"That happens," said January. Wind scratched at the dormer shutters, and the thunder of rain sounded very loud on the Spanish-tiled roof.
"I thought -I hoped-we actually could get through the summer here without anyone falling sick." She propped her spectacles more firmly on her nose with her forefinger, then stripped back the sheets, and wrung a sponge in the vinegar-water she had brought. "We did last summer, four girls and I. Genevi?ve over there..." And there was in her eyes the special smile teachers have when they speak of pupils who have become their friends, "... and Victorine were two of them. Looking back, I can't imagine how we did it. But entire families survived, you know. And quite frankly," she added, "I had nowhere else to go.
Neither did most of the girls."
She bent to her task, mopping down the girl Antoinette's thin body, gently, slopped water dripping onto the sheets. "Every penny I own is tied up in this building, and these girls... Their parents mostly wanted to know they're `in good hands.' Being educated, and out of their way. You know what it costs to leave the city in the summer, to take a room in anything like a decent hotel or boardinghouse in Milneburgh or Mandeville."
A trace of bitterness crept into her voice. "Antoinette is a day student. Her mother asked me to board her here while she left the city, when she heard I was going to stay."
January thought about his mother. When Olympe was sixteen years old she had run away from home.
His mother had made no effort to learn where she had gone.
Rather wistfully, Mademoiselle Vitrac added, "These are mostly not girls whose parents understand them or know what it is they want out of life."
"Did yours?"
She hesitated, looking across at him as he tipped the herb tea into a spouted invalid's cup. Then she shook her head, briefly, and rearranged Antoinette's nightdress so that he could half-lift her and force her to drink. "What is it?" she asked.
"Borage and willow bark. My sister's remedy for fevers. It works, too."
"She's a follower of Dr. Thompson's theories?"
"She's a voodooienne."
"Ah." Mademoiselle Vitrac didn't appear shocked, a little surprising considering her prim appearance.
"Myself, I'd trust a voodoo as much as I'd trust some of the doctors I've met. One of them's one of my financial backers-a doctor, I mean. He insisted I accept a `Postural Remediant' that reminds me of nothing so much as woodcuts I've seen of the Iron Maiden. It's downstairs. I'll show it to you-I have to keep it out because he sometimes comes by."
She smiled faintly, looking down into Antoinette's flushed, wasted face. "I'm always threatening to lock the girls into it for punishment-as a joke, you understand. We made games of what kinds of crimes merit imprisonment. I think the longest was five years for poisoning Monsieur Heymann, that tenor at the Opera the girls are all in love with. Poisoning the Pope was good for three years, as I recall."
The muscle of her jaw stood out again, fighting the knowledge of how close death stood to those giggling schoolgirl games. She propped her spectacles again and went on calmly, "It's supposed to force one into a correct posture while writing, but I can't imagine it doing anything except making one never wish to touch a pen again."
She followed him to Genevieve's bed, holding the girl, who was very restless, while he dosed her with the herbal tea, then sponging her down with vinegar-water while January went on to dose Victorine, who looked, he thought, far too young to be sent away to school.
"Give them this three or four times a day," he told Madamoiselle Vitrac, digging in the half-darkness of his medical bag for the linen packer of herbs, which he set on the dresser top next to the veilleuse. "Made up in tea, as I've done, medium-dark. The disease is going to take as long as it takes, to pass through them.
All we can do is keep it from killing them on the way."
She drew up the sheets over the girls' bodies, and rearranged the mosquito-bars, then followed him down the black ladder of the stairs.
Full daylight leaked through cracks in the shutters and partings in the curtains that covered the tall French doors onto the gallery. It showed January again the books shelved floor to ceiling in the schoolroom and in a corner, as promised, the Postural Remediant, an elaborate cage of metal,