in his skull.

"Did you tell anyone?"

That mellow golden contralto: Begin again. The rope twisted up a few more inches and he cried out.

Thin and flexible, the whalebone training-whip tore the backs of his naked thighs.

"Did you tell anyone?"

"No."

A cut across his belly. He felt blood. How he knew what she wanted he didn't know. Maybe because she was white.

"No, m'am."

It was hard to look at her, hard to make his eyes focus. She wore a ball dress of turquoise silk with what they called a Mary Stuart bodice, the candlelight salting her black lace with gold. Queenly, gracious, lovely as she had been that afternoon, apologizing for what Emil Barnard had written. Black-lace mitts on her hands. On the floor beyond her skirts another woman lay with arms and legs folded into an iron contraption that locked between her ankles; January could just see this slave woman's eyes, brown and huge, staring incomprehendingly at him.

Delphine Lalaurie beat him until he fainted again, beat him without a word or a sound and without change of expression on her face. The agony in his shoulders brought him to twice, when he slumped; he wasn't sure when he woke up the third time if it was true consciousness. He only knew that his ankles and wrists were being locked together behind his back, and that her skirts were close enough to his head to smell the patchouli in their folds.

He thought she said-if he wasn't dreaming-"You say Suzette must have seen him come in?"

"She must have, Madame. The kitchen door was open."

"And, of course, she didn't bother to tell you about it.

"No, Madame."

Hallucinatory in the candlelight, he saw Bastien put a shawl around her shoulders. Sweat bathed her face and made black circles in the armpits of her gown, and she'd taken her hair down, as a woman does for her husband. In the leaping shadows the gray did not show; it hung crow black below her hips. The few pins still snagged in it winked like rats' eyes.

She put out her hand, resting it on Bastien's shoulder. No expression changed her face, but she closed her eyes. Straight and cold, for a moment it seemed to January that Delphine Lalaurie was strapped into the self-shouldered bonds of her own perfection, like one of her husband's infernal posture-correction devices. In the silence he heard her draw breath and release it, like a woman convincing herself that she has to be strong. Whatever the cost, she must go on, to some end known only to herself.

"After all I have done for her," she said. "After all I have done."

"Yes, Madame."

"For the girls. For Nicolas." Had she been anyone but Delphine Lalaurie she would have trembled. In her face was the echo of that yearning ecstasy it had worn in the fever wards, as she held a young man dead in her arms. "Not one of them knows how much."

Then she opened her eyes, calm and reasonable and flawless once more. In utter control, obeyed in all things. "I'll have to speak to her."

She picked up the whip from the table and went out. He was dead.

He was dead and in hell. Though Bastien had taken the candles-as if suspended in space somewhere above the yard January could see the two of them, descend ing the square-angled spiral of the outside stair-he could see also, clearly, Liam Roarke sitting slumped against the wall near the door, the contents of his opened veins a black slow-spreading ocean around his thighs and his bright blue eyes fixed on January.

"You know you didn't have to tell your smelly friend Shaw, Soublet's name," Roarke said, with an evil smile. "You'd told him it before. He knew."

January couldn't argue with him.

There were other people in the room. Sometimes he could only hear them, twisting and groaning softly in the darkness: could smell the blood and filth, and hear the scrape of metal, and the sobbing of the woman on the floor. Sometimes in spite of the darkness he could see them, by the light of red flame whose heat consumed them all: his father, Rose, Ayasha. Ayasha, lying on the bed, raised her blackening face and shook back the long coil of her hair, and said, "You didn't come. And now you're chasing some other girl. You didn't come because you were lying with Rose." Then she threw up all her intestines, and the child she carried inside her, and died again, her hand reaching for the pitcher of water.

January tried to say, "I'm sorry," but only the serpents of hell crawled from his mouth.

Ants covered him in a gnawing wave, eating his flesh to the bones.

Distantly, Hannibal played the violin, a jig that had been popular in Paris two summers ago, before the cholera came.

If he could only get to his Rosary, thought January, he'd be safe, he'd be all right. The Virgin Mary would get him out of this.

