Free Fever Season by Barbara Hambly Page B

head giddily and muttered something in her own tongue. January saw Soublet look around quickly for Ker, and then wave his servant over. “If you consent to come to my clinic, you can be better cared for there, and not only willyou be cured of the fever but full use of the limb will be restored to you within a matter of weeks.”
    January shuddered, but knew if he interfered he might be put out of the Hospital altogether. It was not for surgeons to question the work of actual doctors, and certainly not for a black man to question the opinion of a white. He looked around for Ker, as Soublet had done, but the Englishman was not to be seen.
    “M’sieur?”
    A woman had been standing beside him for some time, a wet cloak hanging from her square, slender shoulders and a look of sickened horror on her face. And well she might look so, thought January, seeing anew the smoky hell of the long room, roaches rattling ferociously around the lamps, the dying laid on pallets along the wall for lack of beds. Barnard crouched beside one old man and shoved what looked like garlic tops into his ears while Soublet and his servant hovered like a pair of sable-cloaked vultures above the delirious German woman. “Do you need help, Madame?”
    She raised her eyes to his. Not far—she was a tall woman. Her eyes seemed dark in the shadows, behind thick slabs of gold-rimmed spectacle lenses, but when she turned toward the lamps, they showed their true color, cindery gray flecked with green.
    “I need a doctor,” she said. She wore a free woman’s tignon, and in the dusky half-light she had a free woman’s complexion. Her face was a long oval with a mouth too prim and a chin too pronounced for real beauty. All arms and legs, she moved as if she were always going to trip, but never did.
    January glanced back at Soublet and the beggar woman. “I’m a doctor.” He went to fetch his satchel from behind the door.
    The rain had eased to a patter, but the air outside smelled thick of it. It was only a break in the storm. An electric wild warmth charged the night, monstrous clouds advancing over the lake like the siege engines of some unimaginable army. He wondered where the girl Cora Chouteau was tonight, and if she was sleeping dry.
    “Three of my girls are down sick.” The wind caught the woman’s cloak, whirled it like a great cracking wing. “I’m sorry,” she added, as they passed through the gate of the Hospital courtyard, and he handed her across the gutter and into the morass of Common Street. “You’ve got as much as you can do here, I know. But I’ve done everything I can, everything I know how to do. I’m not … I’m not very good with the sick.”
    She had a small school on Rue St. Claude, not far from the Bayou Road. Her name, she said, was Rose Vitrac.
    “Sometimes this past year I’ve felt like a peddler trying to sell Sèvres teacups to the Comanche,” she remarked ruefully, taking off her spectacles to wipe rain from the lenses. Away from the Hospital she seemed to gain back some of her poise, to be less like a very young egret trying to balance on its long legs. There was a wry little fold in the corner of her mouth and, even in this time, a dry capacity for amusement. “It’s difficult enough to find Creole girls, let alone girls of color, whose parents are willing to pay for them to learn Latin—or proper French, for that matter, much less, God help us, natural philosophy. But there have to be a few Comanche warriors out there who like …” She hesitated, fishing for exactly the proper word, and January smiled and suggested.
    “Tea?”
    Rose Vitrac chuckled. “Beautiful things, I was going to say.” She put the spectacles back on. “Learning for itsown sake, for the joy of knowing how the universe is put together. Things that have nothing to do with hunting buffalo or scalping people.”
    “You’re probably in the wrong town for that,” he said, still smiling.
    The face she turned to him, as they