Graveyard Dust

by Barbara Hambly

  He set down bowl and cup beside the door, and pushed the shutter wider. The evening was settling down fast, as it did in Louisiana, but enough blue light lingered that he could see all around the little room. It was barely eight feet by ten and contained nothing but the narrow bed he’d slept in as a boy, mosquito-bar tied neatly back; a small desk with its chair; a stand bearing slop jar, basin, and ewer in white German ware. The bed was as Bella had left it earlier in the day, smooth and flat as a tidal beach. The rag rug made a dark oval, exactly in the center of the pale floor.

  January took a lucifer-match from his pocket and lit the candle, then knelt and began to look in every corner and shadow of the room.

  In time he found what he sought, worked in between the sheet and the coverlet—even in the hottest days of summer Bella would not tolerate any bed dressed in sheets alone—at the foot of the mattress. Black flannel. Sniffing it cautiously, January identified at least red pepper and iron, and the rotting flesh of something that felt, through the flannel, like a snake or lizard head. An ouanga. He made a move to untie the stringy root that bound the bag shut, but didn’t. Couldn’t. He only stood with the thing in his hand for some time, not sure why he was trembling. Anger, he thought. Anger that his room had been thus casually violated again.

  Far-off voices still drifted to him from Congo Square. It wouldn’t be long before the cannon in the Place d’Armes sounded curfew. A faint breeze from the door made the candle flicker, the shadows curtsy and loom. His eyes were drawn to the crucifix above the head of his bed. For a moment he thought he saw a dried snake there instead, with his own name written on the slip of paper in its jaws.

  He wondered if his confessor had ever come back to his cloistered room and found a chicken foot on his bed.

  He carried the ouanga downstairs to the kitchen and pitched the black flannel bag deep into the back of the hearth, poking it into the banked embers with a stick of kindling. It caught with a great blazing leap of blue fire—alcohol, or possibly gunpowder—and the stench of burnt feathers and hair.

  When it was consumed he climbed the stairs again, picked up bowl and cup and spoon. But a thought came to him as he was about to reenter his room, and he carried all three down to the yard again, and dumped the jambalaya into the privy. He went into the kitchen and poured the rest of the pot of coffee after it, and set the dishes next to the sink, for Bella to wash after breakfast. Then he let himself out the gate of the yard, and walked down Rue Toulouse to the levee, where women sold gumbo and jambalaya from stands among the brick arcades of the market. Though he could ill afford it, he bought himself something to eat there.

  That night he dreamed that there was another little flannel juju somewhere in his room, and that every time he sought for it, it moved someplace else, rustling like a mouse in the dark.

  TEN

  “Ben, darling, I know you and Olympe were right and I was wrong about Madame Lalaurie last spring, but don’t you think you’re letting what happened affect your judgment just a little?” Dominique judiciously spread two gowns on her bed and studied them: pale yellow mull-muslin frothed with layer upon layer of white lace and a clear lettuce-green tulle trimmed with plum-colored bows. “Do you think the waist on the green is a bit high, Ben? They’re wearing them lower this year.”

  Having come to manhood at a time when women wore clinging high-waisted gauze gowns with virtually nothing under them, January thought all women dressed like idiots these days, his dear friend Rose Vitrac not excepted. He knew better, however, than to say so. “The lower waist is more becoming.”

  “I think so, too. And I never did like those silly aprons.” His sister cast aside the green tulle and with it apparently all recollection of her ecstasies last year on the subject of the dress’s ornamental, lace-trimmed apron. There was more in her of her mother than Dominique would care to admit. “I mean, why would Mathurin Jumon keep his nephew locked up in his attic for five days? Why not just poison him the night he got him into his evil clutches? Wouldn’t Grand-mère Jumon have something to say about it? Or the servants?”

