Graveyard Dust

by Barbara Hambly

  Her gesture amply demonstrated what she thought of a boy of education becoming a marble sculptor. “He’s as bad as you, Ben, wasting the gifts M’sieu Janvier gave you …”

  “Not wasting them at all, Mama.” January smiled at her. He’d long ago realized that being annoyed at his mother would be the occupation of a lifetime. “M’sieu Janvier paid for my piano lessons as well as for Dr. Gómez to teach me medicine. I think as long as I’m making money at one or the other …”

  “Not much money.”

  But January refused to fight, though the wound hurt. “So Geneviève turned M’sieu Laurence out, because of this engagement—it would have given him control of more property, surely? A plantation?”

  Livia looked as if she’d have liked to enlarge on her son’s folly and ingratitude, but in the end she could no more resist slandering a rival than a child could resist a sweet. Besides, reasoned January, the conversation could always be brought back around to his shortcomings.

  “Trianon,” said Livia, with spiteful satisfaction. “And another one across the lake. Geneviève must have hoped to make free with some of the proceeds. But Madame Cordelia sold them up, and put the money in town lots. If she’d held on—”

  “But you see,” said Dominique, “Geneviève and Isaak have been estranged for just years. Isaak was the only one of the boys who was still friends with their father—and I always thought poor M’sieu Laurence seemed terribly lonely. He’d come to the Blue Ribbon Balls and chat with us girls, and be so gallant and sweet, not like a lot of the gentlemen who look at you so when they don’t think you can see, even if the whole town knows you already have a friend. All he wanted to do was dance.…”

  Livia’s sniff was more expressive than many books January had read.

  “No, truly, Mama, we can tell.” Dominique gently discouraged Madame la Comtesse de Marzipan, the less obese of Livia’s two butter-colored cats, from playing with the ribbons she was sewing on the sleeve. “At any rate, when he was taken sick last fall, both Isaak and Célie visited him every day. At least that’s what Thérèse tells me, and her cousin was one of M’sieu Laurence’s maids. When M’sieu Laurence died he left Isaak—oh, I don’t know how much money, and some property as well, I think.”

  “He left him a warehouse at the foot of Rue Bienville, half-interest in his cotton press, a lot on Rue Marais and Rue des Ursulines, which if you ask me isn’t worth seven hundred dollars, fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of railway shares in the Atlantic and Northeastern, and three thousand dollars cash.”

  January didn’t even bother to inquire where his mother had obtained these figures. He merely whistled appreciatively. “Not bad for a marble carver living in the back of his employer’s house. I presume they’ve only been waiting for the probate.”

  “Which would have gone through a lot more quickly had not four-fifths of the judges in this city turned tail and fled at the first rumor of fever.”

  “Well, yes,” said Dominique. “But also, M’sieu Laurence’s mother contested the will. You are going to do something about it, aren’t you, Ben? Not about the will, I mean, but about Olympe being arrested? You can’t let them—I mean, they won’t really …” She let the words hang her trail off unsaid.

  January was silent. Madame la Duchesse de Gâteaubeurre prowled idly into the room, levitated effortlessly up onto his knee, and settled her bulk, making bread with her broad soft paws.

  “Olympe wouldn’t have done such an awful thing!” insisted Dominique. “And as for Célie Gérard having had anything to do with it—stuff! Why would she have wanted to kill her husband?”

  January remembered that sweet-faced child turning away from Shaw, her hand pressed to her mouth with the shock of having confirmed the doubts that had tormented her through the horror of the night. Mamzelle Marie’s words rose to his mind: a thousand reasons men will think a woman poisoned a man.

  Célie, Isaak Jumon had said. And died.

  “I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully. “Maybe I ought to find that out.”

  “I knew about the will, yes.” Basile Nogent rested his forehead for a moment on his knuckles, against the shoulder of an infant angel carved to look like a white boy. The sculptor was small and middle-aged and had the sad thinness to him that sometimes befalls men when their wives die. The empty silence of the other side of the little cottage, the stillness of the yard where the kitchen doors gaped dark and deserted, told its own story. January knew that thinness, that shadow in the eyes. It was what had driven him from Paris, what had driven him back to the strange land of his tangled birth roots and the only family he had.

