Barbara Hambly - 02 Fever Season

She scooped greens from a cauldron at the back of the hearth, handed the white porcelain bowl of them to her son to carry back to the house, and shifted the coffeepot a little farther to one side, where it would warm without boiling. "The voodoos know everything that goes on in this town, Brother," Olympe said.

"Emily Redfern wants to have that same power Delphine Lalaurie has. Wants to have it with everyone, not just with the Americans. That's what ate her about her husband's gambling. Not that it might lose them their home-that little place at Black Oak was hers, not his, and couldn't be took for his debts. But his gambling took away from what she could spend on having the best in town, on being the best."

"Hate her enough to poison him?"

Olympia Snakebones's dark eyes slid toward her young son, but the boy was already out of the kitchen, skipping across the dark yard to the house with his bowl of greens. "The voodoos know everything in this town," she said again, her face enigmatic. "But sometimes we don't tell even each other what we know.

Tell your little Cora to be careful, dealing with that white woman, with any white woman. And you, Brother-you watch yourself too. You get yourself mixed up with the whites, French or American, and you'll be hurtin', too."

They crossed the yard together, Olympe taking off her apron, leaving it on the kitchen table. The smell of burning was thick in their nostrils.

"Tell her there's a man name of Natchez Jim down by Rue du Levee." They paused in the molten light from the dining-room door. "She'll find him near the coffee stand under the arcade of the vegetable market, when he's not out freighting firewood in his boat. He'll get her up the river safe. Tell him I said it's a favor to me."

Dinner was a lively meal, with Gabriel and thirteen-year-old Zizi-Marie up and down, back and forth to the front bedroom where their father, Paul Corbier, was slowly convalescing from a brush with the fever.

While listening to Zizi-Marie's account of how she'd done the finishwork on Monsieur Marigny's yellow silk chairs while her father was ill and thus helped rescue the family finances-which turned out to be quite true, for she was a good upholsterer already-and explaining correlations to Gabriel between Olympe's herbal remedies and his own medical training, it was difficult for January to remember his own worries or to feel anything but joy in the warm haven of that little house. Halfway through the meal there was a knock at the door, a woman from the shacks out toward the swamps, asking Olympe's help with her children taking sick; Olympe said, "I'll have to go."

January nodded. He was on his way to the Hospital himself. Even this haven, he thought, looking around the candldit parlor, was not safe. It could be taken away at any time, as Ayasha had been taken.

"I'll put up extra for you, borage and willow bark," Olympe said, going into the parlor where the shelves were that contained the potions of the voodoo: brick dust and graveyard dust, the dried bones of chickens and the heads of mice, little squares of red flannel and black flannel, colored candles and dishes of blue glass beads.

"We can't stay, either," Gabriel announced, as Chouchou gathered the dishes to carry back to the kitchen with the solemn care of an eight-year-old, and Olympe lifted Ti-Paul down from the box on the chair seat that raised him up to the level of the table. "Zizi and I, we got to help Nicole Perret and her husband pack up. Would you know it, Uncle Ben? Uncle Louis says now his cook and yard man gone over to Mobile, Nicole and Jacques can stay on the porch of his house out by Milneburgh, that he rent for the summer, and work for him. Now the fever here's so bad, Nicole and Jacques will do that just to be away from town."

He pulled on his jacket, ran quick fingers over his close-cropped hair, a tall, gangly boy, like January had been, but with the promise of the gentle handsomeness still visible in Paul Corbier's face. "I ain't scared of no fever, me. Just it's so hot here I wish we could go, too. You think Grandmere might let us, just for a while?"

January couldn't imagine his mother inconveniencing herself to the extent of giving her elder daughter floor space in her lovely rented room at the Milneburgh Hotel-let alone her elder daughter's decidedly working-class husband and four children-to save her had Attila the Hun been on the point of sacking the town. "Stranger things have happened," he told his nephew.

But probably not since the Resurrection of Christ. "Take a smudge with you," he cautioned, as Zizi-Marie came out of the bedroom with her jacket, her father leaning on her shoulder. "And a cloth soaked in vinegar." He tried to think of anything that actually seemed to have some effect in deflecting the fever, the poisons that seemed to ride the stinking, mosquito-humming darkness.

Slices of onion?

Get out of this town, he thought despairingly. Get out of this town.

"You could do us a favor, if you would, Ben." Paul Corbier sat carefully on the parlor divan. He was breathing hard just from the effort of coming out to bid his brother in-law good night. "Alys Roque was here this afternoon, Olympe's friend. She says her husband, Robois, didn't come in last night from working the levee. She's already been to Charity, and the Orleans Infirmary, and Dr. Campbell's, and that clinic the Ursulines have set up where the convent used to be, but... it strikes so fast, sometimes.

And if it's the cholera, it's all the worse. Me, I was shaping an arm cushion one minute and the next thing I knew I was lying on the floor, without the strength to so much as call out."

He shook his head. His face, round when January had first met him in the spring, had thinned with the effects of the disease; and it would be some time before he'd recover the lost flesh. By the look of him he had a good deal of African blood, which had probably been the saving of him. The lighter-skinned colored, quadroons and octoroons, suffered more with the fever. The exquisitely pale musterfinos and mamaloques were as susceptible to its effects as the whites.

"You were lucky," said January softly. Not least, he added to himself, in having a wife who knew about herbs and healing and wouldn't call in some sanguinary lunatic like Soublet to bleed you to death.

Soublet was at the top of his form that night when January returned to the hospital, opening veins and applying leeches with the pious confidence of a vampire. "Balderdash, sir," January overheard him saying to Dr. Sanchez. "Salts of mercury are all very well in their place, but fever resides in the blood, not in the nervous system."

"Salts of mercury mixed with turpentine have been shown to be of sovereign benefit-sovereign, sir!-in cases of fever!" Sanchez retorted. "But the dosage must be heroic! Nothing is of any benefit unless the patient's gums bleed..."

Balderdash? wondered January, as he lifted the half-dead Italian, waxen with phlebotomy, to sponge him clean. The heartbreaking, terrifying thing about the fever was that he didn't know. Nobody knew. Maybe Soublet and Sanchez were right.

On the bed next to the Italian's a dead woman lay. Her face was covered with a sheet, but her hair, long and black, hung to brush the reeking floor, and the sight of it cut his heart. Had he returned soon enough to find Ayasha still alive, could he have saved her by bleeding? By forcing calomel and turpentine down her throat until her gums bled?

Why did one person recover, and another succumb? Might Monsieur A have recovered without the remedy, and did Madame B perish in its despite?

"Stick to surgery, my son," Dr. Gomez had said to him, all those years ago. "These physicians,' they know nothing but calomel and opium, the clyster and the knife. When a man breaks a bone, by God, you know what you've got."