Graveyard Dust by Barbara Hambly

Author:Barbara Hambly [Hambly, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, General
ISBN: 9780307785299
Google: LaVgYtYyI-cC
Amazon: B004HFRJF8
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2011-01-05T05:00:00+00:00

It was five days before January heard from Therese. Having made the journey to Milneburgh once to jog his sister's memory on the subject, he didn't feel able to do so again. In any case he could ill spare either the train fare or the time. For two days he worked at his translation of The Knights attempting to deal tactfully with jokes about wrestling coaches and such lines as: Lying, stealing, and having a receptive arse are all absolute necessities for a political career. . . .

Had that bookseller ever read this play?

And every day, working at his desk, January would smell it, the bitter stench of hair and hooves and gunpowder burning, where someone had made smolder pots in a courtyard to disperse fever from the air. Walking back from Rose's rooms in the evening, he passed Dufillio's apothecary on Rue Chartres and saw that the show globes on display-enormous alembics and bulbous jars of colored liquid, blue and green and crimson in equal proportion most of the year-were now uniformly filled with red, a glowing warning to those travelers who came off the steamboats and walked about the city in the mosquito-whining dusk. There were fewer women in the markets, fewer stevedores even among the diminished numbers along the levee; fewer children played in the packed earth of the Place d'Armes. The Guards, when he went to the Cabildo in the mornings to see Olympe, hovered near to watch and listen, and hustled him and Gabriel quickly out. It seemed to him that the prisoners were very quiet.

On Wednesday a note reached him from Dr. Ker, asking his help at Charity Hospital with fever cases.

In two days, nearly a hundred had been brought in, mostly impoverished Germans and Irish from the shacks where Girod and Perdido Streets petered out into the marshes behind the town. For two days January worked late into the nights, wiping down bodies flushed with jaundice, making saline draughts, watching in helpless frustration as the various volunteer physicians of the town administered whatever remedies they considered appropriate for a disease as mysterious as death itself bleeding, emetics, "heroic" doses of calomel and mercury ("If their gums don't bleed, it ain't enough to work"), plasters that raised blisters on the emaciated flesh. Sometimes their patients recovered, damaged kidneys releasing bloodblack urine in a flood. Sometimes they died.

And with every new case brought in, with every wrung and wasted corpse January helped carry down to the courtyard for the dead-carts, he thought, Not the cholera. We can deal with the yellow jack if the cholera doesn't return.

The Louisiana Gazette ran an editorial furiously denouncing the white-livered cowards who fled the city-the healthiest spot in the nation! at the rumor of a little summer fever. Pere Eugenius, meeting January late one evening in the brick corridor of the hospital, remarked dryly that members of the City Council had requested that the Cathedral not toll the passing bells, "Lest folks coming through on the steamboats get the wrong impression.

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