02 Fever Season bj-2

by Barbara Hambly

  "Shut up," said January, cold and soft, and returned his eyes to Shaw. He kept his words level, almost conversational. "And what does Chief Tremouille say about this version of events?"

  "Not anythin' yet. 'Ceptin' that the Chief called me on the carpet for lettin' you have a weapon, which is a clear violation of the city's code. Roarke's countersuin' you -and the City Guards-and havin' me prosecuted personally for conspiracy to cause a slave uprisin'."

  For a moment January could only sit, openmouthed with disbelief, while Shaw scratched under his shirt again. "Tremouille," the policeman added, "is not real pleased." The man's long, almost lipless mouth was relaxed as if he spoke of the antics of somebody else's rogue horse, but January could see the queer chilly light that burned far back in the gray eyes. "Whatever Tremouille thinks about Roarke's storytellin' abilities, the fact remains that when I came in it was to see you chargin' him with a knife, and the ax stuck in the wall. And there's also the fact that we don't know the names of most of the victims-and those whose names we do know of course Roarke's claimin' he couldn't tell from Adam's off ox and they was never within a thousand yards of the Jolly Boatman or St. Gertrude's Clinic or Mr. Liam Roarke, so there. We don't have one flyspeck of evidence of any specific person bein' there."

  Slow flame started in January's belly. "What about the people on the boat?"

  Shaw reached thoughtfully down to the table, to turn the blue porcelain bowl of jambalaya a quarter-turn.

  "They say they'd rather not testify."

  The flame condensed to a core, cold now, like a fist of lead under his breastbone. "Just like that?"

  "Just like that." The gray eyes met his. Under the water-colored mildness he saw the distant, steely glint of anger to match his own. "I just come from seein' 'em. There's a good deal of feelin' down along the levee-some was even talkin' of marchin' on the Cabildo an' organizin' a jail delivery. Not that Mr.

  Loudermilk had anything to do with that. He's a Christian and he thought it'd be right Christian to buy all them filibusters free liquor. And I'm sure he had legitimate business earlier this afternoon up on Marais Street, where the Grilles live... The Grilles bein' the folk that can't remember now whether they were ever on that keelboat or not. Edouard and his brother, Robert, and their sister, Manon. A gal sellin' berries off'n a tray saw him, she thinks."

  "And have you," asked January, surprised a little at the cold conversational tone of his voice, "told Monsieur Tremouille about this yet?"

  "No." Shaw turned the bowl another quarter-turn. "No need for the Chief to know about it 'fore the trial.

  If there's a trial." He shrugged. "Seems Roarke's feelin' poorly, with all the to-do last night. I'm thinkin' it might - so be he needs to be bled."

  You could have dropped a picayune-bit into the silence, thought January, and heard the splash it made in Paris. The stillness went on, as much of the heart as of the air. He was aware of Hannibal's eyebrows going up, considering the idea; of the anger still alive in his breast, but cold now, like poison; of Shaw watching him beneath those straight colorless lashes, not speculative now, but only waiting.

  Waiting for what he would say.

  He didn't know what he was going to say until the words came out. "I can't."

  Shaw neither replied nor moved.

  The words stuck in his throat, as if he were trying to dislodge individual lumps of broken stone with every syllable.

  "I may make my living as a piano player, but I did take an oath. And that oath says, `Do no harm.' I can't..." He paused, oddly aware of his own breath in his lungs: Gabriel and Zizi-Marie going to help the Perrets pack; the woman Nanie searching through the charity ward, night after night. Someone saying, They just bought their freedom.

  Cora walking away into the darkness of Rue de l'Hopital.

  The weather was cooling; by the feel of the evening air there would be frost that night. Fever season was done. People would be coming back to town.

  And there would be holes, in the fabric of people's lives.

  There were men and women, confused, terrified, somewhere in the frontier territories of Missouri or the west of Georgia, begging and insisting they were free to men who did not speak their language, whose reply to their clumsy pleas would be a laugh and a blow. Men and women who were going to spend the rest of their lives at backbreaking agricultural work. The second man who kidnapped me was the local magistrate... I don't go up there no more. Men and women who were going to die of pneumonia and malnutrition and exhaustion in thin-walled shacks like the one in which he'd slept at Spanish Bayou less than a week ago.

