TWELVE
Thanks to the chattiness of the Metoyer sisters, January had at least ten minutes after his arrival at the head of Florida Walk to loiter and catch his breath.
The whole suburb of Franklin, laid out on what had formerly been Marigny lands, was, like the neighborhood around Colonel Pritchard’s house, thinly inhabited. But streets had been laid out—mucky cuttings through the trees—and houses built. Here and there stood handsome residences of two stories, with new gardens brave against the older, sullen growth of cypress and loblolly; more frequently, cottages like his mother’s, neat, foursquare dwellings of stucco and brick. Good if you were a young couple just wed, reflected January, loafing along with hands in pockets and coat thrown casually over one arm. Good if you sought a quiet neighborhood in which to raise up your children, away from the noise of the old town and the swarming filth of the levees. Good if you wanted the hush of the swamps, the chirp and twitter of egrets and mockingbirds, the thrum of the cicadas in the hot thick summer midafternoon.…
Good if you were a well-off gentleman seeking a quiet place, not to establish a permanent plaçée in the Creole fashion but to tup a parade of lady friends away from the prying American eyes of your business associates and people who took tea with your wife.
Not so good if you were looking for a place where a young man might have been held against his will for several days.
On the other hand, thought January, looking down the prospect of Florida Walk toward Constitution Place—evidently the “canal and basin” advertised by the sellers of these prime properties was the half-dug ditch down the middle of the street—this part of Franklin was far out enough from the river to be very quiet and very isolated. Sellers of fresh vegetables, of lamp chimneys, of milk strolled the weedy verges of the streets, calling their wares in wailing, singsong African-French: “Miiiilk sweet-fresh-miiiiilk just come up from the market miiiilk.…” A gang of children fleeted past, white and colored together, voices like the thin jangling of chimes. Someone was chopping wood—or kindling, by the sharp thin clinking sound. The green smell of the swamps weighted the air.
It would be easy, thought January, for someone to take aim with a rifle from any one of those unbuilt lots, those raw straggling stands of magnolia and oak.…
He shivered, and kept moving.
In time Hubert Granville’s green-and-yellow chaise appeared from the green shade of Elysian Fields Street, and January quickened his loafing pace. Even after the vehicle overtook and passed him it wasn’t difficult to keep it in sight. Yesterday’s rain had transformed the street to an ocean of muck, and the smart bay gelding had to lean heavily into the collar and drag. Hubert Granville was a good driver, though. He didn’t use the whip but kept up a series of encouraging clucks and flips of the reins, letting the beast have its head. As they passed him January made sure to stoop and pick up some imagined coin from the weeds around his feet, so they wouldn’t begin to wonder why every black man they saw was nearly six and a half feet tall.…
But standing and looking as they moved away, he saw that Granville wasn’t alone in the chaise. And the woman beside the banker, veiled to her knees and crowned with a thoroughly illegal bonnet that did indeed look as if a regiment of dragoons had been sacking a flower shop, was unmistakably Geneviève Jumon.
They drew up before a cottage on the swamp side of Constitution Place. Granville was still nose-bagging the horse as January idled closer, then turned down one of the muddy, unnamed streets and disappeared into the trees of a still-virgin lot to observe.
There were four cottages in a row on that side of the square, identical to one another and to his mother’s: four rooms, kitchen, and quarters in the rear. The windows were American-style sashes, not old-fashioned French windows: the yards a little bigger and not quite so close together. Close enough, he thought, that any kind of jiggery-pokery would not go unnoticed by neighbors.
A young woman in a calico dress emerged from one of the cottages, bid Granville a saucy “Grüss Gott, Herr Vilmers,” as she proceeded down the street. The shutters of both of the other cottages stood open, the windows wide. A black kitten balanced on a sill, watching a dragonfly with lunatic golden eyes.
Granville helped Madame Geneviève from the chaise, and escorted her solicitously into the house. As he opened the door to let her in she flipped back her veils, with the gesture of one relieved unspeakably to be freed of uncomfortable nuisance, and yanked off bonnet, veils, and the tignon underneath. She shook out her dense black uncoiling hair as Granville placed a hand on the small of her back, guiding her inside.
• • •
“They didn’t even tell me he was being buried.” Célie Jumon pressed her small hands together, fist inside fist, and her mouth trembled with shock and grief and rage. “They didn’t ask me. Not Papa. Not—not that woman who I suppose I have to call my mother-in-law. Not Mama.…”
“Madame Jumon may not have told your parents,” said Rose kindly, and glanced from January to Monsieur Nogent and the lawyer Corcet, sitting on the other side of the plain cypress-wood table in the Nogent garçonnière.
“And if it helps any,” said January, “and I don’t know if it will, I truly don’t think the man they buried was your husband. Your mother-in-law wanted to identify some body as her son’s as quickly as possible, so that legal matters could be put in train without the complication of a missing body.”
Célie glanced up swiftly, wide brown eyes flaming with hope. “You don’t think—there isn’t a chance that? …”
January shook his head. “Antoine saw him die—though Antoine was almost certainly under the influence of opium at the time. In fact Antoine might have been fetched specifically so that there would be a witness to the death.” In the back of his mind he heard Olympe’s voice, They said he was alive. All three said he was alive.
Loa. A spider. Dark voices in a dream.
He would have given his blood, his freedom, his right hand, to have had someone come up to him as he stumbled blindly through the markets of Paris and say, I’m so sorry, it was all a mistake, Ayasha is alive after all.…
Dreams of agony, of coming up the stairs, opening the door, to see her sitting in her chair by the window with a lapful of some rich woman’s frock, stitching calmly in the paling winter light. Open the door and she smiles—Open the door and she’s dead on the bed with her hair hanging down, her hand reaching for the water pitcher.…
“Madame Jumon.” Corcet’s soft tenor broke through the bleak and terrible reverie. “Forgive me for asking this, but the matter has been spoken of—mentioned—not by anyone here, you understand.… It was brought up at one point that in the event of your husband’s death, your father would control such monies as would come to you.…”
If he expected the young woman to cry out, or bury her face in her kid-gloved hands, or spring to her feet and smite him across the face, the lawyer was disappointed. Madame Célie sighed, her soft mouth tightening, and she looked down at her folded fingers for a moment. “Did she say that?” she asked at length. “Madame Geneviève?”
Corcet hesitated, but January knew there was no point in inflaming enmities and said, “No. It was just a suggestion by a third party who has nothing to do with anyone.”
She made a little sound that could have been mirth, and a tear crept from under her lashes, quickly caught. Mourning did not become her. The dress she wore, high waisted and worked high at the neck, had clearly been recut from a stouter woman’s gown, probably her mother’s. She’d turned back the veils she’d worn over her tignon, but the dark clouds of them surrounded her face and turned her delicate café-crème complexion gray.
“It’s the kind of thing that she’d be likely to say, that’s all.” She drew a deep breath. “And anyone who didn’t know Papa well—and he isn’t an easy man to know—would probably believe it. But it isn’t true.”
She touched the handle of the coffee cup before her, white china, simple like the rest of the room. When old Nogent h
ad shown them up the garçonnière steps, Madame Célie had gone ahead, smiling, touching the doorframe and the table, the chairs of cypress and bent willow, like old and beloved friends. It was a plain room, barely better than a servant’s, but January thought of what it would be, to live with Père Gérard and his anxious wife.
Madame Célie had made coffee for them, a hostess in exile.
Now she said, “At the jail, you said—or maybe it was your brother-in-law, M’sieu Janvier—that you knew your sister would not do such a thing. Even though she is a voodoo and even though there was poison in her house. Just so I know that Papa wouldn’t have harmed Isaak for money.
“Papa … is very fond of money.” She made again that swift single breath of a chuckle, and glanced up ruefully under long lashes. “Well, I don’t think that’s any secret from you. And he didn’t want me to marry Geneviève Jumon’s son. He didn’t want to be connected with her in marriage, and quite frankly I have to say I agree with him.
“Grand-père and Grand-mère were very poor when Papa was born, you see, and they all—Papa and his parents and all his brothers and sisters—had to put up with not only inconveniences, and hunger, but … but indignities. The way people treat you. There was not enough money for all of them to leave St. Domingue together, when the trouble started, so Papa came here first, to work and send money so that the others could come away before Christophe’s men came out of the jungles and took Port-au-Prince.… And the others did not get the money in time. They never came. Papa doesn’t know to this day what happened to them. Papa says that money is the only thing that keeps us safe, the only thing that protects us, now against the Americans as well.”
She was silent, tracing the rim of the cup with her fingers, looking down at the black reflection within. Then she said, “But Papa would never have harmed anyone for money. Not for five thousand dollars or five hundred thousand dollars.”
Still she did not look up. January thought about that plump little man, furious over his daughter’s reputation, furious over his family’s standing, hiring the best white French lawyer, blackmailing the Recorder’s Clerk by bringing a reporter into the room.… Thought about Olympe, that morning when he had gone to see her at the Cabildo. The stench of the cells and the creeping, endless trails of ants. The drone of the flies.
“Would his mother have done it? Geneviève Jumon?”
Célie shook her head. “She is—a wicked woman, M’sieu. But I don’t see how any woman could … could do that to her own son.”
Even if she were under the influence of a man who wanted more money for his own investments?
“What about Uncle Mathurin?” he asked. “If it comes down to a renewal of the lawsuit, the money may very well come to him, and Antoine seems to think he’s the devil in shoe leather.”
She laughed softly. “Antoine.” And there was very real affection in her smile. “Antoine called me the Fata Morgana, and Messalina, and compared me to Jezebel sitting in her window—and later of course when we came to know one another he pretended he’d never said any such things. Antoine has never liked Uncle Mathurin, and he hated his father. In that, he’s like his mother.”
Her face clouded. There was a darkness in the back of her eyes, the memory of scenes that had passed between herself and her husband’s mother.
“Why is that?” asked January.
She shook her head. “I never knew what the original quarrel was,” she answered. “It must have been serious, for a woman like that—a plaçée, I mean—with two small children to abandon her protector. She has a—a foul temper, but she’s also a woman who keeps an eye on the main chance, as they say. It wasn’t M’sieu Laurence’s marriage, at any rate. That came later.
“Isaak wouldn’t speak of it,” she added after a moment. “Only that he had a choice between taking on his mother’s bitterness—poisoning himself and our children, he said—or putting aside the past in order to regain the father he had lost.” She pressed her hand very suddenly to her mouth. Rose put an arm around her shoulders, and after a moment Madame Célie drew breath again, and seemed to relax.
“It’s true Uncle Mathurin is a cynic and deist and doesn’t attend church. But he has done a great deal of good. Secretly, the way Jesus said one should, with not even the left hand knowing that the right one is slipping money to those in need. Sometimes we’d meet them, Isaak and I, when we went to the house—we’d wait for him in the garden outside the garçonnière, and we’d see them coming out. I remember there was a young Russian man, Dobrov I think his name was, a sailor who’d jumped ship: Uncle Mathurin gave him money to live on while he learned French, and went to school to learn accounting so he could find a job. There was a young woman he supported after her husband passed away in the cholera—perfectly aboveboard, as I think they say.… Isaak carved a horse for her little daughter, with tiny roses on its saddle and bridle. He loved children.…”
Her voice thinned again, and this time she sat longer, perfectly still, as if fearing that movement would set off unbearable inner pain. Only her hand closed around Rose’s, tight, a grip upon a lifeline.
Then, quite steadily, she said, “I can’t believe he’s gone. I can’t believe he’s gone.”
January closed his eyes, the scent of his dead wife’s hair clear as a nightmare in his nostrils again.
A very fanciful little boy, Mathurin Jumon had said.
My uncle Mathurin is a consummately evil man.
The tall house standing aloof on Rue St. Louis, empty save for one old woman sleeping alone. A Palissy-ware teapot and a mattress of straw in an empty room.
He visited Olympe at the Cabildo the following morning, taking Gabriel and the two younger children with him. January wasn’t easy in his mind about bringing Chouchou and Ti Paul to the jail; and at the sight of the four-year-old, Mad Solie began to shriek that the child must be taken away, taken away quickly or her father would come and murder him.
“Shut her up,” growled a hoarse voice from the same cell, “she’s scarin’ the little bastard.”
The shrieks abruptly stopped.
“It’ll be all right.” Olympe pressed her face to her smallest son’s plump hands through the bars. “It’ll be all right.” Another woman might have been in tears; Olympe’s face was like wood.
Behind her in the cell a voice asked in English, “Kin I kiss ’em, too? I sure do miss my little boy.”
“I still think we oughta get a real big gris-gris and lay it on that M’am Geneviève,” opined Gabriel, as January descended the gallery stairs afterward with Chouchou, silent as ever, by the hand. Gabriel carried Ti Paul, and January felt a weary anger all over again that he could not lift his niece and nephew in his arms, as he had been used to do. “We could take and split an ox tongue and write her name in it, with some silver money and peppers, and sew it up and leave it on a tomb in the graveyard, and call the spirit Onzoncaire—Onzoncaire’ll do anything, if you remember to pay him off with a sheep’s head and a bottle of whisky.”
As they reached the bottom of the stairs the sergeant at arms in charge of such things cracked his rawhide whip over the back of a slave triced to the post in the center of the yard. Gabriel flinched, but tried to look casual, as if it didn’t have anything to do with him. “Onzoncaire’s this hoodoo spirit with red eyes, and dog’s teeth, and …”
“We’ve had enough gris-gris around here,” January told his nephew grimly. “And if I hear you doing any calling of any hoodoo spirits, I’ll get your papa to wear you out.”
“Mama does,” pointed out Chouchou.
“Your mama knows good from evil,” said January, though he knew Père Eugenius would have a quarrel with this statement. “I bet your mama never called on any hoodoo spirit with dog’s teeth.” He wasn’t at all sure this was the truth, but Gabriel, he noticed, looked thoughtful.
In the big watch room he inquired after Lieutenant Shaw, and was told—as he expected—that the Lieutenant was out on his rounds. He handed Sergeant deMezieres at the des
k a note detailing all he had observed after the funeral, and what he had learned from the Metoyer maid about Geneviève Jumon’s actual or probable whereabouts on the evening of her son’s death, and what Railspike and Kentucky Williams had had to say about Isaak’s departure and Mr. Nash’s employer.
Not, he thought uneasily, as he stepped out into the liquid warmth of the arcade’s shadows, that it would do him a particle of good if Mr. Nash were waiting for him somewhere in the crowds of the Place d’Armes. On the way to the Cabildo that morning he had instructed Gabriel to run immediately in the event of trouble, taking the younger children with him.… He hoped the boy would actually do so.
“Would Onzoncaire take care of Uncle Ben,” asked Chouchou gravely, “if we paid him off?”
“Sure,” said Gabriel, then cast a worried glance up at his uncle. “I mean—well, I guess God could, too.”
“Thank you,” said January, wondering why he tried. “And I’m sure God thanks you, too.”
For the rest of the day he worked at his translation of The Knights. But the absurdly involved efforts of Demosthenes and Nicias to find a tyrant for Athens were insufficient to distract him from the thought of that tall silent half-empty house, and the baroque gleam of sunlight on a Palissy-ware cup. Both Dominique and his mother had departed for Milneburgh Tuesday, and it would take Minou a day to settle in, before she could reasonably expect Thérèse to take a half-day off to make inquiries of the Jumon servants. And on Friday, the Fourth of July, he knew Henri would be coming in from the family plantation, and Minou would be picnicking with him along the shores of the lake, no doubt with her handmaiden in attendance. But a note, at least, he thought, as he brushed his black coat and pressed his good linen shirt preparatory to the long walk to the Soames’s residence in Spanish Fort, would be appreciated.
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