Graveyard Dust

by Barbara Hambly

  “I’ll be very curious,” remarked Hannibal, sipping the watered lemonade that was the only refreshment permitted the musicians in their penitential sweatbox of a parlor off the main ballroom, “to see who actually shows up for this affair.” He produced a flask of Black Drop from his pocket and doctored first his lemonade and then himself. It was the first time in two days, January knew, that he’d been on his feet.

  “Not a Frenchman in the city, I’ll wager.” Cochon Gardinier picked a wafer-thin slice of bread from the platter on the table and examined it with pained indignation, as if he had been offered a fragment of napkin on which to sustain himself.

  “Thy son asked thee for bread, and thou gavest him a stone,” provided Hannibal helpfully. “I’ve seen larger visiting cards, myself.”

  “And tastier ones.”

  “Well, you’re both wrong about the Frenchmen, anyway.” Jacques Bichet slipped in from an exploratory ramble and a chat with La Redfern’s servants. “The guests are starting to arrive, and you know who the first one was through the door? Mathurin Jumon.”

  “Mathurin Jumon?” The others stared at him.

  “But his mother was one of the Queen’s ladies in waiting,” January said. “Her family’s fortune was destroyed by the Revolution.”

  “His mother’s not with him, is she?” asked Uncle Bichet, looking up from tuning his violoncello. “It’s only once in a month of Sundays he’s out without her somewhere around, but I’ve seen her make him cross over the street so as not to talk to a Bonapartiste. Hell, she won’t give but two fingers to the most virtuous Orléaniste on earth.”

  “So what’s he doing here?”

  “He isn’t wearing a mask, by any chance?” inquired Hannibal facetiously. “I mean, every Bonapartiste and Revolutionary in town is going to see him, not to speak of the Americans.”

  “Interesting”, remarked January thoughtfully, “that he took the trouble to be the first to arrive.” He walked out into the narrow hall, and opened the little door into the ballroom just a crack. Past a screen of potted ferns, Mrs. Redfern stood in the columned triple arch of the main doorway to the vestibule, and in the absence of any other guest—it was a good twenty minutes short of the time on the invitations—was chatting with Jumon. January had seen an almost exact replica of her dress last month in Dominique’s latest edition of Le Petit Courier des Dames. The winglike projections over the enormous gauze sleeves were the very newest mode. She must have had it made up, in lace-trimmed sable bombazine, in the past three weeks.

  “Yes,” murmured Hannibal. “He’s one of the prizes, as far as she’s concerned. He must want very much to impress her, and coming this early is the only way he can get credit on her books for being here without meeting anyone who’ll peach to Mama.”

  The two men regarded one another for a moment, baffled. “Madame Redfern? I knew about Vilhardouin courting her, but …”

  “He wasn’t interested in her as of the Pritchard party,” pointed out January. “And why would he need to hang out for a rich widow? His mother’s expenses aside, he’s a wealthy man. There he goes.”

  With almost preternatural timing, Jumon wandered from the ballroom as Madame Redfern turned to greet the next guests in the doorway: Hubert Granville and his wife, followed almost at once by the lovestruck Orell Greenaway, who immediately took charge of Mrs. Redfern’s fan, presented his dance card to her for inscription (“To sit them out with you, Madame, and bear you company”) and empurpled the surrounding air with compliments. It was unlikely that she noticed Jumon was no longer in the room.

  “Business?” speculated Hannibal, as they returned to the parlor to collect their music. “La Redfern is one of the wealthiest women in the city these days.”

  “He sold at least one of his brother’s slaves at the beginning of the month, maybe more. With the price of slaves these days he can’t possibly be hard up.”

  Nearly a dozen new guests were in the ballroom when the musicians took their places and began to play, light airs from last season’s operas, ballads and études, a soft fill behind the chatter of voices in the big, overly decorated room. Mathurin Jumon did not reappear.

  There was talk among the men of business and the election, of the Bank and of tight money and slow times, while the women discussed the cut of gowns and how to keep servants from stealing and, worse, spying; and as before, as always in New Orleans, the ballroom split along a distinct linguistic frontier.

