"Wonderful stuff, opium. Twenty-five drops for a penny, old Lafr?nni?re charges, which is fine if you've got a penny. My father would be proud."
"Your father?"
"Giles Lapatie, of Beau Rivage plantation. A gentleman of the belief that children should be neither seen nor heard nor acknowledged, if they're not as comely as they might be. Educated, yes. Given promises, yes-promises are cheap. Provided for, no. But I'm sure you're familiar with the type. What's that?"
"Philom?ne, at the vegetable market, sent them along."
"Leavings from my betters? Wrap them up for the helpless? How very kind of her." H?lier knocked the basket aside with his stick. For a moment there was no sound but the mice-feet of the rain. "And what about yourself? Come with a few pennies for opium? Maybe make a little music to cheer up the sufferer, since music after all is free?" His voice slurred just a little; January guessed he'd been dosing himself on whatever he could come by.
In a different tone, he went on, "I seem to remember it was you that unlatched me from that hell pit.
Thank you. Soublet seemed to think if they unjointed every bone of my body they could straighten me out, the fool. Lalaurie just stood by rubbing his hands, watching like a schoolgirl when they put the stallion to the mare."
"One of my pupils in Paris had her hands crippled by a 'patented finger-stretcher' her parents were convinced would improve her playing," said January. "It's the fashion, these days."
"Oh, well, I'm so glad to be in fashion." The darkness in the shed was almost complete, but January saw the twisted man's mouth quirk into an ironic grin. "I suppose the priests would say I deserved it. And maybe I did. What can I do for you, my friend?"
"I'm looking for information," said January. "You know everyone in town; hear everything. A friend of mine disappeared off the street last Friday night. It was while you were in Soublet's, but since then you might have heard something."
H?lier tilted his head a little, peering up at January like a turtle under the weight of its shell. His back was to the fluttering rush-dips; impossible to read either his face or his voice. "Disappeared, did she? What sort of friend?"
"A young girl, maybe twenty or twenty-one. Very thin, dark but not Congo black. I think she was wearing a red dress and red-and-black shoes. She would have been coming along Rue de l'Hopital, sometime around midnight."
Helier considered for a time, then shook his head, or made a motion that had once been a headshake but now involved his shoulders and upper back as well. "Have you checked in the Swamp? Along the levee?
She might have met a personable gentleman-maybe even a wealthy white man who promised to look after her and her son."
"She had no son," said January, aware that the last remark did not concern any event of Friday night.
"And she was just coming away from seeing a lover for whom she had made considerable sacrifice."
"The sacrifices of women, pah. They're like cats. They'll park their bottoms on the warmest chair."
January wondered what had been the reaction of H?lier's mother, when Giles Lapatie had refused further support of their son because of his deformity.
"What about Marie Laveau?" he asked. "To what length would she go, if she thought someone were a threat to her; if she thought someone knew something about her? Had seen her, perhaps, where she wasn't supposed to be?" She was waiting on the porch, in the twilight... The water seller giggled. "The whore-bitch poisoner who blackmails half the town? Mustn't say anything against her." He put a finger to his lips in owlish malice. "You'll wake up one morning to find a cross of salt on your back step and no one in the town willing to talk to you, for fear of her. If your friend ran foul of that heathen bawd she'd best cover her tracks; Laveau's hand is everywhere."
Had it been Mamzelle Marie whom Cora had met that night on the street?
He watched her that night, through a lead-tinged curtain of exhaustion: sponging off the bodies of the sick, holding the hands or heads of the dying. Her face was impassive as she bent down to listen to the broken ravings of a young Irishman-gathering secrets? Not much of importance in this place, January reflected bitterly. Charity Hospital was the final refuge of the poor, those without families to care for them, with only their hopes of making a fortune in Louisiana. And most would leave their bones in its soggy, heaving earth.
She saw me, stopped to watch me pass...
And he saw again how the voodooienne's head had turned, dark eyes taking in every detail of the street.
Marie Laveau at Black Oak. Of course Emily Redfern couldn't come into town without occasioning comment. January closed his eyes, his head throbbing like a drum.