  It was clear to him, as if he had read it in a book, that Isaak and Célie had been this man’s family. And now Isaak was gone.

  “Isaak never spoke much about his family to me,” Basile Nogent said, in the hoarse rough voice of a consumptive. “He told me once that he wanted to put them behind him and, another time, that he forgave them, both father and mother, for what they were, for what neither could help being.”

  He shook his head. “An old quarrel, he said. And I understood that it was a pain that he—that Isaak—knew he had to overcome. He saw his father many times, and his uncle Mathurin. He’d meet them near the coffee stands at the market, or in a café on the Place d’Armes; sometimes he’d go by the big house on Rue St. Louis and sit in the courtyard and talk. It is not good when families divide like that, for whatever reason. There.” He pointed to the marble block of a half-carved tombstone, like a classical trophy-of-arms: sword, shield, wreath, and cloak. A graven ribbon looped the sword hilt, bearing the legend JUMON. “Mathurin Jumon commissioned that last September, at his brother’s death.”

  A quirk of irony broke the grief of that wrinkled face, and he ran one thumb—a knob of muscle like a rock—over the curls of the cherub’s temple. “There is a species of insanity that strikes when a will is read. I have wrought marble for forty years.…” His gesture expanded to touch the two rooms of his little shop, to the doors that opened into a yard filled with yet more images still: a dog sleeping on a panoply of arms; two putti struggling, laughing, over a bunch of grapes; Athene with her owl reading a book. “As three-quarters of what I do is to decorate graves, I see people every week who have just heard wills read.” His breath whispered what might at another time in his life have been a laugh, and he coughed again. “I always told Isaak that when I die I’m going to be like the savage Indians and have everything piled up in a big pyre and burned with me.”

  The sculptor again briefly closed his eyes. Did he think he could hide the thought that went across them? wondered January. The grief that asked, Who do I have to leave it to anyway?

  And the same, he thought, could be said of himself. And for an instant the memory came back to him, suddenly and agonizingly, as if he had found Ayasha’s body yesterday; as if he had never seen that picture in his mind before this moment. As if he had not awakened every morning for twenty-two months in bed alone.

  Ayasha dead.

  He still couldn’t imagine how that could be possible. Couldn’t imagine what he would do with the remainder of his life.

  “He was—a good boy.” Nogent’s voice broke into January’s grief, like a physical touch on his arm. “A good young man.” The rain that had been falling since early afternoon, while January had been on the streetcar to the American faubourg of St. Mary to teach his three little piano students there, finally lightened and ceased; a splash of westering sunlight spangled the puddles in the yard.

  “Tell me about Thursday,” said January. “About the day they came for him.”

  Nogent sighed again, as if calling all his strength from the core of his bones to do work that had to be done. “Thursday,” he said. “Yes.” He led January to the back of the shop, where the light struck a simple block of marble. At first glance the headstone seemed unadorned save for the name, LIVAUDAIS. But sculpted over the block was what appeared to be a veil of lace, the work so exquisitely fine that the very pattern of
the lace was reproduced, draped half over the name, the name readable through it—a truly astonishing piece. “We were working on this for old Madame Livaudais. Two—two City Guards came with the warrant. Isaak put aside his chisel and looked at it, and said, ‘This is ridiculous.’ Very calmly, just like that. To the men he said, ‘I see my mother has decided to waste everyone’s time. Please excuse me for just a moment while I get my coat and let my wife know where I’ll be.’ Cool—cold as the marble itself. But the way he touched the block”—Nogent mimicked the gesture, resting his palm for a moment on the flowered delicacy of the counterfeit lace’s edge, holding it there, bidding it farewell—“I knew.”

  The movement of his eyes pointed back to the kitchen building that lay athwart the end of the yard. A little flight of stairs ascended to the rooms above, a garçonnière and chambers that would have belonged to household servants, had there been any. “He went up to the rooms they had, over the kitchen there. I kept the Guards talking, led them away from the doors here so they would not see. He must have gone up the scaffolding of the cistern—you see it there in the corner?—and over the wall into the next courtyard, and so out onto Rue St. Philippe and gone. He didn’t tell Célie; only that he was going with them. The Guards must have waited here for him twenty minutes before they went to look. I think he did that so Célie wouldn’t be accused of helping a runaway to escape. Even then, he thought of her.”

  “May I see?”

  Nogent followed him out into the yard and to the cistern, where, sure enough, January found the scuffing and scrape marks on the frame of the scaffolding that held up the enormous coopered barrel in a corner of the yard. Like most yards in the French town, Nogent’s was hemmed by a high wall, brick faced with stucco that had fallen out in patches, affording handholds. The fringe of resurrection fern along the top seemed to be broken, as if by passage of a body going over, but with the new growth already flourishing it was impossible to tell. January made a move to scramble up himself and see, but the lancing pain in his arms as he lifted them brought him up short.

  “And the night of the twenty-third?” he asked, turning back to the old sculptor. “The night he died? Was young Madame Jumon here then?”

  “That animal Shaw asked the same.” Nogent spoke without rancor—animal was in fact one of the more polite terms by which members of the French and free-colored communities referred to Americans. “And I tell you what I told him. Madame Célie and I had supper together, here in the house, just as dusk fell. Then I went to bed. I tire more easily than I used to, you understand.” He coughed again, and January knew that what he said was true. He wondered if, like the fiddler Hannibal, Nogent welcomed Morpheus with a spoonful of laudanum for the pain.

  “It was threatening rain all evening, M’sieu. I cannot imagine Madame Célie would have ventured forth. Then, too, she had the habit of remaining indoors at night, in the hopes that Isaak would come, or send word.”

  “So Célie was by herself in the garçonnière here?”

  “Yes. But, of course, this animal would have a witness. And when she had none—and she a married lady whose husband was away!—he said, ‘Ah, she is a murderess,’ and placed her under arrest.”

  January’s eye traveled over the brick-paved yard, still puddled from the afternoon’s downpour. The soft, pitted pavement would hold no track, of course, to show whether Célie Jumon had remained in place that night. And it had rained, not once but many times, as always in New Orleans in June.

  “How long had Isaak Jumon been with you, M’sieu Nogent?” he asked.

  “Two years,” replied the sculptor. “Nearly three. He was truly a son to me.”

  “Do you know any who would want Isaak Jumon dead? Who would wish him ill?”

  “Ah.” Nogent was silent, his head bowed, his hand on the scaffolding of the cistern, the subliminal movements of his fingers defining and redefining its shape and grain. Then, “Who would want Isaak dead, M’sieu? I don’t know. His father’s mother, Madame Cordelia Jumon—I think she would have rejoiced in his death. She did what she could to take his inheritance away from him in the courts. His mother—Well, I never thought that her claim of him as her slave would hold up in court.” Nogent shook his head. “But what mother would harm her son?”

  What mother would try to have him declared her slave?

  What mother would refuse to speak of, or to, her elder daughter who disobeyed, all those many years ago?

  “He was a good boy, M’sieu. Not what people say, ‘Oh, he was a good boy.…’ But he had a great goodness in him, a goodness of soul. Did they speak of when he would be buried? Of who would carve the plaque on his tomb? That mother of his …”

  “No,” said January quietly. “No body has yet been found. That’s another thing I’m trying to track down. If he was in trouble, was there anyone Isaak would have gone to? He was missing for four days before his death.”

  “It depends on the trouble,” Nogent said at last. “His uncle Mathurin, I would think. Perhaps his father-in-law. But they both loved Célie. If either of them knew a single thing of this crime, they would not suffer her to be accused. She is … a girl of great sweetness, M’sieu. And great forbearance. She is a girl who does not get angry; but that night, when she’d heard all that his mother had done with the warrant, and the Guards out looking for him, and an advertisement in the paper calling him a runaway slave … she came into the kitchen where I was sitting, and she kicked the side of the hearth, kicked it and kicked it and kicked it, not saying a word, because she was well-taught and well-bred, but with tears of anger running down her face. Whoever has said that she had anything, anything to do with his death is a fool.”

