Graveyard Dust

by Barbara Hambly

  “Ya-allah,” muttered January. He shoved the Abeille into his pocket as his brother-in-law sprang from the deck of the steamboat Boonslick and threaded toward him amid the morning confusion of the wharves. Gabriel, who’d accompanied January to the levee, ran to meet his father, full of news and questions; “It’s going well,” said Paul Corbier, clasping January’s hand. “I go back in the morning, but Michie Drialhet says no matter how much or how little work gets done, we’ll make up the time somehow, for me to be here the seventeenth. Is she well?”

  “She’s well.”

  Fever was in the air. Or more literally fever’s fear. Even to the uninitiated, the market and the levee had a slack air, and those who sold, or loaded, or unloaded, or bargained in the long morning shadows of the market arcades were few, grim, and silent. One would think, looking about, that there were no wealthy people in the city, or that the well-off men had neither wives nor offspring. Only servants and the poor.

  “The crisis seems to be over for the moment,” January replied to his brother-in-law’s question about the past three days. “Ker paid me off this morning—out of his own pocket, I suspect—and slipped me and Weber and the other volunteers some food from the hospital stores, since there’s no funds to cover us. But even without new cases of fever coming in, half the ones still in hospital have developed pneumonia.”

  “I’m not sure but that isn’t worse.” Paul added a couple of oranges from a market stand to the bread Gabriel had brought from home in a willow basket. “At least the yellow jack is over quickly. Pneumonia …” He shook his head. January remembered his own bout with pneumonia—lung-fever it had been called then—as a young man, weeks of lying exhausted in bed even after the fever and delirium had cleared. And at that, he had been carefully nursed by Bella. The patients who crowded the hospital wards, yellow with jaundice and wheezing as they tried to breathe, muttering in broken Gaelic or the dialects of upcountry Lombardy and Bavaria, stood as little chance of recovery as had the slaves on Bellefleur, once the sickness had them.

  You needed to be well fed, and you needed to be strong. And more than anything else, you needed to have someone willing to look after you.

  January sighed and ran a weary hand over his face. He had had no sleep last night and barely any the night before. His whole body ached, and he could only silently bless Augustus Mayerling, the fencing master, for giving him what healing his arms had had, that he’d been able to make it through the past three days. The exercise with weights was something else he’d have to start up again, now that he had a little time.

  “The fabric’s finally arrived for Drialhet’s carriage seats.” Basket on his arm, Paul hurried along the cool shadow of the arcade. “His factor’s meeting me this afternoon.…”

  In the Cabildo’s great doorway they almost brushed shoulders with Burton Blodgett, in a traveling reek of rum—glancing back at him, January saw the journalist was making notes. Damn the man.…

  “I’m sorry, M’am,” a Guard was saying to a woman who stood near the courtyard doors. “Nobody’s permitted to see the prisoners.”

  “But he’s ill!” protested the woman, a stout blond girl in a cotton frock and sunbonnet. “He has the palsy, and sometimes he doesn’t know where he is.”

  “I’m very sorry, M’am.” The man kept his face stony and his voice without expression. “No one’s permitted in.”

  “What’s this?” January walked quickly over to the pair. “Excuse me, sir,” he added, remembering that the Guard was white and as such entitled to deference, “but my brother-in-law and I are here to see my sister …”

  “I’m sorry. No one’s permitted …”

  “Is there trouble, sir?”

  “There was.” Sergeant deMezieres came out from around his big desk and glanced in the direction of the doors, to be sure that Blodgett had truly gone. “Night before last there was a rumor of an attempt at escape and threats of violence.” He brought the words out as if he’d learned them by heart and did not even attempt to look at January as he spoke. “Chief Tremouille thought it best no one be admitted for a time.”

  January opened his mouth to snap, Rumor, hell, and closed it again. In his best French—and thankful he was still dressed as a professional in his black coat and top hat—he said, “Surely a woman might be permitted a visit from her husband and child.”

  “And I have to see my husband,” added the blond woman, crowding up to January’s side. “If he can see his sister, I can see my husband.” January wanted to slap her.

  “I’m sorry. I had this from Chief Tremouille and it’s final. Now, everything will be well in a few days.”

