Fever Season by Barbara Hambly Page A

sickening stenches, buried his mind in the immediate and hellish present. He sponged down exhausted bodies, carried out the dead, followed Dr. Soublet on his sanguinary rounds. A family was brought in, mother, sons, granddaughter all suffering the cholera; they were isolated in a stuffy little chamber as far from the other patients as possible, with the nearly twenty other sufferers of the disease. January worked vainly to keep them at least clean and keep them from going into convulsions. Fear of contracting the disease was enough to keep his mind from Cora Chouteau’s defiant eyes, and the way she’d turned her face away as she’d said, “I promise.” She was going to try to get Gervase to flee with her.
    And they’d be caught.
    He’d
be caught.
    I should never have helped her
, he thought. I
should never have helped her
.
    Then the image of that little boy on the gallery of the garçonnière would come back, the boy who waited for hisfather to come see him, the dream image of the man with the tribal scars on his face, pursued through the woods by dogs. And he didn’t know what to think or feel.
    I couldn’t not
.
    Would Shaw accept that as an argument?
    It would be like Shaw
, he thought,
to watch Madame Lalaurie’s house if he could get the men for it
.
    His only hope lay in proving that Emily Redfern had poisoned her husband, had attempted or intended to poison Cora, or at least given the girl reason to believe she so intended.… And how could he do that?
    Ask Mamzelle Marie?
    He looked across the ward at her, remembering her on the street that day. Now she held the hands of a laborer who gasped, wept, flopped like a landed fish, his body voiding the wastes that were the sign that the fever had broken, the disease had run its course. Her face was calm and distant as it was when she danced, an Adamless dark Eve, with the great snake Damballah in Congo Square.
    She’d seen Cora.
    Here, and at Black Oak.
    It didn’t take a genius to guess that pasteboard coffins, black candles, and graveyard dust could be easily backed up with galerina mushroom or Christmas rose.
    He’d confided everything in Olympe.
Sometimes we don’t tell even each other what we know
. Would his sister put his confidence above the woman who was her sworn Queen?
    His head ached with heat and worry and sheer fatigue by the time he left the Hospital, well after dawn. Shaw was not waiting for him outside. So far, he thought bitterly, so good.
    He crossed Canal Street, with its usual rabble of drunken keelboatmen, carters cursing as they hauled firewoodand produce from the turning basin of the canal where they were unloaded. Dead dogs and garbage floated in the reeking gutters—gnats and mosquitoes whined about his ears. A few vendors moved along the streets by houses shuttered tight, or stopped to gossip at the rare doors that opened to them, hawking eggs or rat poison, asking after neighbors who were gone. His sister’s house was shuttered but the plank lay welcomingly across the gutter, so he assumed that things were as they should be there. His hand fumbled for the rosary in his pocket and he whispered a prayer,
Dear God, not them
.
    Lying awake in the breathless heat of his room, he wondered if they’d heard word yet of Alys Roque’s missing husband. Wondered how Zizi-Marie and Gabriel had fared, packing up the indigent Perrets for their sojourn on Uncle Louis’s floor.
    Wondered if he had gotten Ayasha out of Paris—if they’d had the money to go anywhere else—if she would have survived.
    That way lay madness, and he shoved the images from his mind.
    Tried to think instead of Cora Chouteau. The thought was scarcely more comforting. He felt a little embarrassed as he groped for his rosary again—
Dear God, don’t let her have got caught
—but he did it anyway. He remembered the night he’d spent in the Cabildo last spring, the prison hot as it was hot here, stinking of human waste and human fear. Remembered the voices of the