Graveyard Dust

by Barbara Hambly

  The long walk—over an hour along the shell road that rimmed Bayou St. John—was the result of lacking the twenty-five-cent fare for the steam-train. He and Hannibal made it together in the gluey heat of twilight, accompanied by those other musicians of the town likewise affected by the slow season: Philippe deCoudreau, Ramesses Ramilles, Casimir and Florimond Valada, Jacques Bichet, and others, all comparing notes about the contenders for French and American social prominence who had, as they frequently did, scheduled their entertainments for the same evening, as a way of forcing their acquaintances to publicly proclaim who they thought more critical to their social success.

  “I hear there’s a fix been put on you,” remarked deCoudreau. “We better watch out, or poor M’am Soames’s piano strings gonna bust in the middle of the grand march, and we all get rained on like hell on the way home.”

  “Where’d you hear that?” asked January, and from the corner of his eye saw the Valada brothers exchange a quick, worried look between them, and fall back a pace or two.

  DeCoudreau shrugged. “Where does anybody hear anything, Ben? It’s just around.”

  “Around like that story last year that you were getting married?” inquired Hannibal, stopping, as he had stopped a dozen times, to rest. “And to Liliane Verret, of all people?”

  The matter passed off in a laugh, but in fact Mrs. Soames’s piano went massively out of tune halfway through the dancing later that evening and a total of ten gentlemen had to be forcibly restrained, at one time or another in the evening, from challenging one another to duels or entering combat outright. Two of these challenges were issued by Madame Redfern’s jealous cicisbeo Greenaway, and only forcible restraint kept him from issuing a third to Clément Vilhardouin—one of the few Frenchmen in attendance—when the lawyer mentioned he had dined with the lady again that evening.

  This was a high percentage even for an American entertainment—“Two’s the average,” remarked Hannibal, surreptitiously dumping an ounce of opium tincture into the watered beer, which was all the hostess considered appropriate to offer musicians. “It must be the election coming up, or else somebody sneaked actual alcohol into her liquor.”

  In addition to the gubernatorial supporters of Mr. White speaking ill of his rival General Dawson, Colonel Pritchard attempted unsuccessfully to call out the Reverend Micajah Dunk for implying that the female slave Kitta who had escaped from Pritchard’s household had done so because Pritchard had sold her husband Dan—“I am not implying such a thing, sir, I am stating it outright,” responded Dunk—and two entrepreneurs who were attempting to raise capital in Philadelphia each separately challenged Burton Blodgett, once it was realized that the journalist had entered the party, clad in sloppy evening dress, unnoticed by a back door. Evangeline Soames said her majordomo had undoubtedly been bribed and would be whipped.

  It rained like hell on the way home, long after the final steam-train had departed. After Philippe deCoudreau’s seventh jest on the subject of hexes and fixes, January had to pinch his own hand very hard between thumb and forefinger to remind himself not to throw the jolly clarionettist into the bayou.

  So it was not until the following day—Saturday—that January made the five-mile walk again to Milneburgh, to speak to his sister’s maid on the subject of what the Jumon servants had seen on the night of June twenty-third.

  “But they’re all packed up and gone, M’sieu Janvier.” Thérèse regarded him with some surprise, as if he should have known this and saved himself the walk. “The Jumons have a house in Mandeville.”

  “Henri and I took the ferry across yesterday—to Mandeville, I mean,” put in Dominique, stirring the lemonade the maid had brought to them with a long silver spoon. The rear of the little white cottage Henri had bought for his plaçée stood on stilts over the water. Wavelets clucked and whispered among the pilings and the gray knobbled pillars of the cypress knees that studded the shallows in the shade. “It’s ever so much nicer than Milneburgh. More exclusive, if you understand. Quieter. Sometimes I’m sorry they put the steam-train in between here and town; one gets all those—well, those uptown chaca girls and their beaux, and all the clerks and shopgirls on Sunday outings, bowling and shooting at the shooting galleries and eating ices in the taverns and making such a ruckus.”

  She sighed, and fanned herself with a circle of stiffened china silk, for even on the narrow terrace above the water, the day was warm. Beside her in a white wicker cage, a half-dozen ornamental finches provided riveting entertainment for her plump white cat.

