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

"Here, now, what have we here?"
Dr. Jules Soublet, in charge of the ward by night by virtue of having one of the oldest practices in the
French town, approached them, a tall, brisk, bustling man only a few years January's senior. His coat of
black superfine wool was expensively tailored over heavy shoulders, his linen immaculate-Soublet
changed it every few hours. His servant followed him, bearing on a japanned tray a jar of slow-squirming
brown leeches, six knives of German steel, an array of cupping-glasses and a bleeding-bowl whose white
porcelain was daubed and splashed with red. "Mary, Mother of God, save me!" shrieked the Italian. "I
have not loved those fat capons of Satan but I always loved Thee! Do not leave me in Satan's hand!" He
began to vomit again, clotted black rivers of spew. Barnard and Dr. Soublet both stepped back in alarm;
January caught the man's shoulders to steady him, helped by the tall woman who'd been mopping up.
The vomit spattered her calico skirt. Her face, beautiful and impassive under an elaborately folded tignon,
did not change, dark eyes like a serpent's, registering neither disgust nor pity.
"This man doesn't need your silly Thompsonian trash," Soublet said to Barnard, not sparing a glance for
the sick man. "Weeds and vinegar and cinchona bark-fie! It's clear that his constitution needs to be
lowered. Boy . . ." The doctor addressed January. "Hold him down."
Barnard backed away, clutching his slice of onion, which in the dim light did indeed resemble the
Eucharist. The Italian, too spent to struggle, only wept a little as January gripped his right arm and
shoulder, Soublet's servant his left. Soublet opened the patient's vein at the elbow. The blood was inky in
the semidark.
"There. He should do now. Bind that up." Soublet turned away. "I'll leave instructions to Ker to take
another pint at noon."
The servant gathered up the reeking bowl and moved off in his master's wake.
January muttered, "I saw less blood when Jackson beat the British than I do on any night he's in charge."
The tall woman, turning away, paused, a flick of a smile in the ophidian eyes.
There was no one else to work the ward that night.
January and Barnard moved the dead Russian-or whoever he had been-out onto the gallery and, later,
when they had time, down the stairs to the yard. Three women and four men were already there, rough
sheets drawn up over them, waiting for the dead-cart man. The night was as hot outdoors as in, the roar
of cicadas rising and falling like demon machinery in the dark beyond the wall. Smudges in the yard-and
the fact that the municipal contractors in charge of cleaning the gutters of Common Street hadn't done
their job in weeks-rendered the air nearly unbreathable. A woman moved about the courtyard, lifting the
corners of sheets to see the dead faces underneath.
"Can I come upstairs and look?" she asked January when he went to her. "I'm lookin' for a man name of
Virgil, big man, but not so big as you?" She put an inflection of query in her voice. By her clothing she
was either a slave or one of the dirt-poor freedwomen trying to make a living in the shanties at the ends
of Girod or Perdido Streets, maybe a prostitute or maybe just a laundress. "Virgil, he slave to Michie
Bringier over by Rue Bourbon, but he sleep out and work the levee. He pay Michie Bringier his cost, pay
him good. He didn't come to the shed he rent behind Puy's Grocery, not night before last, not last night
..."
She nodded down at the dead around her feet. "These folks all white."
Though Bronze John's hand touched everyone, white, black, and colored, it was mostly the whites who
died of it and, of them, more often the whites who'd flocked into New Orleans from the United
States-the rest of the United States, January corrected himself-or from Europe. In Europe, January had
known dozens of men whose aim was to come here and make fortunes impossible to find in the
overtaxed, overcrowded, politically watchful lands of Germany, Italy, and France. They'd meet and read
The Last of the Mohicans together or New York newspapers a year old. And there were fortunes to be
made, in sugar, in trade, in the new, phenomenally profitable cotton.
But there was a price.
And with the coming of the cholera, even the blacks and the colored found no immunity, no recovery, no
hope.