Fever Season (28 page)

As January had observed before, everybody always knew everything. Half an hour later he was being ushered by a hotel servant onto the rear veranda of the Hotel Pontchartrain, where Mr. Bailey rose politely from a wicker chair and held out his hand.

“Mr. Rillieux?” he said—Rillieux being the name on the business card January had sent in, one of several from Hannibal’s extensive collection. “You asked to see me?”

“I did indeed, sir.” He’d changed at Madame Clisson’s back into the black coat, white shirt, and high-crowned hat again. “Please forgive the imposition, Mr. Bailey, but I’m a physician, doing research on the pathologies of various types of poisons, particularly those in use among the Negro slaves.” What the original Monsieur Rillieux did for a living he had no idea, since the cards Hannibal collected were generally those bearing only a name. He used his best English, silently thanking the schoolmasters who’d drubbed it into him. It worked far better than any business card could have. “I understand that you’ve recently had a case of poisoning in your own parish.”

“Ah!” Bailey’s face darkened with genuine sorrow. The magistrate was a much younger man than January had expected, the breadth and strength of his shoulders according oddly with a build that was in fact rather slight. “A very sad case, that; quite tragic. Personal friends of mine …”

“I’m terribly sorry, sir. If you’d rather not speak of it …”

“No, no.” Bailey shook his head, black hair shiny with pomade. “No, it’s one of the griefs of my office to attend at the deaths of people I know. From the description it was quite clearly a case of some sort of vegetable poison. Monkshood was my guess, from the dryness and paralysis of the vocal cords—”

“ ‘From the description?’ ” asked January, startled. “You weren’t there?”

“No, as it happens. I had gone to town the previous day on business, and stayed to oversee the delivery of a team of my carriage-horses. Due to a mixup I didn’t receive word of the death until the day of the funeral. I suppose I should count myself fortunate, since I dined there the evening before my departure, but I can’t convince myself I was in any danger. The attack—the intent of her attack—was all too clear.” His neat fingers smoothed the slip of mustache. “From Mrs. Redfern’s descriptions of her own symptoms, and the accounts of the servants, it was almost certainly aconite, or wolfsbane: monkshood is the common name for it in this country.”

January nodded and sat patiently through a catalog of symptoms with which he was already familiar: burning and tingling of the tongue and face, vomiting, difficulty in drawing breath, a sensation of bitter cold. Monsieur Montalban, back in Paris, had displayed them all. Bailey, thank God, seemed a reliable witness, relating what he had heard with a minimum of speculation, aware of the significance of details. “The first symptoms appeared, according to Mrs. Redfern, shortly after dinner on Wednesday evening. The servants said the master complained of a burning in his mouth first, and within a quarter hour the mistress did as well. Either she had eaten more of the
untainted food than he, or the alcohol remaining in his system—I understand he had been in town all the previous night—accelerated the effects of the poison, as well as rendering them more severe. He died later that same night; and though poor Mrs. Redfern was extremely ill throughout the night and the following day, she survived.”

His lips pursed, and he shook his head. “It was a sad business, Mr. Rillieux, a sad business indeed, for he left her deeply in debt.”

And with the Reverend Micajah Dunk buying her slaves and her cattle at the lowest possible prices, January thought dryly, as he thanked the magistrate and descended the gallery steps once more, it was unlikely that she’d get out of debt any time soon.

“And the girl herself?” he asked. “I understand one of the servants said he saw her about the house?”

Bailey looked surprised. “I’d heard nothing about that,” he said.

The day was hot. The city would be wretched, thought January, taking off his hat as he walked back toward Madame Clisson’s house along the level, sandy beach. The breeze from the lake flowed over his face, exquisite in his sweat-damp, close-cropped hair. The temptation was overwhelming to leave the dying in Charity Hospital to their own devices—
let the dead bury their own dead
—and remain here tonight. Clisson, at least, would give him space to sleep above the kitchen of the little cottage on London Street.

He walked as far as the long wharf of the Washington Hotel’s bathhouse, nearly a thousand feet out in the warm shallow waters of the lake, then ascended the gentle slope to the grounds of the hotel itself.

