02 Fever Season

Six

Milneburgh stood some four miles north of the city on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain. The elegant hotels, modest boardinghouses, and small wooden cottages sprinkled along the shallow beaches or sheltering in the pines presented a soothing contrast to the shut houses, reeking heat, and terrible silence of the city. The air here was sweet.

As January and Henri Viellard's groom rode up the white shell road along the bayou, the sun was just setting, the golden peach of a full moon low in the east. Doorways and windows stood open to the fresh breezes. Lights from a thousand candles made glowing patchwork of the dovecolored gloam. Even the bathhouses of the two main hotels were illuminated, floating topaz reflections gemming the lake at the end of the long piers.

Impossible, thought January, that this could exist in the same world as the stricken city he had left. He'd passed through a fairy gate somewhere in the twilight swamps along the Bayou St. John and left the earth of plague and loss and stench and grief behind.

"Henri is an old lady." Dominique held out her hands to him from her bed as he entered the bedroom of the cottage Henri Viellard had bought for her, three tiny rooms arranged one behind the other in a little stand of red oak at the water's very edge. The rear gallery perched on stilts in the lake itself; two chairs of white-painted willowwork were just visible through the open doors, and a cage of finches, fluffing their feathers for the night.

"There's absolutely nothing to be worried about," added Catherine Clisson, friend to both Dominique and January's mother, still the pla??e of the protector who'd taken her under his wing twenty years ago. "We sent as soon as her water broke, but with first babies these things take time." As she spoke she brought extra candles from the dresser drawer. Nearly every candlestick and holder in the house stood on its marble top, a bright regiment of porcelain and silver drawn up for battle.

"Is my mother here?"

"Livia said she would be shortly, when she's finished her dinner."

Madame Clisson sounded like a woman carefully keeping her personal opinions out of her voice. But her statement didn't surprise January in the least. Having lavished on Dominique all the care and attention of which she scanted her two older-and darker-hued-children, Livia Levesque seemed to have lost interest in the girl once she'd negotiated a suitably cutthroat contract for her with the wealthiest white planter Livia could find. She herself owned a neat four-room cottage in the pines on the other side of the Washington Hotel, here in Milneburgh, but rented it out at an extortionate rate to a white sugar broker, and occupied a pleasant room at the Louisiana House, which catered to well-off merchants and landlords of color.

"I hope everything's well with your sister Olympe?" Madame Clisson handed him a towel, and folded back the wide lace cuffs of her sleeves. "We sent for her as well."

"She might be with Nicole Perret."

Dominique's friend Phlosine Seurat came in from the gallery in a froufrou of pink jaconet. "I don't think Nicole Perret-was she the one who's going to stay with M'sieu Louis Corbier?-I don't think she's come."

She closed the shutters carefully behind her, for the night was coming on, and drew the curtains over it.

"Nonsense, darling." Dominique turned her head from the pillows. "I saw all their baggage carried into M'sieu Corbier's this afternoon."

January related his dinner at Olympe's while shedding his coat, then herded Phlosine and Iph?g?nie-Dominique's other bosom friend-from the room, keeping Clisson to help him with the examination. Quite a number of New Orleans planters and brokers paid to bring their pla??es as well as their white families out of the city, especially if there were children involved. Iph?g?nie Picard and Phlosine Seurat had walked over from their own painted cottages to support their friend through her confinement, bringing blancmanges, terrines, and lemonade.

Pretty women, all of them, beautifully turned out in their summery muslins and lawns, silk tignons folded and tied and trimmed for maximum allure. And why not? thought January, remembering the girls at Rose Vitrac's little school, and the different, harder road they were being shown.

