at once." He almost ran, not up the steps to where Soublet would be, but through a door into the lower floor of the Hospital, where those unafliicted with the fever were cramped together in emergency quarters.
January pulled back the sheet. The Russian's boots were gone. So were his teeth. His jaw gaped, sticky with gummed blood; little clots of it daubed his pale beard stubble, the front of his shirt. January whipped aside the other sheets and saw that all the corpses had been so treated. One woman's lips were all but severed, bloodless flaps of flesh. Ants crept across her face. Both women had been clipped nearly bald.
January stood up as if he'd been jabbed with a goad, so angry he trembled.
A hand touched his arm. He whirled and found himself looking into Mamzelle Marie's dark eyes.
"Don't matter no more to them, Michie Janvier." Wheels creaked in the ooze of Common Street outside, harness jangling as the horses strained against the muck. The dead-cart.
"It matters to me."
Mamzelle Marie said nothing. Where the orange light brushed a greasy finger her earrings had the gleam of real gold, the dark gems on the crucifix suspended from her neck a true sapphire glint. "It's nowhere near so bad as it was last year."
Last year.
It had been almost exactly a year.
Paris in the cholera. January felt again the dreadful stillness of those suffocating August days, the empty streets and shuttered windows. Though he'd been working then for ten years as a musician, he'd gone back to the Hotel Dieu to nurse, to do what he could, knowing full well he could do nothing. That epidemic had recalled to him all the memories of fever seasons past: the families of the poor brought in from the attics where two or three or seven had died already, the stench and the sense of helpless dread.
Whenever he'd stepped outside he had been astonished to see the jostling mansard roofs, the chestnut trees, and gray stone walls of Paris, instead of the low, pastel houses of the town where he had been raised.
One day he'd walked back to the two rooms he and his wife shared in the tangle of streets between the old Cluny convent and the river, to find them stinking like a plague ward of the wastes Ayasha had been unable to contain when the weakness, the shivering, the fever had struck her. To find Ayasha herself on the bed in the midst of that humiliating horror, a rag doll wrung and twisted and left to dry, the black ocean of her hair trailing down over the edge of the bed to brush the floor.
Death had spared her nothing. She had died alone. "No." Though January had never spoken of this memory to his sister-who he knew was a disciple of Mamzelle Marie-or to anyone else, he thought he saw her knowledge of the scene in this woman's serpent eyes. Maybe she really did read people's dreams. "No, it's not so bad as last year," agreed January again, softly.
January didn't really expect to be allowed to speak to the houseman Gervase. His query met a bland, sleek smile and a murmured "Oh, Gervase is at his work right now. Madame doesn't hold with servants leaving their work."
He'd never liked the Lalaurie coachman, Bastien. The round-faced, smooth-haired quadroon had a smug insolence to him, a self-satisfaction that boded ill for the other servants of the Lalaurie household, despite all that Madame herself might try to do.
Born a slave and raised in slavery until the age of eight, January had always found it curious that colored masters so frequently worked their slaves hard and treated them cruelly, even if they had once been slaves themselves. Given a chance, he suspected that Bastien would have been such a master, exercising petty power where he could. He knew the coachman had been with Madame Lalaurie a long time, perhaps longer than Dr. Nicolas Lalaurie himself. Upon those occasions when he'd seen them together, it was clear to January that the face Bastien showed his mistress was not the face his fellow slaves saw.
The two Blanque girls-daughters of Delphine -Lalaurie by her second husband, the late banker Jean Blanque-were older than one usually found still unmarried Creole belles of good family: Though they were soft-spoken and polite, as Creole girls must be, January liked neither of them. Even Louise Marie, the cripple, for whom he had expected to develop sympathy when first he had been introduced to the