02 Fever Season

Four

For the next thirty hours January felt like a fugitive, as if Madame Lalaurie's money glowed in the dark and could be seen by all through his pocket.

Slave stealing was what white law called assisting blacks to steal themselves from those who'd paid hard money for their bodies.

And to that was added Accessory After the Fact. Through the remainder of the long night in the Hospital, and walking home between houses shuttered and mostly empty in the blinding light of morning-climbing the gar?onni?re stairs to his bed and later waking and walking over to his sister Olympe's house on Rue Douane for dinner-he felt as if at any moment Lieutenant Shaw would step out from between the houses and say in that mild, scratchy voice, "I'd like a word with you, Maestro."

"Why would she do a thing like that?" Olympe Corbier took a pan of bread pudding from the brick-and-clay oven and set it under a little tent of newspaper to keep the flies off.

"Do what?" Straddling the kitchen's single wooden uliair, January sat up a little straighter. "Give her money?"

"Help her at all." His middle sister turned from the hearth, tall for a woman and thin, her face like a coal black marsh spirit's in the furled fantasia of a blue-and-pink tignon. Olympia Snakebones, she was called among the voodoos: his true sister, his mother's child by that father who had never emerged from the darkness of St. Denis Janvier's yard. "Bernard de McCarty's daughter? Mama-in-law to one of the descended-from-God Forstalls? Jean Blanque smuggled in slaves by the boatload from Cuba."

"Why would she risk her life to mop some sailor's vomit off a hospital floor?" countered January. "You work in the clinics-if helping out other folks isn't enough for you-in order to give your work up to God, to school your pride. Who knows what she thought about what Jean Blanque did? The money may have been part of that." He shrugged, seeing the disdain in his sister's eyes, as it had been from childhood every time St. Denis Janvier's name was mentioned. "She may just have wanted to score points off Emily Redfern."

It surprised Olympe into grinning, something she'd never have let herself do as a girl, and she dropped him a curtsy. "I concede you a point, Brother. You ever met Emily Redfern?"

He shook his head.

"There's a woman," his sister said, "wants to be Delphine Lalaurie when she grows up. Fetch me the blue bowl there behind you, would you, Brother?"

She ladled jambalaya from the iron pot that hung above the coals. Even with all its shutters thrown wide-opening the whole side of the little room to the yard-the kitchen was baking hot, though with the sinking of the sun below the roofs of the American faubourg a little breeze flowed up Rue Douane. The houses on either side of Olympe's were empty, shuttered fast; traffic in the street had ended with the coming of evening; and the oppressive silence, broken only by the far-off whistle of a steamboat, breathed with the presence of Bronze John. He waited out there in the darkness. When Gabriel, Olympe's eleven-year-old son, came darting across the yard to the kitchen from the lighted house, January had to suppress the urge to tell the boy to stay indoors where it was safe.

Nowhere was safe.

"Delphine Lalaurie, she has the best of everything." Olympe muffled her hand in her bright-colored skirts, to keep from her skin the heat of the iron hook with which she rearranged tripods and pots above the fire. Her sloppy, mo kiri mo vini French reminded January of Cora's. It was the French of Africans who'd made the language their own as they'd made what they could of the land. Their mother would faint to hear her-but then, Livia Levesque had not heard her daughter's voice for nearly twenty years.

"When a boat comes in from France with the latest shade of silk, or some kind of bonnet they're all wearing in Paris, Delphine Lalaurie's got it. Either for her or for her daughters, for all it's said she don't let those poor girls eat enough to keep a cat alive. When Michie Davis brought in those French singers for his Opera, Delphine Lalaurie had them to her parties, to sing for her guests, before anyone else in town; and when she gives a ball, no other lady in town dare hold any kind of party that night, knowing it won't be no use."

She wiped her face with one of the threadbare linen towels. "Hell." She chuckled. "I bet if Delphine Lalaurie were caught red-handed taking runaways out of town by the coflie there'd be folks failing over themselves to say it wasn't so. She does what she pleases. And that's what just about rots Emily Redfern's heart."