Delphine Lalaurie would be returning. From his vantage point above the courtyard he could see her, gathering up her heavy skirts to climb the stairs. Her husband Nicolas was with her this time, a sheaf of notes tucked under one arm and one of his experimental postural correction devices in his hands.

Virgin Mary, get me out of this.

Heat consumed January, smoke rising through the floor to suffocate his lungs. The building was on fire, plunging down like an avalanche to Hell.

The building was on fire. He woke and knew it.

There was a little light, coming in through the cracks in the barred shutters that led out onto the gallery, enough to let him know that it was day. Smoke was pouring up through the cracks in the floor.

The woman on the floor, skeletal with prolonged starvation, began to writhe in her shackles, her breath coming in little puffs of pain. One of the men on the beds-there were two beds in the room, he now saw, the manacles dangling from the ceiling pulley between them-stirred and groaned, then lay still again. The man wore an iron collar around his neck, and some kind of iron contraption on one or maybe both of his legs. January's own shoulders were lost in a maze of pain. Agony shot up through his leg muscles, his back, from every welted, bloody inch of his skin.

In the smoke that filtered up through the room the flies were humming wildly around the ceiling, their drone a frantic bass note to Cora's voice-it had to be Cora's making inarticulate shrill grunts beyond the thin wall. January tried to move and was instantly sorry, his head throbbing, so dizzy he nearly fainted again.

But he had to get out. He had to get out. They'd all burn...

Somewhere he heard shouting, a yammer of voices below. "Sir, I'll thank you to mind your own business," came the yapping tenor of Nicolas Lalaurie's voice, and a deeper voice, harsh but familiar-Judge Canonge's?-replied.

"It's a grave allegation and I think it needs to be looked into."

"Do you call me a liar? I'll have my friends call on you in the morning, sir."

"You have your friends do whatever you want, sir, but I'm going to have a look upstairs."

"This man would say or do anything to discredit me and my wife, sir. For years he's spread rumors..."

"You can't tell me that child didn't fall off the roof, two months after you moved into this place!" That was Montreuil's voice. Behind it there was a clashing, a distant thump of feet. January squirmed, gasping in an ocean of heat. If he cried out-maybe if he cried out they'd hear him...

"Judge!" called someone else. "Here, sir! Here's where it started!"

Inarticulate sounds, a woman's voice; then, louder, "I couldn't bear more, sir. I couldn't bear more. After last night..."

"She's been beaten, sir. Severely, it looks like."

"And you're going to punish me," demanded Dr. Lalaurie furiously, "because this slut tried to avenge herself after correction-well deserved, I might add-by firing my house?"

"They're in the attic," persisted Montreuil's voice.

"They're in the attic, sir, chained up and tortured. Sometimes at night I hear them scream!"

Shut up, thought January dully. Shut up, you whining little toad! They're never going to believe you!

"The woman is a fiend incarnate, I tell you! A devil! A female Nero! She..."

January recalled the little man's bulging eyes, his rank breath and nervous hands, and his heart sank. A fanatic with a grudge, and a well-known grudge. And, if Dominique's casual remarks were anything to go by, Madame Lalaurie had evidently taken pains to discredit him by gossip as well. Whispers of opium addiction and Montreuil's half-crazy hatred were Madame's best defense: that, and the people who would never admit that their sons and cousins had married into the family of a madwoman. Who did not have the imagination to completely comprehend the word fa?ade.

"I think maybe you'd better hand over those keys." January felt the swaying weight of many men ascending the outside stairs. He gritted his teeth in rage, tried desperately to cry out again-his tongue so swollen with thirst he could barely make a sound-when they went through the long, obligatory delay of searching the second floor. The attic, you idiots! Didn't you hear Montreuil say "attic"?

Axes crashed on the outer door. Evidently Dr. Lalaurie hadn't handed over the keys after all. Then the stunned silence, the appalled whispers, as even through the choke of the smoke the stench of the place came to them.

