“It’s true,” said Antoine earnestly. January had moved his seat from the window to a table farther in and so had to admire the adroit way in which Hannibal steered the boy to a chair from which January could watch his face while he spoke. “You know, I’ve often thought that true experience, seen through a mind attuned and sensitized, is far more satisfying than anything one could read or see. But I never thought”—he turned his face away a little, his brow suddenly twisting in grief—“my brother …”
“Tell me about it,” urged Hannibal, and nudged the boy’s crêpe-scarved top hat—which Antoine had set on the table, where it blocked the view of his restless hands—out of January’s line of sight.
Antoine had been reading in his own room—a garçonnière above the household offices—at his mother’s house on Rue des Ramparts, on the night of Monday, the twenty-third of June. It was very late, and raining heavily, when he heard knocking on his door. “There was a woman there, sir, a woman of color, masked and wearing a hooded cloak. She asked me if my name was Antoine Jumon, and I said yes; she asked if I had a brother named Isaak, and I said yes. She asked, where was my mother? I said I didn’t know. I thought she must be in the house asleep. The woman said, ‘If you love your brother, come with me. Hurry, there is no time to lose.’ ”
“Did she speak French or English?” asked Hannibal, and the boy looked up, surprised.
“French, of course.” It didn’t seem to occur to him to wonder why the purported Mr. Rafferty, of a New York newspaper, would have been carrying on the entire conversation in French.
Antoine had gone into the main house, but his mother was not in her bed. His guide would not be stayed, however, and urged him into a fiacre waiting in the street. “I did not see the coachman’s face, M’sieu, because of the rain. We drove—hours it seemed—in the darkness, before she ordered the coach to halt and led me out. I had only confused impressions of a great, dark house looming over us with a single candle burning in one upper window, watching us like some malignant eye. She took me through a dark antechamber, to a small, bare room where my brother lay dying on a rude mattress laid on the floor beside the fire.”
“Did you know he was dying?” asked Hannibal gently, looking up from the notebook in which he was jotting. The boy’s mouth trembled with distress.
“His face—ah, God! He was in terrible pain, white and ghastly; he vomited and … and could not contain his bowels, though the servant woman there had cleaned him, and there was not much more in him to void. He—he said, I have been poisoned, Antoine, in a terrible voice, as if his throat were scraped and raw.”
His eyes squeezed shut, and his black-gloved hands began to shake in earnest.
“Please excuse me,” muttered Antoine after a moment. “I—I am not well. My constitution is weak.…”
“Perhaps this will help a little?” Hannibal held out to him the square black bottle from his pocket. “I am myself not of strong constitution.”
Antoine’s eye fell on the bottle, and January could see that the boy recognized the shape of it at once: Kendal Black Drop, triple-strength tincture of the best Turkish opium, brewed by a Quaker family named Braithwaite at eleven shillings the bottle. And he could see the grateful, gentle light in Antoine Jumon’s eyes. “Thank you,” said the boy. “Thank you very much, sir.”
And took a slug that would have felled a horse.
“There isn’t that much more to tell,” said Antoine, after a moment. “I was—I was much affected, so much so that I could barely speak. I clung to my brother’s hand and wept. He tried to speak to me, tried to tell me something, over and over, I don’t know how long I was there. Time seemed to stand still, to stretch and to shrink. There was a fire in the grate; sometimes all that I could hear was the rain, and the hissing of the coals, and all I could do was stare at the goldwork patterns in the red velvet of the pillow beneath my brother’s head, and the way the firelight made jewels of the sweat on his brow. The woman servant there brought me water in a pitcher of fantastic make, like a—like a lettuce, with serpents and insects peering and slipping among the dark leaves. Evil! Horrible! I poured the water out when she turned away. My brother whispered again, I have been poisoned. Then he said, Mother, and Tell her, and Célie.… Célie was my brother’s wife, M’sieu, married only a month. And then—and then he died.”
He looked aside again, covering his mouth with his hand. Hannibal signaled the young woman in the kitchen door to bring them coffee, and waited while Antoine took a sip.