By three in the morning he knew himself to be too exhausted to continue. He'd helped Barnard carry a woman down to the courtyard for the dead-cart and climbed back up the gallery stairs, but instead of going in again, only stood outside the door, leaning his heac against the doorframe, feeling as if he were slowly sinking into the earth. A wonderful feeling, he thought. Maybe he could fall asleep like this and not have to go to the trouble of walking home and lying down.
"You had a tiring day, M'sieu," the soft soot-and-honey voice said at his side. Turning his head he wondered how Mamzelle Marie knew this. She stood at his elbow and even the bottom edge of that fantastic seven-pointed tignon was dark with wet in the oil lamp's dirty glare "Best for all maybe that you go on home."
She fetched him his hat and coat, and walked with him to the courtyard gate, standing in the torchlight for a time, watching him as he went.
He made his way along Rue Villere, in the district of the vast, stinking charnel-houses of the two cemeteries toward Rue Douane, which would lead him back to thc relative safety of the French town. At this hour the towr was silent, save for the scuttling of rats in the alleyway: leading toward the burial grounds, the incessant whine of mosquitoes, and the roaring of the great reddish roaches and palmetto bugs around the iron lamps suspended above the intersections of the streets.
From the direction of Rue Royale and Canal Streei drifted the fat-off jingle of piano and coronet, where the lamps burned bright in gambling parlors. Insensible of mortality, Hannibal had quoted... What was the rest of it: Careless, reckless, fearless of what's past, present, or to come...
Boccacio's revelers-or was the story in Chaucer?-stumbling over the rotting corpses of the plague's dead. In the windows of the pharmacy across the street huge ornamental retorts glowed like rubies with the candles set behind them, all red, a warning to travelers of what the newspapers still denied. The day's rain had left the streets mucky, breathing with the stinks of wet and decay. Everything had a glitter to it, like the sheen of sweat on a dying man's brow.
In the silence it was easy to believe the disease roved the streets like the angel of death. Easy to half-expect the skeletal white shape of Baron Cemetery, the voodoo lord of the dead, coming around a corner in his top hat and his spectacles.
What was disease, anyway? The cholera that had squeezed the life out of Ayasha like a wet doll, the yellow fever that left him every day wondering if Olympe, or Gabriel, or Hannibal would vanish the way the Perrets or Robois Roque had vanished, struck down in their tracks so swiftly that they could not call for help.
The hair prickled on his neck. He was being followed.
This time by more than one person.
He quickened his pace, hopped over the gutter, and waded down the dragging muck in the middle of Rue Douane, keeping clear of the rough shacks and stucco cottages on either side.
Behind him nothing moved. Only a fleeting impression of something in the already wavering darkness away from the hanging lamps. His first superstitious dread-of the dark stalker Bronze John, the softly clattering bones of the bespectacled Baron-switched immediately to the more real dread of those bearded, whiskered Kaintucks, river pirates and killers who roved the streets looking for drink, or a woman, or a black man to beat up.
Ahead of him a man stepped out of the shadows. Then another, sticks in their hands
. Every house between the Rue Marais behind him and the Rue Tr?m? before was locked, empty, their inhabitants enjoying the breezes of the lake in Milneburgh or Mandeville or Spanish Fort. January doubled on his tracks and bolted for the dark mouth of the Rue Marais. As he did so, another man appeared in the street behind him, running toward him, as all of them were running now.
It was like flight in a dream, the horrible slow movement with the primordial ooze gripping his feet. Grimly he wondered where the City Guards were, who were sup posed to be enforcing a curfew against colored and slaves. He reached the corner of the Rue Marais moments before they did and slithered into the long pass-through which led between two houses to the yard behind. It was a dead end, a cul-de-sac, knee-deep in garbage and night soil, and this house, unlike Agnes Pellicot's, had no convenient window to force. But one of the few advantages January had ever found in looking like a field hand was that he was tremendously strong.
