Footsteps crunched on the shells of the bridge. The rope still dangled from Gabriel’s neck and his hands were still bound but he wasn’t limping. In fact he walked with his usual jaunty stride.
“The Grand Zombi’s her friend,” said the boy, without a trace of the pitiful agony that had rent his voice only two minutes before. Without a trace of surprise, either. “ ’Course all the snakes in the bayou would go after Yellowjack, once she told them to. He was really stupid to try and swim.”
TWENTY - FOUR
Judge Canonge was not best pleased, after a day in the courtroom hearing all those cases left behind by ill or absconding colleagues, to be summoned from his own packing yet again to the Cabildo. Nevertheless, half an hour after Constable LaBranche left the watch room where January, Mamzelle Marie, Gabriel, and Isaak waited, the deep golden voice could be heard through the open doors in the arcade:
“Ridiculous? Of course it’s ridiculous! If the man had had the sense God gave a goat he’d have seen there was something amiss in the confession.… What have we here?” The Judge squinted around the grimy semidark of the watch room, then touched his hat brim. “Madame Pâris.”
Mamzelle Marie nodded like a queen.
“Your Honor.” The young man got shakily to his feet, aided by the stick January had cut for him out by the bayou. “My name is Isaak Jumon. I understand you have convicted my wife, and this man’s sister”—he gestured to January—“of my murder.”
The Judge’s dark eyes flicked from Isaak’s face to January’s, and he remarked, “You again.” He looked back at the young marble carver. “You look like you’ve been buried, anyway. Sit down, for God’s sake. LaBranche, get this boy some brandy. I never liked that jiggery-pokery with your brother and his mysterious carriage rides in the middle of the night. And I understand some poor bastard has been buried under your name. Where have you been?”
“In the care of a good couple named Weber.” Jumon glanced self-consciously around him at the various Guards in the room, then sipped from the glass he’d been handed. “Germans, who spoke no English. They feared moreover they would be sent back to Bavaria if they spoke of my presence in their house. They found me, soaked to the skin and dying, close by the gates of the Old Cemetery, and took me in, though they believed me to be stricken with the cholera.”
“Weber worked with me at Charity early in the month,” January explained. He had not been asked to sit, and though his head had cleared considerably with the walk back to town he felt weak and a little shaky, and still half-expected to see snakes moving in the corners when he wasn’t paying attention. “Members of the City Council were at pains to impress upon all of us there that there was no epidemic, and especially that no mention was to be made of cholera.”
“That idiot Bouille,” said Canonge. “As if the pilots of every steamboat on the river don’t carry the news. Though with that imbecile Blodgett giving cry in the newspapers I don’t blame the Council for acting like a parcel of ninnies. They’d arrest the Samaritan on the road from Jericho for operating an unlicensed hack service, belike. I take it,” he added, studying Isaak’s drawn face and emaciated shoulders by the glare of the oil lamp in its bracket above, “that cholera wasn’t your problem.”
Jumon shook his head. “As it happened, I had nursed Monsieur Nogent’s wife during the cholera the summer before last. I know the symptoms, and I knew that, similar as my own were, I had been poisoned, I think with arsenic. I was lucky to survive.”
“Do you know who administered the arsenic?”
Jumon was silent for a time. “I think now that it has to have been Dr. Yellowjack. At the time—and I am ashamed to say it—I thought that it was through some agency of my mother’s. I was—I was upset, and very frightened, and I thought all sorts of things about her that cannot have been true. I went to Dr. Yellowjack’s house, you understand, to ask his help against her.…”
“Thus putting yourself remarkably in accord with your good wife as to the proper way of dealing with the lady,” remarked Canonge grimly. “Far be it from me to speak ill of a man’s mother to his face, but Madame Jumon makes Lady Macbeth appear doting by comparison, and amateurish to boot.”
January stepped unobtrusively back to Abishag Shaw’s desk, and leaned his weight on the corner of it, his knees abruptly weak. His body ached and although the mere thought of food was nauseating, he felt overwhelmed with a desperate craving for sweets. The air in the watch room felt stifling, like a dirty liquid in his lungs and throat, and he wondered if the hallucinations were returning. Everything seemed suddenly distant, like a Rembrandt painting—the Judge’s craggy face in lamplight and shadow, the straggling curls of Jumon’s hair, the buttons on Gabriel’s shirt.
“I was naturally appalled—horrified—to see poor young Madame Coughlin in such a place,” Jumon was saying. “And her daughter, too. She told me she had come there only to ask Dr. Yellowjack’s help. I had not imagined she could be so superstitious as to believe that his potions and gris-gris would ‘change her luck,’ as she said. She swore that she was perfectly safe, but the more I thought of it, the more uneasy I became. I begged her to do nothing foolish, or without consulting my uncle.…”
Jumon’s voice retreated from January’s mind, distancing itself, like the disconnected images of lamplight and blackness. “… began to rain as I made my way toward my uncle’s house … feared more than anything that that poor woman would be lured or forced into something which would cut her off utterly from the help of decent people.… Innocent child.…”
Innocent indeed.
“The symptoms struck me halfway there. I guessed at once what they were, from the metallic taste in my mouth, and from all I had heard of the voodoos. Had not Zoë been in the shop itself, sweeping up for my grandmother’s new tenants, I doubt anyone within the courtyard would have heard me, for I did not have the strength to turn the gate key. I’m afraid I don’t remember much, Your Honor, but I know that twice or three times she went out into the carriageway and listened, fearing that Grandmother would have heard something.”
January listened with only a fragment of his mind to Jumon’s account of Antoine’s visit, reeling drunk on opium; of Zoë’s growing panic and terror about what Grand-mère Jumon would do if she found her son’s slave had admitted a man sick with the cholera to her home; of the bout of pneumonia that had kept Isaak bedfast and delirious for weeks after the Webers found him.
“As soon as I was a little recovered I sent a message to Dr. Yellowjack,” Isaak was saying. “He replied that I must come to him at once, without notifying my wife or anyone else of my whereabouts. There must have been some evil going on at Yellowjack’s house of which I was ignorant, for on my arrival I was overpowered—he had a gun, but he could have done it bare-handed, as weak as I was—and imprisoned in the attic, with this young man here.” He nodded to Gabriel with a smile.
“That old man was snake-bit pretty bad,” put in LaBranche. “That was smart work on January’s part.…” He looked around for January, spotted him in the gloom by the wall, and nodded in his direction. “The sawbones here says January, and Mamzelle—er—M’am Laveau—sure enough saved his life. Yellowjack’s one tough old nigger and that’s for sure. His lawyer, he says. He wants to see his lawyer.”
“I still don’t understand what part the man played in the villainy.” Young Jumon rubbed one thin hand over his face. “Unless—no harm came to poor Madame Coughlin, surely? