vein at the elbow. The blood was inky in the semidark.
"There. He should do now. Bind that up." Soublet turned away. "I'll leave instructions to Ker to take another pint at noon."
The servant gathered up the reeking bowl and moved off in his master's wake.
January muttered, "I saw less blood when Jackson beat the British than I do on any night he's in charge."
The tall woman, turning away, paused, a flick of a smile in the ophidian eyes.
There was no one else to work the ward that night.
January and Barnard moved the dead Russian-or whoever he had been-out onto the gallery and, later, when they had time, down the stairs to the yard. Three women and four men were already there, rough sheets drawn up over them, waiting for the dead-cart man. The night was as hot outdoors as in, the roar of cicadas rising and falling like demon machinery in the dark beyond the wall. Smudges in the yard-and the fact that the municipal contractors in charge of cleaning the gutters of Common Street hadn't done their job in weeks-rendered the air nearly unbreathable. A woman moved about the courtyard, lifting the corners of sheets to see the dead faces underneath.
"Can I come upstairs and look?" she asked January when he went to her. "I'm lookin' for a man name of Virgil, big man, but not so big as you?" She put an inflection of query in her voice. By her clothing she was either a slave or one of the dirt-poor freedwomen trying to make a living in the shanties at the ends of Girod or Perdido Streets, maybe a prostitute or maybe just a laundress. "Virgil, he slave to Michie Bringier over by Rue Bourbon, but he sleep out and work the levee. He pay Michie Bringier his cost, pay him good. He didn't come to the shed he rent behind Puy's Grocery, not night before last, not last night ..."
She nodded down at the dead around her feet. "These folks all white."
Though Bronze John's hand touched everyone, white, black, and colored, it was mostly the whites who died of it and, of them, more often the whites who'd flocked into New Orleans from the United States-the rest of the United States, January corrected himself-or from Europe. In Europe, January had known dozens of men whose aim was to come here and make fortunes impossible to find in the overtaxed, overcrowded, politically watchful lands of Germany, Italy, and France. They'd meet and read The Last of the Mohicans together or New York newspapers a year old. And there were fortunes to be made, in sugar, in trade, in the new, phenomenally profitable cotton.
But there was a price.
And with the coming of the cholera, even the blacks and the colored found no immunity, no recovery, no hope.
January led the woman up to the ward, as he had led so many since June. The arrival of the ambulances called him away: those who had been found, as this woman feared her friend had been found, in the shacks or attics or on street corners where they had fallen. One of those carried in was H?ier the water seller, who raised a shaky hand and whispered, "Hey, piano teacher," as he was borne past. In a different voice he murmured, "Mamzelle Marie," to the woman who had cleaned the floor. And, "Hey, Nanie," to the ragged woman... Even in extremis, the man knew everyone in town.
"You seen Virgil?" she said. "He sleep out, you know, alone in that shack..."
The water seller shook his head. He was fine boned and older than he looked, the creamy lightness of his skin marred by a clotted blurring of freckles. His shoulders, though broad and strong, were uneven with the S-shaped curvature of his spine. Now his face was engorged with the fever jaundice. Dark in the glower of the oil lamps, he trembled, and there was black vomit down the front of his shirt.
"I ask around," the water seller whispered, as they bore him away.
When January went down to the court again he saw Emil Barnard crouched over the bodies of the dead.
Barnard heard the creak of his weight on the steps and straightened quickly, jerked the sheet back into place, and shoved something up under his coat. "I saw a... a black man come in just now." Barnard pointed accusingly out the courtyard gate. "He was doing something with the bodies, but I didn't see what. I must go and report it