Benjamin January 2 - Fever Season by Hambly Barbara

Author:Hambly, Barbara
Language: eng
Format: epub

Zob Barbara Hambly

Fever Season Zo7

him he was too late and had lost his passage money; within the high walls of the Lalaurie house he strained his ears, and grudged the thick curtains that masked all noise from the streets.

The heavily decorated, ostentatious parlor was nearly dark, as usual; oven-hot, as usual; and neither Pauline nor Louise Marie had practiced, as usual. Pauline was peevish, caustic, and spiteful; Louise Marie sniveling with an exquisitely calculated appearance of martyrdom: “It's only that my silly pain has made it so difficult for me to practice. The pain, and the heat, and one of my dizzy spells.” She raised a wraithlike hand to her forehead. “I have told you of my spells, have I not, M'sieu Janvier?”

January thought of Hannibal, weaving exquisite beauty through pain to earn enough to sleep under a roof. , Of Rose Vitrac, sponging off the bodies of the dying in the heat.

,,The heat?“ Pauline laughed with a sound like breaking glass. ”We're like to die in the heat. It isn't as if we ; didn't have a house at the lake.“ ”

“Oh, but you can't expect Dr. Lalaurie to give up his work with Dr. Soublet, just for us.” Louise Marie lifted sunken eyes to meet her sister's. January recalled what the market-women had said, when he'd asked them about Madame Lalaurie: “She's had enough to bear, with that poor girl of hers in and out of that clinic, but she never would have no truck with laudanum. . . . ”

Soubiet's? Was that where Madame had met the suavely dandified Lalaurie?

`No more than she deserved, “had grumbled another. `I ,.1 heard how she throwed a little pickaninny of hers off'n the , roof. . . . ” i

“I heard it was down a flight of stairs, ” had said some- i one else, and the discussion dissolved into an exchange of ~

rumor that would, January reflected angrily, have made Monsieur Montreuil proud.

“And with a doctor in the house, and Mama, you know we must be perfectly safe.” Louise Marie's plaintive . tones tugged back his thoughts. “We can survive the heat.” She sighed as she said it, to let everyone know she did not expect to. “I'm just so sorry, Monsieur Janvier, that I haven't been able to learn my pieces better. I did try.”

Pauline's mouth twisted, her sharp nostrils flaring with an unmade comment. Was this, January wondered, one of those girls of whom Mademoiselle Vitrac had spo

ken? The. ones who were too. bright, too sharp, for their own good? Delphine Lalaurie was the pinnacle of Creole womanhood: hostess, businesswoman, mother, manager of a household of twenty or more persons. What recourse had a daughter of this house, if that daughter's goals and needs did not include a husband and children, Creole tradition, and Creole society?

Halfway through Pauline's careful but unpracticed recital of a Haydn contredanse the door opened. He saw the thin back of the girl at the piano grow rigid. The sticklike hands fumbled on the keys.

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