She scooped greens from a cauldron at the back of the hearth, handed the white porcelain bowl of them to her son to carry back to the house, and shifted the coffeepot a little farther to one side, where it would warm without boiling. "The voodoos know everything that goes on in this town, Brother," Olympe said.

"Emily Redfern wants to have that same power Delphine Lalaurie has. Wants to have it with everyone, not just with the Americans. That's what ate her about her husband's gambling. Not that it might lose them their home-that little place at Black Oak was hers, not his, and couldn't be took for his debts. But his gambling took away from what she could spend on having the best in town, on being the best."

"Hate her enough to poison him?"

Olympia Snakebones's dark eyes slid toward her young son, but the boy was already out of the kitchen, skipping across the dark yard to the house with his bowl of greens. "The voodoos know everything in this town," she said again, her face enigmatic. "But sometimes we don't tell even each other what we know.

Tell your little Cora to be careful, dealing with that white woman, with any white woman. And you, Brother-you watch yourself too. You get yourself mixed up with the whites, French or American, and you'll be hurtin', too."

They crossed the yard together, Olympe taking off her apron, leaving it on the kitchen table. The smell of burning was thick in their nostrils.

"Tell her there's a man name of Natchez Jim down by Rue du Levee." They paused in the molten light from the dining-room door. "She'll find him near the coffee stand under the arcade of the vegetable market, when he's not out freighting firewood in his boat. He'll get her up the river safe. Tell him I said it's a favor to me."

Dinner was a lively meal, with Gabriel and thirteen-year-old Zizi-Marie up and down, back and forth to the front bedroom where their father, Paul Corbier, was slowly convalescing from a brush with the fever.

While listening to Zizi-Marie's account of how she'd done the finishwork on Monsieur Marigny's yellow silk chairs while her father was ill and thus helped rescue the family finances-which turned out to be quite true, for she was a good upholsterer already-and explaining correlations to Gabriel between Olympe's herbal remedies and his own medical training, it was difficult for January to remember his own worries or to feel anything but joy in the warm haven of that little house. Halfway through the meal there was a knock at the door, a woman from the shacks out toward the swamps, asking Olympe's help with her children taking sick; Olympe said, "I'll have to go."

January nodded. He was on his way to the Hospital himself. Even this haven, he thought, looking around the candldit parlor, was not safe. It could be taken away at any time, as Ayasha had been taken.

"I'll put up extra for you, borage and willow bark," Olympe said, going into the parlor where the shelves were that contained the potions of the voodoo: brick dust and graveyard dust, the dried bones of chickens and the heads of mice, little squares of red flannel and black flannel, colored candles and dishes of blue glass beads.

"We can't stay, either," Gabriel announced, as Chouchou gathered the dishes to carry back to the kitchen with the solemn care of an eight-year-old, and Olympe lifted Ti-Paul down from the box on the chair seat that raised him up to the level of the table. "Zizi and I, we got to help Nicole Perret and her husband pack up. Would you know it, Uncle Ben? Uncle Louis says now his cook and yard man gone over to Mobile, Nicole and Jacques can stay on the porch of his house out by Milneburgh, that he rent for the summer, and work for him. Now the fever here's so bad, Nicole and Jacques will do that just to be away from town."

He pulled on his jacket, ran quick fingers over his close-cropped hair, a tall, gangly boy, like January had been, but with the promise of the gentle handsomeness still visible in Paul Corbier's face. "I ain't scared of no fever, me. Just it's so hot here I wish we could go, too. You think Grandmere might let us, just for a while?"

January couldn't imagine his mother inconveniencing herself to the extent of giving her elder daughter floor space in her lovely rented room at the Milneburgh Hotel-let alone her elder daughter's decidedly working-class husband and four children-to save her had Attila the Hun been on the point of sacking the town. "Stranger things have happened," he told his nephew.

But probably not since the Resurrection of Christ. "Take a smudge with you," he cautioned, as Zizi-Marie came out of the bedroom with her jacket, her father leaning on her shoulder. "And a cloth soaked in vinegar." He tried to think of anything that actually seemed to have some effect in deflecting the fever, the poisons that seemed to ride the stinking, mosquito-humming darkness.

Slices of onion?

Get out of this town, he thought despairingly. Get out of this town.

"You could do us a favor, if you would, Ben." Paul Corbier sat carefully on the parlor divan. He was breathing hard just from the effort of coming out to bid his brother in-law good night. "Alys Roque was here this afternoon, Olympe's friend. She says her husband, Robois, didn't come in last night from working the levee. She's already been to Charity, and the Orleans Infirmary, and Dr. Campbell's, and that clinic the Ursulines have set up where the convent used to be, but... it strikes so fast, sometimes.

And if it's the cholera, it's all the worse. Me, I was shaping an arm cushion one minute and the next thing I knew I was lying on the floor, without the strength to so much as call out."

He shook his head. His face, round when January had first met him in the spring, had thinned with the effects of the disease; and it would be some time before he'd recover the lost flesh. By the look of him he had a good deal of African blood, which had probably been the saving of him. The lighter-skinned colored, quadroons and octoroons, suffered more with the fever. The exquisitely pale musterfinos and mamaloques were as susceptible to its effects as the whites.

"You were lucky," said January softly. Not least, he added to himself, in having a wife who knew about herbs and healing and wouldn't call in some sanguinary lunatic like Soublet to bleed you to death.

Soublet was at the top of his form that night when January returned to the hospital, opening veins and applying leeches with the pious confidence of a vampire. "Balderdash, sir," January overheard him saying to Dr. Sanchez. "Salts of mercury are all very well in their place, but fever resides in the blood, not in the nervous system."

"Salts of mercury mixed with turpentine have been shown to be of sovereign benefit-sovereign, sir!-in cases of fever!" Sanchez retorted. "But the dosage must be heroic! Nothing is of any benefit unless the patient's gums bleed..."

Balderdash? wondered January, as he lifted the half-dead Italian, waxen with phlebotomy, to sponge him clean. The heartbreaking, terrifying thing about the fever was that he didn't know. Nobody knew. Maybe Soublet and Sanchez were right.

On the bed next to the Italian's a dead woman lay. Her face was covered with a sheet, but her hair, long and black, hung to brush the reeking floor, and the sight of it cut his heart. Had he returned soon enough to find Ayasha still alive, could he have saved her by bleeding? By forcing calomel and turpentine down her throat until her gums bled?

Why did one person recover, and another succumb? Might Monsieur A have recovered without the remedy, and did Madame B perish in its despite?

"Stick to surgery, my son," Dr. Gomez had said to him, all those years ago. "These physicians,' they know nothing but calomel and opium, the clyster and the knife. When a man breaks a bone, by God, you know what you've got."

What you had, of course, thought January, as he was summoned to hold down a laborer who wept and fought and cursed at them in Gaelic, was a mechanic of the body's armature who had to sit by while a man he was certain was an imbecile opened the patient's veins for the fifth time in as many days.

Rain began to fall: hard, steady, drenching rain that abated not an atom of the suffocating heat. Ants crawled steadily up the walls and over the floor, in spite of the red pepper sprinkled along every baseboard. A man came in, his coat of fine tobacco-colored wool sticking to his broad shoulders with wet and his fair hair and extravagant sidewhiskers dripping on his shoulders, and searched among the sick, as the woman Nanie had searched a few nights ago. Handsome face impassive, he passed once through the ward and then made a second circuit, as if not believing the one he sought was not there.

January saw that it was the men of color he went to, lifting the sheets over the faces of the dead, looking down at them for a few minutes before moving on.

"Can I help you, sir?"

The man turned, and met his eyes with eyes of bright Irish blue. "Thank you kindly, no." His voice had the soft lilt of the well-bred Irish gentry, like that of January's friend Hannibal the fiddler when Hannibal was more than usually drunk. "Just seekin' after a friend."

