Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard Read Online Free

Jeanne at Bellefleur Plantation, who'd showed him and Olympe both where to gather slippery elm, mullein, lady's slipper, and sassafras in the woods. Later he'd been apprenticed to Jose Gomez, a free man of color who had a little surgery down on Rue Chartres. Reading the books Gbmez had of the English surgeons John and William Hunter and watching dissections of sheep and pigs from the slaughterhouses, January had seen no difference between the music that was the life of his soul and the harmonies of blood and organs and bones. And when, finally, the long wars between France and England and the United States were done and it was safe to cross the seas, January had gone to Paris, to study surgery at the Hotel-Dieu.
    He'd been admitted to the College of Surgeons there and had continued to work at the clinic, unable to go into private practice either in Paris or in New Orleans. To be sure, free surgeons of color practiced in both cities, but they were invariably of a polite walnut snuff, or hue. January had long accepted the fact that no American, and few Frenchmen, were ready to trust their lives to someone who so much resembled a pantomime-show Sultan's Ethiopian door guard.
    “At least here in Paris one is free,” Ayasha had said to him, Ayasha who had fled her father's harim in Algiers rather than be wed against her will. “And no one can take that from you.” Ayasha had worked in Paris as a seamstress since the age of fourteen. By the time January met her, she owned her own shop.
    No one can take that from you.
    Except, of course, January had discovered, Monsieur le Cholera.
    It would be two years in August since he had returned home and found Ayasha dead.
    Since then he had discovered that he had progressed not one step farther than that terrified slave boy on BelleAeur Plantation, in terms of what life could and could not take away.
    It was June. A deadly time in New Orleans.
    “That's absolute nonsense,” blustered a railway speculator in a dark gray coat. “Tom Jenkins says he's been down the river almost to the Belize and there hasn't been a sign of yellow jack, much less the cholera, anywhere in the countryside.”
    “Not in the countryside, no.” Dr. Ker of the Charity Hospital took a glass of champagne from the little waiter's tray with a polite nod of thanks. “On the whole the cholera isn't a disease of the countryside. We've had two cases of yellow fever here in the city.”
    “Two?” Granville snorted. “Well, there's a reason to turn tail and run, by gosh! Are you sure they were yellow fever, Doctor? Dr. Connaud-he's my physician, and a splendid fellow with a knife, just splendid!-says it isn't possible that there should be epidemics three summers in a row.”
    “It's the newspapers,” declared Colonel Pritchard. “Damned journalists'll print anything that'll sell their filthy rags. They don't care about the local businesses, or what it does to a city's property values if word gets around there's fever. All they think about is getting a few more copies sold. As for you, Dr. Ker, I'm sure you'll find if you open those two so-called fever victims up that there's some kind of reason for the same symptoms. . . .”
    Was that what young Gabriel had walked from Rue Douane in the old French town to tell him? January wondered. What he wouldn't tell the servants of this stranger's house? That Olympe was sick? Or her husband, Paul? One of the other children?
    Yellow fever? Cholera?
    Not cholera, he prayed desperately. Blessed Virgin, please, not that.
    And while his arms trembled with fatigue, and his heart squeezed with dread, and he felt as if someone were trying to pry his shoulder blades loose with crowbars, he skipped through moulinets, brisés, cross-passes, and olivettes, as lightly as a happy child running in a meadow of flowers. A wave of faintness passed over him; he concentrated on ballottes and glissades, on the glittering protection of the music's beauty that could almost carry his mind away