Graveyard Dust

by Barbara Hambly

  Some part of him, he thought, would never recover from that. Some part of him would always be trapped in that moment, like a ghost returning to repeat endlessly one single action in the same corner of the same house forever: opening the door and finding her. Opening the door and finding her.

  “Where’ve you been?” Corcet was waiting in the shadows of the Presbytère arcade, with Monsieur Gérard and Madame Célie. Shadows lengthened over the Place d’Armes. The fruit vendors had packed up their stands hours ago; the tables outside Bernadette Metoyer’s chocolate shop stood half-deserted, moths dancing around the candles scattered on their tops. A few colored children played marbles in the dirt under the sycamore trees, and someone in the market café near the levee yelled obscenities at a woman who walked away from him. A little farther along the arcade January could see Hubert Granville, chubby and red-faced and sweating in his coat of gray superfine wool, deep in conversation with Geneviève Jumon. Antoine, nearby, fidgeted. January wondered if he’d had his opium for the day.

  “Monsieur Corbier hasn’t arrived,” Corcet went on. “He’s in town, I met him at the levee this afternoon.… Perhaps when this is over we’d better go there and see if they’re all right. The fever takes one so suddenly.”

  January thought of Hannibal, lying still and spent in the darkening quarters above the kitchen, and shivered again. “If someone had been taken sick there, one of the children would have left me a note,” he said. But he spoke without much conviction. He’d been too many times in the hospital when whole families had been brought in, parents, children, grandparents, and maiden aunts together, dead or dying.

  Cholera, he thought, a whisper at the back of his mind. Cholera.

  Please, God, no. Not again. Not them.

  “Let’s get through this first.”

  Two of the jurymen were absent. “God bless it, I never signed on for this!” roared Mr. Shotwell, and Judge Canonge snapped back from the bench.

  “You signed on for whatever takes place in the Court, Mr. Shotwell, during the term of your duties. Bailiff, call in replacements from the jury room.”

  “It’s enough to make you catch the fever yourself,” the saloonkeeper grumbled, and uncorked his flask.

  “I spoke to the men with whom Isaak Jumon stayed between the twenty-first and the twenty-third of June,” whispered January, while the new jurymen were filing in and a city lamplighter kindled the oil sconces around the courtroom’s walls. “Maroons, runaways, hiding in the ciprière, no one who could testify in court. They say Jumon went to a voodoo dance the night of the twenty-third, at Dr. Yellowjack’s. Is it possible to subpoena him?”

  “Yellowjack?” breathed Corcet back. “And get what? Anything resembling the truth? Anything that would clear your sister of poisoning Isaak Jumon, or selling Célie the poison to do so? Yellowjack has his finger in so much crime his testimony would be likelier to hang Olympe than get her released.”

  … said he was going to head on back to town, to see his wife.

  Célie, Isaak had whispered. And died.

  January glanced at the slender girl sitting by her father, chin raised, face a porcelain mask. He started to speak but a wave of nausea gripped him. Damn it, he thought, as he rose and stumbled from the courtroom, Damn it!

  No one noticed him as he fell to his knees and vomited in the gutter outside. Sweating, shaking, he leaned against the brick pillar of the arcade, cold terror gripping his heart. Not the cholera. After all this, not the cholera.…

  He’d been gone all day, all yesterday and the day before. If Ker had sent him a message asking for his help at the hospital he might not have received it. Certainly if there were cholera cases being brought in, the Englishman wouldn’t have said so in a note. But surely he’d have sent one saying, Come in?

  And what if Ker had? he thought. Would he have seen it? How often had he been in the kitchen in the past three days? Or in the house? He hadn’t entered his room in daylight in forty-eight hours, except to pelt in, change his clothes, dash out again. The whole town could be vomiting and purging its heart out and he wouldn’t know.

  Shakily, he climbed to his feet again and made his way back to the courtroom. He felt better for being sick—it might, he thought, merely be bad food of some kind, though as a rule a sausage or a bit of chicken that had gone off didn’t affect him. As a slave child he’d learned to eat anything.

  Olympe looked up as he came into the courtroom. She’d been brought in while he was out, and sat with her manacled hands in her lap. Her face was expressionless, but he could tell, by the way she turned her head, that she’d been hoping when the door opened to see Paul. A glance told him that Corbier was still not in the room.

