hospital, ain't I? Serves me right, eh? Serves me right."
Hunched and crablike, H?lier staggered away between the beds, as if his curved spine and the additional pain of what he had been through were burdens that bent him to the ground. From the gallery January watched him descend the stairs and disappear into the shadows of the carriageway, clinging to the pale stucco of the walls, January drew a deep breath.
The third room was Dr. Soublet's clinic per se.
"Don't want it," muttered a woman's voice in German. "F'riedrich-wo ist Friedrich? Hurts... God, it hurts!"
Soublet and a small, slender man of about thirty whom January vaguely recognized bent over a leathertopped table on which lay the German woman Soublet had been talking to at Charity only a few nights ago. She was nude but for a dirty shift pulled up to her belly. An enormous brace or bracket of iron and leather was strapped to her waist, thigh, knee, and down to the deformed foot. It was she whom January had heard groaning, as Soublet readjusted the straps. The slim little man held a spouted china cup to her lips, but his silent dark eyes watched Soublet's face with a disturbing cold intensity.
"It only hurts because it's improving," replied Soublet bracingly. "Nicolas, for God's sake if the woman won't take the laudanum, hold her nose as you pour! I can't have her jiggling about so. What do you want?" He looked up irritably as the light from the outside fell through upon them with January's lifting aside of the curtain over the door. "And close that door, man! This woman has recently recovered from the fever! Do you want to provoke a relapse?"
January stepped in and closed the door of the ward behind him. The woman, whose arms were strapped to the table, wriggled and began to cry. "Hilf mir," she muttered, "hilf mir... Oh, Friedrich!"
"May I speak for a moment with Dr. Lalaurie?" January looked carefully aside so they would not see the sickened rage in his eyes.
The small man set down the cup and stepped forward. His pointed, waxy face was polite, but there was something in the way he looked at him that reminded January of the American businessman in the ballroom at the Washington Hotel: a calculation of value, an estimate of what he, Benjamin January, could be used for or sold for. "I am Dr. Lalaurie."
"Please excuse the familiarity of my seeking you out, sir." January bowed. "My name is Benjamin January; I work at the Charity Hospital."
"I know who you are," broke in Soublet. "You're one of the servants there."
"I'm a surgeon, actually, sir," said January, in his most neutral voice. He turned back to Lalaurie. "I'm looking for Madame Lalaurie, sir. I know she nurses. I thought I might find her here. I have a few questions I need to ask her about a mutual acquaintance who may have been taken ill with fever."
"My wife nurses at the ward set up in the old Convent of the Ursulines," Lalaurie said. About twenty years younger than his wife, he was slender and small and, January guessed, handsome in a sleek-haired, wiry way. The sleeves of his shirt were linen and very fine, his boots expensive kid, his silk waistcoat embroidered with red and golden birds, nearly hidden under the spotless white apron. His mustache and the tiny arrowhead of a Vandyke lay on the pale face as precisely as if painted. "She should be there this afternoon."
"Really, Nicolas." January heard Soublet's voice as he lifted the heavy double-layer of curtain, stepped through the door to the opium of the ward again. "We can't allow these interruptions. Now bring me the lancets, and the clyster as well. This woman has far too much of the fiery humors in her to permit the submissive state required for proper mollification of the bones."
There were few Sisters in the ward set up in what had been the hospital operated by the Ursuline nuns, before the convent had been moved to larger quarters nine years ago. This building, a long, low room of many windows, had returned to its original use for a time, and that may have accounted for the uncrowded look of the room, the impression of air that could be breathed. The smell here was less foul, and daylight filtered through the windows looking onto the old convent's central courtyard. On pallets, on cots, on two or three old and battered cypress beds donated by the charitable,