More crashing, purposeful as they cut through the second door. The smoke was already lessening, though the heat remained unbearable. The fire brigade must have come swiftly. Where was Madame Lalaurie this morning? Then men were in the room, white men and colored, kneeling beside him, unlocking the manacles from his ankles and wrists. Murmuring in shock and horror at what they saw on the beds, on the floor, on the wall, on the table. In the background Montreuil hopped up and down, shrieking, "I told you so! I told you so! I told you so!" January wanted to slap him.

The courtyard was jammed with people. Black and white and colored, French and American. All fell back, silent with shock, as the first of the men were brought down the stairs, carried by Canonge and Montreuil and a handful of others. January stumbled, not able to walk, supported by a couple of hairy Kaintucks from Gallatin Street and blind in the mid-morning glare. He had a jumbled awareness of the others being brought down behind him, but the wound in his head was making him dizzy and sick, and it wasn't until many days later that he was able to put his recollection of images, voices, events into anything like order. One of the emaciated slaves kept gasping "Food! Food!" and he saw a number of the market-women press forward to give it to them, the bony hands grasping and snatching.

He reeled and staggered, and someone caught him, lifted him up. As he was carried through the gate he saw Nicolas Lalaurie, small. and dapper, standing by the second-floor parlor window of the house, looking expressionlessly out. Beside him, for a moment, Madame Lalaurie appeared, clothed as she had been at the Ursulines' during the plague, in a plain but devastatingly fashionable dark dress. Calm as always. Perfect as always, as if none of this had anything to do with her. Then she turned away. He saw her through a window, directing the maids in replacing the furniture that the firemen had overturned.

His mind didn't fully clear until sometime later, when he and the others were sitting or lying in the courtyard of the Cabildo, and people were filing past. Now and then officials would emerge; January guessed from the mutter of their voices that they didn't know exactly where to take the victims or what should be done with them. Marketwomen, brokers, and dealers from the businesses on Rue Chartres and Canal Street came by, stevedores from the levee, planters, dressmakers, artisans. Their faces formed a blur in January's mind as they stared disbelieving at the mutilated bodies of the men and women on the cots and chairs set in the court, and at the implements that covered the whole of a long table set near the brass fountain in the courtyard's center. How many of them were having second thoughts about the power a master could have over a slave, January wondered. How many were simply taking mental notes of things to be used should they need a little more domestic discipline at some time in the future?

A splotch of black caught his eye. Emily Redfern, leaning on the arm of the Reverend Micajah Dunk, in front of the makeshift cot where Cora Chouteau lay. The bulging blue eyes widened with recognition, and Madame's lace-mitted hand went to her throat, where lay a double-line of moon-gold pearls.

January said to a man near him, "Help me up." He'd guessed Mamzelle Marie would be in the crowded courtyard somewhere, and so she was. It was easy to find her, once he was standing, by the seven points of her orange-and-red tignon. He made his way unsteadily through the press, and when she saw him coming toward her she stood up-she was washing the wounds of the woman who'd been in the iron spancel-and swiftly closed the distance between them.

"You should sit. I'll get to you."

"I don't need to be got to," said January. But he allowed her to lead him to the stairs that went up to the galleries where the cells were, and by the time they reached them he was out of breath and trembling, his head still pounding from the daylight. "I need to talk to you."

She folded her hands before her and stood looking down at him, bronze face calm.

"I know you gave Madame Redfern the poison she used to murder her husband." He spoke softly. There was so much noise around them that there was little danger of being overheard. "I have what's left of the poison, and the tin. I found them in her room at Spanish Bayou. And you were seen, by her house at Black Oak, where the tin was hidden."

"Only by a slave girl." She didn't seem in the least surprised or discomposed. "Her word is no good in a court of law."

"A slave girl who's just come back from death and Purgatory," he said. "Who's going to be a nine days' wonder with the newspapers. And who's now going to be arrested for a crime you know and I know she didn't commit. She couldn't have, she was gone from Spanish Bayou hours before the poison could have been administered; gone by the same boat that took Reverend Dunk away with the five thousand dollars on him that Madame Redfern wanted to keep, out of all the wreckage of her life."

Mamzelle Marie said nothing, nor did the dark serpent eyes shift.