Interesting a wealthy protector was a sure way to establish oneself, to acquire a little property, a little security in the world, without losing one's eyesight to dressmaking or one's youth to hard labor. Even the respectable wives of artisans, the free colored ladies who refused to let their daughters play with the daughters of the pla??es, envied the pla??es their ease and their wealth. He thought of Marie-Neige's older sisters, educated in the more womanly arts of music and conversation, as his sister Dominique had been. Powdered and painted and dressed in silk, they were already being escorted by their mother to the Blue Ribbon Balls.

And why not? He looked around him at the tiny room, the plain but gracefully expensive furnishings, the curtains of sprigged English chintz and the linen sheets starched and ironed by servants' hands. Why not?

Dominique would never have to fear for herself, or for the child she was now bringing into the world, thanks to his mother's hardheaded bargaining.

She was further in labor than Clisson had thought, further than she had shown while her friends were in the room. She lay back in the cushions of the cypress-wood bed while January examined her, and he saw her hand grip hard on the sheets. Once she whispered, "She'll be a little octoroon, my petite. So pretty..."

Hearing the wistfulness in her voice, January didn't ask, Would you love her less were she darker? Grief and questions were not what Minou needed now. Instead he jested, "What, you're not going to give Henri a boy? With spectacles like his and no chin?"

As he hoped, it made her smile. "Wicked one, Henri has too got a chin! In fact several," she added, and her burst of giggles dissolved into another whisper of pain.

"Where is Henri?" he asked Madame Clisson, as he and she left the bedroom a few minutes later. He'd examined Dominique two or three times in the past several months and had conferred with Olympe and anticipated no major problems with the labor itself. But the child had grown in the two weeks since he'd seen his sister last, and he guessed she'd have a difficult time.

"The Hotel St. Clair." Agnes Pellicot and her daughter Marie-Anne-a shy tall girl in her first year of pla?age to a planter's son-had joined Phlosine and Iph?g?nie in the parlor. With them were Dominique's maid Th?r?se, and January and Dominique's mother, the redoubtable Widow Livia Levesque.

"That mother of his is giving a concert and ball." The Widow Levesque uncovered Phlosine's blancmange, regarded it with a single downturned corner of her mouth, and with her free hand rearranged the decorative sprig of leaves that crowned its smooth, ivory-colored dome. She replaced the bell-shaped glass cover with a sniff, as if to say, Well that's the best that can be expected of that. "Like her, to pick the same night as the Musicale for the benefit of that heathen preacher the Americans are holding at the Washington, but there! The woman would have scheduled her own funeral rather than let the Americans have a sou for that vulgar heretic. I trust she will have her reward in heaven," she added dryly, contemplating the terrine. "You used chicken liver for this, Iph?g?nie? I thought as much."

The inflection of her voice was the same one with which she had turned every small triumph of January's childhood into a commonplace. Dr. Gomez says you will make a fine physician one day? I expect he would say that. Slender and delicate in appearance, Livia Levesque had put off her mourning for her late husband as soon as the obligatory year was up on the grounds that black did not become her-few women of color looked really good in it-but still dressed soberly. To hear her talk, she had never been any white man's pla??e, let alone a slave and the wife of a slave. January could never remember hearing her speak of his father.

"Don't tell me the girl's going to give you problems?" Livia turned immense, wine brown eyes upon her son.

"I don't think so." January kept his voice low and glanced at the half-open bedroom door. "But she's in for a good deal of pain and struggle, I think."

"Hmph." There was a world of, Not like my pain, in the single expulsion of her breath. "Fine time for that other girl of mine to be lollygagging in town. Therese, extinguish some of these candles! The waste that goes on in this house is shocking. And beeswax, too! I don't see how M'sieu Viellard puts up with it. I suppose you think you need to fetch him."

"Someone should," said January. "It should be..."

"I can manage here," his mother cut him off coolly. "How far along is she? Is that all? Phlosine"-She looked around, but the girl had vanished fairylike into her friend's bedroom-"Never there when you need them. No more sense than butterflies." She turned her cool gaze back to her son. "You can't suppose that any of those girls are going to be admitted anywhere near a ball at the St. Clair, do you?"