“I’m sorry,” said Antoine after a moment, and drew a deep breath. “Isaak fell limp in my arms, M’sieu. After a little time the woman servant helped me to my feet, led me from the room. I—I was led out, led by the hand into a—a waiting fiacre.… It was still pouring rain, M’sieu, and the carriage—the carriage stopped, I knew not where, and the coachman bade me get down. After that I wandered long, long through the rain, hours it seemed; turning corners here and there among dark houses and still darker stands of trees. At long last I saw lights before me, and made my way to them. They were the riding lights on the masts of ships in the river, and so at length I was able to find my way home. It was dawn, and my mother was awake and waiting for me. And I told her that my brother was dead.”
To which Geneviève doubtless responded, thought January dourly, with a discreetly stifled whoop of joy.
“But this is shocking.” Hannibal added a dollop of opium to the boy’s coffee. “Astonishing! Do you—forgive me for asking—do you have any idea who might have poisoned him? Had he enemies?”
Antoine’s voice sank to a whisper. “He was surrounded by them.” January had to strain to hear. “Our grandmother—you understand, M’sieu,” he added self-consciously, “that my brother and I are—I am, he was, M’sieu—men of color, but our father was a wealthy white man of this city. He left my brother considerable property, but owing to …owing to a division in the family, nothing was left to my mother or me. But his mother, M’sieu, our father’s mother—she is a terrible woman! She tried to have my brother’s inheritance taken away from him before he got it. Yes, and also tried to take that which my father left to his estranged wife, Noëmie, who lives in Paris—Noëmie who hated this country, hated my brother and my mother and me! And the father of the woman that my brother married, he, too, hated my brother. He would have liked to see his daughter a widow, and himself in control of the property she would inherit. And my uncle, my father’s brother …”
Sudden, ugly rage flashed across the boy’s gentle eyes.
Very softly, Antoine said, “My uncle Mathurin is a consummately evil man, M’sieu. My brother—would not see it. Isaak was—very good, my brother. He forgave, even those who had no business being forgiven. Because Mathurin showed him kindness, he thought that he was kind, and I assure you, M’sieu, that this is not the case. My uncle is a powerful man in this city, M’sieu. He has powerful friends. If my brother died, eventually the property would have gone to him. Had I to name one who would have harmed my brother, M’sieu, I would say that it was he.”
“Antoine.”
The boy whirled, face flooding with guilt. Framed in the doorway of Grouchet’s stood the mourning woman January had seen leaving the bank with Hubert Granville. At closer range he saw that she had, indeed, been a beauty once. Even if—his mind leapt to the realization as Antoine rose to his feet and stammered, “Mama”—even if she’d started out life as one of Antoine Allard’s cane hands.
January had seen the look in her eyes a thousand times before, at the Hôtel-Dieu, at the Charity Hospital—the look as she turned her son’s face to the light of the windows, and warily studied his eyes. She did not even try, as the wives of drunks and addicts so frequently do, to pretend she was doing something else. January wondered if Kentucky Williams and the Perdido Street harpies had watered Hannibal’s Black Drop to a degree that it wouldn’t contract the pupils of Antoine’s eyes.
“I was concerned when you didn’t come home,” said Geneviève Jumon, with
false and steady cheerfulness. “You know that I don’t like you wandering about the town without letting me know where you’ll be.” She glanced past her son at Hannibal, who had tucked pad, pencil, and opium bottle out of sight.
“Mama, this is M’sieu Rafferty, of New York,” said Antoine quickly, and just as quickly, Hannibal very slightly shook his head. “He is the—the owner of an art gallery in that city. I sent him some of my sketches and paintings, and he was kind enough to look for me when he came to New Orleans.”
“And very beautiful they are, M’am.” Hannibal rose to his feet and bowed gracefully over Madame Jumon’s hand. “Your son has a great deal of talent. Unformed, of course, and undirected, but technique is easy to acquire when the heart, the fire, is there.…”
January folded up his newspaper and casually strolled from the café.