Somehow, after having seen Madame Lalaurie standing in the doorway in her turquoise gown, the sight of this tall bronze-hued woman before him-poisoner and witch and worshiper of the Damballah serpent-could no longer frighten him. He'd seen worse.

For the rest of his life, he would always know in his heart that whatever happened, he'd seen worse.

"What I'd like you to do," January said, "if you would, is speak to her. Tell her that unless she writes out a paper of manumission for Cora Chouteau-unless she comes up with some alternate explanation about what happened to that five thousand dollars that disappeared, and it better be a good one-you're going to tell the police what she did. The police and her husband's creditors."

Mamzelle Marie started to speak, then closed her lips again. Her eyes were a world of black salt and graveyard dust.

Then she smiled.

"You know why Emily poisoned that man?" January nodded.

"Tell me."

"Because he'd bankrupted himself and her. Because he kept her from being what she wanted to be.

Because he was carrying on an affair, in her house and under her nose as if she were no more than another wench on the property. Because he told her it would go the worse for her, if she dared get rid of the girl-who never wanted to share his bed in the first place. Cora only fled because she found the poison and feared for her life."

"Ah," said Mamzelle softly. She reached down her long-fingered hand, and touched-very gently-the swollen, hurting mess of his shoulder. "I'll do as you ask, Michie Janvier. Certain things are bought with pain, God's favor among them. But you should know it wasn't me that sold the poison; and it wasn't her that bought it."

"You were there," said January. "Cora saw you."

"I was there," she said. "Otis Redfern brought me up there. He offered me the place at Black Oak, to be mine after his wife was dead. Her father tied the place up in trust. It wouldn't be Redfern's to sell, until her death. He had a key, you know."

"So did she."

"As well for her." She folded her arms. "He didn't know that. He told me he'd taken the only one she had. He bought the poison, from a man name Dr. Chickasaw, not a good man, but he have the knowledge; he's out by the end of the Esplanade. It's like her, to have made a copy of that key."

And watching her, as she made her leisurely way through the crowd to Madame Redfern's side, January thought that it was, in fact, very like Emily Redfern to have a spare key. In like circumstances his mother would have had one, too.

"Ben!" It was Rose. She caught his hand, then put her arms carefully around his shoulders-It wasn't fit, he thought dimly, although someone had lent him a pair of rough osnaburg trousers. He pressed his head to her arm, tried to hold her.

She was, he saw, dressed neatly in yellow sprigged with blue, as if for a day's work translating Catullus.

His blood and the sweaty filth from the attic floor left great blotches on the crisp cloth.

"I thought you'd gone there," he said. "I saw your book, and your gloves. I thought you saw Cora's shoes."

"I went early in the day, when I knew she was out, to leave a note about Dr. Barnard's letters," Rose said. "It was stupid of me, to leave the book. Later I had an appointment with a Dr. Groeller in Carrollton-he operates a boys' school-and I was nearly late, trying to find you. I left word with Olympe, and with Dominique, and your mother, to tell you that Cora's shoes had turned up at the Ursulines'. Her dress was there, too."

A few feet away one of the men who'd been brought out of the attic was groaning, writhing on his makeshift cot. His belly was hugely swollen, from gorging himself on the market-womens' berries and fritters, the rest of his body a handful of sticks. Dr. Ker knelt beside him, daubing with alcohol at the galls on his wrists and waist, at the jagged wounds left by a spiked collar in his neck. Past them, Hannibal knelt by Cora, talking gently while she clung to the hand of one of the exhausted skeletons-it had to be Gervase-as if she would never release it.

"They didn't know who had brought the shoes in, or how long they'd been there," Rose said. "I thought I should find you, and ask what should be done."

"I was afraid you'd gone to Lalaurie first." Rose shook her head. "I knew she'd only lie."

His eyes went to the two dark forms, of the Reverend Dunk and Madame Redfern, standing now in a corner of the courtyard talking very quietly, very earnestly, with Mamzelle Marie. Mamzelle Marie shook her head and said something with an air of patient repetition. Dunk retorted, eyes blazing, and Emily Redfern pulled hard on his sleeve and told him to hush. Dunk looked as astonished as if a pet cat had given him an order. But he hushed.