  Familiar after nineteen months with the politics of French New Orleans, January easily identified the Creoles who turned up as either the old-time radicals like Hilaire Morel, the owner of the Café Venise, or Bonapartistes like the Widow Langostine and Judge Laverge, who immediately got into arguments with the radicals over whose fault it was that the Revolution failed and those execrable Orléaniste swine ended up on the throne. The only Orléaniste in sight was Clément Vilhardouin. The lawyer complimented Madame Redfern on her efforts to reconcile the Creole community and unobtrusively found reasons to sit closer to her than Orell Greenaway did.

  “You know Michie Jumon, that was the first one here tonight?” January asked Madame Redfern’s housemaid, in the kitchen during the brief break after the fifth dance. The housemaid, whose name was Claire, nodded—January had a chatting acquaintance with her from meetings both here and at the market, and liked the woman.

  “Big man with the pearl in his neckerchief?” Claire’s hands moved quickly as she spoke, arranging on an enormous tray ring after ring of peach tartelettes. A Protestant from Virginia, she’d been slow to make connections among the largely Catholic slaves in town, and though she was less lonely now than she had been, she still counted January as one of her first friends. “He’s sitting in the library. Gaspar just took him coffee there, not five minutes ago.”

  Obviously a man who didn’t intend to let Jeanne-Françoise Langostine—one of the worst gossips in the Creole community—carry tales back to Madame Cordelia. “Could you do me a favor, Miss Claire?” said January quietly. “Now and then and only if you have the time, could you check on what he’s doing there and who he sees? My sister’s housemaid heard this Michie Jumon was going to sell off her cousin. It’s got her nearly crazy thinking it would be to some broker or dealer. Don’t put yourself out—I understand you’re gonna be run off your legs tonight—but if you’ve got a moment and can find out without causing yourself trouble, I’d appreciate it.”

  Claire smiled warmly. “I’ll do what I can, Mr. January.”

  “Thank you, Miss Claire. It’s all any of us can do.”

  He returned to the ballroom, trying vainly to work the ache out of his shoulders and arms, and swung into a light valse brillante, perhaps the only thing that kept the banker Linus Rowling from calling out the stoutly Jacksonian slave dealer Jim Pratt—the two men were already visibly squaring off with their friends, who at the first bars of the music were hauled from the field of combat by their wives and fiancées, leaving the principals feeling rather silly. At the same time, however, the attorney Vilhardouin stepped between Mr. Greenaway and Madame Redfern, upon whom Greenaway was advancing with hand outstretched for the third time that evening. Over the music—and through his own concentration on timing and lilt—January couldn’t hear what was said, but he could guess from Vilhardouin’s gestures that it concerned scoundrels and fortune-hunters who showed up early to force their attentions on a woman in mourning. Granville and the Reverend Dunk separated the two men, but Hannibal said in an undervoice, “Twenty-five cents says Vilhardouin calls Greenaway out before supper.”

  “And this twenty-five cents is going to come from which wealthy aunt’s legacy?” inquired January, and the fiddler laughed.

  “A jitney, then.”

  “Done.”

  “It does my heart good to see the French community extending the hand of friendship to the Americans,” intoned Reverend Dunk, clapping Vilhardouin on the back. “It truly goes to prove, does it not, that we are all brothers in liberty?”

&nb
sp; Vilhardouin, whose family vineyards in Bordeaux had been wiped out by Napoleon’s wars, cast an eye at Madame Redfern and managed the sour rictus of a smile.

  By the time Claire Brunet managed to relay a message to January, the news was old. January watched the men as they came and went, and none was gone for a longer period of time than was required to relieve themselves, or else they departed in groups and came back smelling of cigars. But Orell Greenaway came close to causing a jealous scene when Madame Redfern vanished for close to half an hour; only Vilhardouin’s return in company with Colonel Pritchard during that period kept him from sallying forth to trap the supposed lovers: “Don’t be an ass, man,” growled Granville. “She probably just tore her petticoat. My wife does that all the time.”

  But Madame Redfern came back, not in company with a woman friend and flounce repairer, but with her business manager, an anthropomorphized weasel named Fraikes, rubbing his hands and looking pleased with himself. “Six seventy-five is a good price, Madame, a very good price indeed.”