He wondered what Emily Redfern would have to say about the time and circumstances of her husband’s death
to an enquirer about poisons in use by those of African descent, but when he sent up his card—or more properly the card of one Hilaire Brun—a servant informed him that Mrs. Redfern had gone into town. “She got this letter, see,” the boy said, when January handed him a half-reale. “She sent for that Reverend Dunk that’s staying here, and they both went off for town in his gig, ’cause she don’t have no carriage no more.”

“Did you see who the letter was from?” January held out another half-reale.

The boy nodded, though he seemed a little puzzled at the obviousness of the question. “It was from a letter-carrier, sir.”

January wondered whether it was worth his while to try again in the morning.

When he reached Madame Clisson’s cottage, only his mother and Euphrasie Dreuze still occupied the porch. Madame Dreuze was saying, “…  wouldn’t be at all surprised if she was feathering her own nest all along! I’m sure she didn’t feed those poor girls enough to—”

They broke off as January came up to the porch.

“Your sister’s sick,” said the Widow Levesque bluntly, snapping shut the crimson silk fan. “The baby, too. I told that maid of Dominique’s when she came over here I’d send you on to have a look, but in heat like this I don’t see what the good of it is.”

January felt the cold clutch of terror in his heart. Not Minou …

“I’ll be there,” he said.

That night he wrote to Hannibal Sefton, care of his mother’s house, that he would be delayed in Milneburgh for as many as three or four days. He asked Hannibal, if at
all possible, to check the barracoons of Dutuillet or Hewlett’s or the St. Charles Exchange to see if any of the former house servants of Emily Redfern still remained in the city.

Of Abishag Shaw, he asked the same, adding in his note that though the local magistrate of St. Charles Parish had signed the death certificate of Otis Redfern, no investigation of the death had been performed and only the widow’s word existed as to her husband’s symptoms or her own.

And in between mixing saline draughts for Dominique, and sponging Charles-Henri’s tiny, brittle frame with vinegar-water and cream of tartar, he would sometimes unwrap the red-and-gold candy tin from his grip, and wonder where, and when, he ought to confess to Lieutenant Shaw that he had spoken to Cora Chouteau and was an accessory after the fact to the murder that she had not done.

What use to find Cora, if she would only be returned to be hanged?

Yet he could not leave her where she was—wherever that was.

Head aching, he would return to Dominique’s feverish murmurings, and the patient, endless, agonizing work of dripping saline draught thinned with a little milk into Charles-Henri’s tiny mouth.

On the second night he understood that he was going to lose the child.

It happens
, he thought, while the pain of the realization sank through him slowly, like a stone dropped in a bog’s peaty waters. His mother had lost her first two babies by St. Denis Janvier—not that his mother had cared more than a cat cares about one drowned kitten more or less. Not many weeks ago Catherine Clisson had spoken to him
of a child she’d lost, a boy of four, and he knew Olympe had had at least one still-birth. New Orleans was an unhealthy place at best, and it was dangerous to birth a child in the time of plague.

Still, he thought, looking from the white wicker cradle across at the white-draped bed where his sister lay, it was a grief he would have spared her. Life held grief enough.

Coming out of the bedroom he found Henri Viellard, dressed for a party in a coat of prune-colored superfine and a vest the hue of new lettuces, sitting on the cypress-wood divan. The fat man stood up quickly—January had not been completely aware before this of how tall he was, easily six feet. “Will she be all right?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” It was the middle of the evening, not midnight. Phlosine Seurat, when she had brought a blancmange for Minou and some étouffée for January, said there would be a danceable at the St. Clair to which everyone who was anyone in Creole society was going. He wondered what this man had told his mother.

“May I see her?”

January stepped out of the doorway. “She’s sleeping,” he warned.

Henri paused beside him, gray eyes anxious behind the thick rounds of glass. “That’s good, isn’t it? I understand that with … with the fever … sleep is healing. Normal sleep, that is.”

January nodded. “But it isn’t the fever,” he said. “It’s milk sickness, which is just as serious.”

