Barbara Hambly - 02 Fever Season

But he did remember, hot summer nights, creeping out of his room to sit on the gallery of the gar?onni?re, waiting for his father to come for him.

That had to have been shortly after they'd moved into the pink cottage on Rue Burgundy. January was eight. His father wouldn't let them leave him, he had told himself. He'd come slipping through the passway into the yard, to tap on his wife's shutters, to stand below the gallery of the gar?onni?re, white teeth gleaming in the moonlight, waiting for his son to come running down to him and be lifted up in those powerful arms.

January had crept out of his room most nights for a year, he remembered-except those nights when St.

Denis Janvier would come to visit his mother-to sit on the gallery in the darkness and wait. The town had been smaller then, with vacant land between the cottages on Rue Dauphine and Rue Burgundy, and between Rue Burgundy and the old town wall, rank marsh where moonsilvered water gleamed between forests of weeds. January had given names to the voices of the frogs crying in the darkness and made up words to the heavy, harsh drumming of the cicadas and the skreek of crickets; the drone of mosquitoes in the blackness. His sister Olympe jeered at him, but he'd waited nonetheless.

His father had never come.

"You have to lie low," he said slowly. Cora looked up, startled, at the sound of his voice. "You have to stay quiet. You can't even think about 'making money somehow' to help Gervase." Even as the words came out of his mouth he couldn't believe he was saying them.

"Slaves are just too expensive these days for them to let him go-or you either. They're watching for you, Cora. You have to get out of New Orleans if you possibly can, and remember that even with the fever on they'll be watching the steamboats on the river and on the lake. You think you can do that?"

She made no reply, neither nodded nor shook her head. But trembling passed over her again, a long silvery shiver, like a horse at the starting line of a race, before they whip the flags down to let them run.

"You send me a note under another name," said January. "Post it after you get to some other city. Set up some way for me to send a letter to you. Can you write?"

"A little," Cora whispered. "My friend taught me." The girl who'd been raped?

"My next lesson with the Lalaurie girls is Friday. Can, you be here Friday evening about sunset?" It meant going to the Hospital again without sleep, but these days that was common enough.

She nodded. Her lips formed the words thank you, without sound. She waited in the dark of the gallery while he slipped away up the pass-through between houses, still as a mouse waiting for the cat to go by.

Idle to suppose that a slave girl accused of murdering her master could turn the accusation on her master's wife. He thought again about poor Anne Montalban, trying to convince her neighbors, and later the police and the press, that Brother Jean, professor of law and pillar of the community, had raped both her and her daughter (and possibly three other local girls who could not be brought to testify) and was in the habit of keeping his niece locked in her room for weeks on end "for the good of her soul." Lying naked on his bed in the heat, hearing the roaring of afternoon rain on the slates, he tried to sleep, and his mind returned to the small, taut face, the wary eyes, of Cora Chouteau.

If you don't fight it's not really rape.

According to Shaw, the Redfern cook had seen Cora slip back into the house, some time after she was supposed to have run away. How long after? In the twilight, Shaw had said.

I slept out in the swamp.

Then after supper Wednesday night Otis Redfern had stumbled against the wall, trying to get outside to the outhouse, gasping and crying with a mouth half-paralyzed, pleading in the heat that there was ice water in his veins. Madame Redfern was found sick in her room only half an hour later, having collapsed from dizziness, too weak to call for help.

Had Cora returned only to steal five thousand dollars and her mistress's pearls? What the hell was five thousand dollars doing lying around the house? Money and credit were impossibly tight this year (his mother had investments, and he'd been hearing about the tightness of money at great length for months).

Most plantations dealt in letters of credit. In the best of times it was rare that even the richest of the planters, the Destrehans or the McCartys, had a thousand dollars cash money readily available.

Or had she gone back to slip powdered monkshood into whatever was being prepared for that evening's meal? Shaw had made no mention of the candy tin. January wondered if he knew about it. He could not imagine a Boston-raised merchant's daughter knowing how to identify monkshood in the woods, much less how to cull and dry it. If Cora didn't prepare the stuff herself, Emily Redfern would have to have acquired it somewhere.

And after all that, were Cora to testify that Emily Ftedfern kept powdered monkshood in the locked cupboard on her own property, and her case failed, she would be in serious trouble indeed.

He closed his eyes. The rain eased off, and a breeze walked across his bare belly and thighs. Why Cora Chouteau concerned him he didn't know. It was madness, insanely risky. He'd learn what he could, but there were things he simply could not do.

At least it was better than lying here obsessively inventorying his own body: did his head ache? (That's just lack of sleep.) Was he thirsty? (That's nothing. It's hot. No worse than yesterday.) Were his joints sore? Nausea? Belly cramps? Was he hot with fever or was it just hotter today? There had been a time when he'd wanted to die, wanted some shining angel from his childhood catechism to appear and tell him he didn't have to be in pain anymore, didn't have to deal with loss and grief and wondering why. But the only psychopomp in town these days was old Bronze John. At the memory of those bloated orange faces, the protruding tongues, the horrible feeble picking of the hands on the coverlets, he'd grope his cheap blue glass rosary from beneath the pillow and whisper, "Be mindful, Oh Lord, of Thy covenant, and say to the destroying Angel, Now hold thy hand..."

Like the choir at Mass the dreary voice of the deadcart man replied from the street, "Bring out yo' dead!"

January rose, and washed, and made his way through streets stinking of summer heat to the Charity Hospital as it was growing dark. The ward was like the waiting room in hell. By lamp glare the color of the fever itself, Dr. Sanchez, another of the physicians volunteering his services, mopped down a withered shop-woman with cold vinegar and niter, the smell of it acrid in the murky dark. There were slices of onion placed under every bed. Dark forms fidgeted like ghosts, conferring in a corner; and coming close January saw it was Dr. Soublet and Dr. Ker, the former British Army surgeon who over the protests of the Creole community had been given the post of Director of the Hospital. "I don't see that,"

Soublet was saying, voice rising with anger. "I don't see that at all." He spoke French, being one of those Creoles who not only had refused to learn English with the advent of the Americans but had deliberately expunged from his memory any English he had ever known.

His servant stood beside him, holding open a box the size of a child's coffin. In it January could see an apparatus of braces and straps, ratcheted wheels and metal splints. Equipment from Soublet's clinic. He'd seen the like in every medical journal for the past dozen years, accompanied by long articles about scientific advances in realigning the bones.

"This man came to this Hospital because he wished to be treated gratis, with the skills we have worked to acquire and the medicaments purchased by the city. He owes us something." On the bed between them, H?lier the water seller moved his head vaguely. His eyes glimmered horribly bright between bloated lids. January guessed that the sick man had only the dimmest notion of what was going on.