Fever Season by Barbara Hambly Page B

petticoats she rose, greeted Soublet with a warm smile and turned her back on Ker without a word. But she did not stop to speak with her husband’s partner, crossing instead to where January stood.
    “M’sieu Janvier?” Her voice was a lovely mezzo-soprano. He had heard that she sang like an angel. Like her daughter Pauline, her eyes were large, coffee dark, and brilliant. Like Pauline she seemed to burn with energy; but instead of the girl’s restless, dissipated resentment, hers was a focused vigor that seemed to fill the room. “I realize it’s an imposition, with as much as you have to do here,” she said, “but might we speak?” Without seeming to, she glanced back at Dr. Soublet and Emil Barnard, hovering just out of earshot, and lowered her voice. “It concerns my houseman, Gervase.”
    There was little space in the Hospital that wasn’t chockablock with the dying. January unlatched the long windows that led to the gallery. “Shut those!” roared Soublet. “Do you wish to kill all these people?”
    You should talk of killing all those people
, thought January dourly. Nevertheless, he closed the shutters behindthem quickly as he and Madame stepped into the steamy rankness of the night.
    “I’m sorry to have to bring you out here, Madame.”
    She chuckled softly. “We walk back and forth through the night miasma coming here, M’sieu. If it’s the night air that causes the fever at all, a little more can scarcely harm us.” She coughed with the smoke of the smudges burning in the courtyard below them and waved her hand. Her gloves were French kid at fifty cents the pair, as immaculate as her apron when she had come in. Having seen the promptness with which she attended the delirious sailor, January couldn’t imagine this woman going through a shift at wherever she nursed without getting as fouled as he was—apron, dress, and gloves were now spotted with water and filth. She must have changed the entire outfit before coming here.
    “Sometimes I don’t think doctors know anything. One can only care for the sick, and pray for their poor disobedient souls.” She crossed herself; January did, too. Her one ornament was a gold crucifix on a slender chain around her neck. “I take it the girl Cora came to ask your help?”
    “I know no one by that name, Madame.” So that sleek bastard Bastien had told her. “It was on another matter that I wished to speak with Gervase. He’s a friend of my sister Olympe. And it wasn’t important. I’m sorry that you were troubled.”
    “M’sieu …” The twinkle in her dark eyes mocked him gently. “The boy’s never been in this city in his life before I purchased him. And I happen to know that spiteful harpy Emily Redfern is looking all over the Parish for someone to blame for her husband’s death besides her own parsimony in keeping her meat hanging too long in the summer. I gather she’s talked her Yankee compatriots inthe City Guard into wasting their time and citizens’ money in pursuit of some poor child who had no more to do with Otis Redfern’s death than you did—and paying off old scores onto her.”
    Regarding her, January guessed there wasn’t a great deal about the personal lives of anyone in New Orleans society that Delphine Lalaurie didn’t know. Related to everyone of wealth and breeding, she was in a position to hear everything. Still he said nothing. In the courtyard below them, Emil Barnard emerged from the Hospital, made his way toward the piled bodies near the gate, then stopped and glanced up to see January standing on the gallery. Barnard coughed self-consciously, shoved the empty flour sack he carried into his pocket, and strolled casually away.
    January was aware of the woman’s eyes on his face. Under the rouge and powder that all Creole women wore, the torchlight showed up lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes, fine lines gouged deep, more than simple weariness could account for. Juxtaposed with that slender figure,