Read Online Fever Season by Barbara Hambly - Free Book Online Page B

rearranged tripods and pots above the fire. Her sloppy,
mo kiri mo vini
French reminded January of Cora’s. It was the French of Africans who’d made the language their own as they’d made what they could of the land. Their mother would faint to hear her—but then, Livia Levesque had not heard her daughter’s voice for nearly twenty years.
    “When a boat comes in from France with the latest shade of silk, or some kind of bonnet they’re all wearing in Paris, Delphine Lalaurie’s got it. Either for her or for her daughters, for all it’s said she don’t let those poor girls eat enough to keep a cat alive. When Michie Davis brought in those French singers for his Opera, Delphine Lalaurie had them to her parties, to sing for her guests, before anyone else in town; and when she gives a ball, no other lady in town dare hold any kind of party that night, knowing it won’t be no use.”
    She wiped her face with one of the threadbare linen towels. “Hell.” She chuckled. “I bet if Delphine Lalaurie were caught red-handed taking runaways out of town by the coffle there’d be folks falling over themselves to say it wasn’t so. She does what she pleases. And that’s what just about rots Emily Redfern’s heart.”
    She scooped greens from a cauldron at the back of the hearth, handed the white porcelain bowl of them to her son to carry back to the house, and shifted the coffeepot alittle farther to one side, where it would warm without boiling. “The voodoos know everything that goes on in this town, Brother,” Olympe said. “Emily Redfern wants to have that same power Delphine Lalaurie has. Wants to have it with everyone, not just with the Americans. That’s what ate her about her husband’s gambling. Not that it might lose them their home—that little place at Black Oak was
hers
, not his, and couldn’t be took for his debts. But his gambling took away from what she could spend on having the best in town, on being the best.”
    “Ate her enough to poison him?”
    Olympia Snakebones’s dark eyes slid toward her young son, but the boy was already out of the kitchen, skipping across the dark yard to the house with his bowl of greens. “The voodoos know everything in this town,” she said again, her face enigmatic. “But sometimes we don’t tell even each other what we know. Tell your little Cora to be careful, dealing with that white woman, with any white woman. And you, Brother—you watch yourself too. You get yourself mixed up with the whites, French or American, and you’ll be hurtin’, too.”
    They crossed the yard together, Olympe taking off her apron, leaving it on the kitchen table. The smell of burning was thick in their nostrils.
    “Tell her there’s a man name of Natchez Jim down by Rue du Levee.” They paused in the molten light from the dining-room door. “She’ll find him near the coffee stand under the arcade of the vegetable market, when he’s not out freighting firewood in his boat. He’ll get her up the river safe. Tell him I said it’s a favor to me.”
    Dinner was a lively meal, with Gabriel and thirteen-year-old Zizi-Marie up and down, back and forth to the front bedroom where their father, Paul Corbier, was slowly convalescing from a brush with the fever. While listeningto Zizi-Marie’s account of how she’d done the finishwork on Monsieur Marigny’s yellow silk chairs while her father was ill and thus helped rescue the family finances—which turned out to be quite true, for she was a good upholsterer already—and explaining correlations to Gabriel between Olympe’s herbal remedies and his own medical training, it was difficult for January to remember his own worries or to feel anything but joy in the warm haven of that little house. Halfway through the meal there was a knock at the door, a woman from the shacks out toward the swamps, asking Olympe’s help with her children taking sick; Olympe said, “I’ll have to go.”
    January nodded. He was on his way to the