There was a jewel in his stickpin the size of little Ti-Paul's fingernail-what kind, it was too dark to tell-and except for the soak of the rain his linen was clean and very fine. His coat, with its wasp waist and lavishly wadded shoulders, was too flashy for a broker's or a planter's. A gambler, January guessed, or someone in the theater.

"Does he have a name, if they bring him in after you've gone?"

The man hesitated, then shook his head. "I'll be back," he said.

There were many people who came in, seeking those they knew among the dying or the dead. Later in the night January thought he saw the woman Nani? return, but through the grind of exhaustion and the haze of smoke could not be sure. He himself studied the faces of the patients, asked the names of those still conscious enough to reply, searching for Robois Roque, as his brother-in-law had requested. When the ambulance came in, toward midnight, he looked again. There was no one he sought, but there was an elderly German woman with a withered and shortened leg, and Soublet descended upon her at once, rubbing his thick-muscled hands.

"Would you like to have the affliction of your limb cured?" the doctor murmured-he had a beautiful voice whcn he chose to soften it-and the woman thrashed her head giddily and muttered something in her own tongue. January saw Soublet look around quickly for Ker, and then wave his servant over. "If you consent to come to my clinic, you can be better cared for there, and not only will you be cured of the fever but full use of the limb will be restored to you within a matter of weeks."

January shuddered, but knew if he interfered he might be put out of the Hospital altogether. It was not for surgeons to question the work of actual doctors, and certainly not for a black man to question the opinion of a white. He looked around for Ker, as Soublet had done, but the Englishman was not to be seen.

"M'sieur?"

A woman had been standing beside him for some time, a wet cloak hanging from her square, slender shoulders and a look of sickened horror on her face. And well she might look so, thought January, seeing anew the smoky hell of the long room, roaches rattling ferociously around the lamps, the dying laid on pallets along the wall for lack of beds. Barnard crouched beside one old man and shoved what looked like garlic tops into his ears while Soublet and his servant hovered like a pair of sable-cloaked vultures above the delirious German woman. "Do you need help, Madame?"

She raised her eyes to his. Not far-she was a tall woman. Her eyes seemed dark in the shadows, behind thick slabs of gold-rimmed spectacle lenses, but when she turned toward the lamps, they showed their true color, cindery gray flecked with green.

"I need a doctor," she said. She wore a free woman's tignon, and in the dusky half-light she had a free woman's complexion. Her face was a long oval with a mouth too prim and a chin too pronounced for real beauty. All arms and legs, she moved as if she were always going to trip, but never did.

January glanced back at Soublet and the beggar woman. "I'm a doctor." He went to fetch his satchel from behind the door.

The rain had eased to a patter, but the air outside smelled thick of it. It was only a break in the storm. An electric wild warmth charged the night, monstrous clouds advancing over the lake like the siege engines of some unimaginable army. He wondered where the girl Cora Chouteau was tonight, and if she was sleeping dry.

"Three of my girls are down sick." The wind caught the woman's cloak, whirled it like a great cracking wing. "I'm sorry," she added, as they passed through the gate of the Hospital courtyard, and he handed her across the gutter and into the morass of Common Street. "You've got as much as you can do here, I know. But I've done everything I can, everything I know how to do. I'm not... I'm not very good with the sick."

She had a small school on Rue St. Claude, not far from the Bayou Road. Her name, she said, was Rose Vitrac.

"Sometimes this past year I've felt like a peddler trying to sell S?vres teacups to the Comanche," she remarked ruefully, taking off her spectacles to wipe rain from the Ienses. Away from the Hospital she seemed to gain back some of her poise, to be less like a very young egret trying to balance on its long legs. There was a wry little fold in the corner of her mouth and, even in this time, a dry capacity for amusement. "It's difficult enough to find Creole girls, let alone girls of color, whose parents are willing to pay for them to learn Latin-or proper French, for that matter, much less, God help us, natural philosophy.

But there have to be a few Comanche warriors out there who like..." She hesitated, fishing for exactly the proper word, and January smiled and suggested,

"Tea?"

Rose Vitrac chuckled. "Beautiful things, I was going say." She put the spectacles back on. "Learning for its own sake, for the joy of knowing how the universe is put together. Things that have nothing to do with hunting buffalo or scalping people."