  January was silent, thinking about the young man dying in the big house alone, the young man who whispered, I have been poisoned. And then, Célie. And died.

  • • •

  There’s a thousand reasons men will think a woman poisoned a man.

  But which woman? January walked along Rue Dumaine in the wet, gathering dusk. Who else could give “no good account of themselves” on the night of Isaak Jumon’s death?

  In the Place d’Armes, gulls squabbled with pelicans over the garbage of the fruit stands while the women closed up their shops. The brick arcades of the market were dark save for lanterns around the coffee stand, and the world smelled of wet sewage, coffee, and the slow black rivers of soot disgorged by the steamboats into the sullen sky. A snatch of song touched him, where a late-working gang heaved cords of wood aboard the Missourian:

  Kimbebo, nayro, dilldo, kiro,

  Stimstam, formididdle, all-a-board-la rake …

  African words, the wailing rhythm a thing of the bones and the heart rather than the mind.

  Rose Vitrac was in her room above and behind a grocery on Rue de la Victoire, a slim gawky woman dressed neatly in contrast to the assortment of slatterns and market-women occupying the rest of the building. As January’s shadow darkened the doorway, she raised her head from the pile of Latin examinations that had overflowed her small desk onto bed, spare chair, and floor. “Ignorant little toads,” she remarked dispassionately and propped her gold-rimmed spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of her nose. Half a dozen candles burned in a cheap brass branch on the desk, different lengths and colors, bought half-consumed from the servants of the rich. “Why don’t Creoles bother to educate their children? Or make certain they’re actually studying what their tutors are paid to teach? Here’s one who seems to think Cicero was merely something that was served at Roman banquets.”

  “I’m sure if Mark Antony could have arranged it he would have been.”

  “You have a point. I hope you’ve come to seduce me into dinner at a gumbo stand somewhere along the levee. I think if I read many more of these I shall go out into the street and start killing young boys at random, and such things give one a terrible reputation, even in this part of town.”

  Rose Vitrac had owned and taught at her own school for young ladies of color, before a combination
of financial ill luck, yellow fever, and the determined enmity of one of her investors over her assistance to a runaway slave had conspired to ruin her. She now eked a kind of living from translating Latin and Greek for a small bookshop on Rue d’Esplanade, and correcting examination papers for two of the boys’ schools in town. “Not much of a living,” she admitted ruefully, as she and January descended the gallery stairs, “but decidedly superior to prostitution or sewing.”

  Or marriage, she didn’t add—and she would have, once, January reflected, walking beside her along Rue Marigny. She was a woman who had been hurt badly by men, once upon a time, and deep in her heart still mistrusted them, sometimes in spite of herself.

  There is time. January moved his aching shoulders. And given my own possibility of earning anything like a living in the near future, maybe it’s just as well. Next month it would be two years since Ayasha’s death. Seeing that shadow in Basile Nogent’s tired eyes, the darkness of that empty house, had uncorked inside him once again that blood-colored river of pain, and he felt obscurely guilty, walking along the levee in contentment with Rose.

  Ayasha, I haven’t forgotten.

  The time would come for them, he knew. Fate and God and Monsieur le Choléra permitting. But when he woke in the night with the memory of a woman beside him, it was Ayasha’s body he sought; it was Ayasha’s hair he sometimes imagined he could smell in the moonlight. His love for Rose had not made the pain grow less.

  Over seven cents’ worth of jambalaya from a market stand, Rose listened to January’s account of the past eighteen hours: what he’d learned from his mother and sister, what he’d seen at the jail, and all Nogent had said. “Here’s the advertisement Geneviève Jumon put in the Courier Friday,” he said, spreading it out where the lantern glare fell on the tabletop. “Considering my mother’s attitude about money maybe it’s just as well I was in Paris when St.-Denis Janvier died, and that he didn’t have much to leave me. Is there a chance you can get close to Célie Jumon? Talk to her? My sister says her father won’t let someone of Dominique’s stamp near her.”