Fever Season by Barbara Hambly Page A

all.” He spoke French, being one of those Creoles who not only had refused to learn English with the advent of the Americans but had deliberately expunged from his memory any English he had ever known.
    His servant stood beside him, holding open a box the size of a child’s coffin. In it January could see an apparatus of braces and straps, ratcheted wheels and metal splints. Equipment from Soublet’s clinic. He’d seen the like in every medical journal for the past dozen years, accompanied by long articles about scientific advances in realigning the bones.
    “This man came to this Hospital because he wished to be treated
gratis
, with the skills we have worked to acquire and the medicaments purchased by the city. He owes us something.” On the bed between them, Hèlier the water seller moved his head vaguely. His eyes glimmered horribly bright between bloated lids. January guessed that the sick man had only the dimmest notion of what was going on. “Moreover, such an experiment can only be beneficial to him! I have had nearly miraculous results from the use of scientifically applied force in the realignment of the skeleton and limbs.”
    “This is a hospital, man,” retorted Ker, in excellent French, “not the headquarters of the Spanish Inquisition! Take that thing away!
Charity
means ‘out of love,’ not ‘for the sake of finding some poor soul to test your theories on.’ ”
    “Theories, sir!” Soublet drew himself up, a tall man with a sort of coarse sturdiness to him and skin like a very bad road surface in the jumpy light. “I do not deal intheories! My work is soundly based on observation, facts, and the latest findings of the medical fraternity—”
    He stopped, his attention arrested by someone at the door of the ward. Turning, January saw Madame Delphine Lalaurie.
    The first thing that anyone ever said of her—the thing that most of Marie Delphine de McCarty Blanque Lalaurie’s admirers always mentioned—was that she glowed. With energy, with intelligence, with strength. There were other beautiful women in the city, possibly others more beautiful by conventional standards, but had she been plain, Delphine Lalaurie would still have drawn all eyes. January had never figured out how some people could do that.
    She was a tall woman, imperially straight; and though nearly every Creole woman of her age had surrendered to rich food and
embonpoint
, she retained the slim figure of a girl. She was clothed in a plain gown of black merino, such as wealthy women wore to nurse in, spotlessly clean even to its hem, as far as he could tell in this light, and unobtrusively on the leading edge of Paris fashion. The linen apron pinned over it, and the linen veil that covered her lustrous dark hair, gave her a nunlike air, as if a queen had taken vows.
    Soublet and Ker immediately went to greet her, but before they could reach her she turned, hastening to the bedside of a delirious, bewhiskered young sailor who had begun to struggle and shout. A harassed nurse was trying to calm him, but he flung her back, eyes staring in horror and agony. Madame Lalaurie caught his shoulders, pressed him back to the bed with surprising strength, whispering to him, gentle words, soothing words. After a moment’s desperate thrashing the man settled back, gasping, then turned and began to vomit. Madame Lalaurie and thenurse held him, and in the livid lamp glare January saw the expression of Madame’s face: a deep intense pity, mingled with something else. An inward look, yearning, longing, ecstasy, as if she knelt in meditation at the Stations of the Cross.
    The man collapsed, sobbing, exhausted. Madame and the nurse wrung rags in a basin of grimy water, sponged his fouled and tear-streaked face.
“Kösönöm,”
the man whispered, or something like it, a language January did not know.
“Kösönöm.”
    “It’s all right,” she breathed, and stroked the crawling hair, “you’ll be all right.”
    Then in a whisper of