"You're probably in the wrong town for that," he said, still smiling.

The face she turned to him, as they stopped before a crumbling, galleried Spanish house, post-and-brick raised high off the ground, was suddenly serious again. Quiet intensity illuminated her eyes. "No," she said. "I'm in the right town for that. If you're a colored boy-if your father is a rich white man-he'll see to your education if you say you want to study Hebrew, or optics, or how logarithms unfold invisible universes that you never even suspected. But if you're a girl? If you're hungry to know, to learn? To see the magic in cosines and radii, to learn how to call lightning out of water and steel and copper wire? This is the only town where that fulfillment is even possible."

"You teach all that?"

"If they want to learn, I find a way to teach it." She looked away from him, suddenly embarrassed, and drew a key from the reticule at her belt. Dawn was just coming, down the river and above the clouds, enough light to show him the freckles that dusted her nose and cheekbones, and to turn the oil lamps in their iron brackets along the wall to fey shreds of torn silk. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm lecturing again. It's a noxious habit."

January shook his head, recalling Dr. Gomez's quiet study, with its glistening jars of specimens preserved in brandy or honey, its worn medical books and ferocious looking galvanic battery. He climbed the tall steps beside her to the gallery, the warm damp wind smiting them again as he scraped the mud from his boots, and she unlocked the door. "And did you find buyers for your philosophic tea sets?"

She glanced up at him, the fear that had come into her eyes with the touch of the door handle leaving them for a moment. She smiled. "A few."

The smell of fever and sickness flowed from the black dark of the house, vile and frightening. Just enough light trickled in from outside to show up a branch of candles on a table just beside the door.

Mademoiselle Vitrac kicked her feet out of the wooden patterns that guarded her shoes, took a match from her reticule, scratched it on the matchpaper. By the growing light January was just able to discern looming bookcases, a blackboard, a globe, and a couple of straight-backed chairs. Saw, too, the knot of fear bunch at the corner of the schoolmistress's jaw. He remembered coming into a house in Paris, smelling that smell as he ascended the stairs.

"It will be all right." He took the candelabra from her unsteady hand.

There were eight beds in the long, low attic above the school's three rooms. Three were occupied. A girl of thirteen-Zizi-Marie's age-sat beside one of the beds, a china basin of water and a candle on the floor beside her. She turned, gratitude flooding her round, pug-nosed face as she heard the steps on the stairs, saw the light of the candles imperceptibly brighten the terrible blackness of the room.

"Mamzelle Vitrac, I think she's worse." Mademoiselle Vitrac bent to hug her reassuringly befare going to look at the girl on the bed.

"She's thrown up twice," the girl went on, fighting tears. "The second time I didn't think she was ever going to stop. She's so hot. Genevieve keeps thinking I'm her sister, and Victorine-I've checked a couple times to see if she's still breathing, with a feather like you showed me, but she hasn't moved or made any sound or anything. And Isabel left and I don't know where she went, but she said she wasn't going to stay and catch the fever from the others."

Her dark eyes begged for reassurance. "It isn't catching, is it? Will I catch it from-from Genevi?ve and Victorine and Antoinette here, from staying and taking care of them?"

"No, you won't, Mamzelle," said January firmly. He set down his satchel beside the girl Antoinette's bed.

"I take care of people every day at the Hospital, and I haven't got the fever yet."

"And anyway, you don't get fever from people who have fever, Marie-Neige." Mademoiselle Vitrac gently took the sponge from the girl's hand. "You get fever from swamp mist and night air, and you see we've got all the windows closed up tight. The fever can't get in and get you. Marie-Neige, this is Dr.

Janvier. He's here to help us take care of the girls this morning."

"M'sieu Janvier," corrected January. "I'm just a surgeon, not a doctor... and I think Marie-Neige and I have met already, at her mother's house. It is Marie-Neige Pellicot, isn't it, Mamzelle?"

