Fever Season (42 page)

“I’m only guessing,” said January. The shadow in the doorway returned to him again, the voice like a golden whip, the silvery rustle of petticoats. The absolute fear in Pauline Blanque’s eyes. “And I can’t know, not knowing Madame. I’m beginning to wonder if anyone really knows her.”

He frowned, as the woman’s face came back to him, the desperate, yearning expression in her beautiful eyes as she sponged the bodies of the dying. “I think now that Cora must have tried to get Gervase to run away with her. And either Madame overheard them, or quite possibly Gervase actually made the attempt to leave, later that night or the following day. I never actually saw Gervase; Madame sent him out of town very soon thereafter. But I’m almost certain she’d see the attempt as betrayal, after all she did, for whatever reasons of her own, to make things easy for Cora. And that she would not forgive.”

In the silence, the boom of the surf sounded very loud.

“I can’t believe that she’d be that vindictive.” Rose’s hand sketched a gesture of denial in the air, but turned, folding in on itself with the refusal only half made. Her profile was only a shape of darkness now against the fading light. “To do this to me only for harboring Cora, to you for helping her …”

“I think it made it worse,” said January. “She helped you, and you conspired to betray her, too.”

“How would she know? I can’t imagine her eavesdropping. But, of course, Bastien would have. Or even Dr. Lalaurie. I never liked him.” She shivered. “He
crept
so,
and was always asking if he could do ‘tests’ on the girls. He was the one who invented those postural contraptions I showed you. I never understood how a woman of her—her excellence—could love a man so
wormy.”

“One thing I’ve learned,” January said with a smile, “love is beyond comprehension. Anyone can love anyone. It’s like the cholera.”

Rose laughed, spectacles flashing in the reflected lamplight. “
Very
like the cholera,” she agreed, and he heard the jest in her voice, and laughed too, at himself, and the ridiculousness of his love.

“But just saying that,” said Rose at length, “makes me realize: it’s true. I don’t know that much about Madame Lalaurie. She might be an habitual eavesdropper, for all I know. I was thinking, ‘She isn’t a vindictive woman,’ but I don’t know that. I’ve never seen her be vindictive. I don’t want a woman I’ve looked up to, as I’ve looked up to her, to be vindictive. But I don’t know. How vindictive is she?”

“I don’t know either.” January rose, and took her hand to bid farewell before seeking the room alotted him above the kitchen. “I think I’m going to find out.”

He remained on Grand Isle another day, going to Mass in the island’s tiny wooden Church. Later, despite the fact that it was Lent, he tuned up and played the old guitar owned by Aramis Vitrac—there wasn’t a piano on the island—and sang ballads and arias from the operas popular in Paris two seasons ago, to the delight of his hosts and the dozen or so neighbors who walked that night from all over the island to dinner. Alice Vitrac joined in gamely on a flute while Natchez Jim rattled spoons and bones and tambourine. “It’s George Washington’s birthday,” reasoned the island’s black-eyed priest. “Well, near enough, anyway.”

The women brought cakes and scuppernong wine, the
men brandy from the smuggler boats that still plied the Gulf.

By day he walked with Rose on the beaches, both bundled alike in rough jackets, the sand chilly between his toes above the tangled
chevaux-de-frise
of driftwood along the shore. It was difficult not to reach across and touch her hand, her face. Yet in some ways it was easier than he had feared it would be. If a friend was all she could bring herself to be, he thought, he would accept her on those terms; on any terms that would let him continue the quick-sparkle entertainment of her conversation, the rare chance to speak of other things besides the day-to-day commonplaces of life in a small French provincial town.

Early on Monday morning January walked to the beach alone, to watch the waves roll in from the Gulf. Coming back he encountered Alice Vitrac, with oysters she’d bought from one of the fisher-families, and took from her the rush basket to carry to the house.

“You’re good for her,” said Madame Vitrac. She looked up at him with her pale, lashless eyes, myopic as Rose, and smiled a little. “I’m glad you’ve come. I was worried for her. I’m sorry you weren’t able to bring her any word of Cora.…”

“Did you know Cora?”

