was only in the fever season that he practiced medicine. The rest of the year he played piano to earn his bread. It was an injustice he'd accepted, upon his return to New Orleans from Paris, nearly a year ago. And things had changed in the city since his departure in 1817.
So he followed Rue Villere downstream, past shabby cottages and grubby shacks in rank jungles of weed, the stench of untended privies, of gutters uncleaned for weeks, and of sties and coops, neglected by their owners, thick as fog around him. An unpaved path, mucky from the morning's rainstorm, led him toward the river.
He was definitely being followed. He didn't want to look back; he couldn't tell by whom.
Rue Douane, the first street of the French town itself, was usually alive with cart and foot traffic. Today, there were only two women in the faded calico of poverty, hur rying with bowed heads. Those, and the dead-carts that lurched toward the cemeteries with their stiffened cargoes wrapped in cheap Osnaburg sheets and their throbbing armies of attendant flies. Like the Americans uptown, the householders here burned piles of hair and hooves from the slaughteryards or smudges made up with gunpowder, to clear the disease-ridden miasma from the air. The smell was foul-charnel house and battlefield rolled into one.
The Four Horsemen, January thought, coughing, would bear that smell on their wake when they reaped the plain of Armageddon with their swords.
He cut across Rue Douane midway between two streets, mud sucking his boots. Just before he sprang across the gutter he glanced back. He saw no one.
What do I do? he wondered. What do I do?
The houses on the other side of Basin Street were mostly small, but built better than those that bordered the swampy town pastures. Neat cottages of plaster and brick lined Rue des Ramparts and Rue Burgundy, pale yellows and celery greens, pinks and sky blues under the savage light. For years, wealthy bankers and planters and brokers had been buying their quadroon and mulatto mistresses dwellings like these, along the back edge of the old town. These days just as many belonged to respectable craftsmen and artisans, clerks and tailors, whose wives and families turned their eyes from their sisters and cousins and neighbors of the demimonde.
His mother's protector had bought her such a house, when January was eight and his full-sister, six. The daughter his mother had subsequently borne to St. Denis Janvier had recently been given the deed to such a house herself, by a fat, indolent Creole named Viellard.
Most stood empty now, shuttered tight in the hot glare of morning. When Bronze John came calling, a lot of people, no matter how strait their circumstances, came up with the money to remove for the summer to one of the hotels or cottages on the shores of the lake, where the air was cleaner, in Milneburgh or Mandeville or Spanish Fort. Those who hadn't done so from fear of the fever, which came nearly every year-or from the horrible combination of summer decay and summer insects-reconsidered the matter when the first cases of the cholera were diagnosed.
As he walked along Rue Burgundy, January counted off houses. After sixteen years' absence he was just coming to know these people again. The yellow cottage belonged to his mother's dressmaker; the two-and-a-half-story town house occupied by Dr. LaPlante and his family (currently residing at his cottage in Milneburgh); the pink cottage owned by the perfumer Crowdie Passebon. The planks that ordinarily bridged the deep gutter from the unpaved street to the brick banquette were one and all propped beside the high brick steps. If anyone was home, no one was receiving visitors. Narrow spaces gapped between house and house, pass-throughs, leading back to the yards behind where slant-roofed outbuildings, of a sort January had never seen in any other city, housed kitchens, laundries, storerooms at ground level and slave quarters above. Each house, even the cottages, was an enclave; each a little fortress walled into itself. In New Orleans there was no such tangle of alleys as had cut and twisted through the inner arrondissements of Paris, enabling a man to duck inconspicuously from one street to the next.
But January had been brought up on this street and knew the quirks and features of any number of those hidden courts. As he approached the pale green cottage belonging to his mother's bosom-bow Agnes Pellicot, he found his muscles growing tense.