The youngest Pellicot daughter nodded. January calculated he'd probably climbed through the window of her attic bedroom last Saturday. He remembered Agnes Pellicot complaining to his mother, "What earthly use is it to educate a girl? It costs a fortune and in the end to whom is she going to speak in Greek or Italian or whatever it is?"

"Well, you can go find Isabel now," said Mademoiselle Vitrac gently. "Tell her I'm not angry at her for leaving. And don't you rip up at her for it, either, Marie Neige, please. Everything turned out all right in the end. Is there anything you can do for them, M'sieu Janvier?" She asked this as Marie-Neige took up her candle in one hand, gathered her voluminous petticoats in the other, and made her careful way down the ladderlike stairs.

"Only what you've been doing." January walked to the pink-and-green china veilleuse that stood on one of the room's plain cypresswood dressers, its candle providing the sole illumination in that corner of the long attic. He touched the backs of his fingers to the vessel's smooth side, and found it warm. From his satchel he took the powdered willow bark and herbs Olympe had recommended, and poured the heated water over them in one of the bedroom pitchers.

"It's all anyone can do," he went on. "The fever is like a hurricane. It passes through the body, tearing up everything in its path, and it's going to take as long as it takes to pass. All we can do is keep the girls alive, keep the fever down by whatever means we can: cool water on the skin, vinegar, herb draughts like this one, saline draughts. Nothing is going to rebalance the body's humors or drive the fever out."

He saw her relax, and nod. "Can I get you water?" she asked. Later, when she brought it, she said, "My mother died of fever, but she suffered cruelly at the hands of the doctors before she died. They bled her; and after they'd gone, my grandmother thought it would be a good idea to blister her, to `revive her,' as she said. I was afraid..." She hesitated. "I was afraid that in not seeking a doctor yesterday, or the day before, I might have... have done them harm. As I said, I'm not very good with the sick. They seemed to be getting better yesterday."

"That happens," said January. Wind scratched at the dormer shutters, and the thunder of rain sounded very loud on the Spanish-tiled roof.

"I thought -I hoped-we actually could get through the summer here without anyone falling sick." She propped her spectacles more firmly on her nose with her forefinger, then stripped back the sheets, and wrung a sponge in the vinegar-water she had brought. "We did last summer, four girls and I. Genevi?ve over there..." And there was in her eyes the special smile teachers have when they speak of pupils who have become their friends, "... and Victorine were two of them. Looking back, I can't imagine how we did it. But entire families survived, you know. And quite frankly," she added, "I had nowhere else to go.

Neither did most of the girls."

She bent to her task, mopping down the girl Antoinette's thin body, gently, slopped water dripping onto the sheets. "Every penny I own is tied up in this building, and these girls... Their parents mostly wanted to know they're `in good hands.' Being educated, and out of their way. You know what it costs to leave the city in the summer, to take a room in anything like a decent hotel or boardinghouse in Milneburgh or Mandeville."

A trace of bitterness crept into her voice. "Antoinette is a day student. Her mother asked me to board her here while she left the city, when she heard I was going to stay."

January thought about his mother. When Olympe was sixteen years old she had run away from home.

His mother had made no effort to learn where she had gone.

Rather wistfully, Mademoiselle Vitrac added, "These are mostly not girls whose parents understand them or know what it is they want out of life."

"Did yours?"

She hesitated, looking across at him as he tipped the herb tea into a spouted invalid's cup. Then she shook her head, briefly, and rearranged Antoinette's nightdress so that he could half-lift her and force her to drink. "What is it?" she asked.

"Borage and willow bark. My sister's remedy for fevers. It works, too."

"She's a follower of Dr. Thompson's theories?"

"She's a voodooienne."

"Ah." Mademoiselle Vitrac didn't appear shocked, a little surprising considering her prim appearance.

"Myself, I'd trust a voodoo as much as I'd trust some of the doctors I've met. One of them's one of my financial backers-a doctor, I mean. He insisted I accept a `Postural Remediant' that reminds me of nothing so much as woodcuts I've seen of the Iron Maiden. It's downstairs. I'll show it to you-I have to keep it out because he sometimes comes by."