  He closed his eyes. Do no harm.

  The anger pounded in his head like the hammer of a migraine. "I can't."

  "Just thought I'd ask."

  Get Soublet.

  He closed his mouth hard on the words. If you won't do it, don't tell him who will. "Is Roarke really poorly?"

  Shaw nodded. "Happens, in jail. Likely it's the food. I'll find someone."

  For some reason January remembered Mamzelle Marie, passing through the big downstairs room of the Cabildo, cloak flickering like a conjure of invisibility around her. Her eyes touching his.

  She'd set the man up for this. Without knowing how he knew, he knew.

  He rested his forehead on his fist, and listened to Shaw's footfalls, barely audible, retreat across the yard and blend with the waking noises of the street.

  Seventeen

  Only one case of the cholera was brought into Charity Hospital that night. Soublet did not appear at all, and neither Emil Barnard nor Mamzelle Marie came in, nor were they needed. There was frost on the ground in the morning. At six, January made his way to St. Anthony's Chapel, to make his confession and hear early Mass. He prayed for guidance, and for Rose Vitrac's safety, wherever she was. When he came out the air was crisp, stinking of the usual city stink of sewage but unfouled by the smudges of the plague fires. Carriages jingled by, coachmen saluting with their whips to friends on the banquette, men and women within nodding or touching their hats. A child dodged around him, clutching her doll. Street-vendors cried gingerbread and umbrellas and chairs to mend.

  The following Sunday, after Mass, he met Shaw by chance in the Place d'Armes. The policeman informed him laconically that Dr. Soublet had been called to the Cabildo. After being bled eight times in two days and dosed with "heroic" quantities of salts of mercury and turpentine, Liam Roarke had died in his cell.

  Of those men and women who had been stolen from their homes, or dragged off the banquettes on their way to their friends' houses or to doctors' late in the night, nothing further was ever heard. Through October and November, and on into the fogs and bonfires of Christmastime, Abishag Shaw made inquiries, patiently writing to slave dealers in Natchez, in St. Louis, in Jackson, none of whom, of course, knew anything about the Perrets, Robois Roque, or any of the other dozen or half-dozen or score or however many it had been. Hog-Nose Billy, when he confessed to kidnapping people off the street as a sideline during H?lier's illness, didn't know how many it was, as he'd been more or less drunk half the time. (It serves me right, H?lier had said, giggling, gesturing around him at the opium-dazed patients of Soublet's clinic-and indeed, thought January, it did.) Nor had the drunken Dr. Furness any better idea. "Hell, we didn't keep track or nuthin'," he said, when Shaw and January spoke to him in his jail cell. "Bring 'em in and get 'em out, that was Liam's way, and didn't we just have our hands full keepin' 'em from gettin' sick while they was there. I do recall as we lost two or three." And he shrugged. January wrote, too, over Shaw's signature when Shaw was too taken up with his other duties to have time; and kept writing, to newspapers, to clergy, to anyone who might know anything. It was early established that no New Orleans dealer had purchased slaves from Roarke- "None who'll admit of it, anyways," remarked Shaw sourly. He did not hear from Rose.

  It was a bad winter for January. Whether due to loss of income during the fever season or to the general slump in sugar prices, many of his pupils' par
ents elected not to send their children to piano lessons when they returned to town. "It isn't anything personal, you understand, Monsieur Janvier." Lettice Sarasse fanned herself with a delicate circle of stiffened yellow silk. "Only times are a little difficult now, you understand."

  "I understand." The class he held in his mother's parlor shrank to two-Catherine Clisson's eight-year-old daughter, Isabel, and little Narcisse Brize-and he lost every one of his white pupils. "Nothing to do with your teaching, M'sieu," explained Madame Lalaurie, slender and queenly in the hot sunlight of her parlor, Bastien in his jam-colored uniform lingering behind her in the door. "It's just that I've come to the conclusion that the lessons aren't doing the girls any good. But I shall certainly recommend you to those of my friends who seek instruction for their children, and to my good Monsieur Huny at the Opera."