A look of surprise flickered behind the spectacles, followed by relief. “Oh,” said Henri, a little foolishly. “Oh, I was told …” He turned quickly to go on into the room, then hesitated and turned back. “Is there anything I can do? For you, I mean. You must be done up. If you need to
rest I can sit with her. Do whatever you tell me to do. It’s what I came for.”

Even though you thought she had yellow fever
, thought January.
Even though your mama probably told you to stay at whatever ball she’s giving tonight
.

The anger he had felt at this man melted, and he smiled. “In that case, yes, I could use a little rest. I thank you, sir.”

The shutters were fastened and the muslin curtains drawn, but plague or no plague, January felt he must breathe clean air, or die. Smudges of lemongrass and gunpowder burned on the gallery over the water, keeping at bay the mosquitoes which, though fewer than in town, could be found even along the lakeshore. Legs dangling over the water, arms draped on the gallery’s cypress rail, January gazed at the constellations of rose and citrine light burning through the trees far along the shoreline. On the heavy air, Haydn and Mozart drifted like the smoke of some far-off battle.

Henri fell asleep shortly before dawn, on the daybed in Minou’s room; his infant son died about an hour later, in January’s arms. January wrapped the wasted little fragment of flesh and bone in a clean towel, and set it aside in the
cabinet
at the back of the house, where neither of the baby’s parents would see. Then he went back to sponging Dominique’s flushed, burning face and body with cool water, trying to bring her fever down. As he worked he whispered the prayers of the Rosary, not counting decades, but simply repeating them over and over again:
Hail, Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee
.

It kept him from thinking. Kept him from wondering if this fate would have overtaken Ayasha, had she borne him the child she had been almost certain she carried the
week before her death. Kept him from wondering what point there was in carrying on.

Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death
.

Not,
Keep us from dying
, as Olympe would petition the
loa
to do, with colored candles and the blood of chickens and mice.
Pray for us at the hour of our death. Hold our hands in the dark. Get us across that wide water safely
.

He looked down at his sister’s face, and felt a great weariness inside.

He wanted Rose. Wanted to talk to her, about Minou’s child, and death; about a dozen other things. It might be months, it might be years, and it might be never, before he could lie with her, talking in the night as he and Ayasha used to talk of matters that do not enter daytime conversation. But in the meantime—or even if not—he wanted Rose as a friend in this smoky world of injustice and contagion and deceit.

Feet vibrated on the gallery. January rose from Dominique’s bedside and dried his hands, thankful there was someone he could send for the undertaker, for it was clear that Minou could not be left. Opening the door, he saw Agnes Pellicot, a fashionably decorated straw bonnet on over her tignon and a porcelain crock of something warm and spicy wrapped in a towel in her hands. Behind her, shy and awkward in sprigged white muslin with a long blue sash, was Marie-Neige.

“Marie-Neige,” said January, startled, even before he bowed and took Agnes Pellicot’s hand in greeting. “Madame Pellicot, I … I thought Marie-Neige was in school in town. There hasn’t been a problem …?”

“Problem?” She sniffed, and at his gesture of invitation crossed the threshold in a swish of crinoline. “I don’t know how much you know about that stuck-up hussy Vitrac, but I never trusted her from the very start. And the
thought that I’d leave my poor little one at some school in town at this time, like some other women I could mention …”

“What happened?” He took the crock of jambalaya without being aware of it, stood stupid in the middle of the room with it in his hands.

“What happened? The lazy slut let three of those poor little girls die—
three of them!
What their mothers can have been thinking of to leave them there with her …”

Like you did all summer?

“Mama …”

“Hush, darling, about things you know nothing of.” Madame Pellicot turned back to January, bristling with indignation. “Well, I should have known, but of course she was sly, and I wanted my dearest Marie-Neige to have all the very best. But I never felt comfortable with it. I always felt uneasy. I—”

“What happened?”

“Really, Ben, you don’t need to take that tone. And set that jambalaya down. It’s hot and you’re like to drop it.” She unpinned her hat from her tignon, straightened the neck-ruffle of her dress. “I took Marie-Neige out of that dreadful place yesterday. The woman was a complete fraud, I knew it from the first.”