  “Is it possible,” asked January patiently, wondering why no one had ever strangled his youngest sister, “for Thérèse to go out there and speak to her cousin—Aveline, is it?—sometime soon?”

  “Oh, but p’tit, we just have weeks and weeks of time.” Dominique regarded him with widened eyes and reached to put a hand on his knee. “And they’re not going to let poor Olympe out of prison any the sooner because of what you’ll find out from Cousine Aveline.”

  “No,” said January. “But Cousine Aveline’s information may be only an indication of something else we need to find out. And we have, in fact, eleven days to find out everything we need, whatever that might be.”

  “P’tit, I’m so sorry!” Minou reached behind her and took Thérèse’s hand. The maid, clothed in a sober but extremely stylish frock of green muslin in contrast to her mistress’s fantasia of honeycomb smocking, lappets, and lace, looked rather put out that her efforts in the direction of locating evidence had not been properly appreciated. “Thérèse, dearest, you won’t mind going out to Mandeville tomorrow—oh, no, the day after tomorrow, Iphégénie and Marie-Anne are coming for tea—oh, no, Tuesday, because Becky needs the help Monday with the laundry.… Tuesday definitely, p’tit.… You won’t mind going to Mandeville Tuesday to speak with your cousin, will you, dear? Only you’ll have to be back to serve at dinner, because Henri will be here. Would you believe it, p’tit?”

  She reached out again and grasped January’s hand. “Would you believe that dreadful Redfern cow has issued invitations to a Bastille Day party? Doesn’t she know anything about France having a King again, even if it is only that awful Louis-Philippe? Even Henri knows that!”

  As it happened, January knew all about Mrs. Redfern’s Bastille Day gala because he’d been contracted to play at it. A thought had come to his mind concerning the absence of the Jumon household in Mandeville and the vacancy of the houses on Rue St. Louis. He accepted his sister’s invitation to lunch—trying not to appear too grateful—and turned the thought over again in his mind while walking back along the shell road to town: walking quickly and staying as close as he could to the other strollers and riders and passengers in carriages, out taking the half-holiday air.

  Hannibal was still asleep when January reached home—he’d been coughing blood the last hour of the ball, keeping himself to the back of the group and concealing his illness with the skill of practice. Bella’s room stank of opium, but January couldn’t find it in his heart to be angry. In the kitchen January found half a pot of coffee warming at the back of the hearth. Though there was no evidence that anything in the kitchen—or in the garçonnière, where January had scattered thin dust on the floor that would take any scuff or track—had been disturbed, he poured the coffee down the outhouse: with some regret, coffee being ten cents a pound. He drew water from the cistern to bathe, and afterward lay on his bed to get what sleep he could, and dreamed of his father.

  “They help you out, but you got to pay them off,” his father said, touching the sheep skull nailed to an oak tree in the ciprière, the offering to whatever spirit it was who had granted someone a wish. The bark of the tree was blotched with brick dust and candle wax, and among the roots of the tree little handfuls of rice and chickpeas were carefully laid out on leaves. “Bosou, he guards those folk that run off into the ciprière. They live there in a village as we lived in Africa, away from the whites. But they don’t just forget him, any more than they’d forget a man wh
o helped them. They show respect, as you must show respect, and Bosou guards the way behind them. Maybe one day he’ll guard the way behind you.”

  In his dream it was as he remembered it, the trail of ants creeping up the bark of the tree, the hum of the flies and the wriggling of maggots in what was left of the sheep’s flesh, the stink of blood and rum.

  “You got to thank them,” his father said. “You got to thank them.”

  Then he stood on one foot with his back to the skull and snapped his fingers, and watched while January—a tiny boy-child as he’d been then—did the same, and spoke words January didn’t remember. In his dream he heard instead a quote from Lucretius: Augescunt alie gentes, alie minuuntur / Inque brevi spatio mutantur saecla animantum / Et quasi cursores vitae lampada tradunt.

  Some races grow, others diminish, and in a short span of time the living are changed; like runners they relay the torch of life.

  Which he knew could not be right.

  But as he and his father walked away he felt eyes in those empty sockets, watching them, and distantly he heard the tapping of African drums.

  THIRTEEN

  “I never thought I’d thank God the rich all leave town by the end of June.” January put his head out of the narrow passway between houses, scanned the still silence of Rue St. Louis. By the dim reflection of the oil lamp at the next intersection all was still; a heavy stillness rank of heat and stench and mosquito whine. A cat darted from an alley, bolted across the street, vanished.

  Stillness again.

  “If we can’t get a witness about what happened here, at least there’s no one to keep us from seeing what there is to be seen.”

  “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” Hannibal coughed, one hand holding himself upright against the crumbling stucco and the other pressed to his side. “If you ever find out how to make consumption good by thinking, please let me know. I’ve been trying for years. Did you ever track down the map your cut-armed friend brought to Isaak, by the way? Find where the meeting place was, if it was a meeting place?”

  “I’m sure it was.” January waited, listening, watching the alley from which the cat had fled. A hundred feet away, on Rue Bourbon, music jangled and men quarreled over their cards in the gambling halls that still ran full-open, but here the stillness was weirdly complete. Only the croaking of the frogs in the gutters sounded—ouaouarons, the slaves called them, not proper French grenouilles—and the roar of the cicadas around the streetlamps. “But with whom, and for what purpose—that’s another matter.”

  In time, satisfied with the hush, he stepped from shelter and led the way across the street, holding close under his arm the dark leather bundle of his medical bag. The Jumon town house rose above them, somehow more isolated than a plantation would have been, perhaps because even when the family was absent, a plantation was never empty. There were always the hands in the quarters, children’s voices, the clack of axes, and the smell of animals. Here there was nothing but the lingering stench of gunpowder and hooves burning somewhere, and the gutters’ unending stink. January walked calmly, unhurried. Though curfew had long ago sounded, only some twenty Guards held night watch in the French town. By the sound of it, the taverns of Rue Bourbon would be occupying most of their attention.

  “I went out there this morning,” he continued, as they concealed themselves again in the dense arch of shadow that was the carriageway. “It was pretty clear from Railspike’s description that that map showed the waste ground out past the Protestant cemetery and the end of Gravier’s canal. There’s a little bayou there, and an oak with a twisted-back limb. Old Michie Crippletree, we used to call it. All the slaves used it for a meeting place, because everyone knew it. I expect whites who grew up around here knew it, too.”

  Hannibal drew a pair of thin-nosed pliers and a length of bent wire from his pocket and set to work on the carriage-gate lock. “And did you find the teacup Mathurin Jumon served Isaak the arsenic in?”

  “I found a teacup with arsenic stains in it,” replied January gravely, his eyes moving ceaselessly up and down the dark streets. “I didn’t attach much importance to it because the teacup was Sèvres pâte dur instead of Palissy ware. Oh, and there was a copy of Laurence Jumon’s will impaled on the tree trunk with an Arabian dagger, and one of Isaak’s visiting cards. Why do you ask?”

  “Just curious. And up she comes.” He pushed the wrought-iron gate inward a little, then closed it behind them, pulling out the black ribbon that tied his hair to bind the gate loosely shut again. “Was the visiting card also impaled on the tree trunk with a dagger?”

  “On the other side of the tree,” extemporized January, scratching a lucifer and shielding the candle he took from his bag. “Separate dagger.”

  “Also Arabian?”

  “Venetian.” Their whispers echoed in the arch of the flagged carriageway. “Quattrocento. Cellini, I think.”

  “Cellini made good daggers.” Hannibal nodded wisely. “An excellent choice. Tasteful.”

  “Which would argue that it had to have been Mathurin. I mean, I can’t see Hubert Granville having the refinement to buy a Cellini dagger.” They emerged into the dark courtyard, the closed and shuttered bulk of the slave quarters looming before them against the sooty sky. The fountain muttered softly; the candlelight showed up a cat’s eyes, hunting frogs among the banana plants.

  “A point, my friend. A most distinct point.”

  “All daggers”, said January, in a tone of deep solemnity, “have a point,” and Hannibal went into a fit of coughing from trying to stifle a laugh.