He drove his foot through the jalousies that covered one of the rickety doors, plunged through in a tangle of curtain, in the dark stumbling into and knocking over unseen articles of furniture. He crashed and thrust his way into the front parlor, hearing the men behind him as they broke through into the rear, groped along the wall. He forced himself to slow down, to move carefully, to feel his way until he touched the door that led into the front bedroom.
He shut it behind him, big fingers shaking as they found the key that such rooms nearly always had, turned it in the lock with a click that made him wince. His pursuers were making far too much noise tripping over furniture themselves to hear. "The curse of Cromwell be after ye, ya stupid pillock!"
"Where the Sam Hill'd he go?"
"Ye got no more sense than to leave the lantern in the alley..." Silent, silent, desperately silent he followed the wall around the room, thrust open the casement window that looked onto the pass-through to the next house and opened the shutters, the reddish reflections of lamplight falling through to show him the door into the rear bedroom, the rough, battered-looking chifforobe with its broken mirror, and the big wooden bed, the mosquito-bar tied neatly back above it.
He slithered through, pulling shut the casements and pushing closed the shutters behind him. As he'd suspected, there was another man waiting in the street, but he was watching the front of the house.
January slipped along the pass-through to the rear of the next house. He used one of the scalpels from his bag to slip the latches on the jalousies, then ducked inside.
It didn't buy him much time, but enough to move through that house, and the next, cursing every time he fell over a chair or a table, knowing they could hear, they would follow. Thank God it was, on the whole, too dark for them to trace his foot tracks of garbage and muck. He came out a final window on Rue Bienville, and moved along the walls, his heart in his throat, toward the high stucco wall at the end of the street, behind which sulfurous yellow light flared like the glare of hell.
He heard them running behind him, the slop and suck of mud under their boots, and the slither and splosh as one of them fell. Four men, he saw, glancing back again, three of them with clubs, one with what looked like a rope. Bearded faces half-unseen under slouch hats, but their hands were white. He had half the length of the street on them now and was of a height to reach the top of the wall with his hands at a jump, dragging himself up and over.
The stench of the place was like liquid muck in his lungs, but at this point he cared nothing about that. The cemetery of St. Louis lay before him, a horror of gaping pits and standing water. The little white houses of marble and stucco and stone clustered beyond the darkness, like the huts in a village of the dead.
The dead lay along the wall, wrapped roughly in sheets of cheap osnaburg or canvas, the fabric moving with rats. January dropped down onto the piled corpses, send ing forth the rats in a shrieking horde, and fled, stumbling, sickened, across the pitted ooze and into the black-and-white jumble of shadow that was the tombs.
The disease isn't contagious, he told himself, slipping from tomb to tomb. He dodged behind one, then another, working his way through the dense-packed mazes. I've worked among the dying for three months now and I haven't contracted it yet.
He was gasping, shaking in every limb, nauseated with horror and disgust. Roaches the length of his finger crept through the cracks of marble boxes. A rat perched on the head of a bricked-up sepulcher marked DESLORMES; eating something, January couldn't see what. In a spot of open ground, water had worked and thrust arms and hands and legs and shards of coffin wood up through the earth, as if Bronze John's victims were trying to climb back out of the ground again, and the surfaces of the pools crept and shivered with feeding crawfish.
There were lights by the graveyard gate, and men moving around, slinging sheeted forms, or emaciated and livid bodies picked off the streets, into piles along the wall. Torches stuck in the ground added their grimy light to the glare of pots of burning hide and hair and gunpowder. The men swung around, startled, when January emerged from among the tombs.
"Where you come from, brother?" called out one, and the other grinned and said, "Hey, Joseph, look like we bury this one alive by mistake. We begs your pardon, sir." They bowed mockingly, cheerful themselves to be wielding the shovels instead of waiting for them.
But their leader, standing naked to the waist on the carload of corpses, like Bronze John himself with the torchlight reflected in his eyes, asked, "Where you come from, sir?"
"Over the wall." January gestured back behind him. "I was coming back from the Hospital. I was followed by a gang of white men with clubs."
"I seen them," said the man on the dead-cart. "Pickin' up the dead, I sometimes seen them. Three men, sometimes four, just shapes in the darkness, but they're carryin' clubs. Never stop me, though." And he smiled. "Can I take you somewheres, friend?"