As if, he thought, she hadn't been one of those girls herself.

When he left she was ordering Madame Clisson and Th?r?se to bring in two dining-room chairs and a plank, to approximate a birthing-chair if Olympe didn't arrive in time.

The Hotel St. Clair stood amid lush plantations of banana, jasmine, willow, and oak some distance back from the lakefront; but its galleries opened to both the prospect and the breezes that came off the water.

As he and the groom Cyrus approached the graceful block of brick and whitewashed stucco that was the main hotel, January saw that colored paper lanterns were suspended from the galleries and smudges of lemongrass and tobacco burned near all the windows against the ever-present mosquitoes. Though it was by this time nearly nine o'clock, well after the hour that entertainments began, as he came up the garden's white shell path he heard no music, only the dull muttering of voices, and an occasional woman's exclamation of anger and outrage.

The first-floor gallery was thronged with little knots of people, the men in black or gray or blue evening dress, the women in the pale-tinted silks of summer wear-and the looped, knotted, wired, and lace-trimmed hairstyles they favored these days that made January wonder despairingly if women had taken leave of their senses in the past ten years-sipping negus and lemonade from trays circulated by white-coated waiters.

"Honestly, the woman deserves to be horsewhipped!" wailed someone buried to her chin in a snowbank of lace, whom January vaguely recognized as an aunt (cousin?) of Phlosine Seurat's protector. Through his mother and Minou he was being reintroduced to the interlocking webs of Creole society gossip.

"Well, what can you expect of Americans?" returned her escort, as January skirted the shell path under the gallery. He sought the inevitable refreshment tables, whose colored waiters he could approach without violating anybody's sensibilities.

"Well, we know who's responsible, anyway," muttered another woman, patting the yellow roses in her hair under an extravagant Apollo knot. "And her husband only dead a week Wednesday!"

"I always said she was a cold hussy..."

"I've heard she doesn't have shoes on her feet, poor thing..."

"And well served, I say! I'm told she led the poor man a dreadful life..."

"... gambled away every sou..."

"... no more than twenty-five cents on the dollar, they say!"

At the far end of the wide gallery that fronted the lake January spotted the buffet, framed in a glowing galaxy of hanging lanterns, candles, and potted ferns. As he approached, above the growl of the crowd he finally heard music, a wistful planxty spun like gold thread from a single violin. He followed it to its source. The violinist perched tailor-fashion on one of the tall stools set behind the buffet for the use of the waiters, a bottle of champagne within easy reach and a dreamy expression in his black-coffee eyes. The gallery wasn't particularly high at that point, and January was a tall man. He caught the balusters, put a foot on the edge of the gallery, and swung himself up. One of the waiters called out, "Well, here's an answer to M'am Viellard's prayer now. You bring your music with you, Maestro?"

"I'm looking for Monsieur Viellard." January stepped over the rail. "What's happening here?"

The violinist set aside his instrument and generously offered him the bottle of Madame Viellard's best champagne. "Departed in command of a force to rescue the captives," he reported. Hannibal Sefton's white face was a trifle haggard but he seemed in better health than when January had seen him a week ago. With his long brown hair tied back in a green velvet ribbon and his shabby, oldfashioned coat, the fiddler had the look of something strayed from a portrait painted half a century ago. "He armed his trained servants, born in his house, three hundred and eighteen; and pursued them into Dan. The guests turned up half an hour ago to discover that the Committee in charge of the Musicale for the Benefit of the Reverend Micajah Dunk had hired away every musician but me and Uncle Bichet. Madame Viellard's fit to burst a corset string and she's gone to the Washington Hotel-with Our Boy Henri in tow-to get them back."

January swore. "I'd have thought that at this time of year there were at least enough musicians in town for two concerts on the same evening. Even if one of them does have to feature Philippe de Coudreau on the clarinet."

