Barbara Hambly - 02 Fever Season

The servant gathered up the reeking bowl and moved off in his master's wake.

January muttered, "I saw less blood when Jackson beat the British than I do on any night he's in charge."

The tall woman, turning away, paused, a flick of a smile in the ophidian eyes.

There was no one else to work the ward that night.

January and Barnard moved the dead Russian-or whoever he had been-out onto the gallery and, later, when they had time, down the stairs to the yard. Three women and four men were already there, rough sheets drawn up over them, waiting for the dead-cart man. The night was as hot outdoors as in, the roar of cicadas rising and falling like demon machinery in the dark beyond the wall. Smudges in the yard-and the fact that the municipal contractors in charge of cleaning the gutters of Common Street hadn't done their job in weeks-rendered the air nearly unbreathable. A woman moved about the courtyard, lifting the corners of sheets to see the dead faces underneath.

"Can I come upstairs and look?" she asked January when he went to her. "I'm lookin' for a man name of Virgil, big man, but not so big as you?" She put an inflection of query in her voice. By her clothing she was either a slave or one of the dirt-poor freedwomen trying to make a living in the shanties at the ends of Girod or Perdido Streets, maybe a prostitute or maybe just a laundress. "Virgil, he slave to Michie Bringier over by Rue Bourbon, but he sleep out and work the levee. He pay Michie Bringier his cost, pay him good. He didn't come to the shed he rent behind Puy's Grocery, not night before last, not last night ..."

She nodded down at the dead around her feet. "These folks all white."

Though Bronze John's hand touched everyone, white, black, and colored, it was mostly the whites who died of it and, of them, more often the whites who'd flocked into New Orleans from the United States-the rest of the United States, January corrected himself-or from Europe. In Europe, January had known dozens of men whose aim was to come here and make fortunes impossible to find in the overtaxed, overcrowded, politically watchful lands of Germany, Italy, and France. They'd meet and read The Last of the Mohicans together or New York newspapers a year old. And there were fortunes to be made, in sugar, in trade, in the new, phenomenally profitable cotton.

But there was a price.

And with the coming of the cholera, even the blacks and the colored found no immunity, no recovery, no hope.

January led the woman up to the ward, as he had led so many since June. The arrival of the ambulances called him away: those who had been found, as this woman feared her friend had been found, in the shacks or attics or on street corners where they had fallen. One of those carried in was H?ier the water seller, who raised a shaky hand and whispered, "Hey, piano teacher," as he was borne past. In a different voice he murmured, "Mamzelle Marie," to the woman who had cleaned the floor. And, "Hey, Nanie," to the ragged woman... Even in extremis, the man knew everyone in town.

"You seen Virgil?" she said. "He sleep out, you know, alone in that shack..."

The water seller shook his head. He was fine boned and older than he looked, the creamy lightness of his skin marred by a clotted blurring of freckles. His shoulders, though broad and strong, were uneven with the S-shaped curvature of his spine. Now his face was engorged with the fever jaundice. Dark in the glower of the oil lamps, he trembled, and there was black vomit down the front of his shirt.

"I ask around," the water seller whispered, as they bore him away.

When January went down to the court again he saw Emil Barnard crouched over the bodies of the dead.

Barnard heard the creak of his weight on the steps and straightened quickly, jerked the sheet back into place, and shoved something up under his coat. "I saw a... a black man come in just now." Barnard pointed accusingly out the courtyard gate. "He was doing something with the bodies, but I didn't see what. I must go and report it at once." He almost ran, not up the steps to where Soublet would be, but through a door into the lower floor of the Hospital, where those unafliicted with the fever were cramped together in emergency quarters.

January pulled back the sheet. The Russian's boots were gone. So were his teeth. His jaw gaped, sticky with gummed blood; little clots of it daubed his pale beard stubble, the front of his shirt. January whipped aside the other sheets and saw that all the corpses had been so treated. One woman's lips were all but severed, bloodless flaps of flesh. Ants crept across her face. Both women had been clipped nearly bald.

January stood up as if he'd been jabbed with a goad, so angry he trembled.

A hand touched his arm. He whirled and found himself looking into Mamzelle Marie's dark eyes.

"Don't matter no more to them, Michie Janvier." Wheels creaked in the ooze of Common Street outside, harness jangling as the horses strained against the muck. The dead-cart.

"It matters to me."

Mamzelle Marie said nothing. Where the orange light brushed a greasy finger her earrings had the gleam of real gold, the dark gems on the crucifix suspended from her neck a true sapphire glint. "It's nowhere near so bad as it was last year."

Last year.

It had been almost exactly a year.

Paris in the cholera. January felt again the dreadful stillness of those suffocating August days, the empty streets and shuttered windows. Though he'd been working then for ten years as a musician, he'd gone back to the Hotel Dieu to nurse, to do what he could, knowing full well he could do nothing. That epidemic had recalled to him all the memories of fever seasons past: the families of the poor brought in from the attics where two or three or seven had died already, the stench and the sense of helpless dread.

Whenever he'd stepped outside he had been astonished to see the jostling mansard roofs, the chestnut trees, and gray stone walls of Paris, instead of the low, pastel houses of the town where he had been raised.

One day he'd walked back to the two rooms he and his wife shared in the tangle of streets between the old Cluny convent and the river, to find them stinking like a plague ward of the wastes Ayasha had been unable to contain when the weakness, the shivering, the fever had struck her. To find Ayasha herself on the bed in the midst of that humiliating horror, a rag doll wrung and twisted and left to dry, the black ocean of her hair trailing down over the edge of the bed to brush the floor.

Death had spared her nothing. She had died alone. "No." Though January had never spoken of this memory to his sister-who he knew was a disciple of Mamzelle Marie-or to anyone else, he thought he saw her knowledge of the scene in this woman's serpent eyes. Maybe she really did read people's dreams. "No, it's not so bad as last year," agreed January again, softly.

January didn't really expect to be allowed to speak to the houseman Gervase. His query met a bland, sleek smile and a murmured "Oh, Gervase is at his work right now. Madame doesn't hold with servants leaving their work."

He'd never liked the Lalaurie coachman, Bastien. The round-faced, smooth-haired quadroon had a smug insolence to him, a self-satisfaction that boded ill for the other servants of the Lalaurie household, despite all that Madame herself might try to do.

Born a slave and raised in slavery until the age of eight, January had always found it curious that colored masters so frequently worked their slaves hard and treated them cruelly, even if they had once been slaves themselves. Given a chance, he suspected that Bastien would have been such a master, exercising petty power where he could. He knew the coachman had been with Madame Lalaurie a long time, perhaps longer than Dr. Nicolas Lalaurie himself. Upon those occasions when he'd seen them together, it was clear to January that the face Bastien showed his mistress was not the face his fellow slaves saw.