Free Fever Season by Barbara Hambly

Hospital himself. Even this haven, he thought, looking around the candlelit parlor, was not safe. It could be taken away at any time, as Ayasha had been taken.
    “I’ll put up extra for you, borage and willow bark,” Olympe said, going into the parlor where the shelves were that contained the potions of the voodoo: brick dust and graveyard dust, the dried bones of chickens and the heads of mice, little squares of red flannel and black flannel, colored candles and dishes of blue glass beads.
    “We can’t stay, either,” Gabriel announced, as Chouchou gathered the dishes to carry back to the kitchen with the solemn care of an eight-year-old, and Olympe lifted Ti-Paul down from the box on the chair seat that raised him up to the level of the table. “Zizi and I, we got to help Nicole Perret and her husband pack up. Would you know it, Uncle Ben? Uncle Louis says now his cook and yard man gone over to Mobile, Nicole and Jacques can stay on the porch of his house out by Milneburgh, that he rent for the summer, and work for him. Now the fever here’s so bad, Nicole and Jacques will do that just to be away from town.”
    He pulled on his jacket, ran quick fingers over his close-cropped hair, a tall, gangly boy, like January had been, but with the promise of the gentle handsomeness still visible in Paul Corbier’s face. “I ain’t scared of no fever, me. Just it’s so hot here I wish we could go, too. You think Grand-mère might let us, just for a while?”
    January couldn’t imagine his mother inconveniencing herself to the extent of giving her elder daughter floor space in her lovely rented room at the Milneburgh Hotel—let alone her elder daughter’s decidedly working-class husband and four children—to save her had Attila the Hun been on the point of sacking the town. “Stranger things have happened,” he told his nephew.
    But probably not since the Resurrection of Christ
.
    “Take a smudge with you,” he cautioned, as Zizi-Marie came out of the bedroom with her jacket, her father leaning on her shoulder. “And a cloth soaked in vinegar.” He tried to think of anything that actually seemed to have some effect in deflecting the fever, the poisons that seemed to ride the stinking, mosquito-humming darkness.
    Slices of onion?
    Get out of this town
, he thought despairingly.
Get out of this town
.
    “You could do us a favor, if you would, Ben.” Paul Corbier sat carefully on the parlor divan. He was breathing hard just from the effort of coming out to bid his brother-in-law good night. “Alys Roque was here this afternoon, Olympe’s friend. She says her husband, Robois, didn’t come in last night from working the levee. She’s already been to Charity, and the Orleans Infirmary, and Dr. Campbell’s, and that clinic the Ursulines have set up where the convent used to be, but … it strikes so fast, sometimes. And if it’s the cholera, it’s all the worse. Me, I was shaping an arm cushion one minute and the nextthing I knew I was lying on the floor, without the strength to so much as call out.”
    He shook his head. His face, round when January had first met him in the spring, had thinned with the effects of the disease; and it would be some time before he’d recover the lost flesh. By the look of him he had a good deal of African blood, which had probably been the saving of him. The lighter-skinned colored, quadroons and octoroons, suffered more with the fever. The exquisitely pale musterfinos and mamaloques were as susceptible to its effects as the whites.
    “You were lucky,” said January softly.
Not least
, he added to himself,
in having a wife who knew about herbs and healing and wouldn’t call in some sanguinary lunatic like Soublet to bleed you to death
.
    Soublet was at the top of his form that night when January returned to the hospital, opening veins and applying leeches with the pious confidence of a vampire. “Balderdash, sir,” January overheard him saying to Dr. Sanchez. “Salts of