Hannibal winced at the mention of one of the worst musicians of the rather slender selection available, even at the best of times, in New Orleans, and shrugged. "You reckon without the necessity of showing up the Americans. Madame Viellard heard that the Committee to Buy a Church for Micajah Dunk was having a Musicale to raise money-and Dunk being a hellfire lunatic who believes the Devil is French makes it all worse-and moved her concert and ball up to the same evening, to make sure that anybody with any pretentions to society in Milneburgh came to her party and didn't drop money at the Musicale when the collection plate went around. That would have settled the Musicale's hash, except that the Committee that's running it is headed by a lady rejoicing in the name of Emily Redfern, who's damned if she's going to let herself get shown up by French heathens who keep the Sabbath the way people in Boston keep the Fourth of July. The result being that Mrs. Redfern upped her Musicale to include an orchestra that would shame the Paris Opera."

He poured out a glass of champagne for January; he drank his own from the bottle. "La Redfern offered me twice what Madame Viellard did-enough to keep me in opium for weeks. I strongly suspect old Reverend Hellfire isn't going to get a whole lot of money once expenses are met, but I also suspect that's no longer the point."

"Wonderful." January sighed, too used to the rivalries between Creole society and the lately come Americans to even attempt to argue the matter logically. Maybe Ma dame Lalaurie had been trying to pick her rival Redfern's pocket.

"So if you've got your music with you, Maestro," added Uncle Bichet, a thin old freedman who still bore on his face the tribal scarrings of the African village where he'd been born, "I opine you.can make a good five dollar this evenin'-or ten, if you want to walk over by the Washington and play the piano there."

"Not this evening." January reflected ruefully that tonight was the only occasion in the past ten years on which he stood to make more from his medical skills than from his piano playing. "But I do need to go to the Washington, if that's where Monsieur Viellard's to be found. Hannibal, can I beg your assistance?" At a Creole society ball, January knew, a man of color could enter without problems, provided he knew his place and kept to it. But the matter would almost certainly be otherwise at a function given largely by Americans.

They collected Cyrus and the horses from the courtyard in the front of the hotel. As the three men walked the crushed-shell path along the lakefront toward the Wash ington Hotel, January asked, "What's Madame Redfern doing running the Committee? She's newly a widow and just over being sick, at that."

Hannibal shrugged. He had a fresh bottle of Madame Viellard's champagne in hand, but aside from a slight lilt to his well-bred, Anglo-Irish French he didn't show the wine's effect-not that he ever did unless well and truly in the wind. "If you know that much about her you'll know of her determination to figure in society-society as Americans understand it, that is. They're a repellently godly lot."

Away from the hotels the darkness lay warm and silken, thick with the smell of water and decaying foliage, and the drumming of cicadas in the trees.

"What else do you know about her?"

"Redfern's late lamented owned a plantation down the river from Twelve-Mile Point and, as you say, has just shuffled off this mortal coil. But since God has almost universally been known to make exceptions to social rules if you hand His Representatives enough money, I suppose it's perfectly acceptable for her to carry on whatever chicanery necessary for the good of the Church. You thinking of marrying La Redfern for her money? I toyed with the notion but gave it up."

January laughed. "Just curious. A friend of mine had a run-in with her." He wondered if there were any way of getting up to Spanish Bayou to have a look at the little house on Black Oak.

"Just as well." Hannibal sighed. "The Redfern plantation's on the block for about a quarter its worth, for debts -the man owed money to everyone in town except me and she's selling off the slaves for whatever they'll fetch. They don't think her creditors are going to realize thirty cents on the dollar."

"Twenty-five," said January, mindful of the conversation he'd overheard.

"Ah. Well. There you have it. So much for cutting a figure in society." He took a long pull from the bottle, a dark silhouette against the gold-sprinkled lapis of the lake.

Cyrus Viellard, walking behind with both horses on lead, added, "I hear she still got that little place next by Spanish Bayou, that they can't sell for debt cos of some way her daddy tied it up." He spoke diffidently, as was his place. "Michie Fazende and Michie Calder, that was owed money, they're fit to spit.` But it won't do her no good neither, cos it ain't a farm or anything like that."

Just a place where she could conceal poison from her husband, thought January, as they mounted the rear steps of the Washington Hotel and made their way through the kitchen quarters to where a waiter said they'd find "all them ladies havin' a to-do."

It was always difficult to get more than a general impression of a woman in the deep mourning of new widowhood. Entering the ballroom built behind the Washington Hotel, January had an impression of a stout little figure of about Cora Chouteau's height but approximately twice the girl's slight weight. Though the ballroom was illuminated as brilliantly as myriad oil lamps would permit, black crepe and veils hid everything of her except the fact that she was on the verge of poverty: despite considerable making over to lower the waist and the addition of far more petticoats than the skirt had originally been designed to accommodate, Mrs. Redfern's weeds were about fifteen years out of fashion. As January approached-with a proper air of deference-he had a vague view of a pale, square face and fair hair under the veils, but his clearest impression of her was her voice, sharp as the rap of a hammer. She was speaking English to a purpling and indignant Madame Viellard.

"I'm sorry if you feel that way, Mrs. Viellard, but as I've explained to you before, the musicians signed a contract." Mrs. Redfern jerked her head to indicate a slender, gray-clothed man, like an anthropomorphized rat, hovering at her side. "Mr. Fraikes drew it up and it does specify that it is legally binding no matter what the date-"

"What is she saying?" All her chins aquiver, Madame Viellard turned to her son. Henri was a fat, fair, bespectacled man in his early thirties whose sheeplike countenance amply attested the relationship. "Does that woman dare tell me that the men I hired for my own party are forbidden by law to play?"

"It's the contract, Mother," explained Henri Viellard in French. "It invalidates even a prior agreement. I'm sure the men didn't read it before signing. It isn't usual-"

"Isn't usual! Who ever heard of musicians signing a contract! They should never have done so! I paid them to play, and play they shall!"

Ranged among the buffet tables, a group of ladies in mourning or half-mournirig-the fever had as usual struck hardest in the American community-observed the scene with whispers and gestures concealed behind black lace fans. With the utmost air of artless coincidence, they jockeyed among themselves for a position next to the short, burly, rather bull-like man in their midst. His self-satisfied expression accorded ill with his ostentatiously plain black clothing: presumably the Reverend Micajah Dunk. On the other side of the buffet the musicians themselves were gathered, every violinist, cellist, coronetist, clarionetist, and flautist January had ever encountered in nearly a year of playing balls and recitals in the city since his return last November. They clutched their music satchels and looked profoundly uneasy, and who could blame them? They played for both Americans and Creoles, turn and turn about. If they fell seriously afoul of Madame Viellard they could lose half their income, and if of Mrs. Redfern, the other half.

Hannibal sidled over to an excessively turned-out American gentleman in a cutaway coat with a watch chain like a steamboat hawser. "Sharp practice," the fiddler commented in English. "Making them sign a contract."

The man spat a stream of tobacco juice in the general direction of the sandbox in the corner. "Got to be sharp to stay in business, friend." The ballroom was hazy, not only with the mosquito-smudges burning in the windows but with cigar smoke, and stank of both it and expectorated tobacco.

"Mrs. Redfern's a better businessman than poor Otis was, if you ask me," added another man, stepping close.

He had a weaselly face and an extravagant mustache, and spoke with the accent of an Englishman. "Of course, the same could be said of my valet. Pity her father's no longer with us. Damn shame, her being sold out like that, but it would have happened anyway."

"Anyone know what's being done with her slaves?" asked somebody else. "She had a few right smart ones." "Like the one ran off with the money Otis got from selling those six boys in town two weeks ago?"

The American spat again.