From there January's gaze traveled up to the thirdfloor gallery of the prison: the womens' cells. Rose had been locked up there, he thought. Locked up with the drunkards, the prostitutes, with madwomen and women like Kentucky Williams. Lying on dirty straw and sick with grief over the death of her girls, over the collapse of everything she had worked for so hard.

He felt strange inside, hollow; empty of everything that had shaped his life for months. But she hadn't moved away from him, or made even the show, as another woman might, of protecting her dress from the muck that covered him. Her hand, resting lightly where his shoulder muscles met his neck, was cool in the spring morning heat.

"What did she say," he asked after a time, "when they brought her in? Madame Delphine?"

Rose's mouth folded tight, and for the first time he saw a flash of anger behind those round spectacle-lenses. "They haven't brought her in," she said.

Rose would not leave Cora, and told him not to be stupid. Hannibal, who was still with Cora when Rose and January returned to her, told him not to be stupid as well. "I can stand," said January doggedly.

"So does my violin bow, if I prop it up very, very carefully."

In the end Hannibal and Paul Corbier walked with him down Rue Chartres, to the big green house on Rue Royale.

The doors and the carriage gate were shut. Men and women, several hundred strong, were gathered outside in Rue de l'Hopital and the Rue Royale, muttering among themselves, little gusts of sound, like the wind a coming storm makes in trees. About half seemed to be idlers from the levee, Kaintucks and whores from Gallatin Street, people who ordinarily would have stepped over the body of a dying black in the gutter, or at most paused to check his pockets. But the lure of scandal was strong. Self-righteousness is a heady drug.

Mixed with them were the folk of the market, vendors and farmers and shopkeepers; colored stevedores and Irish workmen and householders, catchoupines and chacalatas, their anger and outrage the summer pulse of bees. Though the fire had been doused, the smell of smoke hung heavy on the air, like the stench of the fever season. The smell of lies and rumors, hearsay and the assurances that everything is fine.

Through the windows January could see into the second-floor parlor, where he had taught piano.

Delphine Lalaurie was pointing out to a couple of men-Creoles, friends of hers, January thought, by their dress, people who probably never would believe their lovely friend guilty of anything-where to replace a marble-topped table. She went herself to position a gold-veined vase on its top.

In any crowd January was the tallest person present, with one exception, and that exception he saw at the fringe of the mob, near the carriage gate.

"What are you waiting for?" he asked, when he'd made his way over. The lanky Kentuckian regarded him with deceptive mildness in his cold gray eyes. "Judgment Day, belike," Shaw said. And then, when January frowned uncomprehendingly, he added, "What she done weren't a crime, Ben."

"What?"

"Well, misdemeanor mistreatment of her slaves, maybe." Shaw spat in the general direction of the gutter.

"Last time there was a complaint she just got a fine for it."

"l, "said January, his voice icy with rage, "am not her slave."

"Maybe," agreed Shaw placidly. "But she's related to every member of the City Council from Mr. Prieur on down, and to every banker in the city to boot. She holds mortgages on half the property in this city.

And those she don't hold mortgages on need her to invite their daughters to the right parties so they can catch husbands."

For some reason January thought of Roarke's attorney Mr. Loudermilk, buying free drinks among the keelboatmen and riverrats of the wharves, trying to organize a jail delivery. Of whatever threat it had been, that had decided the kidnapped Grille brothers and their sister not to testify against Roarke after all.

There was not so very much difference between Rue Royale and Gallatin Street. Only that Roarke's crimes had been, at least, comprehensible.

"So you're telling me the police are going to sit back and do nothing."

"I'm telling you," said Shaw softly, "that in ten years, this won't have happened." His eyes swept back to the tall house, the lace curtains moving in the windows, the walls like a self-enclosing fortress, only slightly streaked with smoke. "Nice lady like that? They didn't see nuthin'."

"Well, I sure saw somethin', me!" A heavyset countryman pushed close to Shaw. "Me, I been to the Cabildo. What you sayin', she gonna get away with what she done?"

