Fever Season (45 page)

“I’m not doin’ nothing,” whispered a voice, a broken plea out of the darkness. The smell of urine struck him, pungent and vile in the heat, half-buried under the slurry of other kitchen smells. “Not doin’ nothing, just getting
myself a little water. Please, Mr. Bastien, don’t tell her I was bad. Don’t tell her. Please.”

A woman crouched on the other side of the big pine table, near the shelves and cupboards of the far wall. The open hearth, banked though it was, threw enormous heat but almost no light. Still, January could see that the woman was far smaller than Rose. An emaciated face, cheekbones stabbing through stretched skin, haunted eyes pits of shadow under a white headscarf, and a dark dress hanging baggy over bony limbs.

The dress was sweat soaked, the smell of it stinging, but it was buttoned down to the wrists and up to the woman’s collarbone.

There was an iron collar around her neck. She was chained to the stove.

“Don’t tell her, Mr. Bastien.” Her voice was barely louder than the scrape of a hinge. She pressed her cheek to the wooden doors of the cupboards against which she crouched, trying to hide behind one blistered hand. “Don’t let her know I was bad.”

January’s heart locked in his chest. All he could seem to see was the way the soft brick of the floor was worn in a shallow groove between the stove, the table, the cupboards, and the chamber pot in the corner—the only places where this woman was allowed to walk—and all he could smell was the stink of the dress she didn’t dare to unbutton for the sake of coolness, and the piss she wasn’t even allowed to pass outside. All he could think was,
She has Rose here somewhere. She has Rose here
.

Then as if a door opened somewhere inside him he saw Montreuil again, and Olympe’s bleak eyes.
Those rumors were around before she lived next to Montreuil. Dear God
, he thought.
Dear God
.

He opened the kitchen door a crack. Outside, Bastien
shut and double-barred the gates—they would have done for a medieval city—and walked over to the stable, to check the carriage-team. Satisfied—by his step he was satisfied—the coachman crossed back to the main house. January gave him a few moments to get away from the rear windows, then slipped out. Moving with the utmost caution to the outside stairway, he climbed warily, listening it seemed with the whole of his body and trembling with shock.

Lights came up in what had to be the rear parlor downstairs, muzzy patterns of gold on the herringbone bricks. Minutes later one of the second-floor windows bloomed with candle glow. A shadow briefly darkened the slitted louver lines.

Servants wouldn’t be active in the main house at this hour. One of the family, then. Did the crippled Louise Marie attend balls? Or was she at home?

Barely breathing, he ascended the second flight. The smell that lingered on the third-floor gallery, even with the doors of the chambers shut and locked, told him he had found the place he sought.

There was a candle in his pocket, and a screwdriver. Though it froze his heart to make a light he did so, shielding it with his body, to examine the lock. It was of a simple latch kind, yielding to the removal of the the metal plate on the doorjamb. He slipped the latch free, eased the door open, then stepped through and shut it. The smell here was a thousand times worse in the thick trapped heat of spring: feces, urine, moidering blood. The strange, slightly metallic smell of maggots. Ants made trails along the walls, up the studs, across the rafters. Flies attacked the light in swarms.

The room was empty, but beyond the shut door at its far side, someone groaned.

I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to do this
. The words gyred stupidly through his mind as he crossed the tiny room, hoping weirdly that the door on the other side would be locked. Hoping like a child in a nightmare that he wouldn’t have to see what he knew he was going to see.

At first they didn’t look human, or anyway not like living men who had once walked the levee, sang to ladies, maybe eaten mangoes with the juice running down their chins. The way their arms were chained—elbows together above and behind the head, wrists together in a travesty of an upside-down L, ankles locked to the bands around their waists—it took January a few moments to understand that they were men at all, and not misshapen fetishes carved out of knobbed brown-black oak. Unable to move, they knelt in their own waste, on the other side of a table where a whalebone riding whip and a cat-o’-nine-tails lay with items only barely guessed at. Starvation had rendered them almost unrecognizable as men. It was only when the thing hanging on the wall moved and tried to make noise that he realized that it, too, was alive.

It was Cora.

He didn’t know why he recognized her. Maybe by her size, rendered still more childlike by advanced emaciation. Her tiny feet, hanging ten or twelve inches above the floor in their heavy leg irons, looked no bigger than a turkey’s claws. There was an iron gag in her mouth, the kind he’d seen in old museums labeled a Scold’s Bridle, locked behind her head and forcing her mouth open. Flies crawled in and out, over a thin, constant stream of drool.

January’s mind stalled, blocked by what he was seeing. He realized he hadn’t the faintest idea what he should do. These people obviously couldn’t walk, couldn’t make it down two flights of stairs. He had heard the phrase,
ran screaming
—he hadn’t known what it had meant, he realized.
All he wanted to do was flee, shrieking, down Rue de l’Hôpital, blotting this sight from his mind forever.…

His hand shaking so badly he could barely manipulate the latches, he unfastened the iron cage around Cora’s head, pulled it off as gently as he could. The girl made a horrible noise in her throat, then spat out maggots. “Gervase.” She nodded to the room’s inner door.

It was locked. January set his candle on the table, looked among the horrors there for a piece of thin wire that he could use to work the pawls—theoretically, at least. He’d never picked a lock in his life, though Hannibal had assured him it wasn’t difficult. In the watery uncertainty of the single flame the tools were terrible, each a silent word of pain: levered clamps, intricate mechanisms of screw and strap, something like a half-unfurled speculum mounted on a screw. Ants and roaches crept over the caked blood.

From among them he picked a vicious little hook, turned back to the door. There was a dim scraping behind him, one of the chained men trying to wriggle across the floor. January brought the candle close to the lock, bent to work the hook.

