Fever Season (35 page)

January wrote, too, over Shaw’s signature when Shaw was too taken up with his other duties to have time; and kept writing, to newspapers, to clergy, to anyone who might know anything. It was early established that no New Orleans dealer had purchased slaves from Roarke—“None who’ll admit of it, anyways,” remarked Shaw sourly.

He did not hear from Rose.

It was a bad winter for January. Whether due to loss of income during the fever season or to the general slump in sugar prices, many of his pupils’ parents elected not to send their children to piano lessons when they returned to town: “It isn’t anything personal, you understand, Monsieur Janvier.” Lettice Sarasse fanned herself with a delicate
circle of stiffened yellow silk. “Only times are a little difficult now, you understand.”

“I understand.” The class he held in his mother’s parlor shrank to two—Catherine Clisson’s eight-year-old daughter, Isabel, and little Narcisse Brize—and he lost every one of his white pupils.

“Nothing to do with your teaching, M’sieu,” explained Madame Lalaurie, slender and queenly in the hot sunlight of her parlor, Bastien in his jam-colored uniform lingering behind her in the door. “It’s just that I’ve come to the conclusion that the lessons aren’t doing the girls any good. But I shall certainly recommend you to those of my friends who seek instruction for their children, and to my good Monsieur Huny at the Opera.”

But November turned to December, and Christmas drew on, and there was little money for coffee at the market or to attend the Opera himself. It was Hannibal, who had gone back to his make-and-scrape existence with the return of Livia Levesque and her cook to New Orleans on the fifteenth of October, who first suggested that there might be something more to the matter than simply “hard times.”

“You haven’t actually been going around saying you’re going back to medicine, have you?” he asked, perched on Livia’s sofa rosining the bow of his violin after January’s two pupils had departed one afternoon. “I had the impression you didn’t think you’d do well at it, but if Ker or one of the
beaux sabreurs
of the local medical community decided to become your patron …”

“Ker couldn’t do a thing for me.” Puzzled, January turned from the piano keys. “He said I was welcome to work at Charity anytime, but I know what that work pays a junior surgeon. The only offer I had,” he added wryly,
“was from Roarke, as a means of getting me into the clinic to murder. Who said I was going back to medicine?”

“Froissart.” Hannibal named the manager of the Orleans Ballroom, and tightened a peg. Beside him on the sofa, Les Mesdames—Livia’s two stout, butter-colored cats—slept with their paws over their noses just as if they hadn’t finished their daily round of hissing and posturing at one another fifteen minutes ago. The December afternoon was a misty one and the slow chilling of the light made January tired and depressed, a holdover from childhood memories of the grinding season. “I asked him why he’d hired Rich Maissie to play the St. Stephen’s Day ball next week, instead of you.”

“Maissie?”
January had read of the ball in the newspapers, and had been expecting a note from Leon Froissart any day. He’d only thought the fussy little Parisian late with his arrangements.

“Well, he hemmed and hawed and wouldn’t look me in the eye and said something about that he’d heard you’d gone back to medicine and weren’t playing anymore, and anyway he’d already spoken to Maissie about the rest of the season.…”

“The
rest of the season?”
Nobody contracted, save by the night.

The white man’s dark eyes met his, worried and questioning. January had the odd feeling of having been punched beneath the sternum; the sense of seeing the first sores of something incurable on his own skin.

“No,” he said slowly. “No, I haven’t spoken to him at all.” It was childish to feel hurt; to remember the quadroon boys calling him
sambo
from a safe distance away.

“I thought it was strange, myself.” Hannibal angled his fiddle a little toward the glass panes of the door. January got to his feet, lit a spill from the fireplace, and
touched it to the branches of tallow work-candles on the piano, the table, the sconces on the wall. His mother would fuss—it was barely four—but the room was genuinely dark. “And I thought he was lying, but I couldn’t imagine why. Still can’t.”

“Could you ask around?” said January worriedly, shaking out the spill. “Find out?” He’d been back in New Orleans now exactly thirteen months. It had been his impression that balls and parties began earlier than Christmastime, at least among the town dwellers, though the big families didn’t come in from the plantations until after the grinding was done. But with no notes or requests coming in he’d thought that perhaps the fever—or maybe the summer’s “hard times”—had affected the Creoles’ enthusiasm for holding dances whenever and wherever they could.

