Barbara Hambly - 02 Fever Season

The two Blanque girls-daughters of Delphine -Lalaurie by her second husband, the late banker Jean Blanque-were older than one usually found still unmarried Creole belles of good family: Though they were soft-spoken and polite, as Creole girls must be, January liked neither of them. Even Louise Marie, the cripple, for whom he had expected to develop sympathy when first he had been introduced to the household last spring, made him uneasy. She was clinging and self-pitying, constantly referring to her twisted back and misaligned pelvis.

"I do my best," she said with a sigh, blinking her large hazel eyes up at him from the piano stool. "But as you see, I'm no more a musician than I am a matrimonial catch." Her lace-mitted hand, thin to the point of boniness strayed for the thousandth time to the bunches of fashionable curls that hung over her ears, readjusting the ribbons and the multifarious lappets of point d'esprit. Louise Marie was dressed as always in the height of Paris fashion, the bell-shaped skirt of girlish yellow jaconet trimmed with blond lace, flounces, and far too many silk roses. The bodice was specially cut, and the skirt specially hemmed, to accommodate the twist of her spine and the uneven length of her legs.

"As long as you do your best, Mademoiselle Blanque," replied January, with the patient friendliness he had long cultivated to deal with pupils he didn't much care for personally, "you'll make progress. This isn't a race," he added, with a smile. "It's not like you have to be ready to open in Le Mariage de Figaro at Christmas."

"Well, that's a blessing," muttered Pauline, prowling from the shuttered windows of the second-floor front parlor where the piano stood. The younger sister slapped her fan on the piano's shining rosewood top, then a moment later caught it up and beat the air with it again, as if the necessity to do so were unjust penance imposed upon her alone. Though he had bathed before coming here, January felt the stickiness of sweat on his face and under his shirt and coat.

In April or October, all the long windows onto the gallery would have been thrown wide at this time of day to catch the breezes of coming evening. But now that was a luxury that could not be risked. Fever rode the night air, invisible and deadly-that was all that anybody knew of it. The winter curtains of velvet and tapestry had been exchanged for light chintz and gauze, but those were drawn closely over the tall French doors; and the light they admitted was wan and sickly gray. The woven straw mats underfoot, and the muslin covers masking the opulent furniture, did little to lighten or cool the room. With its mirrors swathed in gauze, its ornaments veiled against flyspecks, the place had a shrouded atmosphere, tomblike and drained of color.

"Oh, darling, please..." Louise Marie made a feeble gesture toward her sister's fan and produced another cataclysmic sigh. "If you would... The heat affects me so!"

Any other family would have been in Mandeville, where January knew Madame Lalaurie owned a summer cottage and a good deal of property. Nicolas Lalaurie was a doctor-a partner at Jules Soublet's clinic on Rue Bourbon-but somehow January suspected the small, pale, silent Frenchman would have had no objection to leaving a town where only the poor remained to fall ill. But Madame Lalaurie, almost alone among the high Creole society, had chosen to remain in town and nurse the sick. January guessed that Dr. Lalaurie-not a native Creole himself-knew his reputation would never survive flight from a danger that his wife faced with such matter-of-fact calm.

He guessed, too, that one or the other of the Lalauries had-decreed that the two girls should remain as well: the doctor out of wariness about how things looked, or Ma dame simply because the possibility of falling ill had never entered her mind.

Her face like bitter stone, Pauline slapped open the sandalwood sticks and began to fan her sister, while Louise Marie, a long-suffering smile of martyred gratitude and a gleam of satisfaction in her eye, jerked and hobbled through a Mozart contredanse in a fashion that amply demonstrated that she had done none of her appointed practice during the previous four days.

But January was used to pupils not practicing, and there were things he could say to praise without condemnation, which he knew would do him no good. All girls of good family studied the piano from childhood, though few kept up lessons into their twenties. Madame Delphine Lalaurie, however, was as renowned for her piano playing as she was for her hospitality, for her business acumen, for her beauty and social connections, and it was unthinkable that her daughters should fall below the standard she set. Watching Louise Marie's exaggerated winces at her mistakes-as if they were catastrophes imposed upon her by a spiteful Muse instead of the result of her own negligence about practice January felt a pang of pity for them.

Madame's very perfection was probably not easy to live up to.

"That was good, Mademoiselle Blanque. May I hear Mademoiselle Pauline on the Haydn now?" Their mother had been the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in New Orleans; Marie Delphine de McCarry's first husband a city intendant, a Spanish hidalgo of great wealth, and her second, Jean Blanque, a banker whose signature underwrote nearly every property deed in the city. Their two older sisters were the wives of two of the most influential men in the parish. With the early death of their little brother these girls became heiresses to a sizable fortune in city rents and land; to an unshakable position in Creole society; and to this huge and almost oppressively opulent house, with its gilded ceilings and French furniture, its marble stairs and crystal lighting fixtures.

But as he watched the older girl-a young woman, in truth, in her early twenties make an elaborate business of limping across the parlor to the most comfortable chair; clutching heavily on her sister's arm; sending Pauline to fetch a fan, a cushion, a kerchief, to call for Babette to fetch some lemonade from the kitchen-summoning Pauline back when she had gotten started on the Haydn march, because she suddenly felt faint and needed her vinaigrette-he knew Louise Marie would never marry. And Pauline? She was still what they would consider marriageable in any society, eighteen or nineteen, and would have been pretty had she not been so thin. Some wasting sickness there, thought January, studying her rigid profile with a physician's eye. Not consumption. Her color looked good, and she seemed to have no trouble drawing breath. An inability to digest certain foods, perhaps? Her hands were stick thin, wrist bones like hazelnuts standing out under the gold of her bracelets; her whole body seemed brittle, stiff as wood as she played, mechanically and badly. Resentment rose off Pauline like steam from the mosquito-wriggling gutters.

At her sister? January had seen other households rendered twisted and tense by the manipulation of a chronic invalid, and Louise Marie certainly seemed to take delight in interrupting her sister's practice. "Oh, here's Babette; darling, will you bring the lemonade here?" Pauline must have had a lifetime of being admonished to obey her sister: she stopped playing immediately, stalked to the parlor door where an emaciated servant woman stood with a single German crystal goblet of lemonade on a tray. This Pauline snatched without so much as a word of thanks and brought it across to the invalid. January, who had hoped to have a quick word with the servant, watched the woman depart, a dark-clothed ghost whose plain white muslin tignon brought back a memory of petite Cora, who dressed like a freedwoman's daughter but arranged her headscarf like a slave.

For the remainder of the lesson January watched for his chance to have a moment alone, to slip away and find another servant, to ask discreetly that word be got to the houseman Gervase to meet him. But only in so watching did he become aware of how bounded he was by the regulations of society. A guest in the house never spoke to the servants, be that guest white or free colored. Neither was expected to have the smallest inclination to speak to a black, a slave. And well-trained servants, for their part, never came into the presence of guests unless specifically sent for. Listening, he was aware of how quiet the entire floor was. Now and then he heard a soft tread in one of the rooms above, but no one entered the big front parlor in which the piano stood or the smaller sewing parlor, which opened from it through an arch of cypress wood painted to resemble marble. The shadowy hall that divided the house, American fashion, from front to back, was still. If any servants moved about, laying the table in the long dining room or cleaning the lamps in Dr. Lalaurie's library behind it, they did so without sound.