  The hell it will. But January knew that to speak of the fever now would not help Olympe or open a way to see her. And with Blodgett nosing around, it might very well result in his, and Paul’s, being detained on some petty charge to keep them quiet.

  “Thank you,” he said, keeping his eyes down. One always started out by saying Thank you to a white man in authority. “Might you be able to do us the favor of letting us know how she is?” He was aware of Gabriel, standing half-hidden behind Paul with his hand thrust deep in his pocket, eyes shut, whispering something under his breath. “Madame Corbier? She’s in the women’s cells …”

  “She’s well,” said the sergeant immediately. “All of them are well. There’s no”—he stopped himself from saying yellow fever and changed it to—“no reason for concern about the … the incident a day or two ago. Everyone up there is well and healthy.”

  January had to bite his lower lip not to say, It’s good to know you have such an exact knowledge, right off the top of your head, of the condition of every prisoner in a pest hole that crowded.

  It’ll only come back on us, Olympe had said.

  “Thank you. You’ve relieved our minds.”

  “Putain,” spat Gabriel, as they emerged from the building into the arcade again. January saw the young blond woman standing a few feet away, her face to the stuccoed brick of one of the arches, hands pressed to her mouth as she wept. “You were right, Uncle Ben. That voodoo doesn’t work for sour apples.” The boy pulled a little wad of red wax from his pocket and tossed it away into the gutter. “I paid that Queen Régine fifteen cents and I did everything she said exactly, turned around and walked backward and jumped on one leg and snapped my fingers three times—”

  “And now you’ve lost your fifteen cents,” said January. “And had the Devil in Hell laugh at you besides.”

  “You’d have spent the money better burning a candle for your mother’s safety,” interjected Paul quietly. He dug in his pocket, and carefully brought out a silver dime and a couple of cut bits.

  “You’d have spent the money better on rice and beans.” January put a staying hand on Paul’s wrist. “Which is what your father has been working all summer to keep on the table.”

  Paul gently shook off his grip, and held out the coins to Gabriel. “So now go do that.” He nodded toward the Cathedral. “Make your confession first.”

  “No, Papa, that’s food money.” The boy looked genuinely distressed. “I got that fifteen cents I gave Queen Régine holding horses outside Monsieur Davis’s gambling parlor. You know we can’t—”

  Paul pressed the coins into his son’s palm. “We need to show God we’re sorry. And to ask His help. Go make your confession, and burn the candle.”

  Wretched, the boy ran off toward the arched doorways of the church. Paul sighed, then turned back to January. “It isn’t wrong, you know, what she does. She thinks very carefully, and I do not believe I have ever seen her do anything that would offend God. But children … they don’t understand sometimes. To them it all looks the same.”

  Maybe to God it all looks the same, thought January. The stench of the gutters, the reek of burning horns and hooves, darkened the air as with a vapor; from the corner of his eye he saw Blodgett step delicately to the edge of the arcade, ignoring the weeping woman, and pick the ball of crimson wax from the gutter, turning i
t speculatively in his hands. Or maybe we’re only frightening ourselves with games, and God neither knows nor cares. Maybe the Devil in Hell is laughing at us all.

  “Maestro.”

  January turned. Lieutenant Abishag Shaw slouched over to the archway where he and Paul stood, and spit a line of dark tobacco juice at the bloated corpse of a rat floating in the gutter’s reek.

  “Your sister’s well. She been helping out with the other ladies that was—affected—by this ‘incident’ you hear tell of.”

  January’s eyes met the cool gray ones for a moment, then lowered again, as he knew they must before a white man’s. “Were many women ‘hurt’ in this ‘incident’?”

  “Two so far,” said Shaw. “And three of the men.” He was silent for a time. Then, “Speakin’ of it around the town won’t help no one, you know. Nor would me losin’ my job with the Guards, nor you getting’ on the bad side of Chief Tremouille and the City Council and all them.”

  January drew a deep breath. “I know that,” he said. “Thank you for telling us.”

  “I got a thing or two else to tell you besides,” Shaw continued, “if’n you got the time to walk a little with me on the levee.”