  “I didn’t hear who they was talkin’ of selling, Mr. January,” said Claire, coming to the door of the wretched little musicians’ parlor during the next period of rest. “But Mr. Fraikes, he paid over money to Mr. Jumon right away, in cash, hard money, that I guess Mrs. Redfern’s about the only person in town who has it these days. But Gaspar tells me they talked about selling ‘him’ and sending ‘him’ over in the morning, so it couldn’t have been your cousin, could it?”

  “No,” said January, infusing voice and expression with all the gratitude he could counterfeit. “No, it isn’t. Thank you, Miss Claire. Thank you so much.”

  “It isn’t as if the money were all tied up in a family plantation still,” mused Hannibal, after she’d gone. By common consent the other musicians had arranged the room’s three chairs in a line for the fiddler to lie down on, and Jacques had fetched a wet cloth from the kitchen to lay over his eyes. Hannibal had grown paler throughout the evening, fighting the racking cough; the first thing he’d done when out of the ballroom was cough until he could barely stand.

  He took a swig of opium, made as if to take another and then changed his mind, and replaced the bottle. “When they sold up the land I imagine both Laurence and Mathurin got a share of cash, to invest in town property, which is what Laurence left to Isaak. Granted, most of the slaves probably still belong to Cordelia, but Jumon can’t need money so desperately that he curries favor with a social climber like La Redfern for the sake of six hundred and seventy-five dollars. Can he?”

  “I don’t know,” said January, and slipped back into his coat and gloves. “Once more into the breach, dear friends—It’s certainly something,” he added, helping Hannibal to his feet, “that I plan to find out.”

  FIFTEEN

  “Jumon is selling up, all right.” Augustus Mayerling extended a long-fingered hand out sideways to the length of his arm, rather like a very well dressed scarecrow in a vest of gold Florentine silk, the sleeves of his white linen shirt rolled halfway up forearms of sinew and rope. “And turn … touch my hand. Touch my hand. Smooth, smooth.… No, without moving your hips touch my—so!”

  January straightened his body again, sweating and panting but triumphant. Three weeks ago he had barely been able to lift the weighted beam to his shoulders; a few weeks before that, unable to raise so much as a filled cup. Now, although the movement left him aching, he could swing and maneuver the seven-foot rod at most of the targets the fencing master set him.

  Early sunlight just clearing the roofs of Maspero’s Exchange and the Destrehan town house slanted through the long windows of the Salle d’Armes, thrown open to catch whatever cool remained of the dawn. Even at this hour the air smelled of burnt gunpowder and sewage; a woman down in Exchange Alley sang drearily of the virtues of soap. Farther off, a steamboat whistle hooted.

  Another day. The last before Olympe’s trial began.

  “Madame Redfern, as you heard, bought not only Mathurin Jumon’s personal valet Claude, but a matched carriage-team of white horses, very expensive, for cash money I am told.” Mayerling extended his other hand, cold pale sherry-colored eyes watching with scientific exactness the play of January’s bare shoulder muscles as he turned to touch the target now here, now there. “The matter was discussed last night at the Café Venise—Hilaire Morel, you understand, gossips like a schoolgirl and says that Americans know nothing of true Revolution—and Athanase de Soto, a pupil of mine, said that Monday afternoon he met Jumon in Milneburgh before the Redfern fête and purchased ten head of Jumon’s cattle, apparently for something less than they were worth.”

  “But why?” January straightened again and stood with the beam across his shoulders, regarding the Prussian in bafflement.

  Of medium stature and slender build, the fencing master was one of the most demanding in the city, no more so on his pupils than on himself. Most mornings when January arrived—long before any of the aristocratic Creole pupils who would have been appalled to know that a man of color was allowed into the Salle—it was to find Mayerling already lifting iron scale weights or the weighted beam to further develop strength and flexibility, or engaging and disengaging the salon’s door handle with neat, small circles of his colichemarde.

  “There are any number of reasons.” Mayerling shrugged, and came to help January lift the beam down. “It is the slow season, and his mother is a monstrously expensive woman; he may have had investments in the Bank of the United States that now are in danger.”