"What you say?" Kentucky Williams jostled up behind the man. "That French cow-whore gonna get away with that?"

She had a voice like an iron gong, and the murmur rose around them, angry, disbelieving. Someone got a brick from the building site where January had blown up his bomb, and lobbed it through the window on the ground floor; someone else shrieked, "Monster! Murderess!" in English that grated like a saw.

Fists began to pound on the gate. Around the corner on Rue Royale others hammered at the door. More bricks were hurled at the house; there was a tinkling smash of glass.

"Now see what you done started?" murmured Shaw mildly and put a surprisingly gentle hand on January's arm to draw him back.

Hannibal asked, "I take it you're not on duty," and Shaw looked down at the fiddler in a kind of surprise.

"I been told off special by Chief Tremouille not to cross the Lalaurie threshold," he said. "So I guess I won't." A couple of Gallatin Street toughs and an Ohio boatman got a cypress beam from the construction and began to smash at the gates with it like a ram. The voice of the mob rose to an angry baying, French and English-"Like the howling of Irish wolves against the moon, " Hannibal murmured.

More bricks were thrown, and a dead rat from the gutter. Men appeared from the levee as if drawn by the noise or by the sudden, whiffed promise of loot.

Shaw checked the pistols at his belt. "I ain't seen the daughters all mornin'. I been watchin'. But I can't stand by if they offer her harm."

"Let them," said January coldly. His brother-in-law had lent him a jacket, too short in the sleeves, sticking to his back from the scabbed welts left by the whip, and had had to put it on him. He still could not move his arms. The mob thrust them back, pushing at the gate, and Shaw snaked his lean body forward, working his way to the front.

He was thus almost knocked to the banquette a moment later when the heavy black gates flew open.

Black horses reared and plunged in the archway, eyes rolling in terror; January saw Bastien on the box, wielding a whip in all directions. The mob fell back before the plunging hooves, maybe thinking the coachman was taking his moment to escape. Only when the carriage lunged forward did January see the woman inside, dark-veiled, calm, unbreakably perfect, gazing out over the heads of the rabble. Bastien cracked the whip again and the horses threw themselves forward. Someone shrieked a curse, and the mob surged after the carriage. But the horses were swift. The carriage rocked and swayed as it picked up speed, up Rue de l'Hopital to the Bayou Road, and out toward the lake.

Some of the mob ran after it, hurling bricks and cursing. The rest turned back, pouring through the open gates, into the wealthy house, and began to loot.

January felt a touch on his side. Looking down he saw that Rose had joined him. There was a crash as someone hurled the gold-veined vase down from the second-floor parlor, men scattering and laughing at the sound of the stone shattering. Someone else yelled in English, "Watch out below!" and the piano was thrust over the edge of the gallery, squashing like a melon as it hit the banquette. Bodies jostled January from all sides, crowding to be in at the carnival of destruction and theft.

January sighed, and with the effort of his lifetime put his arm around Rose's shoulders. She hesitated, then leaned very gently into his side.

"Let's go home." ? Did she or didn't she?

It's always difficult to write a fictional account of a historical crime, particularly in cases where the writer has to make a judgment about whether any crime was committed or not.

Newspaper accounts of events in New Orleans in the 1830s could be exaggerated, libelous, poisonous, selfserving, or misleading-all uniformly refused to acknowl edge epidemics of yellow fever until hundreds died, for instance-but the April 10, 1834, editions of the Gazette and (more significant to my mind) both the English and the French editions of the Bee contain accounts of the fire at the Lalaurie mansion, the discovery of the seven mutilated slaves in the attic, and the subsequent mobbing and sacking of the house. The Bee also contains the deposition of Judge Canonge, one of the most notable local jurists, as to the finding of the slaves. Barely two years after the events, Harriet Martineau, an Englishwoman passing through New Orleans, spoke to numerous eyewitnesses and attests that the debris from the Lalaurie house blocked the street for some time. George Washington Cable and his two assistants, and later Henry Castellanos-who was born and raised in New Orleans-had ample opportunity to speak to firsthand witnesses as well as to examine documents: neither of them appears to have had any doubts that the events did take place.

