"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.