"Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 2 - Fever Season" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

off Bronze John from one another-to carry water and vinegar and saline draughts, to fan away the
humming swarms of mosquitoes and flies-he felt uneasy uptown.
Maybe that was why he realized so quickly that someone was dogging his steps.
His head ached from twenty-four hours without sleep. His senses felt dulled, as if someone had carefully
stuffed his skull with dirty lint soaked in the stinking fluids of the dying; his very bones weighed him down.
His last patient that day had been a nine-year-old girl who'd walked the twelve streets to the hospital
from the levee where she'd been selling oranges. Her mama, she said in English, before delirium claimed
her, would whale her for not staying on to finish the day. The child had died before she could tell anyone
who her mama was or where that lady could be found.
As of that morning, no newspaper in the town had yet admitted that there was an epidemic at all.
The fever had first come to New Orleans in January's sixteenth year. In those days you never heard
English spoken at all, though the city already belonged to the United States. He'd been studying medicine
then with Dr. Gomez and had followed his teacher on his rounds of the hospitals; it seemed to him now,
twenty-four years later, that the ache of grief and pity never grew less. Nor did his fear of the fever itself.
He wasn't sure exactly what it was that made him realize he was being stalked.
A glimpse from the corner of his eye as he dodged across Jackson Street among the ambulance wagons,
the produce carts, the drays of sugar and indigo on their way to the levee from the inland plantations
along the lake. A horse lurched to a stop, tossed its head with an angry snort. A driver cursed in Spanish.
Steps away, Freret Street lay deserted under the hot weight of brazen sky, but January knew he wasn't
alone. He quickened his stride.
If he walked down Canal Street, among the hip-high weeds, strewn garbage, and dead dogs of what
French and Americans alike called the "neutral ground," he would be spared at least some of the stenches
of the cemeteries. There seething corpses lined the walls three-deep, like bales on the levee, waiting for
tomb space and the men to bear them in. But though he was an accredited member of the Paris College
of Surgeons who had practiced at the HStel Dieu in that city for six years, January was perfectly well
aware that he looked like a field hand: six feet, three inches tall, powerfully built despite the dust of gray
that now powdered his short-cropped hair, his skin as glossy black as his African father's had been. That
was one reason why it was only in the fever season that he practiced medicine. The rest of the year he
played piano to earn his bread. It was an injustice he'd accepted, upon his return to New Orleans from
Paris, nearly a year ago.
And things had changed in the city since his departure in 1817.
So he followed Rue Villere downstream, past shabby cottages and grubby shacks in rank jungles of
weed, the stench of untended privies, of gutters uncleaned for weeks, and of sties and coops, neglected
by their owners, thick as fog around him. An unpaved path, mucky from the morning's rainstorm, led him
toward the river.
He was definitely being followed. He didn't want to look back; he couldn't tell by whom.
Rue Douane, the first street of the French town itself, was usually alive with cart and foot traffic. Today,
there were only two women in the faded calico of poverty, hur rying with bowed heads. Those, and the
dead-carts that lurched toward the cemeteries with their stiffened cargoes wrapped in cheap Osnaburg
sheets and their throbbing armies of attendant flies. Like the Americans uptown, the householders here
burned piles of hair and hooves from the slaughteryards or smudges made up with gunpowder, to clear
the disease-ridden miasma from the air. The smell was foul-charnel house and battlefield rolled into one.
The Four Horsemen, January thought, coughing, would bear that smell on their wake when they reaped
the plain of Armageddon with their swords.
He cut across Rue Douane midway between two streets, mud sucking his boots. Just before he sprang
across the gutter he glanced back. He saw no one.
What do I do? he wondered. What do I do?
The houses on the other side of Basin Street were mostly small, but built better than those that bordered
the swampy town pastures. Neat cottages of plaster and brick lined Rue des Ramparts and Rue
Burgundy, pale yellows and celery greens, pinks and sky blues under the savage light. For years, wealthy