  “Grand-mère Jumon isn’t well,” said January. “And she’s seventy years old—I doubt she’s been up in those attics for years.” He seated himself on the rocking chair of red cypress that stood near the open window. Beyond, in the cottage’s yard, his sister’s cook, Becky, emerged from the kitchen with a stack of white porcelain dishes balanced in her hands; set them down on the bench under the gallery; and commenced to wrap each in newspaper, laying them in a wooden crate at her side. Straw littered the flagstones all around her. Knowing what the kitchen at his mother’s house was like on Mondays, with the washtub boiling all day and a cauldron of red beans set for good measure over the back of the long-burning fire, January completely understood the decision to risk getting rained on by doing the packing outside.

  Back at his mother’s, Bella was doing her packing outdoors, too.

  Most of the wealthy brokers, landlords, and bankers who could afford to do so rented cottages on the lakefront during the summer season, in Milneburgh or Mandeville or Spanish Fort. Many, as Mathurin Jumon had said, were already gone. Though it was only a short train ride from Milneburgh to the city, many also rented cottages—or at least rooms or suites of rooms—for their colored plaçées, especially if there were children involved. With the steadily advancing summer heat, the stink rising from the gutters and the summer infestations of every insect from fleas to mosquitoes to roaches and palmetto bugs, to say nothing of the risk of fever, people had been leaving New Orleans since early June.

  Soon, January reflected, there would be “no one at all left in town,” as the wealthy Parisians had lamented at the balls where he’d played. No one a wealthy person would know, anyway.

  Only the poor.

  No wonder the property owners of the town were having, as Shaw would call them, conniption fits.

  “And then again, Madame Cordelia may very well have been in on it,” January went on, as Dominique began the endless process of selecting pelerines, stockings, tignons, reticules, fans, gloves, petticoats, and shoes to go with the yellow ensemble. “That would let Mathurin establish an alibi by going to Mandeville. And it would be easy to bring Isaak to the house in the first place: the men at the Widow Puy’s all agree that Isaak received a note of some kind on Friday afternoon.”

  “And so he arrived at the house and the woman who has just finished trying to wrest his inheritance from him in the courts hands him a cup of opium-laced coffee and says, Oh, cher, drink this.” Dominique turned with her arms full of lace. “Which reminds me, have you tried the coffee they serve at the Café Venise on Rue du Levee? They put cocoa in it, I think, and hazelnut liqueur—really excellent, although Mama says they only do that because they buy inferior beans. Still, I’m going to get some hazelnut liqueur and experiment with it, for Henri. I’m told they sell a really excellent hazelnut liqueur at …Oh, thank you, Thérèse,” she added, as her maid entered and set on the marble top of the bureau a tray bearing two glasses of lemonade. Thérèse looked at January, looked at the chamber’s dishabille—Dominique had pulled two more frocks from the chifforobe and laid them out in a fluffy meringue of petticoats—and met her mistress’s eye with a patient and disapproving sigh. Men, even brothers, had no place in a woman’s bedroom, particularly not men of color.

  When the woman left, his sister Minou turned back to him. “Or maybe she struck him over the head with a slungshot?” She returned, rather disconcertingly, from her excursion into coffee and romance to the subject at hand. “And then what? Carried him up to the attic herself? Isn’t that a little—a little Sir Walter Scott?”

  January breathed half a chuckle at the mental image. “Maybe,” he replied. “But the fact remains that Isaak was under that roof on the night of the twenty-third and that he died there of poisoning with his wife’s name on his lips. And I’m rather curious as to how he came there, and when.”

  Dominique arched her eyebrows.

  “You said
Thérèse was related to one of Laurence Jumon’s maids?” he asked.

  “Oh!” Her face broke into a sunny smile at the thought of an intrigue. “Of course! Cousine Aveline! The one who was having an affair with that awful groom of Monsieur Bouligny’s. Do you know, that groom was stealing oats from Bouligny and selling them by the peck to—”

  “Could Thérèse be persuaded to talk to her?”

  “P’tit, Thérèse will talk to anyone about anything! I absolutely can’t get a word in! Do these topazes go with the primrose silk, p’tit? There’s going to be a ball at the Hôtel Pontchartrain on Friday night—Henri’s mother is holding one opposite that awful Mrs. Soames—but Henri promised to take me to supper, masked, at the Café d’Auberge in Spanish Fort that night, and sometimes candlelight isn’t kind to a yellow this bright.”