But Uncle Bichet, who played the violoncello, shook his head when January had asked him about the matter in the shadowy vaults of the market one afternoon: “I thought you managed to make some remark about Ma’am Soniat that got repeated back to her, that she didn’t hire you for her little ball last week—either your or that mama of yours.” The old man shook his head again and dusted the powdered sugar of a beignet from his fingers.

“You know you got to be careful, Ben.” Bichet eased himself back on the brick of the bench where he sat. “These Creole ladies, they take against a man, they tell all their friends. You not talkin’ out of turn, since you came back from Paris, are you?”

“I didn’t think Creole ladies even knew one musician from the next,” replied January bitterly. “Let alone paid attention to what we say—and no, I haven’t had any particular opinion about Solange Soniat. And my mother
slanders everyone in town, and I’ve never been blackballed because of it. Have times changed that much?”

“Ben,” sighed the old man, “times changin’ now so that I don’t know what to expect.” Steamboats whistled sadly, invisible through fog gritty with soot and thick with the burnt-sweet smell of a thousand sugar vats. “All I know is you wasn’t playing at the Soniats’ last week, or the Bringiers’ Wednesday, and that Richard Maissie that can’t find his way through a country dance with a compass and a Chickasaw guide just been hired to play the Opera when they open with
Euryanthe
next month. You got somebody real mad, and that’s for sure.”

Xavier Peralta?
January wondered. It was true that he’d run afoul of that haughty old planter last winter, when it had appeared that either he or the Peralta’s son was going to hang for the murder of an octoroon beauty at a ball. But in clearing himself, he had cleared Peralta’s son as well; and though at one point Peralta had attempted to kidnap him and put him on a boat out of the country, he’d gotten the impression that the planter now considered the matter closed.

In any case a few enquiries among the market-women satisfied him that Peralta père was still on his chief plantation at Alhambra, where he had been since May. And certainly a man who owned five plantations and nearly four hundred slaves had better things to think about at grinding time than scuppering the career of a piano player.

But whoever had declared himself—or herself—his enemy, thought January, he or she was almost certainly white. He was asked to play at the Blue Ribbon Balls at the Orleans Ballroom—not so frequently as last winter, to be sure—and Monsieur Froissart showed no embarrassment in dealing with him on those terms. Nor did the ballroom manager make mention of passing him over for
the St. Stephen’s Day subscription dance. January, hoping the matter would be forgotten, said nothing.

Still, after speaking to Uncle Bichet he began to feel uneasy whenever he passed through the brick carriageway into the courtyard behind the ballroom building, or climbed the service stairs to the ballroom itself above the gambling halls on the lower floor. From childhood he’d never liked the sense of people talking of him behind his back.

At a Mardi Gras Ball early in February he asked Dominique about it, Dominique masked and radiant in a rose silk Court-dress of sixty years ago: panniered, powdered, and patched, clinging close to Henri’s side. Henri for his part did not speak to January or acknowledge that anything had ever passed between them in that little cottage in Milneburgh: but that was only the custom of the country. It wasn’t done to admit that one’s mistress had a brother who was a black man, whether or not that brother had saved her life. January didn’t grudge it exactly. He was in fact moderately gratified to see how assiduous the fat man was of his mistress’s comfort, fetching her pastries and lemonade and making sure she always had a seat in one of the olive velvet chairs around the three sides of the dance floor.

When Minou finally came over to the ivy-swagged dais, January explained what Hannibal and Uncle Bichet had told him. “You heard anything about that?” he asked his sister, under the soft strains of a Haydn air played to cover the between-dance gabble of flirting and champagne. “About someone wanting to have me blackballed? Starting rumors? Though God knows what they’d be about.”

What were the rumors of Rose Vitrac about?
The thought made him shiver.

“God knows what any rumor is ever about, p’tit.”
Minou tapped his wrist with her lacy fan, concern for him in her eyes. After four months she’d put back a little of the flesh her illness had cost her; and though she still looked tired and brittle, her smile was just as lovely. “It will blow over, cher. I’ve heard nothing from Mama, and of course Henri wouldn’t know—I’m not sure Henri knows Jackson was re-elected. Or was elected the first time, for that matter,” she added thoughtfully, though the corners of her mouth tucked up, as they always did when she spoke of her lover, and her eyes sought out the enormous pink-and-blue satin shape by the buffet, like an omnivorous pillow devouring oysters with the other Creole gentlemen. “I’m not sure it would be best to ask him, for fear of making the situation worse. All one can do is … well!”

