that no couple from town had arrived yesterday to sleep on the old man's floor and replace his departed servants in tending to his guests.
Something must have happened, he thought uneasily, and occupied his mind through the short train journey with appalling scenarios of what he would find when he reached Olympe's house.
What he found, of course, was young Gabriel competently making a roux in the kitchen for that evening's gumbo, while Ti-Paul gravely spun pots on the kitchen floor. "Mama, she's on her way out there now," the boy reported to January. "Juliette Gallier's son was took bad with fever yesterday, so Mama figured Aunt Minou would be all right, with all her friends there that've had babies, and you, and Grandmere, even if a message didn't get to you in time. She left 'bout an hour ago."
January nodded. "Did Nicole Perret and her husband stay in town for some reason?"
The boy frowned. "I don't know," he said. "I know they were getting ready Thursday night-they sent their heavy stuff that Zizi-Marie and I packed-and they were going to go Friday morning first thing. I walked past there today and the place is all locked and the plank up." He set the skillet on the back of the stove and gathered the assortment of bowls from the table in which sausage, onion, celery, and peppers had already been neatly chopped. "You care to come back here for supper before you go on to the Hospital, Uncle Ben? I'm making callas."
"You got a deal there." Young as he was, Gabriel made the best deep-fried rice-balls January had ever tasted. After checking on his brother-in-law's progresss-carcely necessary, since Paul Corbier had never developed the jaundice stage of the fever and was well on his way to recovery-exhausted as he was, January made his way down Rue Toulouse to the Cathedral to hear Mass and light candles for the safe recovery of Minou, and the safe passage of little Charles-Henri through the coming weeks. It was difficult to find a space unoccupied before the Virgin's altar to set the two new votives. You would need a forest fire of lights, he thought, gazing at the soft-glowing holocaust of yellow wax, to safeguard all who stand in need of it now.
He set up a candle for Cora Chouteau as well. Returning home in the smoky glare of sunset he kept glancing behind him, certain that Shaw was watching the place, positive that he was again being followed.
He checked the gar?onni?re thoroughly-or as thoroughly as his fatigue would let him-for signs that it had been entered, then lay for a long time listening to the distant rattle of drums from the direction of Congo Square. He wondered whether Cora had succeeded in getting herself caught for urging Gervase to escape and if she had given his name to the City Guards.
The worst of it was that he didn't know. He didn't know how he could find out, either.
He could only wait for the trap to close. He slept, but not well.
The specter of arrest followed him through the streets to Olympe's house after dark, and from there to the Hospital, to be obliterated only by blind weariness, heat, and stench. Following Soublet with his leeches and his cupping-glasses among the bodies of the sick, still he felt a kind of weary anger at the bright silken figures -sipping negus on the galleries of the Hotel St. Clair, in the ballroom of the Washington Hotel. How dare they, he thought, fight their trivial buttles over which musicians would play at whose ball when four miles away men and women were struggling for their lives against an invisible slayer and the air dripped with the stink of corpses smoke, and death?
Unreasonable, he knew. If you have the money to flee, why picnic in the garden of the Angel of Death?
His mother's presence in the city, or Minou's, or that horrible iron-voiced Madame Redfern's, wouldn't lessen the suffering of H?lier or that poor Italian, since beyond doubt they would only lock themselves behind their shutters and smudges as everyone else in town was doing.
Except people like Olympe. And Marie Laveau.
And Delphine Lalaurie. And Rose Vitrac.
He returned to the house on the Rue Burgundy through morning heat that he knew was already too overwhelming to permit sleep. Gabriel had sent a jar of ginger water home with him yesterday afternoon.
He was sitting on the steps drinking the last of it-and reading an editorial in the Gazette that claimed