Graveyard Dust

by Barbara Hambly

  He skirted the outside of the crowd, where pickpockets skirmished discreetly, like wolves around the fringes of a herd. Kentucky Williams slouched in the rear door of the saloon, angling her head as if by doing so she could see what was going on in the ring of jostling backs. She wore a soiled Mother Hubbard, and quite clearly nothing under it except a pair of men’s boots.

  “Kentuckilla my pearl.” Hannibal bowed deeply, and kissed her grimy hand. “What is it that you were telling me about the gentleman who hired Mr. Nash to assassinate my friend?”

  Williams took the cigar out of her mouth and blew a cloud of smoke. “This’s just what I heard from Kraut Nan down to the Salt River Saloon. Say, wasn’t you the nigger got his back hurt? Set them books down,” she ordered January. “You boys want a drink?” It wasn’t ten in the morning but she’d clearly had two or eight herself. January shook his head. Even Hannibal avoided the potations dished from the barrel behind Williams’s plank bar. “All I heard was it was a white man,” she informed January. “A toff. Slick tailed coat, plug hat—big bastard, Kraut Nan says. Walked in, handed the man the money, walked out. No word said. Didn’t even buy a drink, but Ned came straight over and bought one, so she knew it was money he give him.”

  “Did Mamzelle Nan say whether he was dark-haired or fair?” January remembered Mathurin Jumon’s powerful height, Hubert Granville’s broad shoulders and heavy neck.

  The saloonkeeper thought about it a moment. Then she shook her head, and scratched under one massive breast for fleas. “Just he was big.”

  “Big is all Kraut Nan sees in a man anyways,” remarked Railspike, sauntering back from the crowd. She added a physically impossible speculation concerning Kraut Nan’s amorous capacity and added, “You the nigger askin’ about that boy Isaak over to the Turkey-Buzzard? Gimme a drink, fiddler.”

  Hannibal produced a bottle from his pocket and handed it to her; she didn’t even bother to check whether it contained laudanum or whisky, just drained it, and threw it against the side of the rude plank shack. Unlike Williams she was a handsome woman, if one found a square chin and a strong cast of feature handsome. Her eyes were pale, cruel in a face lined with dissipation and smeared heavily with rice powder and rouge.

  “Great big feller come in, black as the ace of spades,” she said, in her coarse upriver English. “I forget what day this was. Ace of Spades asks if they had a boy name of Isaak workin’ there. Well, I’d already figured Isaak for a runaway. He was a sweet kid, told me all about his wife and wouldn’t have nuthin’ to do with the girls that worked the back room there. But Ace of Spades didn’t look like a slave-catcher, so I said we did, though he wasn’t in. Then Ace of Spades give me this note for him—a map, it looked like, drawn on a square piece of paper about so big.” Her large, coarse hands sketched the shape of a quarto book page.

  “Was it anywhere you know?”

  She made a wry little mouth with her scarred lips, and shook her head. “Hell, I don’t get out of town much—who wants to go tromping around the mud? There was kind of a square with crosses down at the bottom, and a couple of lines that might have been canals or bayous. I remember there was a tree on it, with a twisty limb, like that”—she scrunched and maneuvered her arm momentarily into a sideways V—“I give this to Isaak when he came in, and he looked at it and stuck it away in his pocket, but I seen him take it out and look at it two, three more times during the day. So he musta knew where it was.”

  January nodded—he knew where it was, too. “Do you remember anything else about the man who came with the note, M’am?”

  Railspike shook her head, lank curls swinging. Behind her the noise redoubled. Men howled, shrieking, as a single yowl of pain ripped the air. Then the crowd seethed, reconformed itself, men paying off and demanding money, while the little trapper and a friend dragged Duff back, bloody foam dribbling from his jaws, and a big fair man in a plaid shirt savagely kicked the defeated yellow hound, dying already in a great soak of gore.

  “You stupid cur! Rotten whoreson shit-eater!” Near the fence two men were shoving each other and shouting already about whether the defeat did or did not constitute a fair loss; January wondered if one of them had been dosed with cocaine, to turn him into a fighter, or whether the doglike ferocity was just the result of booze.

  “Oh, yeah,” remembered Railspike, “he had just one arm. ’Cause he reached acrost himself like this”—she demonstrated—“to get the note out of his pocket. Big ugly bastard.”

