Barbara Hambly - 02 Fever Season

Her head carne up, like a deer startled in the woods, and she saw the gentle teasing in his eyes.

Something eased, very slightly, in the corners of that expressionless little mouth.

But she did not smile. She dwelled in a country where smiles had been forgotten years ago. "Do you teach the daughters of a lady name Lalaurie? Great big green house on Rue Royale?"

January nodded again. He glanced around him at the narrow tunnel they stood in, between Agnes Pellicot's house and that of Guillaume Morisset the tailor, also out of town. The slot of shadow stank of mud and sewage where mosquito-wrigglers flickered among the scum. "You want to go somewhere a little more comfortable, Mademoiselle LaFayette? The town's half closed up, but at Breyard's Grocery over on Rue Toulouse I can get you a lemonade."

Eyes that seemed too big for that pointed, delicate face raised quickly and as quickly darted away. She shook her head, a tiny gesture, and January stepped past her, still cautiously, to push open the gate that led into the Pellicot yard. The French doors into the house were shuttered, as were the doors of the service building at the back of the yard. The brick-flagged porch below the slave quarters' gallery was a slab of blue-black velvet. January led the girl to the plank bench outside the kitchen where Agnes's cook Elvire would sit to shell peas or pluck fowl, and said, "Wait here a minute for me, if you would, Mamzelle."

She stiffened, panic in her eyes.

"I'm just going around to latch the door. I'll be back." He was conscious of her, bolt upright and motionless as a scared cat, on the bench as he crossed through the yard again, down the blue tunnel of passway, and out to Rue Burgundy. He stepped back through the French doors into Agnes Pellicot's parlor and latched them; and on the way through the cabinet pantry to the stairs, he found a cheap horn cup on a shelf beside the French china dinner service. This he carried in his waistcoat pocket up the stairs, through the attic, out the window, across the roof, and down the outside stairs, marveling that he'd made that circuit earlier at a dead run. It was a wonder what you could do with a good scare in you.

When he returned to the yard Cora LaFayette was gone. He saw her a moment later just within the gate to the pass-through out to the street, poised to run.

He waited in the middle of the yard, as he'd have waited not to startle a deer in the cypress swamps behind the plantation where he'd been born. In time she came away from the gate and hurried to the bench again, keeping close to the wall.

Runaway, he thought. And making more of it than she needed to. Did she really think that with the fever and the cholera stalking the streets, with the town half-empty and fear like the stench of the smoke in the air, that anybody would be chasing a runaway slave?

He filled the horn cup from the coopered cistern in the corner of the yard and held it out to her. Cora drank thirstily, and he sat on the other end of the bench, laying coat, hat, and satchel down beside him.

Aside from her dress, which was not a countrywoman's dress, her hands and face were clean. She'd been in town a little time.

"Do you know Madame Lalaurie?" he asked her, when she set the cup aside. "Or know of her?"

The girl shook her head. "That is, I know she's a rich lady, if she's got a big house like that, and bought slaves." She looked down at the toes of her shoes, black and red, to match the dress, with frivolous white lacings. "She bought a houseman, only a week or so ago, name of Gervase, from my master-that used to be my master, before he freed me," she added hastily. "Michie..." She hesitated, fishing around for corroborative detail again. If her name were LaFayette her master's would probably be, too, so she said, "Michie Napoleon LaFayette: But Michie LaFayette, he set me free, and I come to town looking for Gervase. We were married, me and Gervase. Really married, Michie Janvier, by a priest and everything."

Her dark eyes were childishly earnest, looking into his, but he saw in the flinch of her mouth, heard in the inflection of her voice, that she lied. Not that it was his business. There were a lot of men who didn't want their people to marry, or even to become Christians. But it wasn't any of his affair, though as a Christian he hoped this girl had at least been baptized. He asked, "So why didn't you try to see Gervase yourself?"

"I did!" She spread out her child-small hands, with the roughened skin of washing-up on the fingers and backs. "I tried. I went to the house on Rue Royale, and they always keep the big gate there shut. That coachman of Madame's there, he wouldn't let me in. I asked him." There was anger in the set of the little mouth. "He just smiled at me nasty and said Gervase was busy and Madame wouldn't have her people taking time off from their work to chat with girls in the street. I told him I was his sister," she added naively, and sighed.

January forebore to mention how many "sisters" and "cousins" and "brothers" came loitering around to speak to servants in the twilight. Only the slackest of mistresses would permit such dalliance, and Madame Delphine Lalaurie was known for the silent efficiency of her servants. "So you want me to talk to Gervase?"

Cora nodded. "If you would, M'sieu. After the second time that coachman-that Bastien-turn me away, I watched the house, and I saw you go in. The cripple-man selling water across the street, he say you was the music teacher for Madame Lalaurie's two girls. He say you also work at the Charity Hospital during the fever season, so when I... I couldn't wait for you to come out of the house, I look for you at the Hospital."

Where there was too much of a crowd for you to want to come up to me, thought January, studying that wary, triangular face. It didn't surprise him that the water seller would know everything about him. In New Orleans, the vendors who sold everything from strawberries to fire irons through the narrow streets knew everything about everyone.

But that, too, was none of his business. This girl's lover had been sold, and she had run away to see him again. For all his mother's talk about the unruliness of blacks (not that his mother was so much as a half-shade paler than Cora LaFayette) he could not blame her for it. "What would you like me to tell Gervase?"

Her smile transformed her like spring dawn, not just her face but her tense little body as well. Joy became her. Then she swallowed, again, thinking hard and contemplating once more the toes of her red-and-black shoes. "Could you ask him if there's a way we can see each other? If there's a way he can get out? Just for an evening, I mean, M'sieu. They keep that gate closed tight all the time. I'll meet you here," she went on quickly. "If that's all right with you, Michie Janvier. Tomorrow night?"

"Wednesday," said January. "Wednesday afternoon. I teach the Lalaurie girls Tuesdays and Fridays, and I'm working at the Hospital Tuesday night."

"Wednesday afternoon." She got to her feet, her smile coming and going, like a child fearing to hex a wish. "'I'll be here, Michie Janvier. Thank you."

She looked so fragile, standing poised in the brazen sunlight, that it was on January's tongue to ask her if she had a place to stay. But if she were a runaway, he thought, she wouldn't tell him. And if she were a runaway it was better that he didn't know. Still he felt a pang of worry for her, as she darted away like a small rusty damselfly into the dark beyond the gate.

He shrugged his coat back on, shifting his wide shoulders beneath it, shirt gummy with sweat. As he donned his hat again, tucked his bag under his arm and crossed Agnes Pellicot's yard, he thought of his own room behind his mother's house, his own bed, and a few hours' sleep without the stink of death in his nostrils, without the whimpers of the dying in his ears.