In 1934, one hundred years after the event, New Orleans journalist Meigs Frost printed a "vindication" of Marie Delphine de McCarty Blanque Lalaurie, claiming that the story could not be true on the grounds that the Lalaurie house on Rue Royale itself was clearly undamaged. Frost also claimed that the house dated from the late eighteenth century-which was completely untrue-and neglected to mention that the structure was substantially rebuilt by one Pierre Trastour in the late 1830s, so badly damaged had it been. Since Frost's account also contains a quaintly romantic, but provably untrue, legend about Madame Lalaurie as a young woman voyaging to Spain to plead for her first husband's life with the Queen of Spain (Don Ramon de Lopez y Angula was called back to "take his place at court" in full honor, but died in Havana). I found it difficult to place much credence in many of Frost's assertions. There are a number of possibilities and suppositions involved in the case, but in my judgment-and I thought long and hard about this before undertaking this project-the fact that Monsieur Montreuil next door had been done dirty by a member of Madame Lalaurie's family does not outweigh the fact of Judge Canonge's deposition or the fact that, when she and her husband fled New Orleans in 1834, Madame Lalaurie apparently made no attempt to deny the allegations made against her or to countersue Montreuil, Canonge, or anyone else. Most accounts state that thousands of people filed through the courtyard of the Cabildo that April afternoon in 1834 and saw not only the seven mutilated slaves, but implements of torture (unspecified) that "covered the top of a table." At least one account adds that two of the tortured slaves died from overeating immediately after their long period of starvation; others were so badly injured as to be pensioners of the city for the rest of their lives.

Following her escape from the house on Royal Street, Delphine Lalaurie crossed Lake Pontchartrain to Mandeville. There she stayed for some ten days, evidently hoping that the whole matter would blow over. When it did not, she and her husband signed over power of attorney to the husbands of her two married daughters (she had four in all) and took ship, first, it is said, for New York and then for Paris. There, some stories allege, Delphine Lalaurie lived out her days. One account says she died hunting boar in the Pyrenees.

However, notarial records exist stating that she was back living quietly in New Orleans by the late 1840s; for in 1849 she petitioned to manumit a middle-aged slave named Orestes. Every one of her detractors has made it clear that Delphine Lalaurie did have favorites among her slaves, notably the faithful coachman Bastien; and she is recorded to have manumitted another slave while living at the Royal Street house in 1832. Bastien the coachman was said to have been killed when, after driving Madame and her husband to safety at Lake Pontchartrain, he tried to return to the house and was torn apart by the mob. What Bastien thought of his mistress's activities in the attic, and why he attempted to return to the house can, of course, only be conjectured.

Too many modern cases exist of men who imprisoned one or several youths or girls in their homes or in improvised dugout cellars, over periods of months, as sex slaves or for purposes of torture, before killing them, for me to believe that Madame Lalaurie "couldn't" have done what it is alleged that she did.

Records from the 1840s also indicate that next door to the widow of N. L. Lalaurie in the Faubourg Marigny lived her two unmarried daughters. Most stories add that Madame Lalaurie was buried secretly in St. Louis #1 Cemetery, but no one knows the location of her grave.

Please remember, however, that this is a work of fiction, not a scholarly biography. I used the sources that were available to me and made the best decisions I could from what I read about what the situation and circumstances might have been like, if what the newspapers said was in fact true. If there is further information conclusively vindicating Delphine Lalaurie, I would be delighted to see it. I have tried above all to keep the flavor of place and time and not do violence to my source material.

The house that now stands at 1140 Royal Street in New Orleans has been so extensively rebuilt that very little remains of the original structure. When one of the McCarty plantations was subdivided into house lots, one of the streets was named Delphine Street and remains so to this day.

Barbara Hambly

July 1997

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BARBARA HAMBLY attended the University of California and spent a year at the University of Bordeaux, France, obtaining a master's degree in medieval history. She has worked as both a teacher and a technical editor, but her first love has always been history. Ms. Hambly lives in Los Angeles with two Pekingese, a cat, and another writer. She is at work on the fourth Benjamin January novel, Sent Down the River.