Barbara Hambly - 02 Fever Season

"You're lucky my mother's away," January remarked, closing the gate behind him. "She'd order Bella to chase you off with a broom. Sir," he added.

The scarecrow spat a dark stream of expectorant onto the bricks. "I been chased off better." He spoke in a mild, rather scratchy tenor and blinked up at January from un der the wide brim of a countryman's rough hat and a greasy curtain of hair the color of dried onion tops. "And worse," he added, carefully folding up his newspaper and rising to a height barely half an inch less than January's own. There was a hole in the skirts of his old-fashioned coat. "Sorta comes with workin' for the law. Now what's all this truck"-he gestured with the paper-"about there bein' `no sign yet of any epidemic fever in the city'? These newspaper fellers live in the same town as the rest of us, or what? `Some few of the weak-kneed have ignominiously fled at the sound of a rumor...' "

"The newspapers always say that," said January. "The businesses in town won't have it any other way."

Lieutenant Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans City Guard widened his eyes in momentary startlement at this piece of journalistic cooperativeness, then shrugged. "Well, I don't suppose it's any news to anybody in town." He tucked the paper away. "I understand yore laid out, Maestro, and gotta be back at the Hospital tonight, but there's sort of a matter I gotta take up with you." He spat again and wiped his bristly chin. "You acquainted with a gal by name of Cora Chouteau?"

He pronounced the French name correctly, something one wouldn't have expected from the raspy, American flatboat-English he spoke, and January tried not to react.

By the sharpening of those rain-pale eyes, he didn't think he succeeded.

"Chouteau?" He shook his head. "The name isn't familiar."

"Little gal so high, 'bout as dark as yore ma." Shaw had made the acquaintance of the redoubtable Widow Levesque last Mardi Gras. "Skinny. Sort of pointy chin they say. Twenty-two, twenty-three year old."

January manufactured furrows of thought in his brow, then shook his head again. "Why are you looking for her? A runaway?"

"In a manner of speakin'." Shaw gently scratched under the breast of his coat. "She did run away, yeah.

But when she left she helped herself to five thousand dollars from the plantation accounts and the mistress's pearl necklace and poisoned the master an' the mistress both for good measure. The mistress'll live, they say. They buried the master Friday."

"It isn't true!" January thought that Cora would flee from him entirely, but in fact she only turned her back on him sharply and went a few steps, her arms folded over her breasts, hands clasping her skinny shoulders. In the dense noon shadows under the Pellicot kitchen gallery her face was unreadable, like a statue, always supposing some Greek sculptor would have expended bronze on the pointed, wary features of an urchin and a slave. A wave of trembling passed over her, an ague of dread.

January leaned against the rail of the gallery stairs. What was it, he wondered, that she feared he would read in her face?

"What this policeman tell you?" She flung the words back at him over her shoulder.

"Why don't you tell me?"

Her breath sipped in to spit some counter-accusation, but she let it go. She rubbed one hand along her arm, as if trying to get warm.

"Did this Otis Redfern rape you?" January asked.

Cora sniffed. "What's rape?" she demanded. "My... a girl I knew, a friend of mine, she was raped. She was sick after for a long time. I took care of her..." She shook her head. "She fought him, and he hurt her."

The softness of her mouth hardened again. "So you don't fight, and it's not so bad. But if you don't fight, it's not really rape, is it? And what's the sense of fighting anyway? He'd just have one of the men come in and hold me down. That's what he said. He said he'd have Gervase do it. You think I'd kill him over that?"

"There's women who would."

"If every woman killed every master who had her against her will, there'd be dead men lying like a carpet from here to the Moon. And that M'am Redfern, she wouldn't get after him about it. Just made my work harder for me, like I liked being fingered and poked and pestered by that smelly old man. If it wasn't for Gervase I think I'd have gone crazy."

She made a quick gesture with her small hands and faced back around. Beyond the shade of the gallery the sun smote the yard like a brass hammer. The dead-carts had finished their morning rounds, and the voice of a man or a woman in the street, or the creak of a wagon, fell singly into the hush.

"You know how they do," Cora said. "She tried to get me sent out to the fields, he said I was to work in the house. She said if I worked the house I'd do the chambers and the lamps. He said no, I had to do something genteel, like sewing. Me, I'd rather have cut cane than be under the same roof with her all day.

She puts me hemming sheets and then makes me pick out every stitch 'cos the hem's too wide, she says.

And then he says, to me he says, `Don't rub up against her, don't be always givin' her trouble, can't you see what you do'll come back on me?' What I do comes back on him?"

She drew another breath, anger narrowing her dark eyes. "I never killed him. I ran away. I had to run away. It's her that was out to kill me."

January raised his eyebrows. "If every woman killed every wench her husband had, there'd be dead women lying like a carpet from here to the Moon."

"Yeah." Cora's mouth quirked with a kind of grim humor. "But I heard them fighting. I heard her say, 'You sell that slut of yours if we're so hard up for money from your gambling' -and he was a terrible gambler, Michie Redfern was. And Michie Redfern says, `You're not telling me what to do, woman, and if you take and sell her I swear to you I'll find her again and it'll be the worse for you.' Not that he cared about me, Michie Janvier. But M'am Redfern is an overbearing woman, a Boston Yankee woman, always on about how much money her daddy had had, and Michie Redfern wasn't going to take anything off her. You known men like that."

January had known men like that.

"That's still a long way from her killing you."

"Michie Janvier, I swear what I'm telling you is true." She came back and sat on the end of the bench that was drawn up near the stairs where he stood. She wore a green dress today, though she still had on the red-and-black shoes. The skirt's folds hung limp, for it had been cut to accommodate several more petticoats than she was wearing; cut to accommodate a corset, too, as the red dress had been. No servant wore corsets, and Cora was not wearing one now.

Where had she gotten those? he wondered. And the soap and water to wash her face this morning. Not in the Swamp, the squalid agglomeration of grogshops and brothels that festered a few unpaved streets behind the Charity Hospital: that was the place most runaways went. But hers weren't dresses that could be acquired, or kept in good condition, in that maze of mud-sinks and cribs. He remembered the woman Nanie two nights ago, looking for her Virgil among the sick. Her stained dirty clothes had the stink of sweat ground into them, not because she was a particularly unclean woman but because spare labor and time and the fuel to heat water were luxuries among the poor, and their clothes went a long time between washings. Neatness of appearance was something that could be maintained only with great care and with a certain minimum of money.

His own coat and waistcoat, folded tidily over the rail of the stairs behind him with the cravat tucked into a pocket, were one badge of his freedom. Even more than the papers the law demanded he carry-and as much as the well-bred French his tutors and his mother had hammered into him as a child-they said, This is a free man of color, not somebody's property to be bought and sold.