Fever Season (18 page)

“You mean, is he dangerous?”

“Not dangerous, but …” January thought again. “Yes. Is he dangerous?”

Hannibal settled his back to the rail of the empty bed’s footboard, folded small white hands, delicate as a woman’s, around his bony knees. “I don’t think so,” he said, after long consideration. “But he’s certainly cracked where Madame L is concerned. He’s a cousin of sorts to the Montreuils who own that plantation downriver. It seems Alphonse’s brother married a woman named Manette McCarty, who’s some kind of cousin to Madame. Now, when Alphonse and Albert’s father died, he left his money, not to his deserving sons, but to his widow. She in turn, when she was gathered to the reward of all good Creole matrons, passed along the money and a substantial hunk of property to brother Albert’s children by means of an unbreakably airtight will. Don’t ask me why she bypassed Alphonse. Maybe she didn’t like him very much.”

“I can understand her sentiments.”

Hannibal coughed, a brief line of pain appearing between
his dark brows, and he fished in his pocket for the opium tincture that suppressed both coughing and pain. He took a tiny, judicious swig. “I suspect he’s even more unpleasant on close contact. God knows how his wife … well. In any case, the brother’s children, instead of sharing some of the proceeds with Uncle Alphonse, as he probably hoped they would, turned the real estate by an Act of Procuration over to their mother—who, as you recall, is Madame L’s cousin, Creole society being stiff with McCartys. The Act of Procuration was handled by the Louisiana State Bank—Jean Blanque’s old outfit—and since Madame is widely known to keep all her business affairs in her own hands rather than let Nicolas Lalaurie lay a finger on them, Montreuil assumed that she was behind the plot.”

“Was she?” January got to his feet to light a pair of candles, for with the thunder of rain overhead the afternoon had gone pitchy dark.

“Who knows? Most of the McCartys go to her for business advice, or for money to float investments. She bankrolled this school, I know that. I don’t know whether she advised Cousin Manette or not. But Montreuil’s never forgiven her.” Hannibal picked up his violin again, sketching threads and bones and shadows of airs while he spoke, as another man might have drawn boxes and diamonds on the margin of a paper while speaking, or made knots in string. “Then when the Ursuline Sisters put their land along Rue de l’Hôpital up for sale, Montreuil wanted to buy the lot next to his house, except he didn’t have the cash—
videlicet
Act of Procuration, above. Madame bought the lot—and the unfinished house—out from under him.

“Since that time he’s been telling everyone who’ll listen that she’s a monster. His wife claims she saw her chase a little Negro girl off the roof with a cowhide whip—
though how she could have seen that I can’t imagine, since the Montreuil house is a full story shorter than the Lalaurie—and reported her to the police for it. The girl had actually died of a fall, and Madame was fined, so it isn’t really surprising that Madame is pretty careful these days to keep her servants behind walls and away from anyone who might talk to any of Montreuil’s people. You grew up in this town. You know the kind of things that get printed in the papers, and talked around the markets, and believed.”

January was silent for a time, listening to the rain and remembering the fury in Mademoiselle Vitrac’s voice, the bitterness in her gray eyes. “I take it Mademoiselle Vitrac knows Madame Lalaurie? If Madame helped finance the school?”

“Rose knew the wife of one of Madame’s McCarty cousins—she’d gone to school with her in New York. The banks were less than eager to lend Rose money once they found out there was no Monsieur Vitrac. I gather someone made the mistake of remarking to Madame Lalaurie how one couldn’t really expect a mere woman to manage a business—some people have no sense of self-preservation.”

The violin shaped a phrase of notes, as clear and mocking as the ironic lift of an eyebrow: were it not for consumption, and pain, and the twin nepenthes of alcohol and opium into which that pain had driven him, Hannibal would have been the greatest at his art. He was still one of the finest violinists January had encountered, in New Orleans or in Paris. As he played, his eyelids had a crumpled look, lined and discolored, but the dark eyes themselves were dreamy, lost in the music and the rain.

