earlobes. "I see I wouldn't make a particularly good desperado."
"Want of practice." He returned her smile, and she laughed.
"Ah. So I can look forward to getting better at skulduggery with time. Cora would be proud of me."
"I'll let you know what I find out." He walked with her to the pass-through, opened the gate, and followed her to the street. The only movement there was a woman in a red headscarf selling kerchiefs and pins door to door and the flies that swarmed around a dead dog.
"But I think the first thing we need to do is ascertain whether Cora made it to Madame Lalaurie's house that night at all."
Shutters tightly closed and latched, curtains drawn to exclude any possibility of fevered air, the small ward on the ground floor of the yellow stucco building on Rue Bourbon was like those ovens in which Persian monarchs had had their enemies immured to roast. But there was no flame here. Only darkness, and the bleared glare of the jaundiced lamps; the smell of human waste, medicine, and blood, solid enough to cut. For a few moments January only stood looking down the ward, with its double row of makeshift pine-pole beds, bare for the most part of any semblance of mosquito-bars-most without sheets as well. The air was a low thick mutter of delirium and panting breath.
No nurse was to be seen: January made his way between the beds-not more than twenty could be crammed into what was usually a shop selling coffee and tobacco to the shut and curtained door at the rear. In the courtyard behind, the air grated with the smoke of burning gunpowder. The kitchen building was nearly invisible through its cinder gray screen. A wooden stairway ascended to a gallery, and as he put his foot to the lowest step, January heard a woman groan.
"That's good, that's good!" cried Dr. Soublet's voice, enthusiasm bordering on delight. "The ligaments and bones are accommodating themselves to the pressure of the apparatus!"
There were three rooms upstairs. One seemed to be a sort of office, tucked in a corner where the gallery ran around to join the slave quarters, and unoccupied. In the second, several beds had been set up in the shrouded gloom. These were farther apart than those in the shop, and equipped with mosquito-bars.
Small tables between them bore slop-jars and bleeding-bowls. Their contents crept with flies. The candlelit darkness reeked of opium.
In each bed a sufferer lay, invisible behind white clouds of gauze and murmuring in narcotic dream.
January stopped beside the first bed, put aside the netting, and looked down into the face of Hclier the water seller. The young man was strapped into an iron apparatus like Torquemada's nightmare, over head, shoulders, and back. In spite of the netting, flies swarmed on the sores that the straps had worn in the flesh of his splayed-out arms, and crawled over his unprotected eyes and mouth.
Angrily, January leaned down and unbuckled the straps. To hell with the `process of the cure,'" he thought. It was one thing to joke with Mademoiselle Vitrac about that obscene iron maiden in the school; this was quite another.
In all his years of witnessing "infallible machines" invented by one physician or another, he'd never seen one with his own eyes that worked.
Could a man of color be arrested in this town for interfering with a white physician's patient?
These days it wouldn't surprise him.
"Get up," he said softly. "Get out of here while you can."
But the water seller only rolled his head and stared at him with drugged turquoise eyes. "Get out?" he asked, and giggled. "All this opium and you tell me, `Get out'? Who're you to tell me anything, nigger man? Who're you to tell a white man-a white man..." He groped about for the end of his sentence.
January took him by the arm and sat him up. "You're not a white man," he said. "And if you stay here..
." H?lier dragged his arm free, lips drawn back in an ugly rage. "Don't you tell me I'm not a white man, you black nigger." He crawled to his feet, and grabbed the end of the bed with a gasp of agony. "Don't you tell me anything. Why ain't I a white man, eh? Why ain't I? Look at that!" He held out his arm. "You ever see whiter?" Then the drug sponged the anger from his face. He gestured around him at the ward, and giggled again. "I'm in a white man's