  The fencing master threw January a linen towel, to wipe the sweat from his face and hair, and used another himself. The morning sunlight, just moving down the wall, tipped the ivory brush of his military-cut hair and made tiny, crinkling shadows in the saber scars that laced the beaky face. “I observe he is not selling anything to which his mother might hold claim. In fact to sell to La Redfern, for cash—and to feel the need to sweeten her by attending her party—says to me at least that he is doing this without Madame Cordelia’s knowledge. In any case, before returning to Mandeville yesterday, he sold two women servants, Zoë and Irene, to the American dealer Bill Palmer.”

  “Zoë?” January paused in the midst of putting on his shirt, shocked. “Are you sure?”

  “This was the name, yes.” In some surprise at his reaction, Mayerling regarded him for a moment. “I took note because they were Byzantine Empresses, Zoë and Irene—I kept wondering if there were a third named Theodosia somewhere. This is important?”

  January nodded. The look of amused complicity in Jumon’s eyes; Zoë’s smile. I don’t think she approves.… The affection unmistakable in his voice.

  Then fury for the woman’s sake and sickened disappointment, as if he himself had been sold. Maybe only the old fear he’d had as a child, waiting for his mother to be sold away from him, for his friends or aunts or others whom he loved, to disappear. The pain of that betrayal must have been worse than anything in her life. He tried to hear Mathurin’s deep voice: I’m terribly fond of you, Zoë, but …

  But what?

  “I don’t think he’d have done that if he weren’t desperate.”

  And his personal valet. Longtime friends, with him for years.…

  How could he? How COULD he?

  Even as he thought the words January felt contempt for himself, for his own naïveté. He could almost hear Olympe’s sneer. Write a note and send it by a boy down to the dealers on Baronne Street, is how, brother. That’s how they mostly all do it.

  Like a man regretfully deciding to have an old dog shot because it’s become flatulent or incontinent in the house, and sullies his carpets or disturbs his guests.

  The jewels on Madame Cordelia’s wrists. The fabrics purchased on whims and never even cut. The pink-and-gold dishes, the mantillas—seven, eight, ten of them—in their boxes.

  And like a devil’s voice whispering in his heart, the sentence formed itself: If he betrayed her, if he sold her, does she love him still? Or will she be willing to talk?

&
nbsp; Mayerling came over to him, a kind of chilly concern in the strange hazel eyes. “You knew this woman?”

  “I’d met her. I saw them together.”

  “Ah.” The Prussian considered, head tilted to one side like a bird. “Palmer does not give top prices, but he pays in cash. I understand he’s leaving today, for the Mississippi Territories, to sell where the prices are high.” There was a flex of irony in that light alto voice, nothing so definite as disapproval, but the kind of deliberate neutrality Mayerling cultivated in dealing with his pupils, all of whom were the sons of wealthy slave owners, and slave owners themselves. A member of the Junker nobility, he had come to this country, January knew, with secrets of his own, and he kept a great deal to himself. Still, when January’s breath caught in pain as he tried to shrug into his coat, the sword master helped him on with it with the matter-of-fact skill of a valet.

  “Thank you,” said January, and glanced at the sun on the wall. Early yet. There was a chance he could still find Palmer—and his chattels—at his offices on Baronne Street, though his skin crept at the thought. Automatically he checked his coat pocket for the papers that proved him a free man and breathed a sigh of gratitude that he had intended to make another attempt to see Olympe at the Cabildo that morning, and so had dressed like a man of some substance. With any luck Palmer would pay more attention to the quality of his clothing and the excellence of his English than to the color of his face and hands.

  “Myself, I am on a handshaking basis only with Mathurin Jumon,” said Mayerling, as he walked with January down the narrow stairs. “But my wife”—and there was unalloyed delight as he spoke of the woman who in her childhood had been one of January’s piano pupils—“my wife belongs to several of the same charitable societies as Madame Cordelia Jumon. They are related, for all I know: all these Creole families seem to be. Shall I ask her to go to Mandeville and speak with this redoubtable lady? According to Madame Mayerling”—he spoke his wife’s formal title, as men must even in the presence of their friends—“Madame Jumon is a woman who has suffered greatly in her life and continues to suffer at voluble length. It should not be difficult to learn details.”