"Damn fool, Otis, insisting that money be paid him cash, not a bank draft or credit-but that's the man for you! Hubert Granville tells me-"

"I hear she didn't get but four-five hundred for good cane hands. Damn shame." The American looked at January, and said to Hannibal, "That your boy? Looks like a prime hand. They're paying eleven, twelve hundred apiece for good niggers up in the Missouri Territory. I could give you a good price for him."

"My friend," said Hannibal gently, "is a free man. We're here with a message for Mr. Viellard."

"Oh." The American shrugged as if the matter were of little moment. "No offense meant." He was still looking at January as if calculating price. January had to lower his eyes, and his hand closed hard where it lay hidden in the pocket of his coat.

"None taken." The softness of his own voice astonished January, as if he listened to someone else and thought, How can he be so docile? What kind of man is he?

Again he wondered why he had left Paris, except that to have remained there would have cost him his sanity from pain and grief.

Evidently some compromise was reached among Mrs. Redfern; her lawyer, Mr. Fraikes; and Madame Viellard.

Henri Viellard escorted his mother in queenly dudgeon toward the ballroom door, and Mrs. Redfern bustled importantly back to relate the results, whatever they were, to the committee of widows basking in the radiance of the Reverend Dunk. January noticed how the Reverend clasped Mrs. Redfern's mitted hands and bent his head close down to hers as they spoke, like an old friend.

He guessed that money had changed hands somewhere.

Hannibal touched Henri Viellard's sleeve as he passed, and drew him aside in the carved square arch of the ballroom door. "Monsieur Viellard?" said January. "I've come from Mademoiselle Janvier's house."

He did not mention that he was Madamoiselle Janvier's brother. He'd met Viellard before but wasn't sure the man remembered him, or remembered that he was Minou's brother. It wasn't something a protector wanted to know about his pla??e.

But Viellard turned pale at his words, gray eyes behind the heavy slabs of spectacle lenses widening with alarm. "Is she all right? Has she...? I mean..."

"She's started labor, yes," said January softly. "I don't anticipate there being real danger, but it's going to be difficult for her, and she's in a good deal of pain. I'm going back there as quickly as I can. And if something does go wrong, I think you should be there."

"Of course." The young planter propped his spectacles with one chubby forefinger-their lenses were nearly half an inch thick and the weight of them dragged them down the film of sweat on his nose. "It's..

. it's early, isn't it? Does she seem well? I'll be-"

"Henri." His mother's voice spoke from the hall. "Do come along. Our guests will be waiting."

Henri poised, frozen, lace-edged handkerchief clutched in hand, eyes flicking suddenly back to January, filled with indecision, grief, and fathoms-deep guilt. Then he looked back at his mother.

"Come along, Henri." Madame Viellard did not raise her voice, and though no woman of breeding would have held out hand or arm for any man, even her son, merely the gaze of those protruding, pewter-colored eyes was like the peremptory yank of a chain.

Viellard dabbed at his lips. "I'll be there when I can." His eyes, looking across at January's, begged for understanding. "You'll tell her?"

"I'll tell her."

Dominique was in hard labor all night. Weakening, exhausted, propped in the birthing-chair by her friends and her mother, she clung when she could to her brother's big hands. Only once, when she was laid back on her bed half-unconscious to rest between contractions, did she whisper Henri Viellard's name.

Shortly after dawn she gave birth to a son.

"I expect Henri will be along soon," remarked Hannibal. He had walked over from the Hotel St. Clair with a napkin full of crayfish patties left over from the buffet and a bottle and a half of champagne.

"Having gotten at least some musicians back, the company was determined to make the most of them.

The dancing broke up only a half hour ago."

"Throw those out." January regarded the patties with a dour eye. "They've been out all night and they're probably bad. It would serve Madame Viellard right if half her precious guests died of food poisoning.

And drink to Charles-Henri." He uncorked one of the champagne bottles, drank from it, and handed it to his friend. "Poor little boy."

