Graveyard Dust

by Barbara Hambly

  “King snake,” said January, as the mottled brown-and-blue tail whipped away out of sight. “Mambo Jeanne on Bellefleur used to tell us that king snakes have powerful spines and can kill any other snake just by wrapping around it and crushing all its bones.”

  “I knew there was a reason I never went beyond Rampart Street.” Hannibal looked around him at the still greennesses of cypress and loblolly pine, sweat already running down his face from the contained heat among the trees. “I didn’t know all this was out here. Rather like discovering the maids’ dormitory in my aunt Rowena’s house.”

  “King snake’s nothing to worry about.” January scouted the knots and clumps of underbrush where Omulu and Baron Cemetery had lurked in wait last night. “You can tell a poison snake’s trail because it’s wavy; the safe ones leave a straight track like a ruler.”

  “Must be awkward for them when they come to a puddle. Over flood, over fire.…”

  January found the deep print of Paul’s big boots, and where the mahogany chair leg had scraped the willow trunk against which it had rested. In a clump of reeds, nearer than he’d thought it had been last night, he found the narrow neat marks of Mayerling’s English boots.

  On the other side of the bayou he found what he sought: broken twigs, and the soft brown leaves of last summer’s oaks pressed down into the wet ground. Looking back through the trees across the narrow green water he saw Hannibal in the middle of the clearing, just where Gabriel had stood last night. The fiddler was blithely continuing with Act Two of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as if he expected the spotted snakes with double tongue, thorny hedgehogs, newts, and blindworms to be listening in the deeper green silences of the ciprière.

  Not long-legged spinners nor beetles black, thought January uneasily, turning to listen to that green invisibility. Bosou and Ogu and Agassu, watching with red ageless eyes; the demon Onzoncaire and the bleeding sheep-head sacrificed to Omulu; the rainbow serpent coiled under the reeds. And behind them the dimmer manitou spirits of the Choctaw and Chickasaw, exiled but still listening, angry at their people’s dead and wanting blood.

  Killdevil Ned Nash was here, thought January. Or someone was. And had decided not to try it.

  Did he see us? Know there was more than one?

  Or was there some other reason? Something else he saw?

  He moved along closer to the edge of the water, picking his way carefully among the reeds. Gnats whirled up in clouds; wasps and dragonflies, hanging over the water, flickered away in eerie silence.

  He found the marks of bare feet about four yards from the farthest signs of Killdevil’s moccasin scuffs. Two men—one of them with enormous feet, larger than January’s own—and someone who could have been either a boy or a woman. The marks came up out of the bayou itself, and hugged cover with the expert caution of those who knew the country well.

  Thunder whispered overhead, low and close, a lion’s growl. Wind whipped at the oak leaves and the long gray beards of moss. The cricket cries increased in the dense green air, as if the whole world were suddenly compressed by the coming of the rain.

  January crossed back over the bayou on the rummage of deadfalls and cypress knees that had taken him, more or less dry shod, over the still green water in the first place. With the wind snaking in his long hair and his pale face skull-like with exhaustion and illness, Hannibal had the look of a wood-elf himself in the sudden dimming of the storm light.

  Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!

  You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout

  Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!

  You sulfurous and thought-executing fires,

  Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts.…

  “Do you feel it?” He swung around as soon as January was near. “The watchers in the woods? Be not afeared, the isle is full of noises.…”

  January nodded. Looking back across the bayou to where the reeds grew thick, he understood whole and suddenly why Ti Jon had lied to him, and where Isaak Jumon had been between the twenty-first of June and the twenty-third, and whom he had gone to meet beside the crooked tree near the Bayou Gravier. Oaks and willows, reeds and hackberries made matte walls of greens, dark and drenched with the rain; the beryl water was still, save for the growing and spreading circles of the falling drops. The air breathed the smoky odor of rot, and the waiting tension of the Congo drums.

  “Indeed it is,” he said softly. “Indeed it is.”