Every penny I own is tied up in this building.…

January thought of his sister, and of the child she had
just borne. Of Agnes Pellicot, and of his mother. Men routinely gifted their plaçeés with money or property as a
congé
when they put them aside; it was, he knew, one reason why many women of color crossed over the line of respectability and allowed white protectors to take them. With even a little money, it was possible to start a business, to buy a boardinghouse or rental property, to invest in steamship stocks or sugar futures. Men would start a plaçeé’s son in business, but rarely her daughter.

“What do you think of Cora?” he asked. “You met her. Do you think she’d have done murder?”

Hannibal considered for a time, tatting his bits of Rossini and Vivaldi into a glittering lacework in the dimness. “I think she could have,” he said at last. “She’s hard—but then most women are harder than one thinks. Even our Athene.” He nodded toward the house below them, where Rose Vitrac would be lying, sleeping, January hoped. Alone as she had always been alone. “Whether she
would
have is another question. The problem could have been solved fairly simply by her running away, if she hadn’t decided to take the money and the pearls with her—and of course as a house servant she’d have known where to find them. Myself, I wouldn’t have taken the whole five thousand dollars, let alone the pearls, because the theft would be a guarantee of pursuit. But it may be she wasn’t thinking very clearly.”

Beside him, the girl Geneviève turned in her sleep, and whispered something, despairing. Hannibal leaned close, but the girl fell silent again. The sound of the rain seemed very loud.

“I know Cora did tell Rose not to seek out or try to speak to Madame Lalaurie for her, not that Rose has more than a bowing acquaintance with Madame. It’s hard to tell
how people will react to things, and Cora didn’t want to jeopardize her friend’s position. Which doesn’t mean she didn’t dose Otis Redfern’s soufflé for him: a woman can treat those she cares for with kindness and still be an ogre to her enemies, the same way a man can manumit a loved and loyal slave on the same day he whales the living tar out of another slave for putting too much sugar in his tea. People have surprisingly hermetic minds.”

“Do you think Emily Redfern poisoned her husband? If the mistress was gone beforehand, the wife would have no cause to do it; if it was before Cora left, would she have done herself out of six or seven hundred dollars by poisoning her?”

“Don’t ask me.” Hannibal wrapped his fiddle in its holed and faded silk scarves, and stowed it carefully in its case. “It’s hard to believe La Redfern would pass up a chance at the money, but one can’t tell. Maybe not even the servants in the household could tell. In Dublin when I was growing up there was a woman who kept her two nieces chained in a cellar for five years so she could go on lending their inheritance money out at four and a half percent. One’s always hearing about domestic tyrants who beat or mistreat their wives and children, and no one in the family dares speak of it because they know it’ll do them no good. There may have been things going on in that household we’ll never know about—which may be one reason why our Emily is trying so hard to retrieve her runaway property.”

The rain was lightening. Pale daylight leaking through the cracks in the shutters struggled against the candle glow, then slowly bested it. Hannibal gathered up his fiddle case to go.

“One thing I do know, though,” he added, pausing in
the door. “And I think you know this, too, if you talked to her even for a short time. Cora isn’t one to give up. I don’t think she’d have left New Orleans without Gervase. And given her circumstances, I don’t think she’d walk out either on that money, or on Rose.”

January was careful, upon approaching the Lalaurie house later that afternoon, to stay on the downstream side of Rue de l’Hôpital, crossing over only when directly opposite the gate rather than risk another encounter with Monsieur Montreuil. The rust-colored town house seemed shabby and sordid to him, and he imagined, as he studied it through the thin-falling rain, that the curtains in the upper-floor windows were half-parted, to afford a view of whoever might be passing in the street. The Montreuil house and the Lalaurie shared a party wall. There was no way that he could perceive for anyone in the Montreuil house to see if Madame Lalaurie hurled a dozen slaves from her own roof.