January started to say, "Take me to the Rue Burgundy," but another thought came to his mind. He thought of his brother-in-law, asking him to look out for a friend's missing husband; of a woman in a ragged yellow dress, searching through the charity ward for her man. Of his niece and nephew saying,
"We packed 'em up..."
"Take me over to Rue St. Philippe, if you would." He had no stomach for moving about the dark streets of the French town alone.
The man on the dead-cart smiled again. "Hop right on," he said.
Ten
Eustace D?lier, being a moderately well off advocate of color, owned a snug little town house on Rue St.
Philippe, stuccoed dark rose in color and sporting shutters painted blue. The house was dark and boarded shut, when Bronze John the dead-cart man dropped January off in front of it. "Look like nobody here." In the heat, beneath the swaying oil lamp's flare, he was no more than a sheathing of gold over blackness, and the gleam of eyes.
"Somebody's here," said January. "If you listen you can hear his violin."
The music, though stronger in the rear yard, was still muted and difficult to locate, as if, like the harps of faerie, the soft sad planxty issued from beneath the ground. Janu ary listened at the shutters of first one side of the house, then the other, but the sound grew no clearer. At length he walked backward until he could see the gables in the roof. From the soft bricks of the kitchen loggia he selected a suitable chip-in Paris there were always pebbles for tossing at windows, but Louisiana was founded on silt, and if there was a pebble in the length and breadth of New Orleans it had probably been imported from New York-and threw it at the blue shutters that overlooked the yard.
The violin did not stop. To do so would be an admission that there was a trespasser in the house.
Knowing the houses on both sides of the D?liers' were vacant, he called out softly, "Hannibal!"
He tossed another chip of brick, and called the fiddler's name again. This time the shutter opened. Long dark hair hanging down over his shoulders, the fiddler's face was a pale blur in the hot blackness. "But soft-What light through yonder window breaks? Or attempts to break... Bear you the essen
ces of immortal grape or poppy flower? Good God, Benjamin," Hannibal added in a more normal voice, "what happened at that Hospital of yours? You smell like you've just come out of a common grave."
"I have," replied January somberly. "Come down and let me in. I'm not so comfortable, standing outside in the night."
He pulled off his coat and boots on the open loggia at the house's rear, and ran water from the rain cistern to wash his hands and face and hair. While he was doing this the shutters that led from the loggia into one of the cabinets opened, and Hannibal stood there, resplendent in his usual shabby white linen shirt-he disdained calico-and dark trousers that hung on his too-thin frame like laundry over a fence.
"Mind the bath," he said, holding aloft the cheap tallow candle he carried. It was typical of the fiddler, thought January, that he would purchase candles rather than use the household stores, just as he was sleeping in the attics rather than occupying his unwitting hosts' beds. The bath of which he spoke was an enormous one, copper and expensive, established in its own alcove under the stairs, with a cupboard for towels wedged in behind. "They store the extra chairs here, too, if you'd care to carry one up. We can return it later."
"I'll sit on the floor," said January. "You're right. I came out of a shallow grave tonight, and it's made me wonder about some things that have been happening, since the fever season began."
Hannibal had brought in a cot from the slave quarters across the yard and a table. Half a loaf of bread and some cheese occupied a tin box, beside a jug of water, his violin, and the inevitable stacks of books and newspapers. A bottle of whisky and another of Black Drop-triple-strength tincture of opium-stood, both corked, on a small packing box next to the cot, near a candleholder of pink-and-blue porcelain hung with Austrian glass lusters. He'd collected all the mosquito-bars in the house and rigged them as a sort of tent over the entire bed, including the packing box. At his gesture, both he and January crawled up under the clouds of white gauze, to sit on the worn, patched sheets while the insects hummed fitfully in the darkness outside. As January had suspected, there was a packet of tallow lights inside the packing box, with a Latin copy of Metamorphosis, a stack of old copies of the Bee and the Courier, and a couple of volumes of Goethe.
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