Barbara Hambly - 02 Fever Season

Still January made no reply.

"One cannot approve, of course, under most circumstances, of runaways," Madame Lalaurie went on. A mosquito hummed in the torchlight, close to her face, but such was her breeding that she didn't flinch, let alone swipe at it with her gloved hand. "But sheerly as a human being one cannot but feel for anyone who lives under the heel of a woman like Emily Redfern."

"I know nothing of her, Madame."

"Pray God you never have the occasion to learn, M'sieu." She sighed, as if about to add something else, then changed her mind and put the remark aside. "Be that as it may, M'sieu, Friday night I will order Bastien to leave the carriage gate open-though he will naturally be watching for thieves-from eleven o'clock until midnight. Gervase will be in the yard. I don't wish to know anything further."

January inclined his head. "Of course, it's your own business whether the gate is open or closed, Madame."

Wry amusement pulled at the corner of her lips. "I like a man who's discreet. Monsieur Blanque was like that. I don't believe, in all the years we were married, that he ever said, `I am going to play cards with so-and-so.' Only, `I am going out.'"

Jean Blanque, January recalled, in addition to running one of the largest banks in the city, had had connections with half the smugglers who brought illegal slaves and other goods into the city. It was to Blanque that Jean Laffite had come to begin negotiations with the Americans in the face of the British invasion. Discreet indeed!

"I trust I shall be able to rely upon your discretion in the future?" She made as if to go, then hesitated, her hand going to the reticule on her belt. After a pause she opened it and withdrew a smaller purse that clinked heavily in her hand. "Please give her this."

"I don't know who you mean, Madame."

Her smile widened, the twinkle brightening in her dark eyes. "Ah. Very well, then." She opened her hand and let the purse fall to the planks of the gallery and, with the toe of her slipper, nudged it into the shadows next to the door.

January saw her to the street. Bastien waited with the black-lacquered carriage and the four-in-hand of black English geldings that were the admiration and envy of Creole and American society alike. A long cardboard dress box lay on the driver's seat-Madame had changed her clothes before coming, then. The coachman sprang from the box to help her inside, with a combination of obsequiousness and tenderness; and as he shut the door, Madame Lalaurie smiled her thanks.

The grimy lantern light of the Hospital's porch glinted on harness brasses, polished like gold, and they were gone.

Emil Barnard straightened up quickly from the corpses by the gate as January came back through and yanked the sheets into place before hurrying away. Flies roared up in a cloud. Sickened, January didn't even look this time. When he climbed the stairs and passed through the ward he saw that Soublet, his servant, and their apparatus for the straightening of the skeleton and the limbs were all gone: H?lier the water seller, with his crooked spine and uneven shoulders, was gone, too.

He stepped out onto the. gallery again and retrieved the purse from the shadows. It contained ten Mexican silver dollars and assorted cut bits.

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."