Barbara Hambly - 02 Fever Season

A woman dressed like a slave on the streets would be noticed, especially by someone looking for a runaway. The dress was a disguise.

The cleanliness was a disguise.

Both depended on money and a place to stay.

After a long time of silence, Cora said, "Me and Gervase, we used to meet over by Black Oak. That's the place next up the river from Spanish Bayou-Michie Redfern's plantation just south of Twelve-Mile Point. Black Oak isn't hardly a plantation, just a little bit of land, but M'am Redfern's pa bought it for her when she came down from Boston to marry Michie Redfern. At least that's what Leonide told me, Michie Redfern's cook. They was gonna go to business together, M'am Redfern's pa and Michie Redfern, only he died. Michie Kendal, I mean."

She took a deep breath, not meeting his eyes, folding carefitlly the pleats of her green cotton sleeve where they ran into the wristband. There was a thin line of tatted cotton lace there, pale ecru, the kind schoolgirls produced by the yard while their governesses read to them from edifying books.

"That's where Gervase and I went, after Michie Redfern told him and the others-Laurent, and Randall, and Marcel, and Hermes, and Sally-that he was selling them on account of what he owed Michie Calder and Michie Fazende. Michie Redfern, he found us there. He sent Gervase back to the house and he hit me a couple times, then he had me, like your policeman said; though what that was supposed to prove I don't know. That a big man can stick it into a little girl my size when he can have her whipped if she don't let him? We both of us knew that."

Contempt blazed in her eyes.

"A couple days later he takes Gervase and the others on into town. Gervase told me he'd been sold to Warn Lalaurie, on Rue Royale-the others was gonna go to the Bank of Louisiana, and be sold up north in Missouri and Arkansas Territories, where they need cotton hands something bad. M'am Redfern, she doesn't say much to me, but she looks at me like the Devil looks at a little child out lost in the swamp. I slip out of the house and walk over by Black Oak again in the afternoon. I'm feeling bad, missing Gervase and wondering if I can get away long enough to come down to New Orleans and see him now and then, or he can come back maybe and see me.

"It's hot, and I start lookin' around the house for a cup or something to get me some water."

The look of calculation had disappeared from her face; replaced by a pucker in her brow as she called back the events to her mind. She was no longer thinking, January thought, about her story, no longer tailoring it for what she thought he wanted to hear.

"Black Oak's a little house," she went on after a time. "All the furniture and dishes and that been cleaned out a long time ago, but I thought there might be something. Mostly Gervase and I just layed in the bedroom, where it's cool, and didn't go in the other two rooms. But there's this cupboard in the parlor by the fireplace, that's always locked with a key. Only this time when I went in it wasn't locked, and inside I found this tin jar, like they sell candy in. It was new-it wasn't rusty nor chipped nor nothingbut when I opened it, there was a little sort of bag inside, made out of black flannel, full of crushed-up dry leaves and some seeds. I knowed the smell of it, 'cos one of the women on Grand Isle where I grew up was a conjure, and she told all us children what to stay away from in the woods. It was monkshood, and poison, and I knew then it had to be M'am Redfern that hid it there, in the little house where she had the key to, to keep it away from her husband finding it. I remembered how M'am Redfern had looked at me, all day, when her husband was gone."

She looked down again, tugging the ruffle of her sleeve.

"And what did you do?"

"I was scared." Cora raised those great dark eyes, under a fringe of thick-curled lashes. "I slept out in the swamp that night, and in the morning I hid in the trees near the steamboat landing by Spanish Bayou.

They'd said there was a boat coming in that day-Michie Bailey had said, that rode over the day before because he was bringin' down these horses of his to sell in town. When the boat came in, I slipped in the water and swam around the far side of it. The men down on the engine deck pulled me up and hid me in the hay bales, for Michie Bailey's white horses. And, Lordy, you'd have thought they'd give those horses feather beds, the fuss they made over 'em."

January studied that guarded face. Wondering how much of what she told him was truth.

"And you didn't go back to the house for anything before you went down to the boat?"

She shook her head vehemently. "I didn't steal no money. Nor no pearls. Michie Redfern, he probably took them pearls himself and sold them for gambling money or to pay off some more money he owed.

He owed everybody in the Parish. That's what probably happened. And I sure didn't kill anybody. But I had to run away, Michie Janvier. She'd have killed me. I know she would have. I had to find Gervase.. ."

"And what?" asked January softly. "Get him to run away, too?"

Her eyes remained on her sleeve ruffle, which she stroked and smoothed, stroked and smoothed with her tiny, work-roughened fingers. "I don't know. Maybe we can-can find some way to make us some money. To buy him free. Sometimes white folks lets their servants work out-sleep out, too, long as they come back and pays 'em. But I just want to see him. To talk to him."

For a time January said nothing. Madame Lalaurie was an astute businesswoman, and it wasn't outside the realm of possibility that she'd let a slave operate independently, though not, probably, a trained houseman. But looking at that down-turned little face, the careful deliberation of those little fingers tracing the folds of the cloth, he knew those were not Cora's thoughts.

He'd seen monkshood poisoning, in Paris, at the Hotel Dieu; a woman named Montalban had poisoned the brother with whom she lived. He thought about the agonies of vomiting and blindness, the sweating, convulsions, pain. Thought about Shaw sitting on the steps of his mother's gallery, spitting tobacco and recounting the facts of the case without ever asking why or if January had made inquiries about the purported murderess's lover scant days after the woman herself had been seen at the Lalaurie house.

Bastien the coachman would have reported her to Shaw, he thought. Would have reported, too, January's request to speak to the young man.

It didn't mean Shaw didn't have other information, held back as a speculator holds sugar or cotton, against a rise in prices.

"Cora," said January slowly, "whether or not you put poison into Otis Redfern's supper, Madame Redfern thinks you did. The police think so, too. Now, I told them I hadn't met you, hadn't ever heard of you, and I implied I hadn't ever been asked to take any kind of message from you to Gervase. At least when Lieutenant Shaw asked me to notify him if you did ask me, I said I would. All this is illegal. I could get into serious trouble for it."

Cora licked her lips and folded her arms again, as if chilled despite the day's burning heat. "You mean you can't help me anymore." It was not phrased as a question. That's what he meant.

And that, he thought later, should have been the end of it. For everyone's good.

That's when he should have walked away. Last night he had dreamed about his father.

He didn't often. His memories of his father-or the man he believed to have been his father-existed only in flashes, isolated incidents of time: being picked up, up and up and up at the end of those powerful arms, and the coal black face with the gray shellwork of tribal scars grinning joyfully below him, or walking along the edge of the bayou, listening to the deep bass voice hum-sing songs he barely recalled. He didn't even know where his father had been when he was told that his mother was being sold to St. Denis Janvier, whether his father had still been on Bellefleur Plantation then or not.