“Oh, yes.” Her voice grew less shy. “I grew up just over on P’tit Chênière. I’ve known Rose most of my life. Cora, too. They were inseparable.”

January thought of those two girls, growing up in this world of driftwood and tawny sand.

“Cora told me she nursed Rose when she was sick.”

Alice glanced up at him, quickly, looking to see what and how much he might have guessed. They stood still for a moment, sea wind blowing cold over them and rippling the long grass; then she said, “Well, I’ve always thought
Papa Vitrac … I think he was only trying to do right by Rose. By his own lights. The man who—who hurt her—was a neighbor of ours, a planter, a man of color like yourself. Much lighter than you, but big like you. He tried for years to get Rose to marry him, you see. I think he thought that by doing what he did, he would force her hand. Force her father’s hand.”

January said softly, “I see.”

Something of his anger must have shown in his eyes, for Madame Vitrac went on, “Papa Vitrac wasn’t the only one who thought it would be the thing. You know that generally if a man
does
ruin a girl, the first thing everyone thinks of is to have him marry her. So I suppose Mathieu can be excused for thinking it was a good idea.” She shrugged. Her own opinion on the subject was plain in the sudden set of that soft mouth.

“And I take it,” said January, resuming his way toward the house, “that Monsieur Vitrac thought so, too.”

Madame Vitrac put up her hand to brush the fair strings of her hair out of her face, where the wind took them. “He told Rose that she would have to marry this man. I think he was only trying to get her established creditably and didn’t want to have to look very far or very hard. The man did have quite a nice little plantation, over on Isle Dernière, though they said he was hard on his slaves. He later sold up and moved to the mainland, up in the Cane River country; Cora must have told Rose that, or she never would have returned. Because he—he came around. Trying to force her into saying yes. Afterward, I mean. That’s when she became so ill.”

January frowned. “You mean as a ruse? To get him to go away?”

“No.” Madame Vitrac took back the rush basket from him with a brief smile of thanks as they reached the steps
of the house. “I mean she went into the woods and ate nightshade. Cora and my mother were the ones who found her. I don’t know, but I think that Cora—and my mother—were the ones who talked Papa Vitrac into giving her the money to go to New York to school.”

Rose herself never spoke of the matter, and in her eyes January could see—or thought he could see—that whatever had happened in this place, she had made peace of a kind with it, and was content to be here.

They spoke of music, and the Opera in Paris and Rome; of Pakenham’s invasion and the Chalmette battle; of steam engines and bombs and mummies and nesting birds. They built a fire of driftwood, bought oysters from the fisher-boys and ate them raw with the juice of limes, while the waves curled on the sand and a line of brown pelicans emerged silent as ghosts from the mists and, as silent, vanished.

They spoke of the epidemic, and of why the fever might come in the summertimes and not the winters, and why not every summer; of why sometimes cures seemed to work—even onions under the bed—and why sometimes they did not; of the white ghost-crabs that scurried in the retreating scrum of the surf, and of pirate treasure and hurricanes. “I’ve watched the winds and the clouds here,” said Rose, “and the winds and air in the marsh. It feels different there, but I can’t say
why
it’s different, what is different about it. There has to be some way of identifying what it is. Everyone talks about the miasma of sickness, but it’s only a guess, you know. There has to be a way of making it visible, like a chemical stain turning the color of water.”

“Will you come back?” he asked her at last, when on the second evening it grew too dark and too damp to sit
on the gallery longer. “This will blow past, like a hurricane. It always does.”

“And like a hurricane,” said Rose softly, “it will leave wreckage, and that long tedious season of rebuilding. But you’re right,” she added. “I can’t stay here forever, with nothing to read but newspapers a year old, and no one but Alice to speak to. I don’t know.” She shook her head, and reached out, very quickly, to touch his hand in parting for the night. “I don’t know.”