  Not them. Not them.

  He took his seat. Olympe closed her eyes, breathing hard. Her face was a mask; and it came to him that if there was cholera in the city, it might have begun in the jail as well. He hadn’t seen her, spoken to her, in three days. In the flare and smut of the oil lamps she seemed to have aged years.

  Hubert Granville was up at the front of the court, speaking quietly to Greenaway. His gesture took in the two women seated in the front row, Irish or German by the look of them. Corcet whispered, “Two of his witnesses haven’t shown up. Marie-Noël Sauvignon and the Louche woman.”

  January glanced across at the door, where Mamzelle Marie stood framed. Clothed in a dress of plain black wool made high to her throat, her seven-pointed tignon white as a death-lily against the gloom behind her, she scanned the courtroom, dark eyes seeking out the remaining witnesses. One of them, sandy-haired and freckled, met her gaze with cold defiance. The prettier one flushed, and looked hastily away. Greenaway walked to them protectively, but Mamzelle Marie had already moved to take a seat, her face the face of a woman who has never seen a chicken foot in her life.

  In the back of his mind January heard Greenaway’s voice: Gentlemen of the jury, this woman Corbier is a voodoo, and accustomed to making threats against those who cross her.…

  He wondered if, like Dr. Yellowjack, Mamzelle Marie might have done her friend more harm than good.

  Abishag Shaw was still absent. Constable LaBranche, trying hard not to meet Mamzelle Marie’s gaze, had two clay pots and a candy tin on the table before him and didn’t look happy. The poisons, guessed January, they’d found in Olympe’s house.

  No sign yet of Paul. Rose entered with Basile Nogent, and caught January’s eye. Fortune Gérard took a seat beside January, almost as haggard as Olympe. The heat of the lamps was unbearable. January brought out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead, sweating though he felt strange and cold.

  There was a protracted argument, in English and in French, over the selection of jurors, while the jurymen passed around hip flasks and looked at their watches, and darkness slowly overtook the windows of the room.

  “It’s the damned aristocracy running this country, that’s what it is,” declaimed Shotwell in English, and passed his flask to Barnes. “And them Creoles are in with ’em, tryin’ to keep good men down.”

  “Seventy-six votes in Plaquemines Parish …”

  In the front row, Burton Blodgett scribbled away on his notepad, soulful dark eyes darting from Olympe’s face to Mamzelle Marie’s. He rose and staggered toward Miss McLeary and her companion, and Canonge rapped hard with his gavel and switched from French jury instructions to English: “Leave that till after the trial, Mr. Blodgett.”

  “The Constitution of the United States declares …”

  January’s attention shifted, as if beyond his own volition: “It’ll cost me ten dollars just to get the wagon painted up with my shop name,” juryman Quigley was saying, “plus the repairs to the harness.…”

  Juryman Seignoret looked at his watch. The Cathedral clock could be heard, striking nine.

  And wretches hang, that jurymen may dine, thought January, and wondered how many of those in the box today would disappear tomorrow: Leaving town on business, or coming down “sick” in order to abandon New Orleans
with its threat of coming plague. Only Olympe would be left, he thought, immured in the jail for the rest of the summer.…

  “Are you Célie Jumon?” The Bailiff rapped his staff.

  “I am.” She looked like St. Agnes, facing the wheel and the knife.

  “Célie Jumon, you stand accused of causing the death of your husband, Isaak Jumon, by poisoning.… All right, all right,” the Bailiff added impatiently, and translated into English. “Having paid one Madame Olympe Corbier to either administer or cause to be administered, or sell to you the wherewithal to administer, poison to your husband. How do you plead?”

  She lifted her chin, delicate and beautiful in her black gown and veil. “I am not guilty, sir.” And she remained haughtily silent while the man translated again.

  “Olympe Corbier, you stand accused of causing the death of one Isaak Jumon of this city by poisoning.…” He paused, then translated for the benefit of jurors Shotwell, Barnes, and Brennert. “Having been paid by one Madame Célie Jumon to administer or cause to be administered, or sell to her the wherewithal to administer, poison to the said Monsieur Jumon. How do you plead.”

  Olympe sighed, and stood up. There was defeat, and exhaustion, and an iron stillness in her face. “I plead guilty,” she replied, in a clear, carrying voice. “Célie Jumon paid me fifty dollars to put arsenic into her husband’s drink, when he came to see her that night. And this I did.”

  TWENTY - TWO

  Once when he was twelve January had gone down to the Armory on Rue St. Peter with Olympe and Nicolas Gignac, on the day soldiers brought in a new shipment of gunpowder. Olympe, at ten, was already experimenting with spells, and she’d dared the boys to come with her. Nic and January faked a fight to draw the men away while Olympe slipped forth and helped herself to about a cupful from the open barrel. As payment she’d given each boy a generous spoonful, and Nic had used his to make a sort of bomb that he’d thrown into a hornet’s nest—Nic had never been notable for his brains.

  January still remembered the roaring cloud of insects, the split-second violence, the frenzy of terror and confusion and rage.

  It all came to his mind now.

  Corcet was on his feet, shouting “Madame Corbier! Madame Corbier!” while Monsieur Gérard lunged up, flung himself at that erect, manacled figure in the dock. Célie, too, was standing, crying “No! No, it isn’t true!” and every juryman was giving tongue like six couple of hounds with a possum up a tree, gesturing and shouting with Mr. Shotwell’s voice rising above all others: “If you did it, why the tarnation didn’t you have the courtesy to say so three weeks ago?” Canonge slammed his gavel again and again, shouting for order and threatening to have the court cleared, while above all other sounds Olympe cried out, in a flat desperate voice, “I poisoned him. I poisoned him. Célie Jumon gave me fifty dollars and I poisoned him,” without change of expression, as if she were some kind of horrible clockwork toy.

  The Bailiff seized Gérard, dragged him back before he could reach Olympe. Other Guardsmen entered the courtroom, two of them pulling Olympe to her feet and another two closing in on Célie. The girl looked around her desperately, a deer ringed by hounds in a clearing; Gérard, seeing his daughter across the heads of the crowd, tried to force his way back to her but was held fast by the Guards, against whom he fought like a roped bull.

  “I poisoned him,” called out Olympe again, and someone in the jury box yelled, “Well, then, hang the bitch and let us out of here!”

  “Order! Order or I’ll have the court cleared!”

  Rose and Basile Nogent were trying to struggle forward, swimmers in a heavy sea. Blodgett had leapt up on a bench, and from this vantage point was scribbling wildly; Geneviève Jumon clutched Hubert Granville’s sleeve and poured out words unheard over the tempest.

  Mamzelle Marie had vanished.

  “Olympe!” January waded through the press around the dock, thrusting men aside unheeding of the pain in his shoulders and arms, and for an instant caught his sister’s arm.

  She turned, dark eyes blank as a stranger’s. “Don’t meddle with it, brother,” she said quietly.

  “Papa!” Célie’s scream drew January’s attention, as the girl was pulled away through the door; Fortune Gérard’s fist crashed into the jaw of the nearest Guardsman and the little man went down under a storm of clubs and blows. When January turned back, Olympe was gone. It took him some minutes to battle his way to the door. When he ran down the steps to the arcade it was to see Olympe and Célie led into the Cabildo. Célie turned desperately back as if she could catch a glimpse of what was taking place in the courtroom, but Olympe stared resolutely ahead of her, in the flare of the oil lamps, willing herself not to feel, not to know.

  January stood for a time, panting in the dark arcade. He felt numbed, blind, as if he’d been struck over the head—then he turned, and strode as fast as his long legs could carry him up Rue St. Pierre, and over to Rue Douane, to the yellow stucco house where his sister lived.

  The doors were closed, shuttered. The plank drawn up, which customarily led over the gutter from the banquette to the street. Traces of light burned in the jalousies of the front bedroom window. January pounded on the parlor shutters with his fist, and saw a shadow start and move behind the jalousies, but no one opened to him. He pounded again, harder, and called out “Paul! It’s me, Ben!” to a silence like that of a house stricken by plague. “Paul, open up! Let me in!”

  He went over and hammered on the bedroom shutters. “Paul, it’s Ben!”

  No sound. But the silence behind those shutters was pregnant with breath, furtive stirrings furtively stilled.