  Augustus and Madeleine Mayerling were sitting on the gallery steps outside the garçonnière when Hannibal and January returned. “I abase myself with chagrin at having failed you,” said the fencing master, shedding his wasp-waisted coat and rolling up his fine linen sleeves as January helped Hannibal to lie down on Bella’s bed. The fiddler had made it most of the way back from the ciprière in the rain, but exhaustion had claimed him as they’d passed the cemeteries; arms aching, January had half-dragged him up the stairs. Madeleine Mayerling, a full-bosomed, beautiful woman with dark hair wound into fanciful knots and ringlets, measured herbs into the little china pot of the veilleuse as her husband of six months went down to the cistern for water, and scratched a lucifer on the striking paper to kindle the flame underneath.

  “Orell Greenaway put a bullet through Clément Vilhardouin this morning at six,” Mayerling said, returning with the dripping pail and shaking the rain out of his hair. “Vilhardouin died an hour and a half ago.”

  “Majnûn,” said January, in Arabic—fool.

  Mayerling’s scarred face showed no change of expression, but the long upper lip pressed taut. “As you say. I’m told he spent all of yesterday evening in the woods at the end of Erato Street, shooting at playing cards nailed to the trees there: I am pleased to report the entire Court of Spades still enjoys excellent health. The surgeon Greenaway hired—that idiot Bernard over on Rue Bourbon—bled Vilhardouin and dosed him with calomel by the cupful, but I doubt he would have survived in any event. I hope he had a partner on Madame Célie’s case?”

  “None.”

  “Monsieur Trepagier—my first husband, as you know, Monsieur,” said Madame Mayerling, “engaged in two duels while we were married.” She crossed the little room in a rustle of claret-colored skirts, a steaming cup of herb tisane cradled in her hands. “This in spite of the fact that the next year’s crop was already mortgaged and not yet in the ground, and in the event of his death I—and the children that I had then—would have been left destitute. The man he fought, and killed, was in a similar case, and I knew his wife. It was that which made me finally stop believing that he would ever offer me even the protection that the law demands.”

  “I would not love thee, dear, so well,” quoted Hannibal, cocking a sardonic glance up from his pillows, “loved I not honor more.”

  “Goodness gracious me.” Madame Mayerling widened her velvet-brown eyes and held the cup at arm’s length above him, “I have accidentally spilled every drop of this scalding hot tisane over poor Monsieur Sefton’s head.”

  Hannibal lifted his hands in surrender. “Now mark me how I will undo myself.”

  “See that you do, then.” She handed him the cup and settled in the chair that Mayerling held for her. Whatever could be said of her first husband, thought January, this second, odd marriage agreed with her. The haunted grimness of her widowhood had been replaced by a kind of zesty humor that he had not even seen in her girlhood. It was as if the subdued calm of her early years itself had been a facade, a defense against fate penetrated only by the ferocity with which she pursued her music. She wore now the look in her eyes comparable only to that of a young child presented with a large dish of Italian ice and a spoon: as if, at twenty-eight, she were finally permitted to be young.

  “I spent Wednesday afternoon at tea with Madame Cordelia Jumon,” she said a short time later, after January had gone down to the kitchen to fetch up the spirit kettle and remains of his mother’s coffee beans. “We used to make jokes—my girlfriends and cousins and I—a
bout how Monsieur Mathurin Jumon would never marry because he could never find a woman who would spoil him the way his mother spoiled him, calling him ‘my lover’ and ‘my cabbage’ and all those other things as if he were still in dresses. Years, as far back as I can remember. And now—poof!” She gestured as if drawing back from an explosion.

  “A viper in her bosom; an adder; a beast who was always selfish, always cruel to her, always delighted in hurting her, even from the time he was a little child—this from a woman I heard with my own ears telling how he and his brother used to sleep in her bed with her, they loved her so much. Madame Cordelia would tell my father in detail about how she used to tell Monsieur Mathurin and his brother to pick out the most wretched little beggar child they saw, and she would give alms, saying that it was her gift to them so they would go to Heaven because of her. I remember she’d go on for hours—she saw my mother fairly often when I was a child—about what Monsieur Laurence and Monsieur Mathurin must be thinking about her when they were apart, and would ask them about what they’d been thinking about her at such-and-such a time.”

  Hannibal coughed. “Makes Monsieur Gérard sound positively Lear-like.”

  “I’d have run from home screaming,” said Augustus Mayerling flatly.