She smiled faintly, looking down into Antoinette's flushed, wasted face. "I'm always threatening to lock the girls into it for punishment-as a joke, you understand. We made games of what kinds of crimes merit imprisonment. I think the longest was five years for poisoning Monsieur Heymann, that tenor at the Opera the girls are all in love with. Poisoning the Pope was good for three years, as I recall."

The muscle of her jaw stood out again, fighting the knowledge of how close death stood to those giggling schoolgirl games. She propped her spectacles again and went on calmly, "It's supposed to force one into a correct posture while writing, but I can't imagine it doing anything except making one never wish to touch a pen again."

She followed him to Genevieve's bed, holding the girl, who was very restless, while he dosed her with the herbal tea, then sponging her down with vinegar-water while January went on to dose Victorine, who looked, he thought, far too young to be sent away to school.

"Give them this three or four times a day," he told Madamoiselle Vitrac, digging in the half-darkness of his medical bag for the linen packer of herbs, which he set on the dresser top next to the veilleuse. "Made up in tea, as I've done, medium-dark. The disease is going to take as long as it takes, to pass through them.

All we can do is keep it from killing them on the way."

She drew up the sheets over the girls' bodies, and rearranged the mosquito-bars, then followed him down the black ladder of the stairs.

Full daylight leaked through cracks in the shutters and partings in the curtains that covered the tall French doors onto the gallery. It showed January again the books shelved floor to ceiling in the schoolroom and in a corner, as promised, the Postural Remediant, an elaborate cage of metal, straps, and delicate boxwood rollers designed to force a girl to sit upright with her wrist properly raised to the task of writing.

"Five years for poisoning Heymann, at the very least," he agreed judiciously, pausing to study the thing.

"Odd," he added, "one never sees boys forced to sit and write a certain way. Only girls."

"You notice," replied Mademoiselle Vitrac, with a touch of astringency in her voice, "which sex wears the corsets." She crossed to the divan set at right angles to the desk, where two girls slept in a mussy, crook-necked heap: Marie-Neige and a delicately pretty adolescent who was presumably the truant Isabel. The schoolmistress bent and brushed aside a strand of Isabel's coarse black hair, which, unbound and uncovered, had caught in the corner of her rosebud mouth. Both children looked desperately young.

"It must be very difficult for them," January said softly. "Coming here. Choosing this road."

"It is," she replied. "I hope at least that I've given them somewhere to come. Let them know that there is a different road to choose. It isn't an easy road. No one I've ever met seems to believe that a woman can want anything more than some man and children of her own to make her blissfully happy." There was bitterness in her voice again, the utter weariness of a warrior who has gone into battle every day of her life, in the knowledge that she will have to fight and refight for the same few feet of ground each day until she dies.

He wanted to ask her how she had come to it, how she had won the right to pursue her own strange dream of knowledge for its own sake. He had met women intellectu ala in Paris and knew their path was difficult enough. What it must be for a woman here, and a woman of color at that, was almost beyond imagining.

But weariness overwhelmed him, and he guessed that she, too, was close to the edge of collapse. So he only asked, "Will you be all right?"

"Oh, yes. Marie-Neige and Isabel help me-I have other friends, too, who come in to nurse. But nursing isn't the same as having someone who knows what he's doing look at them." She held out her hand, long-fingered and slim, but large of bone, strong to grip. "Thank you," Rose Vitrac said. "Beyond words, thank you. The medicine you gave me-will that be enough?"

"I think so." January set his satchel on the gallery rail again, tilted it to the daylight. "My sister said she'd give me more of them..."

He paused, bringing out the tin of herbs in his hand. It was easy to recognize, for it was the one thing he hadn't put into the bag himself it had to have been placed there by Olympe. And opening it, he smelled the comforting familiarity of the fever remedy.

It was the tin itself that caught his eye: bright red and gold, new and shiny, with WILLET'S BOILED SWEETS inscribed on its lid.

And remarkably similar to the tin Cora Chouteau had described as containing Emily Redfern's stock of poison.