"Ye'll have to excuse him." Liam Roarke guided January out into the doubtful shelter of the porch that ran around three sides of the building. "Settin' up a fever hospital in that old warehouse of his was the one decent act the man's ever done, and without help nor even a relief that can be counted on, the rage of it and the helplessness get to him. And he's bone weary."
As he had been even in the dead of night in the Charity Hospital, Roarke's chin was cleanly shaven between the l golden wings of his side-whiskers and his linen was spotless, his coat pressed. "As who is not?" January said. "Did you find your friend?"
Roarke hesitated, some thought passing fast behind the pale eyes. Then he said, "That I did not. I fear the fever's took him, poor fellow. And yoursel', sir? You're one of the surgeons at the Hospital, are you not?
And no man's bhoy?"
"That's true, yes, sir," said January. "I looked in, searching for a friend who's taken ill, no one knows where. I suppose I should only be glad this part of town has someone willing to run a hospital, with the Charity and the regular clinics overflowing."
"He's a good man in his heart, you know." Roarke gazed sadly in the direction of the shambling labyrinth that was St. Gertrude's. "I've never been one as has a spark in his throat, as they say, but I can pity a man who has. You say you're after searchin' for a friend? It's turn and turn about, then. Come over there wi' me. I'll make him take you round, never fear."
"I've had a look already. I'd best be on my way." The rain had ceased, the day's heat redoubled.
January, still in the black coat and white shirt of his medical office, felt himself more and more acutely a target in a hostile land. Exhaustion descended on him, the endless night and the day that had gone before it crushing him like seven hundredweight of chain.
"Come back, then, when you've a chance." Roarke smiled in the shadows of the porch. "The fact is, Gerald needs a surgeon in the place, and it might so be he'd pay you better than the Charity folk do."
And what makes you think I can get to the clinic and back alive? Even if I didn't mind being belabored with a cane if I should happen to forget to call that drunken lout "sir"?
Nevertheless January thanked him and left, to make his way along Rue des Ramparts. At St. Anthony's Chapel lie stopped, and in its silent dimness knelt for a time, glad only for the silence and the peace, telling over the prayers of the rosary in the dark.
Praying that he would survive the fever season. Praying that he would not come one day to Olympe's house to find her, and Paul, and the children dead with blackened faces in puddles of their own bile.
Praying that he would not receive today, or tomorrow, a letter from Milneburgh informing him that his mother, or Dominique, or her child, had succumbed.
Praying that he would not be left to face the remainder of his life utterly alone.
It was the second of October. Only a few weeks, he thought, until the summer broke. Until the fever broke. When he emerged from the chapel, he knew that he ought to go to Mademoiselle Vitrac's, to relieve her for a time of her nursing duties, as Hannibal had done. But he went home instead. He stripped and bathed in tepid rainwater from the cistern and for a long time lay on his bed, the heat of the day on him like a soaked blanket. Remembering Ayasha. Trying to remember his father's face. Seeing in his mind the straight slim figure of Cora Chouteau, walking up Rue de l'Hopital in the dark.
Through the open windows he smelled the smoke of burning, and he slept at last in the terrible silence of Bronze John's domination of the town.
He reached the school a few hours before sunset the following day and related to Mademoiselle Vitrac all that had befallen him since leaving Charity Hospital and all he had learned or guessed. "Not that the Guards will do a thing about it," he concluded bitterly. He tilted the veilleuse, carried the cup of tisane to Genevi?ve's bed.
The girl was dying. January could see it in her face. There was little more to her than a skeleton, her exquisite complexion livid