“What did you think?” he asked ten minutes later, when Hannibal joined him at the coffee stand in the market arcade where he’d supped with Rose last night.
“You mean other than the fact that our boy is obviously an addict and was just as obviously taking advantage of Mama’s absence on the night in question by dosing himself to the verge of insensibility with Smyrna nepenthe? St. John’s Eve is just about the shortest night of the year. If he’d driven ‘hours’ to this mysterious house and wandered around for ‘hours’ afterward—not to speak of the ‘hours’ spent staring at snakes in the water pitcher—it would have been noon by the time he got home.”
“There is that,” agreed January, who signaled one of the pralinnères with a gesture of his finger. Hannibal paid for both pralines—a brown and a white—and handed the remainder of the money back to January. Coffee and soup at Grouchet’s, though not overwhelmingly costly, had cut deeply into January’s slender resources, and there was still his mother to pay for room and board. “Did you notice that it was a woman servant who brought him there, and a woman who attended Isaak—the same woman, maybe? Even at that hour of the night it wouldn’t be impossible to hire a hack.”
“A pity Mama put in an appearance before we could get a description out of him.” Hannibal checked his notes. “I observe that in addition to Célie’s name Isaak also mentioned their mother’s—interesting, given the reason he was in hiding in the first place. And Mama, of course, was absent from home that night.”
“And evidently hadn’t told Antoine where she was going, or when she’d be back,” mused January. “Curious. Though if she was behind it and didn’t want to be placed on the scene of the death itself, I don’t imagine she’ll be difficult to trace. In fact, she’ll be cudgeling her brain for some way to mention casually the thirty-seven people who saw her in the hours before her son’s death.”
“Did they?”
“I don’t know,” said January. “I can only assume she did to Shaw, since he made no attempt to arrest her as well. But I’m certainly going to find out.”
Saturday, 28 June
M. Mathurin Jumon
Rue St. Louis
New Orleans
Dear M. Jumon:
In my investigation of the horrible accusation that has been leveled against Madame Célie Jumon, your name was mentioned as a possible source of information about your nephew Isaak Jumon, of whom, I have been told, you were quite fond. I understand that you have probably already spoken to Madame Jumon’s attorney, a M. Vilhardouin, but it is my understanding that M. Vilhardouin is carrying on his investigation only insofar as concerns Madame Jumon and not the woman who is accused along with her, a Madame Corbier. By investigating on behalf of both, I hope to gain a clearer insight into the circumstances of your nephew’s death.
Might I trouble you for an hour of your time, at your convenience, in order that I may learn further particulars about your nephew that might point out some direction for further investigation? Please let me know a time and venue most convenient for a meeting.
Many thanks for your help and consideration in this matter.
Your obedient servant,
Benjamin January, fmc.
SEVEN
At the subscription ball for the St. Margaret Society, held that night in the Théâtre d’Orléans, January took the opportunity to more closely observe Mathurin Jumon, that consummately evil man. He saw, as he had seen Thursday night at the Pritchards’ party, only a tall, powerfully built man of an age only a few years greater than his own, whose dark-browed handsomeness blended with the black of his well-cut mourning attire, assiduous in attendance on his brilliant mother. Madame Cordelia Jumon appeared to have come to the ball sheerly in order to be congratulated by all her acquaintances for garnering the strength to do so: she spent most of it seated in one of the Théâtre’s stage boxes, sipping the negus and punch her son brought to her and dissecting a piece of plum cake into smaller and smaller pieces without ever actually eating any. Since the musicians’ dais stood on the stage, ensconced in imitation archways from last spring’s performance of Barbarossa, January was able to hear a good deal of what was said by the assorted ladies who ascended to participate in Madame Cordelia’s little court, at least between dances when his concentration wasn’t divided between the beauty of the music and the pain in his shoulders.
“Dearest, are you sure you’re well enough?” That was Elaine Destrehan, one of the most prominent of the Creole matrons.
