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

January led the woman up to the ward, as he had led so many since June. The arrival of the ambulances
called him away: those who had been found, as this woman feared her friend had been found, in the
shacks or attics or on street corners where they had fallen. One of those carried in was Hèier the water
seller, who raised a shaky hand and whispered, "Hey, piano teacher," as he was borne past. In a different
voice he murmured, "Mamzelle Marie," to the woman who had cleaned the floor. And, "Hey, Nanie," to
the ragged woman . . . Even in extremis, the man knew everyone in town.
"You seen Virgil?" she said. "He sleep out, you know, alone in that shack . . ."
The water seller shook his head. He was fine boned and older than he looked, the creamy lightness of his
skin marred by a clotted blurring of freckles. His shoulders, though broad and strong, were uneven with
the S-shaped curvature of his spine. Now his face was engorged with the fever jaundice. Dark in the
glower of the oil lamps, he trembled, and there was black vomit down the front of his shirt.
"I ask around," the water seller whispered, as they bore him away.
When January went down to the court again he saw Emil Barnard crouched over the bodies of the dead.
Barnard heard the creak of his weight on the steps and straightened quickly, jerked the sheet back into
place, and shoved something up under his coat. "I saw a . . . a black man come in just now." Barnard
pointed accusingly out the courtyard gate. "He was doing something with the bodies, but I didn't see
what. I must go and report it at once." He almost ran, not up the steps to where Soublet would be, but
through a door into the lower floor of the Hospital, where those unafliicted with the fever were cramped
together in emergency quarters.
January pulled back the sheet. The Russian's boots were gone. So were his teeth. His jaw gaped, sticky
with gummed blood; little clots of it daubed his pale beard stubble, the front of his shirt. January whipped
aside the other sheets and saw that all the corpses had been so treated. One woman's lips were all but
severed, bloodless flaps of flesh. Ants crept across her face. Both women had been clipped nearly bald.
January stood up as if he'd been jabbed with a goad, so angry he trembled.
A hand touched his arm. He whirled and found himself looking into Mamzelle Marie's dark eyes.
"Don't matter no more to them, Michie Janvier." Wheels creaked in the ooze of Common Street outside,
harness jangling as the horses strained against the muck. The dead-cart.
"It matters to me."
Mamzelle Marie said nothing. Where the orange light brushed a greasy finger her earrings had the gleam
of real gold, the dark gems on the crucifix suspended from her neck a true sapphire glint. "It's nowhere
near so bad as it was last year."
Last year.
It had been almost exactly a year.
Paris in the cholera. January felt again the dreadful stillness of those suffocating August days, the empty
streets and shuttered windows. Though he'd been working then for ten years as a musician, he'd gone
back to the Hotel Dieu to nurse, to do what he could, knowing full well he could do nothing. That
epidemic had recalled to him all the memories of fever seasons past: the families of the poor brought in
from the attics where two or three or seven had died already, the stench and the sense of helpless dread.
Whenever he'd stepped outside he had been astonished to see the jostling mansard roofs, the chestnut
trees, and gray stone walls of Paris, instead of the low, pastel houses of the town where he had been
raised.
One day he'd walked back to the two rooms he and his wife shared in the tangle of streets between the
old Cluny convent and the river, to find them stinking like a plague ward of the wastes Ayasha had been
unable to contain when the weakness, the shivering, the fever had struck her. To find Ayasha herself on
the bed in the midst of that humiliating horror, a rag doll wrung and twisted and left to dry, the black
ocean of her hair trailing down over the edge of the bed to brush the floor.
Death had spared her nothing. She had died alone. "No." Though January had never spoken of this
memory to his sister-who he knew was a disciple of Mamzelle Marie-or to anyone else, he thought he
saw her knowledge of the scene in this woman's serpent eyes. Maybe she really did read people's
dreams. "No, it's not so bad as last year," agreed January again, softly.