The bony servant entered with the inevitable glass of lemonade for Mademoiselle Blanque in the stifling heat, and vanished in well-trained silence. If nothing else, thought January, Jean Blanque’s widow would have far too accurate a knowledge of what men and women cost to indulge in that kind of waste. When the lesson was over he asked one of the market-women selling berries in the street outside if she had seen or heard of anyone leaving the Lalaurie house the previous Friday night, but the woman only crossed herself quickly, and hurried on her way. January
put up his oiled-silk umbrella and made his way riverward to the cafés that sheltered under the market’s tile-roofed arcade.

Most of the market-women were gone, and the shadowy bays empty to the coming twilight. The air smelled thick of sewage, coffee, tobacco, and rain. A few crews still worked in the downpour, unloading cargoes from the steamboats at the levee. Others sheltered on the benches under the arcades, black and white and colored, joking among themselves and laughing. At the little tables set up on the brick flooring, brokers and pilots and supercargoes sipped coffee and dickered over the prices of flour and firewood, corn and pipes of wine. At other tables, upriver flatboatmen or the crews of the keelboats that still plied the river’s jungly shores muttered in their barely comprehensible English; and under the arches on the river side a stocky, curly haired man in a somber black coat argued prices with the broker Dutillet over a little coffle of slaves standing, manacled, in the rain.

As he passed them January heard Dutillet say in English, “Nine-fifty is as high as I’ll go; take it or leave it, sir.” And the man protested, “Nine-fifty! Why, a good field hand’s going for over eleven hundred in the Missouri Territory!”

January paused, recognizing the melodic organ-bass of the voice.

“Then take ’em up to Missouri and sell ’em there, by all means, Reverend,” retorted the broker. “And considering what you paid that poor widow for ’em, you ought to take shame to yourself.”

January realized the man in the black coat, whose face was vaguely familiar to him, was the Reverend Micajah Dunk, in whose honor Emily Redfern had gone to battle
with the entire Creole community over the matter of musicians.

He passed on, shaking his head. A market-woman pointed out the man he sought, sitting alone at a table with a cup of coffee and beignets before him. January approached him, held out his hand: “Natchez Jim?”

“I was last time I looked.” The boatman smiled, and clasped January’s fingers in a grip like articulated oak logs. “You’re the musician, Mamzelle Snakebones’s brother.”

“Last time I looked,” replied January, and Natchez Jim gestured him to the other chair. The boatman was bearded, his hair a mass of braids like a pickaninny’s, done up in string. His clothing had all started out different colors shortly after Noah’s flood but had weathered to the hue of the river on a bleak day. He smelled of pipe tobacco and badly cured fur, but his French, except for an occasional Creole pronunciation, was the flawless French of Paris. “My sister told me you’d be willing to take someone upriver to Ohio.”

“She told you that, did she?” Jim gestured, asking if January wanted some coffee, and January shook his head. He propped the dripping umbrella against the side of his chair; rain still thundered on the tiles overhead and veiled the cathedral, away across the Place d’Armes, in opaline curtains of moving gray. “It might so be. I owe her many favors, your sister.”

He fished from the front of his shirt a grimy ribbon that had once been red, with a flannel juju bag on the end of it. “This has saved my life, not once but time and again. He’s an angry man, the river. Sometimes all you can do is stay close in to the bank, that he see you not. Yes, I told her I’d take a passenger. Four days, five days it must have been. She spoke then as if it would be soon. Is your friend ready to travel?”

January shook his head. “She’s disappeared. We can’t find her. I sought you out to see if you had taken her already, Friday night.”

“Not me.” The boatman replaced his juju bag in his breast. “Have you checked the fever hospitals? The cholera wards? It takes one fast, the cholera.”

“I work at Charity,” said January. “I haven’t seen her there, or at the Ursulines.”

“There’s a place that’s opened near the turning basin, up in the Swamp where the keelboatmen stay: St. Gertrude’s, I think. If she’s a runaway she may be there.”