  After another hour of Minou’s nonstop chatter, and a substantial breakfast of poached eggs, scallops, and grits (“Oh, Becky doesn’t mind making it up, p’tit—and I’m absolutely enslaved to her cream sauces”), January made his way to the prison, where under the eye of a City Guard he was escorted once again up to the third-level gallery, to the narrow barred window of Olympe’s cell. Behind her in the dim chamber he could hear women’s voices arguing—harsh and foul-tongued English—and the sound of stifled weeping. The smell that breathed from that close hot twilight was unspeakable.

  “Gone?” Olympe frowned, reaching her hands through the bars to take January’s. Her fingers felt thin, callused, and knotted; her face appeared more gaunt even than it had on Saturday under a tignon that, though clean, was already damp with sweat.

  “Cleared out and gone, Mamzelle Marie says. Calabash, seashell, cats, money.… But I found a tricken bag in my room last night when I came home.”

  “Hidden?” asked Olympe. “Or out where you could see it?”

  “Hidden in the bed.”

  Her eyes narrowed, dark with uneasiness. “Voodoos sometimes have more than one house,” she said after a time. “Especially if they’ve been around awhile. And a man may hire more than one voodoo to warn you away, or to put the death fix on. Have you checked under the steps? Or in the yard, for places where something may have been buried?”

  January shook his head.

  “There’s fever here.” She lowered her voice, leaning close to the bars. “Not in this cell, but in the one on the end of the gallery. The Guards will beat us, if word of it gets out. It’s just jail fever, they say, not yellow jack. But last night I saw him: I saw the fever walking along the gallery, like a ghost made of smoke and sulfur. He’s here, Bronze John. Mamzelle Marie, she’s burning green candles for me every day, and bringing me fever herbs.”

  January remembered the candle he had lit in the Cathedral only that morning, for Olympe’s forgiveness in the eyes of God. “We’ll get you out,” he promised, squeezing her fingers again. “Did Célie Jumon tell you anything about where Isaak might have gone in trouble? Or anything about his uncle Mathurin? Brother Antoine seems to think Uncle Mathurin might have been the one to do Isaak harm.” Considering the neat columns of money ranged along the edge of the desk, Mathurin had certainly been able to afford to hire Killdevil Ned.

  “I know nothing of him.” She removed her fingers from his, to scratch her arm. Though Gabriel brought her clean clothes every day, January could see the fleas on her bright tignon and the white sleeve of her blouse. “He has dealings with the voodoo doctors sometimes, I know, but then many white men have.”

  January supposed that if a respectable young matron could hide herself in the Cathedral to meet Dr. Yellowjack, it was nothing for a Creole gentleman to make arrangements with him for the secrets of his business rivals, or for girls like those who’d passed him in the gate at Congo Square. From another cell on the gallery he heard the hoarse voice of Mad Solie panting, “M’sieu! M’sieu! Tell them! When you leave this place tell them that I didn’t kill those children! It was my father and my husband that killed them! They tried to force me to do it but I wouldn’t listen, I wouldn’t do it!”

  And another woman’s weary voice, “Will somebody shut her up before she starts Screamin’ Peg off again?”

  “They’re trying to murder me in here! They come into the cell every night, and stand at my feet, and whisper to me, whisper to me, holding my children’s little heads in their hands!”

  “What about you?” he asked Olympe. “Are you all right here?”

  She sighed, and shook her head. “I’m as well as I can be. You know me. I can sleep through anything, and some of the girls here let me have one of the beds. When Gabriel brings me food, I share it around. I tell their fortunes, too, though I don’t always tell the truth.” She glanced back over her shoulder at the shapeless indistinct shadows of the cell. “Gabriel brought me a letter from Paul; said it came with a little money that Michie Drialhet advanced him. He says he’ll be back …”

  “Monsieur Janvier?”