  “Thank you, M’am,” said January softly. “You’ve both been most helpful.”

  “Here, now!” Williams gestured with her cigar as he bent to pick up Hannibal’s books. “Don’t you go hurtin’ your back again with those! I’ll get somebody to haul ’em over to the French town for you. You just give us the direction.…”

  January started to decline—the fight by the fence had blossomed into full-scale hostilities and men were arriving by the score; it would be only a matter of time until Killdevil Nash appeared. But rather to his surprise Hannibal said, “Thank you,” and gave her the number of Livia Levesque’s house.

  “Are you insane?” demanded January as they left the yard. “You think any of those boys is going to actually deliver books instead of selling them?”

  “You obviously haven’t tried to sell books in this town.” Hannibal cradled his violin and his remaining bottle of opium. “They’re as safe as if they were common dirt. Now let’s find a grocer—with your mother out of the way we can ask Rose to lunch and learn how she breached Forteresse Gérard and got in touch with Madame Célie.”

  “You’re going to ruin my reputation yet.” Rose Vitrac competently brushed aside the pile of onion pieces from the chopping board and went to work on a pepper.

  “I thought Madame Lalaurie did that last year.”

  “So she did.” The former schoolmistress nudged her spectacles more firmly up onto her nose with the back of her wrist, blinking with the vapors of the onion. “But I have dreadful premonitions of being forced to go to Hannibal every six or seven months for a new set of papers, to establish a new identity.…”

  “You don’t think there’s people in this town who do just that?” Hannibal emerged from the kitchen, wiping his hands on one of Bella’s linen towels. “How do you think I get opium money, when I’m too under the weather to play?” He turned his face aside, and coughed again. “Admittedly I’m not one of the best, but still … I always knew those years of penmanship exercises at Eton would come to something.”

  “I’m sure your masters are very proud of you.” Rose turned back to January. “Which reminds me—Monsieur Landreaux, who has a bookshop on Canal Street, has asked me if I’d translate four plays for him: Helen in Egypt, The Heracleidae, Plutus, and The Knights. He’s preparing a special edition for boys—he’s arranged a printer in New York—but he needs the translations by the end of July. I was wondering if you’d like to do two? It isn’t much—ten dollars apiece—but I know it’s hard to find work in the summers. Are you interested?”

  “Mademoiselle Vitrac,” said January, inclining his head, “that sound you hear is me sharpening my pens. Thank you.”

  “The Knights is a little racy.” She swept the peppers into a bowl. “So you’ll have to edit as well.”

  “To the pure all things are pure.” January collected up the various little dishes of spices and vegetables, and carried them into the roaring heat of the kitchen. “And I think that as an older, wiser, and more experienced man I should be the one to translate the Aristophanes.…”

  “You mean Aristophanes is more fun to translate than Euripides.”

  “That, too,” agreed January. “Now tell me about Madame Célie and the ruin of your reputation.”

  A very small quantity of sausage grilled in a pan set on a spider over the hearth coals, with the crawfish and redfish that had been all the three friends’ pooled resources could obtain from the market. While January made a roux and Hannibal checked on the rice bubbling slowly in its
cauldron, Rose related how she’d observed the coffee merchant’s house for most of Sunday morning and the pretext by which she’d spoken to his daughter after she’d discreetly trailed them to Mass.

  “As I’m about the same complexion as Monsieur Nogent, it wasn’t difficult to pass myself off as his sister,” said Rose. “I slipped a note to Madame Célie as we spoke, so that she could assure her father later that yes, she did recall Monsieur Nogent speaking of a sister in Mandeville. When I went to the shop this morning and left a note for her—perfectly aboveboard and saying only that Monsieur Nogent is ill and misses her terribly—her father seemed to find no difficulty in my chaperoning her to Nogent’s house tomorrow. What he’ll think if the truth is revealed I daren’t speculate.”

  “Cannot a plain man live and do no harm, / But that his simple truth must be abused / By silken, sly, insinuating Jacks?” Hannibal inquired. He perched on the edge of the table where there was at least a stirring of air from the open doors. The thick smell of sausage and garlic was insufficient to cover that of red pepper and turpentine, painted along the base of the walls to discourage ants. Outside in the little yard, the sun beat mercilessly on the open ground, and cicadas had begun to drum in the palmetto and banana shrubs that grew to the sides of the garçonnière.