"With a father as wealthy as Henri Viellard he's a not so-poor little boy." Hannibal followed January into the house, leaving the crayfish patties, napkin and all, on a corner of the porch for the cats. "He'll have an education-not that three years at Trinity ever did me noticeable good-and with luck a start in business.

My beautiful Madame Levesque... my exquisite Phlosine... Catherine, I kiss your hands and feet..:"

He made his way around the ladies in the room, pouring out champagne. "To Charles-Henri."

January crossed through the little dining room to his sister's bedroom, cleaned now of the smells of blood and childbirth. Sandalwood burned in a china brazier, to sweeten the air. Olympe had never come. There were a thousand plausible reasons, most probable of which being that others simply needed her care, but he felt the clutch of fear in his heart that he would return, and open her door, and find what he had found in Paris.

He pushed the thought away. Iph?g?nie and Madame Clisson had tidied the room, bathed Charles-Henri, made Dominique as comfortable as they could. She slept now, haloed in white lace and morning light, her son nestled against her side.

Poor little boy.

She had done by him the best she could, January reflected. She had borne him to a white man, and a wealthy one. Her son would, as Hannibal said, have an education, probably a good one. He would be fair-skinned-octoroon, according to the usage of the country, and with any luck featured more like his seven white great-grandparents than the single African woman who had been brought across the Atlantic in chains to be raped by her captors. That helped.

It helped, too, to be a boy, especially if one's father took care to see his son apprenticed to a trade or profession and not raised as a "gentleman" in the expectation of an inheritance that might never come.

H?lier the water seller was a pla??e's child, whose father had married a white lady and lost all interest in his Rampart Street mistress and her crippled son.

For girls it was another matter.

Too many among the respectable free colored looked askance at the daughters of the pla??es, assuming automatically they would be what their mothers had been. Rose Vitrac had told him about the pressure put on her pupil Genevi?ve by the girl's mother, for Genevi?ve-before the fever had wasted her-was a beautiful girl, seventeen and with the fair-skinned beauty so valued by the whites. Even for those girls who had the strength to battle their mothers' expectations, it was sometimes hard to marry among the free colored.

And if you wanted something different, something besides being a mistress or a wife?

An education is almost a guarantee of a solitary road, Rose Vitrac had said, propping her spectacles on her nose in the stifling dark of the attic room above the school she had fought so hard to establish. Yet there had been that bright triumph in her eye as she'd added, I've made it thus far.

On his way to the little railway station later that morning-accompanied by Hannibal, who was declaiming The Rape of the Lock to egrets, cattle, and passing market-women for reasons best known to himself-January turned his steps to the modest cottage on Music Street where Uncle Louis Corbier rented rooms to colored professionals for the season. The old man himself was still asleep, but January ascertained from a servant girl sweeping the porch of the boardinghouse next door that no couple from town had arrived yesterday to sleep on the old man's floor and replace his departed servants in tending to his guests.

Something must have happened, he thought uneasily, and occupied his mind through the short train journey with appalling scenarios of what he would find when he reached Olympe's house.

What he found, of course, was young Gabriel competently making a roux in the kitchen for that evening's gumbo, while Ti-Paul gravely spun pots on the kitchen floor. "Mama, she's on her way out there now," the boy reported to January. "Juliette Gallier's son was took bad with fever yesterday, so Mama figured Aunt Minou would be all right, with all her friends there that've had babies, and you, and Grandmere, even if a message didn't get to you in time. She left 'bout an hour ago."

January nodded. "Did Nicole Perret and her husband stay in town for some reason?"

The boy frowned. "I don't know," he said. "I know they were getting ready Thursday night-they sent their heavy stuff that Zizi-Marie and I packed-and they were going to go Friday morning first thing. I walked past there today and the place is all locked and the plank up." He set the skillet on the back of the stove and gathered the assortment of bowls from the table in which sausage, onion, celery, and peppers had already been neatly chopped. "You care to come back here for supper before you go on to the Hospital, Uncle Ben? I'm making callas."