  A thought crossed January’s mind: a black locked cupboard in an attic, a bloodied strip of sheet. “Maybe they tried,” he said.

  Hannibal’s gaze crossed his, but the young woman went on, “In any case, now none of that has ever happened. Mathurin was always an unnatural brute. He never cared for her, always sought ways to hurt her and slight her—the teacups we were drinking out of were Sèvres ware, Louis XVI, fifty dollars apiece! She was wearing girandole earrings the size of chandeliers!”

  “Did she say why he was selling up?”

  Madame Mayerling shook her head. “But so far he’s put on the market not only the carriages and horses and slaves that you heard of, but one of the properties that went to him in the settlement when they sold up Trianon, a warehouse at the foot of Julia Street. Madame Cordelia says he’s given her some tale about investing in slaves to be let out, but he’d have to be buying an army of them. In any case what he isn’t spending the money on is the black peau de soie she feels is critical to her standing in society—one can’t be properly respectful to the dead, apparently, in plain paramatta—and getting her carriage reupholstered.”

  There was silence, save for the drumming of rain on the roof, and the muffled bubbling of the water over the spirit lamp. January measured out the ground coffee and added it to the water, nipped chunks of sugar from the loaf and arranged them neatly in a saucer on a folded napkin. “Mathurin can’t be spending that much on rustic ware. It sounds as though he were being blackmailed.”

  “I thought of that,” remarked Mayerling, who was, after the manner of fencing instructors, idly experimenting with Italianate redoubles with a coffee spoon. “If there’d been a run on a bank or a plunge in stocks, one would hear, and I’ve gambled with the man. He never plays beyond what one would spend on an evening’s entertainment in some other pursuit.”

  “It’s a shame,” said his wife. “Because he has done a great deal of good.”

  “I’ve heard that,” said January. “I’ve heard also that he has dealings with the voodoo doctors from time to time—over what, I don’t know. What does his mother say of his charities?”

  “Not much. They’re usually people steered to him by the St. Margaret Society, or through Père Eugenius, though I think Mrs. Coughlin and her daughter, Abigail, came to him through a mutual friend.”

  “Coughlin?” Hannibal straightened from his pillows. “Lucinda Coughlin?”

  “You know her?” Madame Mayerling regarded him in surprise. “A Philadelphia woman; her husband died of the fever last year. Monsieur Mathurin has been helping her find respectable employment, and giving money toward her daughter’s schooling.”

  “Little girl about five years old?” Hannibal held out his hand to indicate a height of about three feet. “Honey-colored curls and big brown eyes? Looks like she came out from under a hill in Ireland somewhere?”

  She nodded. “Abigail. I’ve met them over at Monsieur Mathurin’s two or three times since Christmas.”

  “And Lucinda’s a blond woman?” Hannibal coughed again, deep racking shudders, and groped under his pillow for the opium bottle. He sank back, white-faced, against the cushions, his breath stertorous, but a curious bright gleam in his dark-circled eyes. “Flax blond? Your height, but slim? About your age?”

  “That’s Mrs. Coughlin,” said Madame Mayerling. She took the teacup from the bedside lest it spill. “A very sweet woman, from the little I saw of her. Maybe too strict with her daughter, who seemed a bit of a minx. Mrs. Coughlin had difficulty in finding employment of any kind in a shop, you understand, because she couldn’t leave Abigail alone, but I understand they were arranging to have the girl put in the Ursulines convent during the day at school. She’s a little young for it.…”

  “And the first time she opened her mouth she’d probably blow the roof off the building,” said Hannibal. He took another sip of opium. “I’ve heard that child swear. She could take the paint off a gate at fifty paces and make a muleskinner faint.”

  Madame Mayerling, Augustus, and January all regarded him in stunned silence.

  “Lucinda Coughlin,” said Hannibal, “is one of the most active—certainly one of the speediest—prostitutes on Girod Street, and if her daughter’s still virgin I’ll turn in my fiddle and become a monk. The pair of them got me drunk and turned my pockets out at the Brown Meg the day before Christmas and left me facedown in the gutter on Tchoupitoulas Street. Thank God it wasn’t raining.”