  But November turned to December, and Christmas drew on, and there was little money for coffee at the market or to attend the Opera himself. It was Hannibal, who had gone back to his make-and-scrape existence with the return of Livia Levesque and her cook to New Orleans on the fifteenth of October, who first suggested that there might be something more to the matter than simply "hard times." "You haven't actually been going around saying you're going back to medicine, have you?" he asked, perched on Livia's sofa rosining the bow of his violin after January's two pupils had departed one afternoon. "I had the impression you didn't think you'd do well at it, but if Ker or one of the beaux sabreurs of the local medical community decided to become your patron..."

  "Ker couldn't do a thing for me." Puzzled, January turned from the piano keys. "He said I was welcome to work at Charity anytime, but I know what that work pays a junior surgeon. The only offer I had," he added wryly, "was from Roarke, as a means of getting me into the clinic to murder. Who said I was going back to medicine?"

  "Froissart." Hannibal named the manager of the Orleans Ballroom, and tightened a peg. Beside him on the sofa, Les Mesdames-Livia's two stout, butter-colored cats -slept with their paws over their noses just as if they hadn't finished their daily round of hissing and posturing at one another fifteen minutes ago. The December afternoon was a misty one and the slow chilling of the light made January tired and depressed, a holdover from childhood memories of the grinding season. "I asked him why he'd hired Rich Maissie to play the St. Stephen's Day ball next week, instead of you."

  "Maissie?" January had read of the ball in the newspapers, and had been expecting a note from Leon Froissart any day. He'd only thought the fussy little Parisian late with his arrangements.

  "Well, he hemmed and hawed and wouldn't look me in the eye and said something about that he'd heard you'd gone back to medicine and weren't playing anymore, and anyway he'd already spoken to Maissie about the rest of the season..."

  "The rest of the season?" Nobody contracted, save by the night.

  The white man's dark eyes met his, worried and questioning. January had the odd feeling of having been punched beneath the sternum; the sense of seeing the first sores of something incurable on his own skin.

  "No," he said slowly. "No, I haven't spoken to him at all." It was childish to feel hurt; to remember the quadroon boys calling him sambo from a safe distance away.

  "I thought it was strange, myself." Hannibal angled his fiddle a little toward the glass panes of the door.

  January got to his feet, lit a spill from the fireplace, and touched it to the branches of tallow work-candles on the piano, the table, the sconces on the wall. His mother would fuss-it was barely four-but the room was genuinely dark. "And I thought he was lying, but I couldn't imagine why. Still can't."

  "Could you ask around?" said January worriedly, shaking out the spill. "Find out?" He'd been back in New Orleans now exactly thirteen months. It had been his im pression that balls and parties began earlier than Christmastime, at least among the town dwellers, though the big families didn't come in from the plantations until after the grinding was done. But with no notes or requests coming in he'd thought that perhaps the fever-or maybe the summer's "hard times"-had affected the Creoles' enthusiasm for holding dances whenever and wherever they could.

  But Uncle Bichet, who played the violoncello, shook his head when January had asked him about the matter in the shadowy vaults of the market one afternoon. "I thought you managed to make some remark about Ma'am Soniat that got repeated back to her, that she didn't hire you for her little ball last week-either your or that mama of yours." The old man shook his head again and dusted the powdered sugar of a beignet from his fingers.

  "You know you got to be careful, Ben." Bichet eased himself back on the brick of the bench where he sat. "These Creole ladies, they take against a man, they tell all their friends. You not talkin' out of turn, since you came back from Paris, are you?"

  "I didn't think Creole ladies even knew one musician from the next," replied January bitterly. "Let alone paid attention to what we say-and no, I haven't had any particular opinion about Solange Soniat. And my mother slanders everyone in town, and I've never been blackballed because of it. Have times changed that much?"

  "Ben," sighed the old man, "times changin' now so that I don't know what to expect." Steamboats whistled sadly, invisible through fog gritty with soot and thick with the burnt-sweet smell of a thousand sugar vats. "All I know is you wasn't playing at the Soniats' last week, or the Bringiers' Wednesday, and that Richard Maissie that can't find his way through a country dance with a compass and a Chickasaw guide just been hired to play the Opera when they open with Euryanthe next month. You got somebody real mad, and that's for sure."

  Xavier Peralta? January wondered. It was true that he'd run afoul of that haughty old planter last winter, when it had appeared that either he or the Peralta's son was going to hang for the murder of an octoroon beauty at a ball. But in clearing himself, he had cleared Peralta's son as well; and though at one point Peralta had attempted to kidnap him and put him on a boat out of the country, he'd gotten the impression that the planter now considered the matter closed.

  In any case a few enquiries among the market-women satisfied him that Peralta pc're was still on his chief plantation at Alhambra, where he had been since May. And certainly a man who owned five plantations and nearly four hundred slaves had better things to think about at grinding time than scuppering the career of a piano player.

  But whoever had declared himself-or herself-his enemy, thought January, he or she was almost certainly white. He was asked to play at the Blue Ribbon Balls at the Orleans Ballroom-not so frequently as last winter, to be sure-and Monsieur Froissart showed no embarrassment in dealing with him on those terms.

  Nor did the ballroom manager make mention of passing him over for the St. Stephen's Day subscription dance. January, hoping the matter would be forgotten, said nothing.

  Still, after speaking to Uncle Bichet he began to feel uneasy whenever he passed through the brick carriageway into the courtyard behind the ballroom building, or climbed the service stairs to the ballroom itself above the gambling halls on the lower floor. From childhood he'd never liked the sense of people talking of him behind his back.

  At a Mardi Gras Ball early in February he asked Dominique about it, Dominique masked and radiant in a rose silk Court-dress of sixty years ago: panniered, powdered, and patched, clinging close to Henri's side. Henri for his part did not speak to January or acknowledge that anything had ever passed between them in that little cottage in Milneburgh: but that was only the custom of the country. It wasn't done to admit that one's mistress had a brother who was a black man, whether or not that brother had saved her life. January didn't grudge it exactly. He was in fact moderately gratified to see how assiduous the fat man was of his mistress's comfort, fetching her pastries and lemonade and making sure she always had a seat in one of the olive velvet chairs around the three sides of the dance floor.

  When Minou finally came over to the ivy-swagged dais, January explained what Hannibal and Uncle Bichet had told him. "You heard anything about that?" he asked his
sister, under the soft strains of a Haydn air played to cover the between-dance gabble of flirting and champagne. "About someone wanting to have me blackballed? Starting rumors? Though God knows what they'd be about."

  What were the rumors of Rose Vitrac about? The thought made him shiver.

  "God knows what any rumor is ever about, p'tit."

  Minou tapped his wrist with her lacy fan, concern for him in her eyes. After four months she'd put back a little of the flesh her illness had cost her; and though she still looked tired and brittle, her smile was just as lovely. "It will blow over, cher. I've heard nothing from Mama, and of course Henri wouldn't know-I'm not sure Henri knows Jackson was re-elected. Or was elected the first time, for that matter," she added thoughtfully, though the corners of her mouth tucked up, as they always did when she spoke of her lover, and her eyes sought out the enormous pink-and- blue satin shape by the buffet, like an omnivorous pillow devouring oysters with the other Creole gentlemen. "I'm not sure it would be best to ask him, for fear of making the situation worse. All one can do is... well!"

  January didn't know how she did it, since she wasn't looking in the direction of the triple doorway into the ballroom's vestibule at the top of the stairway from below; but she caught sight of a mother and daughter entering, and turned her head. "She must want that poor little thing out of the house! I'd have said Marie-Neige was too young to come to balls for a year yet."

  It was Agnes Pellicot, with Marie-Neige.

  The poor girl looked painfully shy in her grown-up gown, green-striped satin cut low over small, lush breasts. Her face peeked shyly from an explosion of fluffy dark curls beneath a Circassian turban and pearls. Her two older sisters-the eldest of the four, Marie-Anne, was with her own protector in the cluster around the buffet tableswalked behind her. Marie-Louise wore an expression of miffed suspicion, but Marie-Therese seemed serene in the knowledge that no prospective suitor of hers-or Marie-Louise's, for that matter-was going to find the chubby fourteen-year-old any competition for the elder two. January knew better than to catch the girl's eye, though he suspected she'd be grateful to see a familiar face.