"You got a deal there." Young as he was, Gabriel made the best deep-fried rice-balls January had ever tasted. After checking on his brother-in-law's progresss-carcely necessary, since Paul Corbier had never developed the jaundice stage of the fever and was well on his way to recovery-exhausted as he was, January made his way down Rue Toulouse to the Cathedral to hear Mass and light candles for the safe recovery of Minou, and the safe passage of little Charles-Henri through the coming weeks. It was difficult to find a space unoccupied before the Virgin's altar to set the two new votives. You would need a forest fire of lights, he thought, gazing at the soft-glowing holocaust of yellow wax, to safeguard all who stand in need of it now.

He set up a candle for Cora Chouteau as well. Returning home in the smoky glare of sunset he kept glancing behind him, certain that Shaw was watching the place, positive that he was again being followed.

He checked the gar?onni?re thoroughly-or as thoroughly as his fatigue would let him-for signs that it had been entered, then lay for a long time listening to the distant rattle of drums from the direction of Congo Square. He wondered whether Cora had succeeded in getting herself caught for urging Gervase to escape and if she had given his name to the City Guards.

The worst of it was that he didn't know. He didn't know how he could find out, either.

He could only wait for the trap to close. He slept, but not well.

The specter of arrest followed him through the streets to Olympe's house after dark, and from there to the Hospital, to be obliterated only by blind weariness, heat, and stench. Following Soublet with his leeches and his cupping-glasses among the bodies of the sick, still he felt a kind of weary anger at the bright silken figures -sipping negus on the galleries of the Hotel St. Clair, in the ballroom of the Washington Hotel. How dare they, he thought, fight their trivial buttles over which musicians would play at whose ball when four miles away men and women were struggling for their lives against an invisible slayer and the air dripped with the stink of corpses smoke, and death?

Unreasonable, he knew. If you have the money to flee, why picnic in the garden of the Angel of Death?

His mother's presence in the city, or Minou's, or that horrible iron-voiced Madame Redfern's, wouldn't lessen the suffering of H?lier or that poor Italian, since beyond doubt they would only lock themselves behind their shutters and smudges as everyone else in town was doing.

Except people like Olympe. And Marie Laveau.

And Delphine Lalaurie. And Rose Vitrac.

He returned to the house on the Rue Burgundy through morning heat that he knew was already too overwhelming to permit sleep. Gabriel had sent a jar of ginger water home with him yesterday afternoon.

He was sitting on the steps drinking the last of it-and reading an editorial in the Gazette that claimed all reports of fever in the city were the base falsifications of alarmists-when the gate to the yard opened, and Rose Vitrac stepped through.

She looked around the yard, shielding her eyes. January recalled telling her he lived in the gar?onni?re behind his mother's house, but didn't remember whether he'd described the house or said what street it was on. He must have, he thought, ducking back into his room to catch up his waistcoat and put it on. He was buttoning it-and his shirt-as he clattered down the wooden steps.

She looked up, tension and uncertainty leaving her face like shadow before light. "I'm sorry to trouble you like this, M'sieu Janvier."

"My fault." He led her into the shadows under the gallery, and brought up one of the wooden chairs there. "I meant to come check on your girls Saturday, but I was called out to Milneburgh to care for my sister. She's not ill," he added, seeing the flash of genuine concern on Rose Vitrac's face. "She was brought to bed, safely delivered of a son. I did see Marie-Neige's mother for just a moment-she's a friend of my mother-but with everything happening I wasn't able to speak to her." Mademoiselle Vitrac shook her head. "It isn't the girls," she told him. "Though Antoinette is still a bad case; the others seem a little better. It's Cora Chouteau. She never came back Friday night, and I'm afraid some harm has befallen her."