“Nonsense, child, of course I am.” A martyred smile and a discreet cough. “I’m as strong as a horse.” A beautifully calculated gesture that implied imminent collapse, the Théâtre’s gaslights glimmering on the two-inch band of diamonds and pearls worn over the glove of sable kid. Most women came out of mourning for their children in three months, but Madame Jumon had merely exchanged crêpe and bombazine for black silk, which formed an admirable backdrop to the diamonds she wore. “My dear Mathurin looks after me so well.”
Her dear Mathurin, January noticed, did not, as so many of the men present did, disappear into the lobby and thence through the discreetly curtained passage that led to the Salle d’Orléans next door, where a Blue Ribbon Ball was in full swing. The wives of January’s fellow musicians in Paris, or of the artists who’d lived in the same building on the Rue de l’Aube—scarcely missish women—had not been able to credit it when he’d told them of the Blue Ribbon Balls: not that the free colored demimonde would have such entertainments, but that they were so frequently held within a hundred feet of the respectable subscription balls. “And they countenance that?” his own wife, Ayasha, had asked incredulously. “That the mistresses of their husbands and brothers—and fathers, ya-Allah!—will be dancing in … What? Another room?”
“It’s actually the building next door,” said January, a little apologetically. “But the same man owns both buildings, and they’re connected by a passageway. It’s the custom of the country.”
“It is my belief that the men in your country all need a good lesson,” Ayasha had replied. At the memory of that hook-nosed brown face, that sable ocean of hair braided and pinned in halfhearted imitation of a white woman’s weaker tresses, January’s heart still constricted in his breast. She had added, with a malicious glance sidelong, “And the women, too.”
He brought his mind back from the memory, as he had perforce learned to do. The music helped, the bittersweet solace of a Mozart waltz: yearning, parting, sentimental regret, layered like a soupe anglaise. His back and shoulders ached like fire, and his heart hurt, cut to ribbons by the knife of time. But the music lifted to its next quick movement, as if it sighed, shrugged, picked up its beribboned petticoats, and said, Life goes on.
And life did go on.
“Such a shame,” said Mrs. Pritchard, when Mr. Greenaway brought her punch, “that poor Emily Redfern couldn’t attend, after all the work she’s done for the society.…”
“And the fortune she handed over,” added her husband grudgingly. “Hard cash, too. She must be the only person in town these days with cash money at hand, and she has to hand it over to some charity.…” He was already in retreat toward t
he lobby doors.
“She feels it very much,” sympathized little Mrs. Granville, pretending not to see the men’s departure. “Hubert and I dined with her this evening, and with that nice Mr. Vilhardouin”—she got the pronunciation more or less right, and Greenaway stalled in his tracks like Balaam’s ass—“such a kind gentleman, and so careful of Emily’s comfort, only he is a Catholic, of course. I wonder what can be keeping him?”
Greenaway resisted Pritchard’s impatient gesture, shook his head—after that January saw him look around every time a newcomer entered the planked-over parterre of the theater. When Clément Vilhardouin finally did make an appearance (“So sweet of you to have stayed to keep poor Emily company!” effused Mrs. Pritchard. “I know it must have bored you terribly to miss the ball!”), Greenaway stalked over to the attorney with the obvious intention of learning exactly what had passed.
January hid a grin and wondered if he could get a note to Hannibal, playing for the Blue Ribbon Ball at the other end of the notorious passageway, laying odds on a Vilhardouin—Greenaway duel before the end of the night.
Most of the women in the room, however, were left bredouillées by their escorts, making a tapestry along the walls while the men appeared and disappeared into lobby, passageway, and Salle. Hubert Granville was especially prone to this sort of intermittence, though when present he was attentive to the point of uxoriousness to his stout little wife. “No, I’m steering clear of investments in banks for now,” January overheard him say to Colonel Pritchard, while they waited for their respective ladies to return from Madame Jumon’s box. “At least till after next month’s elections.” The music intervened, a lively mazurka, and January caught only the tail end of his account, “… thought I’d be able to put in a lot more, but it may not work out that way.”
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