  “By the way, has anyone considered that Madame Célie’s father has just as much to gain by Isaak’s death as either Mathurin or Granville, provided he can keep his daughter out of quod? She’s underage, after all, and five thousand dollars can turn a lot of interest in five years. He’d have to get rid of Olympe, and a note from him would have fetched Isaak just as smartly as one from Mathurin.”

  “It was a white man who hired Nash,” pointed out January.

  “You’re saying a black man couldn’t use a white one as a cat’s-paw?”

  “And Monsieur Gérard could not have kept Madame Célie from knowing Isaak was in the house,” added Rose. She scraped onions, peppers, celery, and garlic into the roux and, while January stirred, added water from the jar beside the stove. “The shop on Rue Royale has only a tiny storeroom, and their house is like this one.…” She nodded across the yard at the pink stucco cottage: four small rooms, comfortable but not elegant and certainly impossible to conceal a prisoner in even had Monsieur Gérard been capable of bringing Isaak there unnoticed.

  “Have it your way.” Hannibal poured himself out another cup of chicory-laced coffee. “Just don’t assume that because Gérard loves his daughter that he wouldn’t try to rid himself of her husband—or of your sister, Ben. When’s the funeral, by the way?”

  “This afternoon,” said January. “Though I had to find that out from Shaw; it isn’t posted anywhere. Shall we go buy an immortelle and pretend to lay it on a fictional uncle’s grave?”

  The funeral of Isaak Jumon was an extremely small affair. Sitting on the low slab of a tomb in the New Cemetery, already three-quarters sunken into the earth, January watched the black-clothed forms as they came through the gate from Rue Bienville: pallbearers maneuvering a rather plain pine coffin down the narrow aisle, a priest—January’s confessor Père Eugenius, in fact—Antoine Jumon in an even more dandified absurdity of mourning with plumes as well as a scarf on his hat and a candle the size of a child’s leg in a cut-paper holder. Madame Geneviève followed, a crêpe-black specter veiled to her knees, leaning on the arm of Hubert Granville. There was a sizable space between the mourners and the catafalque: from where he and his friends sat, January could smell the corpse.

  “Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination,” murmured Hannibal, pressing a handkerchief to his nose. “Are you sure you want to go in for a closer look?” But he stood when January stood, and followed him and Rose quietly as they moved from tomb to tomb, working their way closer to the churchyard wall. Because of the height and closeness of the sepulchers, some barely a yard apart along the weed-grown brick paths, it was possible to come quite near to the cortege—

  “—fortunate he belonged to a burial society,” Bernadette Metoyer was saying, holding a musk-scented handkerchief to her nose and taking advantage of her distance behind the reeking coffin to chat with her sisters—January recognized them from the Blue Ribbon Balls—and their friends. She nodded toward their destination, a tall square tomb with TRAVAILLEURS DE ST. JACQUES carved on its pediment. Marble slabs, simply inscribed, blocked the mouths of nine of its ten compartments. “At fifty cents a month it’s more than she ever laid out.”

  “Not that I wish to be morbid,” said Marie-Eulalie Figes, plump and pretty in a frock of tobacco-colored mousseline de laine, “but that’s the kind of improvidence that’s going to get poor Geneviève buried in potter’s field. That dreary little wheelbarrow of a hearse—pish! And he her eldest son and the only one worth the powder to blow him to hell, in my opinion. And these gloves!” She held up her hand. “Cotton. Cotton! And only a little rag of crêpe for an armband, and a penny dip candle.…”

  “It was Mathurin Jumon we have to thank that there are gloves and crêpe and candles at all,” said Agnes Pellicot, a formidable plaçée who had invested her money wisely and was Livia Levesque’s closest friend. “Had he not given Geneviève money I don’t think she’d even have paid for a hearse. Antoine isn’t best pleased.”

  “By the smell of him,” commented Virginie Metoyer, resplendent against all city laws in a mourning bonnet that reminded January forcibly of Plutarch’s accounts of Alexander the Great’s funeral car, “Antoine will be fortunate to get to and from the tomb without falling down.”

