Free There Shall Your Heart Be Also by Barbara Hambly Page A

store-room as well. Williams sat at
the foot of the bed, a big-boned white woman wearing what the black
whores called a good-time dress , a faded calico
mother-hubbard whose front was splashed and blotted now with
crusted brown blood. One sleeve was torn and a makeshift bandage,
also spotted from a seeping wound underneath, ringed her right
forearm. “Gimme your dope, Hannibal,” she added more quietly,
holding out her uninjured hand, and Hannibal passed over his bottle
of opium-laced sherry without a word.
    The girl Delly lay quietly on the bed, her
face wrapped in several bar-rags and what looked like somebody’s
torn-up mother-hubbard bound around her chest and shoulder. “Dumb
bitch tried to pull him off me,” growled Williams to January,
gently holding the bottle to Delly’s lips. “Can you swallow a
little of this, honey? Easy – not too much -- that’s my good girl.”
She patted Delly’s hand encouragingly. “Didn’t think I could goddam
take care of myself.” She took the cigar out of her mouth to take a
gulp of the sherry herself, then passed the bottle back to
Hannibal. “How bad’s she hurt, Ben? She be all right?”
    Hannibal’s note had said, Bring your
kit , so January had brought the battered leather case of
probes, forceps, fleams and scalpels that his mentor in New Orleans
had given him back in 1817, when he’d left to study medicine in
Paris – little realizing at that time how useless it was for a
black man to attempt to practice medicine on whites, even in that
land of liberté, egalité , etc. Oddly enough, in the two
years since his return to New Orleans in 1833, he’d found himself
acquiring a clientele after all: unfortunately, all of it among the
poorest class of freed (or runaway) slaves, who couldn’t afford the
largely light-complected physicians patronized by the better-off
free colored artisans.
    January had long ago resigned himself to the
fact that he was going to be playing piano for his living the rest
of his life.
    In addition to the tools of his one-time
trade, he’d brought vials of camphor and opium, and bundles of
herbs recommended by his voodoo-priestess sister and various “root
doctors” – freed and slave – in the countryside. One of these he
held out to Hannibal. “Can you get some boiling water from the
Turkey Buzzard, and steep about a quarter of this in it?” The
Turkey Buzzard stood about a hundred feet from the Broadhorn, and
combined the usual Swamp amenities of barroom, gambling parlor, and
bordello with about a dozen beds for hire in three or four
chambers, qualifying it as a hotel. It boasted a kitchen of sorts,
and a dining-room that served up grits, beans, and whatever mules
might have given up the ghost the previous day, occasionally varied
if an alligator happened to get too far from the canal at a time
when the patrons were sober enough to hit it.
    “Did you put anything on this, Mrs.
Williams?” January asked, gingerly beginning to unwrap the bandages
on Delly’s face.
    “Like what?” The proprietress pulled her
snarly light-brown hair back into a knot on her nape. “My daddy
said duck-shit an’ cobwebs was good for cuts, but I was god-damned
if I’d go huntin’ for a duck in the middle of the night. ‘Sides,
that was just for little cuts, not a big hack like he gave her.
There’s ducks down at the turning basin by the cemetery, though, if
you need—”
    “My teachers swore by brandy.” January
flinched a little as the bandages stuck, then came away from the
split mess of brow and cheek. Though crusted almost shut with
blood, Delly’s brown eyes blinked up at him unharmed.
    “You mean brandy-brandy?” asked Williams
doubtfully. “Or the tonsil varnish me an’ Railspike make out of
tobacco-juice an’ red pepper?”
    “Brandy-brandy, if you’ve got it.”
    Williams fished in a broken goods-box under
the bed. “You want Lemercier or St-Valbert?”
    Stifling the urge to inquire how bottles of
France’s finest had wound