January returned to New Orleans on the twenty-eighth of February, to find that Emil Barnard—
Doctor
Emil Barnard—had not been idle in his absence. Six other letters had been written to the
Bee
, mentioning that it was the gracious and charitable Delphine Lalaurie whom January had insulted and further stating that he was known to have assisted in the escape of a number of slaves.

“Really, Ben, this is getting intolerable,” pronounced his mother, the day of his return. She’d emerged from the back door of the house only minutes after he slipped from the passageway and crossed the yard, too exhausted and depressed to go in and speak to her first. Lying on his bed, he heard the light sharp tap of her shoe-heels on the steps, and closed his eyes in dread. She’d been saving all the newspapers for the preceding nine days and placed them on the end of the bed. “And don’t lie on your bed with your shoes on,” Livia continued. “I swear, when Bernadette Metoyer came over to tea the day before yesterday I didn’t know what to say. Is it true what Agnes Pellicot tells me, that you were carrying on an affair with that Vitrac, that starved poor Marie-Neige nearly to death?”

“Mama,” said January, without opening his eyes, “you
have only to
look
at Marie-Niege to know that no one starved her nearly to death.”

“Ben, that is a most unkind and unfeeling thing to say.”

It was the kind of thing she said all the time. “I’m sorry, Mama.”

“You’re my son.” He imagined he could hear the admission stick in her throat. “And you will always have a home with me, even if you can’t pay me the rent you owe me right now. I’ll give you another few weeks on that. But I will have to ask you to be quiet when you come and go, and not draw attention to this house.”

“Ben, you really have to be more careful,” cautioned Dominique, a few nights later, when both were invited to Olympe’s house for dinner. “Rumors get around so terribly. You can’t insult someone like Delphine Lalaurie! Why, she’s seen to it that crazy man Montreuil has nearly been run out of business, for spreading those horrid lies about her keeping slaves chained in her attic.”

“Those rumors were around before she lived next to Montreuil.” Olympe laid down her spoon and regarded her younger sister with boneyard eyes. “I heard things like that when she still lived over near the bank on Rue Royale.”

“That’s silly,” protested Dominique. “Ben’s been in the house, haven’t you, Ben? Did
you
see any slaves chained up?”

“I doubt she’d give her daughters’ piano teacher a tour of the dungeon.” January ate a forkful of Olympe’s excellent grillades. Dominique hadn’t invited him to her house, as was her usual wont, since his return from Grand Isle.
Coincidence?
he wondered. Or an overwhelming dread that news of his unhallowed presence might somehow reach
Henri? Or, God forbid, Henri’s mother? “The housemaid I saw looked all right.”

“So she’s not keeping them chained up in an attic, for the Lord’s sake!” Dominique gestured impatiently. Small pendant diamonds flashed in her ears. “Monsieur Montreuil’s just insane, and an opium-eater too, I’ve heard. I mean, Madame Lalaurie did manumit old Davince—”

“Who then had to leave the state,” pointed out Olympe. “Mighty convenient for her—as it is for everyone who frees a person who’s lived in their house and knows their affairs. And she does have her favorites.”

“Well, so does everyone. Besides, Henri eats over there all the time, and he’s seen her servants. Every white person in town knows that’s a lie.” Dominique shrugged, and picked at her food, clearly uncomfortable. At the far end of the table the children, from Zizi-Marie to the baby, were following this discussion with interest. “You just hate her because Mamzelle Marie hates her. Blacks are always complaining that their white folks don’t feed them. Goodness knows Bella always is, about Mama, and she’s certainly not about to die of starvation.”

January held his peace. He’d seen his mother count and weigh not only leftover meat so that her cook would be accountable for it, but the burnt stumps of household candles. It was true, he knew, that for every servant who was kept to rice and beans, there was another who made a fair living off selling surplus food and pocketing the profit.

But his mind returned to the shadowed figure in the music-room doorway, to the voice cold as struck gold.
“Begin again. Begin again. Begin again.”