  The puddles left by last night’s rain steamed faintly in the soot-grimed light. Stevedores sweated in grim silence or sang the eerie wailing hollers in half-forgotten tongues: Gaelic, African, fisherman-Greek.

  “I made a few inquiries concernin’ Hubert Granville and Miz Geneviève’s money.” Shaw pushed his disreputable hat back on his head, and ran a bony hand through his lank hair. “Antoine’s right, insofar as he knows, in that Granville’s been investin’ her money for her for years. He’s got a little syndic of women he does that for.”

  “Bernadette Metoyer and her sisters,” guessed January.

  “They’s in it,” agreed Shaw, unsurprised. “Our friend Granville takes a little percentage—that’s what he tells Miz Granville, anyways. My guess is that ain’t all he takes, but that’s neither here nor there. But it seems—lookin’ at the records anyway—that his bookkeepin’ is of the permeable order, and he’ll sort of scootch the money back and forth with his own investments, which works passably well if nuthin’ else goes wrong. Now, with money tight an’ business slow an’ Mr. Jackson up in Washington unravelin’ the Bank of the United States an’ sendin’ that money every which way, it appears that a man who has the money to set up a bank stands a good chance of gettin’ more from the government in the near future, and it looks like that’s what Mr. Granville been tryin’ to do. Only he ain’t quite there yet.”

  “Would five thousand dollars do it?”

  Shaw scratched, and spit at an enormous palmetto bug making its unoffending way across the bricks of the market arcade. “Might so be.”

  The palmetto bug scurried off, offended but unsullied.

  “What about the night of the twenty-third?”

  “Granville was in Constitution Place all right. With Miz Geneviève, or at least with a widow in black and veils, accordin’ to Hallie Birnbaum, what has the cottage next door. The cook girl for the Careys acrost the square says Granville’s carriage was there round about seven when she was finishin’ up supper, an’ didn’t leave till close to mornin’—she was up lookin’ after her little girl who’s sick. But the way them folk know about each other’s business I purely doubt Granville or Miz Geneviève could have kept Isaak prisoner either in the house itself or in the coach house without somebody sniffin’ wise. And besides, what would be the point?”

  “To force him to sign something, maybe?” January shook his head. “Whoever gave him the poison, he was somewhere from Saturday to Monday.” For a moment it crossed his mind to speak of what he had found, or had not found, on Rue St. Louis, but he wasn’t at all sure what he could say. The stink of old blood, like a stain of graveyard dust on his mind, but nothing, he thought, that had to do with Isaak. Instead he asked, “Should I see what I can find from the woman Zoë? I could probably get across to Mandeville and back by Monday night when I’m supposed to play at Madame Redfern’s.”

  “And of all the damn stupid things I’ve ever heard of in this town.” Shaw sighed. “A ball celebratin’ Bastille Day—with every royalist an’ Orléaniste an’ seven kinds of Revolutionary radicals an’ leftover Jacobins an’ who knows what-all else rufflin’ an’ spittin’ at each other—has got to be the stupidest.” He shook his head. “We’ll be cleanin’ up corpses for weeks. Duelin’ is illegal in this state, you know. You can go to Mandeville, Maestro, but I doubt it’ll do you much good. Yeah, I’d like to know a whole hell of a lot more about what went on at that house than I do now, but askin’ that Zoë woman ain’t the way to learn it. You seen how she looks at Mathurin, an’ he at her. They’s right good friends, not to put too fine a point on it … an’ anyway no testimony of her’n is gonna stand in court anyway.”

  Because she is a slave, thought January bitterly. Not that Zoë would testify against Mathurin Jumon in any case. He remembered the smile in her eyes as she’d looked at Jumon in the shadowy study, the smooth way she’d stepped in to cover the argument with his mother. The way Jumon had half-grinned after her, I have a feeling Zoë does not approve …

  Cold panic zinged him, half-guessed, half-perceived—a glimpse of buckskin and trade-goods blue from the corner of his eye.

  He swung around, his breath jagging in his throat.

  But whoever it was, if it was indeed anyone, had faded into the shadowy mill under the market arcades. Only a few fishermen, bargaining in Greek with a woman in a bright tignon over a netful of snapper and oysters; a lean-jawed steamboat pilot with a goatish Yankee beard joking with Ti Jon; Dr. Yellowjack, sitting by himself at a small table with coffee, watching the sun glare in the Place d’Armes with cold, narrow eyes.