  January stood for a long time on the pavement. Hot black silence pressed the Rue Douane, darkness absolute but for the oil lamp on its chain above the intersection nearby. A dog barked. A few houses away, a baby wailed. What do I do now? What do I do?

  It was growing in his heart, why Olympe had lied. Why her husband had not appeared in court, why he would not now open the door. Cold knowledge and dread.

  No, he thought.

  Gabriel leaving the house last night. Crossing the yard in the lamplight, waving a jaunty good-bye at the gate into the passway that led to the street. You watch how you go, now.

  No.

  He closed his eyes. What do I do?

  “You got business out this late?”

  A City Guardsman stood at his elbow: blue uniform, brass buttons, cockade of black leather in his hat. Expression of wary neutrality.

  January drew a deep breath. The man’s only doing his job. “I’ve just come from being a witness at a court case at the Cabildo, sir. A special session convened by Judge Canonge on account of the crowding of the docket,” he added, as the man opened his mouth in disbelief that the courts would still be sitting at ten at night. “I was charged with a message for my brother-in-law here. I’m on my way home now, sir.”

  “Mind if I see your papers?”

  January produced them. The Guard held them up to the streetlamp’s flare to study the signature, which happened to be one of Hannibal’s better efforts.

  “Best you get along home, Mr. January.” The Guard handed them back with a mollified air. “It’s after ten.”

  “Yes, sir.” The man could arrest him, and that would be the doom of them all. “Thank you, sir.” January walked away from the house, shivering all over with anger, panic, dread.

  What do I do? What do I do?

  The chicken foot on the bed—a warning.

  Killdevil Ned Nash, paid off by a white man, a toff—who might not, January knew, even know why Lucinda Coughlin had said to him, “Go down to the Flesh and Blood and give Ned Nash two hundred dollars.”

  Never lets himself come into view.… Always uses a cat’s-paw.…

  That’s the way not to get caught.…

  Dr. Yellowjack, coming toward him through the swaying dancers with a plate of chickpeas in one hand, a cup of lemonade in the other. And the signet ring that appeared so mysteriously on Célie Jumo
n’s windowsill: He’d been a fool, to study paper and handwriting, to say, This is a trap and not think, The juju ball, the graveyard dust, appeared in my room the same way this appeared in Célie’s room.

  And he saw in his mind, whole and clear and suddenly, the blond woman, the angelic child, in the Cathedral the morning after Olympe’s arrest. It has to work, the woman had said, and January had thought then she’d spoken of a gris-gris. But she meant, he understood now, whatever leverage they were using to obtain money from Mathurin Jumon.

  What Yellowjack had given her that day had in all probability been steamboat tickets out of town, which she could not be seen to purchase herself for fear of being traced.

  The nuns won’t get me, the lovely child had asked, will they?

  Lucinda Coughlin was at Yellowjack’s on St. John’s Eve. The packed earth of the banquette along Rue des Ramparts thudded under his feet as his pace quickened. And Isaak saw her. Of course she’d told Yellowjack—of course Yellowjack would get rid of Isaak, lest the boy speak to his uncle. And, when, after consuming the poison, Isaak left the place—how? Why?—of course she’d tell Yellowjack get rid of Célie, too.

  The oily glare of the lamp above Rue Toulouse glimmered down the street as he passed over the sloppy intersection, the street close to his mother’s house. He passed it by, prayed he wouldn’t meet another Guard.

  A cat’s-paw … Mambo Oba. Someone who could deliver a warning, and a curse when the warning wasn’t heeded, and then drop out of sight, so that Mamzelle Marie wouldn’t recognize the hand of Dr. Yellowjack. That’s the way not to get caught.

  Mathurin Jumon, almost certainly turned into a cat’s-paw against himself.

  Candles burned behind the jalousies on Rue St. Anne. Mamzelle Marie’s daughter opened the door to him, tall already, beautiful already, with her mother’s secret ophidian eyes. “Maman hasn’t yet come home.”

  Damn it, thought January. Damn it, damn it. He thought about going to the Cabildo in search of her, but nearly an hour had passed. Mamzelle Marie would certainly be gone by this time, the cells all locked, Olympe beyond his reach. The Guards would only send him home, if the Guard he’d spoken to wasn’t there. If he was, January stood a good chance of a night in the cells.