  From the courtyard there was no way to break into the shop, but whatever had been there, January guessed, had been cleared out for the new tenant: JOSEF BRAEDEN, he had seen the legend inscribed on the door. DENTIST. For a few minutes he held his breath, as he and Hannibal moved into the center of the brick-paved space; it was always possible that one or two of the slaves had been left behind to watch the house. But Madame Cordelia, it appeared, would not lessen her comfort in the Mandeville house—or else she was unwilling to let any of her servants remain unsupervised in the city for two months. No light flared in any of the rooms that opened from the galleries that rose above the kitchen. No voice called out, demanding who was there, and when January and Hannibal climbed to check them, the rooms were vacant and stripped of their simple goods.

  A brief visit to the local livery stable had already informed January that the six Jumon horses were gone. On the other side of the courtyard, the inevitable garçonnière lay above the office where January had spoken to Mathurin Jumon, reached by a narrow stair. “A Chubb,” whispered Hannibal, fingering the lock as January handed him the long-bladed scalpels, the forceps, and the bullet-probe he’d brought, along with his mother’s kitchen candles, in his bag. “I figured Grand-mère Jumon for a locker-upper.”

  “With the jewels she wears?” breathed January back. “We’ll be lucky if we can get into the main house.”

  “We should have gotten Dago Crimms to help us. He’d have kept his mouth shut, and he wouldn’t have taken much.” The fiddler’s hands were shaking as he worked with the picks, and he stopped twice, once to press his hand to his side to still his coughing, and again to take a cautious sip of opium. In the narrow yellow glow of the candle his face was set and lined with pain.

  “It would only take one item traced back to us,” said January grimly, “for all of us to be in a lot more trouble than we are.”

  “Oh, Dr. Yellowjack’s generally pretty careful where he fences his plunder. Yellowjack’s Dago’s receiver,” Hannibal added. “Savvy old bastard. Works it all up through Natchez. Never lets himself come into view at all—always uses a cat’s-paw of some kind, tells one person one thing, another another.… Which is the way not to get caught. And here we are.” The latch gave under his hand. “Like ladies and moneyed relatives, it’s all in how you ask.”

  There was a library on the floor immediately above the office, and above it, two
small bedrooms. Holding the candle aloft, January had an impression of a beautiful desk of Syrian work, inlaid shell and colored woods in ebony, of gold-stamped books on the shelves instead of the workaday ledgers downstairs, of chairs under Holland covers. On desk and mantel, and locked behind the glass fronts of cabinet shelves, platters, ewers, tureens gleamed in the tiny flame: exquisite glazes, fantastic and intricately accurate shapes. Snailshells, salamanders, fish so meticulously rendered, January could tell a drum from a bass; strawberry leaves, clover, lettuces, worms. Nothing that anyone these days would remotely describe as good taste, thought January, studying a bowl sculpted in the likeness of a forest floor—ferns, mosses, pebbles, tiny flowers, small snakes, and pillbugs all exact. But a garden of bizarre delight all the same.

  Another portrait of Madame Cordelia Jumon smiled from behind a protective draping of gauze, and drawing this aside, January gazed up for a moment into the long, delicate face, the haughty nose, and the dark eyes beneath a snowy extravaganza of high-piled, rose-swagged hair. Lapdogs peeped from beneath the flounces of a green Court gown wider than its wearer was tall. He tried to picture this girl—for she seemed no more than sixteen—operating a plantation such as the one on which he’d been born.

  He’d heard someone—his mother? Dominique?—mention in passing Hercule Jumon’s decease when the two boys were small. That would have put it somewhere in the nineties. After the fall of the King, anyway. This lovely, Court-raised girl, left a widow in her teens, would have had no home to return to. In his mind he heard Célie Jumon’s voice: Papa never knew what happened to them.…

  “Well, it answers one question anyway,” remarked Hannibal, as they made cursory investigations of each garçonnière bedroom, then passed along the gallery to the rear of the main house. “Why Laurence’s wife left. That bedroom of his doesn’t look like it’s ever been cleared out. Not that any woman in her senses would share quarters with Grand-mère Jumon, but I’m sure living in the garçonnière wasn’t what she had in mind, either.”