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Authors: Barbara Hambly

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Fever Season

BOOK: Fever Season
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THE CRITICS LOVE BARBARA HAMBLY’S

Fever Season

A
New York Times
Notable Book of the Year

“This is
HISTORY MYSTERY AT ITS BEST!

—Rocky Mountain News


HISTORY IS IN EVERY FIBER OF THE BOOK.… BARBARA HAMBLY IS ON MY ‘A’ LIST
for sure now.”

—Charlotte Observer


FEVER SEASON
is filled with
RICH
, well-researched detail and a cast of
FASCINATING
and
COMPLEX
characters.”

—Mostly Murder


STELLAR.… ENTHRALLING.… THE TEEMING PLOT IS FLAWLESS, THE LANGUAGE BEAUTIFUL, AND THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL BRILLIANTLY DISPLAYED.

—The Drood Review of Mystery


A HAUNTING STORY OF INJUSTICE
.… An
EYE-OPENING
look into a little-known period in U.S. history.”

—MLB News

“An
ENTERTAINING
and
INFORMATIVE
new historical series.”

—The Rue Morgue

More Praise for FEVER SEASON

“A dynamite sequel to
A FREE MAN OF COLOR!

—Booknews
from the Poisoned Pen

“Hambly proves herself to be an expert in verbal photography. Her accounts of the heat and humidity nearly drip off the pages. And the tension she creates leading up to a surprise ending is not unlike the storms brewing out in the Gulf waiting to explode over the city and citizens of New Orleans.”

—The Tampa Tribune

“Grips the reader from start to finish.”

—The Washington Times

“An intrigue more dangerous than the plague.”

—San Diego-Union-Tribune

“Offers a rich, detailed look at a … time in Louisiana history when it was newly made a state.”

—Florida-Times Union

Praise for Barbara Hambly’s

A Free Man of Color


MAGICALLY RICH AND POIGNANT.

—Chicago Tribune


A SMASHING DEBUT, RICH AND EXCITING WITH BOTH SUBSTANCE AND SPICE.

—Star Tribune
, Minneapolis


AN ASTONISHING TOUR DE FORCE.

—Margaret Maron


A DARNED GOOD MURDER MYSTERY.

—USA Today


SUPERB.

—The Drood Review of Mystery


A SPARKLING GEM.

—King Features Syndicate

Also by Barbara Hambly

A Free Man of Color

Graveyard Dust

Sold Down the River

Die Upon a Kiss

Wet Grave

And in hardcover:

Days of the Dead

All available from Bantam Books

This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.
NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED
.

Fever Season
A Bantam Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam hardcover edition published July 1998
Bantam paperback edition/May 1999

All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1998 by Barbara Hambly.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-49319.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books.

eISBN: 978-0-307-78528-2

Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, New York, New York.

v3.1

For Laurie

Special thanks to the staff of
the Historic New Orleans Collection
for all their help; to Kate Miciak for her
assistance and advice in redirecting
the story; to O’Neil deNoux;
and, of course, to George.

Contents
NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

As in my previous book of this series,
A Free Man of Color
, I have employed, as far as possible, the terminology of the 1830s, which differs considerably from that in use today. In the 1830s, as far as I can tell,
creole
was generally taken to mean a native-born white descendant of French or Spanish colonists. If a person of African parentage was being referred to, he or she was specified as a
creole Negro
, that is, born in the Americas and therefore less susceptible to local diseases than
Congos
—African-born blacks.

There was a vast distinction between
black
and
colored
. The latter term had a specific meaning as the descendant of African and European ancestors.
Sang mêlé
was one of the French terms: “mixed blood.” Any colored person would have been deeply offended to be referred to as “black,” since
black
meant “slave”; and the free colored had worked long and hard to establish themselves as a third order, a caste that was neither black nor white. Likewise, they were careful to distinguish between themselves and slaves of mixed race and between themselves and freedmen, whatever the percentage of African genetics in their makeup. Given the economics of the time and the society, this was a logical mechanism of survival. That they did survive and thrive, and establish a culture of amazing richness that was neither African nor European, is a tribute to the stubborn and wonderful life force of the human spirit.

ONE

In fever season, traffic in the streets was thin. Those who could afford to do so had left New Orleans with the ending of Lent; those who could not had all through the long summer hurried about their business as if Bronze John, as they called the sickness, were a creditor one could avoid if one kept off the streets.

Midday, the molten September heat raised steam from the water in the French town’s cypress-lined gutters and the rain puddles in the soupy streets. Mephitic light filtered through clouds of steamboat soot from the levees and gave the town the look of a grimy but inexplicably pastel-walled hell. Only those whose errands were pressing walked the streets then.

So it took no great cleverness on Benjamin January’s part to realize that he was being followed.

Charity Hospital, where he’d spent the night and all the morning among the dying, lay on the uptown side of Canal Street, the American side. It was against January’s nature to spend more time on that side of town than was absolutely necessary, to say nothing of the fact that Americans seemed to regard all free persons of color as potential slaves, money on the hoof going to waste that could be going into their pockets in the big markets along Baronne
and Levee Streets. Americans made no distinction, as the French were careful to do, between African blacks—be they slaves or freedmen—and the free persons of color whose parents had been both colored and white. Not, January reflected wryly, that it made a great deal of difference in his case.

But even in fever season, when men and women, black and white and colored, were only hands to hold off Bronze John from one another—to carry water and vinegar and saline draughts, to fan away the humming swarms of mosquitoes and flies—he felt uneasy uptown.

Maybe that was why he realized so quickly that someone was dogging his steps.

His head ached from twenty-four hours without sleep. His senses felt dulled, as if someone had carefully stuffed his skull with dirty lint soaked in the stinking fluids of the dying; his very bones weighed him down. His last patient that day had been a nine-year-old girl who’d walked the twelve streets to the hospital from the levee where she’d been selling oranges. Her mama, she said in English, before delirium claimed her, would whale her for not staying on to finish the day. The child had died before she could tell anyone who her mama was or where that lady could be found.

As of that morning, no newspaper in the town had yet admitted that there was an epidemic at all.

The fever had first come to New Orleans in January’s sixteenth year. In those days you never heard English spoken at all, though the city already belonged to the United States. He’d been studying medicine then with Dr. Gomez and had followed his teacher on his rounds of the hospitals; it seemed to him now, twenty-four years later, that the ache of grief and pity never grew less. Nor did his fear of the fever itself.

He wasn’t sure exactly what it was that made him realize he was being stalked.

BOOK: Fever Season
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