  “You know he fences stolen goods?” January nodded toward the small, wiry wangateur as he and Shaw walked on. He lowered his voice, unable to rid himself of the feeling that whatever he might say, the voodoo doctor would hear.

  “I know.” They turned down an aisle between stalls of greens and tomatoes and aubergines, edging past those slothful housewives and late-sleeping servants who would have to pay for their laziness with wilted lunches. Shaw glanced back at the taut little figure in its bright calico shirt, its leather top hat and hackle feathers stuck in the brim. “Provin’ it on him’s another matter. Nor could we prove he’s the one who brokers half the faked papers in this town—everythin’ from turnin’ slaves to free men down to bringin’ in Congos from Havana to sell with papers claimin’ they’s Creole niggers born up-country here. He smuggles girls in, too, Congos or brights that don’t speak no English nor French, for a whippin’ parlor he’s supposed to have someplace outside town. We searched that house of his on the bayou two, three times.…” He shook his head. “He’s a bad customer, Yellowjack Joe.”

  His gray glance slid sidelong to January again. “You all right yourself, Maestro? Keepin’ safe?”

  “Getting a little tired of looking over my shoulder.” Tired, too, though he would not say it, of searching his room every time he came home, and of keeping food locked up.

  “Well, I have my men keepin’ an eye out for Mr. Nash,” said Shaw. “But with two of ’em down with what Councilman Bouille insists is indigestion”—and an angry glint flared in his eyes—“we can only do what we can. Constable LaBranche went down the Swamp t’ other day—on another matter, not lookin’ for Nash—an’ ended up stabbed, an’ damn lucky he wasn’t killed. But we’ll get him.”

  “I’m sure you will, sir,” said January. “I’d just rather it was before he got me.”

  In the summer of 1789, goaded beyond endurance by an incompetent King, a spendthrift court, and a government that would not tax anyone who actually had money, a mob of out-of-work laborers, uneducated riffraff, and starving women attacked and razed the fourteenth-century fortress of the French King on the outskirts of Paris. Urged on by journalists and pamphleteers, they slaughtered its tiny garrison, p
araded the severed head of its commander through the streets (January had always wondered what happened to the head), and freed “in the name of Liberty” exactly seven men, one of whom had begged not to be let out of his cell because he was insane and knew himself unable to survive in the outside world.

  The uprising triggered by this event had swept the House of Bourbon from the throne of France.

  And this, apparently, was all anyone in America remembered about the chain of events that had opened the way for Napoleon Bonaparte’s dictatorship and twenty-five years of the bloodiest and most violent endemic warfare Europe had ever known. In Paris, January had talked to the survivors of those days—his landlady among them—and knew that the various garbled and politicized accounts in circulation in the New World were very far from the truth. He knew, too, that every party involved in the chaos of old-style Revolutionaries versus moderates versus Jacobins versus Bonaparte versus Louis XVIII versus the House of Orléans—the dead King’s self-serving cousins who had subsequently grabbed the throne—had at one time or another taken refuge in New Orleans, that pocket-sized version of la France d’outre-mer.

  So only a woman who had been paying attention to nothing for the past thirty-five years but the size of her bank balance and the social status of those who greeted her on the street would have even considered issuing several hundred invitations to a “private party” in celebration of Bastille Day.

  Benjamin January duly presented himself at the back door of the Redfern summer mansion on Rome Square in Milneburgh as the sun was setting on the fourteenth, in company with nearly every other first-rate musician in town: Mrs. Redfern did nothing that she did not overdo. The marble-topped buffet tables in the dining room groaned with joints and saddles of ham and beef on expensive platters of pink-and-gold Meissen, rémoulades of mushrooms, peach flan and wine ices, crêpes, vol-au-vents, artichoke hearts, and pâtés à l’Italienne. Red, white, and blue bunting transformed the ballroom into something that more closely resembled a rally for the recent election. Cornucopias of flowers vied with the scents of floor wax, tobacco, and the stink of the gas lamps overhead.