He heard Cora scream and started to straighten up, his head moving straight into the numbing blow from behind. His body hit the wall. He had a brief glimpse of Bastien raising an iron crowbar for another blow, and remembered nothing more.

Pain brought him to, unbelievable pain in his neck, back, shoulders. He thought someone must surely have run iron needles under the scapula, through the cervical joints, into his ribs, everywhere, but in the utter dark, the abyssal stench and heat, he couldn’t tell. He couldn’t move, was too disoriented to even judge in what position his body was pinned. He threw up, the spasms rending his shoulders like the rack, and the vomit ran warm down his naked chest and belly. Blinding pain drilled through his skull, enough to stop his breath.

He passed out.

He came to from the pain of being moved. Even the light of the branch of candles near the door was pain, gouging through his eyes to his brain. He threw up again, doubled over this time, his wrists manacled behind him, being drawn steadily up. He tried to straighten, tried to move to lessen the agony in his shoulders, but the rope or chain on the manacles kept pulling up toward the ceiling, dragging his arms up behind him. Hannibal had spoken once of his lunatic uncle, fixated on the Spanish Inquisition, and January recognized what this had to be, from old woodcuts: a ceiling pulley, a set of wrist-chains, a rope, and a demon to pull on it until the victim’s feet lifted from
the floor and his arms were wrenched from their sockets. The light was like an ax in his skull.

“Did you tell anyone?”

That mellow golden contralto:
Begin again
. The rope twisted up a few more inches and he cried out.

Thin and flexible, the whalebone training-whip tore the backs of his naked thighs.

“Did you tell anyone?”

“No.”

A cut across his belly. He felt blood.

How he knew what she wanted he didn’t know. Maybe because she was white.

“No, m’am.”

It was hard to look at her, hard to make his eyes focus. She wore a ball dress of turquoise silk with what they called a Mary Stuart bodice, the candlelight salting her black lace with gold. Queenly, gracious, lovely as she had been that afternoon, apologizing for what Emil Barnard had written. Black-lace mitts on her hands. On the floor beyond her skirts another woman lay with arms and legs folded into an iron contraption that locked between her ankles; January could just see this slave woman’s eyes, brown and huge, staring incomprehendingly at him.

Delphine Lalaurie beat him until he fainted again, beat him without a word or a sound and without change of expression on her face. The agony in his shoulders brought him to twice, when he slumped; he wasn’t sure when he woke up the third time if it was true consciousness. He only knew that his ankles and wrists were being locked together behind his back, and that her skirts were close enough to his head to smell the patchouli in their folds.

He thought she said—if he wasn’t dreaming—“You say Suzette must have seen him come in?”

“She must have, Madame. The kitchen door was open.”

“And, of course, she didn’t bother to tell you about it.”

“No, Madame.”

Hallucinatory in the candlelight, he saw Bastien put a shawl around her shoulders. Sweat bathed her face and made black circles in the armpits of her gown, and she’d taken her hair down, as a woman does for her husband. In the leaping shadows the gray did not show; it hung crow black below her hips. The few pins still snagged in it winked like rats’ eyes.

She put out her hand, resting it on Bastien’s shoulder. No expression changed her face, but she closed her eyes. Straight and cold, for a moment it seemed to January that Delphine Lalaurie was strapped into the self-shouldered bonds of her own perfection, like one of her husband’s infernal posture-correction devices. In the silence he heard her draw breath and release it, like a woman convincing herself that she has to be strong. Whatever the cost, she must go on, to some end known only to herself.

“After all I have done for her,” she said. “After all I have done.”

“Yes, Madame.”

“For the girls. For Nicolas.” Had she been anyone but Delphine Lalaurie she would have trembled. In her face was the echo of that yearning ecstasy it had worn in the fever wards, as she held a young man dead in her arms. “Not one of them knows how much.”

Then she opened her eyes, calm and reasonable and flawless once more. In utter control, obeyed in all things. “I’ll have to speak to her.”

She picked up the whip from the table and went out.

He was dead.

He was dead and in hell. Though Bastien had taken the candles—as if suspended in space somewhere above the yard January could see the two of them, descending the square-angled spiral of the outside stair—he could see also, clearly, Liam Roarke sitting slumped against the wall near the door, the contents of his opened veins a black slow-spreading ocean around his thighs and his bright blue eyes fixed on January.

“You know you didn’t have to tell your smelly friend Shaw, Soublet’s name,” Roarke said, with an evil smile. “You’d told him it before. He knew.”

January couldn’t argue with him.

There were other people in the room. Sometimes he could only hear them, twisting and groaning softly in the darkness: could smell the blood and filth, and hear the scrape of metal, and the sobbing of the woman on the floor. Sometimes in spite of the darkness he could see them, by the light of red flame whose heat consumed them all: his father, Rose, Ayasha. Ayasha, lying on the bed, raised her blackening face and shook back the long coil of her hair, and said, “You didn’t come. And now you’re chasing some other girl. You didn’t come because you were lying with Rose.” Then she threw up all her intestines, and the child she carried inside her, and died again, her hand reaching for the pitcher of water.

January tried to say, “I’m sorry,” but only the serpents of hell crawled from his mouth.

Ants covered him in a gnawing wave, eating his flesh to the bones.

Distantly, Hannibal played the violin, a jig that had been popular in Paris two summers ago, before the cholera came.

If he could only get to his Rosary, thought January,
he’d be safe, he’d be all right. The Virgin Mary would get him out of this.

Delphine Lalaurie would be returning. From his vantage point above the courtyard he could see her, gathering up her heavy skirts to climb the stairs. Her husband Nicolas was with her this time, a sheaf of notes tucked under one arm and one of his experimental postural correction devices in his hands.