January didn’t know how she did it, since she wasn’t looking in the direction of the triple doorway into the ballroom’s vestibule at the top of the stairway from below, but she caught sight of a mother and daughter entering, and turned her head. “She must want that poor little thing out of the house! I’d have said Marie-Neige was too young to come to balls for a year yet.”

It was Agnes Pellicot, with Marie-Neige.

The poor girl looked painfully shy in her grown-up gown, green-striped satin cut low over small, lush breasts. Her face peeked shyly from an explosion of fluffy dark curls beneath a Circassian turban and pearls. Her two older sisters—the eldest of the four, Marie-Anne, was with her own protector in the cluster around the buffet tables—walked behind her. Marie-Louise wore an expression of miffed suspicion, but Marie-Thèrése seemed serene in the knowledge that no prospective suitor of hers—or Marie-Louise’s, for that matter—was going to find the chubby fourteen-year-old any competition for the elder two. January
knew better than to catch the girl’s eye, though he suspected she’d be grateful to see a familiar face.

But he did say, “If you get a chance, Minou, would you ask Marie-Neige if she’s heard from her schoolmistress, Mademoiselle Vitrac? Or if she knows where Mademoiselle might be found? I’d appreciate it.”

“Mademoiselle Vitrac?” Minou’s forehead wrinkled under the snailshell curls of her powdered wig. “That woman who stole all that money and let those poor girls all die of the fever?”

“That’s a lie!” said January, shocked that the story had worked itself down to the placée demimonde. “Who told you …?”

“Hey, Maestro.” Uncle Bichet set aside the champagne he’d been sharing with Hannibal during this exchange, and picked up his viol’s beribboned bow. “Old Froissart squintin’ this way. Looks like those folks out there startin’ to die of no dancin’. Can’t let that happen.”

“Will you play a Basket Quadrille for the next dance?” urged Minou. “Hercule Lafrènniére promised me one.…”

“I’ll play one at the end of the set if you get Henri to dance with Marie-Neige.” January felt a pang of pity for the girl. “She can’t possibly be afraid of him.”

“Well.” Minou flirted her fan at him. “I’ll see what I can do. But if Henri runs away with her I’ll have you to blame.”

January sank his concentration back into the music—a waltz-cotillion and a delicate Mozart country dance—but his eyes returned a dozen times to the dancers, seeking out the shell hue of his sister’s gown, or the multifarious greens and whites of Marie-Neige’s. It was hard not to think about Rose; hard not to imagine her stumbling along the banquettes after her release from the Cabildo,
frightened and wondering desperately what would become of her. Hard not to picture the men he’d seen in the darkness of the Bayou step from an alleyway in front of her—then behind her as she turned in panic—clubs and rope in hand.

Not Rose
, he thought, as he had prayed daily for months now.
Not Rose
.

Shouts cracked like gunshots from the vestibule, breaking the music’s flow. “You, sir, are a lying lackey of an Orleanniste whoreson!”

“Better the lackey of true kings than a half-caste Radical murderer!”

January broke off his playing as a woman screamed. Beside him, Hannibal murmured resignedly, “Here we go again.”

Since everyone in the ballroom was rushing to the vestibule doors, the musicians rose and followed, at a more leisurely pace, Hannibal carefully stowing his violin on top of the piano and scooping up a bottle of champagne from the buffet table in passing. “Brinvilliers and DuPage, over that Conti Street brickyard lawsuit?” he guessed, naming two lawyers who, not content with an enlivening exchange of personalities in court ten days ago, had continued their insults of one another’s ancestry, ethics, and personal habits in the
New Orleans Bees
ever-libelous letter columns. January’s mother read them aloud over breakfast, with obvious relish—there was never any shortage of such altercations in the press, and they almost invariably ended in violence.

The fight in progress in the upstairs vestibule was hardly the first—or the thousandth—such event January had witnessed in two-thirds of a lifetime playing at New Orleans public entertainments. Both men were armed with small swords—fatally, the employees of the ballroom
had hesitated to confiscate weapons that were part of their fancy-dress costumes—and the taller lawyer, younger and fiercely mustachioed, with a Romantic’s crop of long black hair, was lunging and striking at the shorter, a military-looking little man in more-or-less Turkish garb who’d already taken a cut on his temple and was bleeding freely. The shorter man was shouting, “Cur! Coward! Having refused to meet me like a gentleman … !”