  January had heard the creak of footfalls approaching on the gallery stairs, but hadn’t thought much of it. The recollection of Killdevil Ned, however, had lurked in the hazy interstices between last night’s waking and sleep—the knife descending, the memory of his own physical weakness, helpless against the mountain man’s strength. As a result he nearly fell over the gallery rail, leaping back. The graying little man who had spoken to him recoiled, equally startled, from this extreme reaction, and someone in the next-door cell hooted with laughter and yelled, “Got a guilty conscience, Sambo?”

  “Please excuse me,” begged the little man, removing his rather aged beaver and holding it over his heart. “I’m terribly sorry if I startled you. It is Monsieur Benjamin Janvier, isn’t it?”

  January felt as if there were a dozen north Mexico trappers concealed in every cell along the Cabildo’s upper gallery, taking a bead on him with their rifles.…

  But he couldn’t say so to the man who stood in front of him, thin-shouldered and diffident, in a rather bright green long-tailed coat and pantaloons of an unlikely buttercup hue. “I’m he, yes.”

  The visitor produced a card. “The Widow Pâris said I might find you here, when I came to speak with Madame Corbier,” he said. “Please pardon my presenting myself with no better introduction than this.”

  Vachel Corcet, fmc.

  Attorney at Law

  350 Rue Plauche

  “I’m afraid if you’re here to speak to Madame Corbier you’ve been misinformed,” said January. “We have no way of paying you.”

  But Olympe, resting her elbows on the sill of the narrow window, only studied the sagging face in its frame of carefully pomaded curls and for the first time a slow smile touched her eyes. “P’tit,” she said to January, “there’s something you don’t understand about Mamzelle Marie.” She extended her hand to Corcet. “I thank you, M’sieu Corcet. Mamzelle—the Widow Pâris—told you my brother’s started making inquiries already about this?”

  “She did, yes.” Corcet’s eyes shifted and he wet his lips with a mouselike pink tongue. Working for Marie Laveau was clearly not something that overwhelmed him with delight. January wondered what the Voodoo Queen had said to the attorney to cause him to offer his services gratis. “And that someone is evidently determined not to let him pursue the investigation. If you have a few minutes to bring me up to date on what you might have learned? …”

  Together, January and Olympe told him all they knew, while the Guard spit tobacco over the gallery railing and a voice in the courtyard below intoned, “Theseus Roualt, you are hereby sentenced to five lashes with a whip, to be paid for by your master William Roualt.…”

  “It’s clear to me that, whatever feelings of affection he professes—and whether or not he actually had anything to do with the murder—Mathurin Jumon has a stake in his nephew’s death,” said January at last. “And he has an equal financial stake in seeing that Isaak’s bride doesn’t inherit, either. A wife’s claims on a dead man’s property are clear. But in the absence of that wife, if it comes down to a court b
attle over close to five thousand dollars between a dead man’s dead father’s white brother and that same dead father’s colored former mistress, I suspect I know which way that verdict is going to go.”

  “And Mathurin can’t get rid of Célie,” remarked Olympe bitterly, “without he gets rid of me as well.”

  “Conversely,” remarked Corcet, turning his hat brim in soft, nervous hands gloved with yellow kid, “if you are cleared, Madame Corbier, Madame Célie will be cleared as well—hence the attempts against your brother. I wonder if Clément Vilhardouin has experienced similar difficulties?”

  “Not likely we’re going to find out,” said January. “Though it would tell us something if he has.”

  “Does Monsieur Jumon strike you as the kind of man who would murder his nephew—and cause his nephew’s bride to be hanged—for money?” asked Corcet. “He appears to have plenty of it already, if his mother’s jewelry, carriage, clothing, and house in Mandeville are any indication. He does a great deal of charity work, you know, in a quiet way: settling annuities on deserving invalids, for instance. He has provided for the education of a number of young people who might not otherwise be able to afford it. Mathurin Jumon does not appear to be an evil-intentioned man. Or a man who would kill for gain.”

  Olympe snorted with derision. “Charity work. There’s half a dozen of the most charitable men and women in this town send their slaves down to be whipped if they pass the time of day with a milk seller in the kitchen door. Two of ’em I know of wash the cuts out with salt brine afterward. And worse things,” she added, with a glance at her brother, who had nearly lost the use of his arms through an encounter with a white woman renowned for her charity.