Free Fever Season by Barbara Hambly Page A

mercury are all very well in their place, but fever resides in the blood, not in the nervous system.”
    “Salts of mercury mixed with turpentine have been shown to be of sovereign benefit—sovereign, sir!—in cases of fever!” Sanchez retorted. “But the dosage must be heroic! Nothing is of any benefit unless the patient’s gums bleed.…”
    Balderdash?
wondered January, as he lifted the half-dead Italian, waxen with phlebotomy, to sponge him clean. The heartbreaking, terrifying thing about the fever was that he didn’t know. Nobody knew. Maybe Soublet and Sanchez were right.
    On the bed next to the Italian’s a dead woman lay. Her face was covered with a sheet, but her hair, long and black, hung to brush the reeking floor, and the sight of itcut his heart. Had he returned soon enough to find Ayasha still alive, could he have saved her by bleeding? By forcing calomel and turpentine down her throat until her gums bled?
    Why did one person recover, and another succumb? Might Monsieur A have recovered without the remedy, and did Madame B perish in its despite?
    “Stick to surgery, my son,” Dr. Gomez had said to him, all those years ago. “These physicians, they know nothing but calomel and opium, the clyster and the knife. When a man breaks a bone, by God, you know what you’ve got.”
    What you had, of course, thought January, as he was summoned to hold down a laborer who wept and fought and cursed at them in Gaelic, was a mechanic of the body’s armature who had to sit by while a man he was certain was an imbecile opened the patient’s veins for the fifth time in as many days.
    Rain began to fall: hard, steady, drenching rain that abated not an atom of the suffocating heat. Ants crawled steadily up the walls and over the floor, in spite of the red pepper sprinkled along every baseboard. A man came in, his coat of fine tobacco-colored wool sticking to his broad shoulders with wet and his fair hair and extravagant side-whiskers dripping on his shoulders, and searched among the sick, as the woman Nanié had searched a few nights ago. Handsome face impassive, he passed once through the ward and then made a second circuit, as if not believing the one he sought was not there. January saw that it was the men of color he went to, lifting the sheets over the faces of the dead, looking down at them for a few minutes before moving on.
    “Can I help you, sir?”
    The man turned, and met his eyes with eyes of brightIrish blue. “Thank you kindly, no.” His voice had the soft lilt of the well-bred Irish gentry, like that of January’s friend Hannibal the fiddler when Hannibal was more than usually drunk. “Just seekin’ after a friend.”
    There was a jewel in his stickpin the size of little Ti-Paul’s fingernail—what kind, it was too dark to tell—and except for the soak of the rain his linen was clean and very fine. His coat, with its wasp waist and lavishly wadded shoulders, was too flashy for a broker’s or a planter’s. A gambler, January guessed, or someone in the theater.
    “Does he have a name, if they bring him in after you’ve gone?”
    The man hesitated, then shook his head. “I’ll be back,” he said.
    There were many people who came in, seeking those they knew among the dying or the dead. Later in the night January thought he saw the woman Nanié return, but through the grind of exhaustion and the haze of smoke could not be sure. He himself studied the faces of the patients, asked the names of those still conscious enough to reply, searching for Robois Roque, as his brother-in-law had requested. When the ambulance came in, toward midnight, he looked again. There was no one he sought, but there was an elderly German woman with a withered and shortened leg, and Soublet descended upon her at once, rubbing his thick-muscled hands.
    “Would you like to have the affliction of your limb cured?” the doctor murmured—he had a beautiful voice when he chose to soften it—and the woman thrashed her