  January left on the nearest tomb the wreath of zinc ivy he’d brought, and edged from behind a square brick edifice to watch them walk away among the carven trophies of mortality. He’d glimpsed Basile Nogent as one of those who bore the casket, and wondered how many of the elderly sculptor’s works surrounded them, each whispering, You, too, someday.

  Yet there were other words, darker words, whispered by those crowding houses for the dead of stucco, marble, and brick. On a low benchlike grave, barely large enough to shelter a coffin, he saw a cheap plate bearing a slice of pound cake and the glint of silver dimes and reales thrust into the cracks of the bricks. Someone there who had had Power in life. Someone—root doctor or voodooienne—who like the loa might be able to come back and help those still struggling in the mortal world. Other tombs were marked, white chalk or red brick dust, or dribbled with wax where candles had been burned. Plates of rice or congris. Scraps of lace. Cigarettes.

  Thank him, Mamzelle Marie had said. Tell others still in fear that prayers do get heard.

  What kind of prayers? January wondered. Colonel Pritchard dead of yellow fever, maybe? A master who changed his mind about selling a slave? A woman who changed hers about whom she would lie with? Someone coming to Paul Corbier’s door with work to support him and his family through the slow drag of the summer heat?

  (A bookseller needing four Greek plays translated quick? whispered a voice in the back of January’s mind, and he pushed that thought aside.)

  “Ego sum resurrectio et vita,” Père Eugenius’s voice drifted down the gloomy alleyway. “Qui credit in me, etiam si mortuus fuerit, vivet: et omnis qui vivit et credit in me, non morietur in aeternum.…”

  January crossed himself. Beside him, Hannibal whispered, “Not bad, if your poor sap from the bayou gets a snug grave and a proper burial out of it, whoever he is. Better than the potter’s field.” He stood, arms folded, looking down toward the little group, and it occurred to January that the potter’s field was undoubtedly where Hannibal would one day lie. Then the fiddler grinned, all somberness vanishing from his face, and added, “Think what an embarrassment on Judgment Day.” He coughed, the violence of it doubling him up, and he caught for support the empty iron flower-sconce on a tomb marked GRILLOT. From its peaked roof a marble angel regarded him with disdainful eyes.

  And as if in response, outside the cemetery wall January heard a horse snort, and the restless jingle of harness. Quietly he steppe
d back between the tombs and made his way to the gate, Rose and Hannibal at his heels. He could still hear Père Eugenius’s voice, “Benedictus Dominus, Deus Israel, quia visitavit et fecit redemptionem plebus suae.…”

  And behind it, Madame Geneviève’s hysterical wails.

  Just beyond the graveyard gate, the hearse awaited return to town from among the weedy fastnesses of the surrounding Commons. As Bernadette Metoyer had said, it was a plain two-wheeled cart, drawn by a single horse. No plumes, no finery, no crêpe for Isaak Jumon. Beside it a barefoot child held the reins of a very handsome bay gelding, hitched to a green-and-yellow chaise.

  “It’s at this point,” remarked Hannibal, slouching against the gatepost, “that you signal a conveniently passing fiacre, spring into it and cry, ‘Follow that chaise.…’ ”

  “Which is why the heroes of novels are always noblemen,” murmured January. “They’re the only ones with cab fare in their pockets at all times. Do me a service, would you?” He checked his watch, and then Hannibal’s—which for a wonder was out of pawn—to make sure they read approximately the same time. “Stay here and see what time Granville and Madame Geneviève leave, if they leave together.”

  “And if they don’t leave together?”

  “Then I’ll have had a long walk for nothing.” January stripped off his black coat, and turned up his sleeves against the afternoon’s deadly heat. “It’s half an hour’s walk to Constitution Place. The Metoyer sisters should be enough to delay Madame Geneviève’s departure until I can get there. I’m going to find out at least which house there is Granville’s, and if it looks like they could have kept Isaak there.”

  As he stepped through the cemetery gate he looked back. He saw Rose and Hannibal among the tombs, the tall slim woman in her green-gray frock and spectacles, the shabby dark-coated skeleton. Beyond them, his back to a crumbling sepulcher, a man watched the funeral, black-coated, black-hatted, black-gloved, an enigmatic shadow in the hot daylight. Though he was at too great a distance to be sure, January would have sworn that it was Mathurin Jumon.