  EIGHTEEN

  “Are you sure we’re talking about the same Lucinda Coughlin?”

  “If we’re not,” said Hannibal, “there are not only two ladies by that name, but each has an adorable-looking little five-year-old daughter named Abigail. Possible, as Aristotle would say, but partaking of the improbable-possible rather than otherwise. Myself, I’d say our friend Uncle Mathurin is being set up.” He coughed. Augustus, who was nearest him, caught his shoulders to steady him as the spasms doubled him over. He was a long way, thought January worriedly, from being out of the woods.

  “You’d better rest,” he said, as he and the sword master eased their friend back against the pillows.

  A smile flicked at one corner of the graying mustache. “I don’t seem to have any choice about that. To sleep, perchance to dreamt.…” Hannibal closed his eyes, and was asleep as if he’d been struck over the head.

  January and Madeleine Mayerling walked out onto the gallery together, leaving her husband by the bed. “I don’t suppose you know where this Madame Coughlin is supposed to live?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I only saw her twice, at Monsieur Mathurin’s, when I went to call about the subscriptions for the St. Roche Society Ball.” She worked her hands back into her gloves. “All he told me was that she was a woman he was helping, financially and in a business way. He asked me whether any of my aunt Alicia’s relatives were in need of a governess or a companion. The situation was complicated, he said, by Abigail’s youth, as the child could not be left alone. But the very fact that he’d be seeking such a position for her—with his relatives and friends, I mean—tells me that he is ignorant of what she is, if in fact what Hannibal says is true. And in any case”—she made a wry grimace—“this is Monsieur Mathurin we’re talking about.”

  “A model of rectitude,” said January softly. “Impervious to Cupid’s darts.”

  For a moment his eyes met those of the woman he had taught. Then because he had been trained from earliest childhood never to look into a white person’s eyes—especially not those of a woman—he glanced aside. But the silence lay between them anyway, matters that were not discussed between women and men.

  At length, gazing carefully out over the rain-pocked puddles of the yard, Madame Mayerling said, “If you�
��re wondering whether Monsieur Mathurin’s tastes are—unorthodox—I haven’t heard it. Men of that persuasion often approach Augustus,” she added, without irony. “But that doesn’t mean there isn’t something afoot. And if there is scandal broth brewing, should Isaak have seen something, or learned something …”

  “Yes,” said January. “The only problem is that if Isaak went where I think he went after he left the Turkey-Buzzard Saloon, there’s no way that Lucinda Coughlin could have gotten anywhere near him.”

  • • •

  January considered the matter through the rainy afternoon, between bouts of trying to capture some of Aristophanes’ absurd lyricism and frame the worst of that playwright’s jokes into something a publisher could print without fear of prosecution. Propped on his mound of pillows Hannibal slept, waxen and skeletal. Two or three times January produced his stethoscope from his desk drawer and listened to Hannibal’s chest. But though the faint, wheezy rattle of consumption was always present, there was no sign of pneumonia, which given Hannibal’s general state of health would almost certainly finish him. Useless to hope, however, that the fiddler would be in shape to make inquiries in the Swamp concerning the double life of Lucinda Coughlin anytime soon.

  But to go into the Swamp himself would mean death. January thought he had glimpsed Nash within the French town, watching him, and had begun to fancy that the market-women crossed over Rue Royale when they saw him coming. Shaw might possibly help him, but there had been no word from Shaw.

  Far off a steamboat moaned, down at the foot of Canal Street. Otherwise the world was silent, save for the silvery voice of the rain. The downpour ended at sunset, and heat and blue twilight deepened in the room, and he went and dragged the mattress of his bed from his own room into a corner of Hannibal’s, then went back and brought the mosquito-bar as well. Useless, maybe. The fiddler was too far gone now to provide him with anything in the way of protection. But January had dreamed last night of the demon Omulu, and of red eyes watching him from within a sheep skull clotted with dry blood and ants. Waking, he had had to fight the desperate urge to tear mattress and pillows and bedding to pieces lest there be feathers in them twisted into the shape of a rooster or a cat. Lying in the darkness he had tried to think of all the places in the room where balls of black wax and graveyard dust might be secreted.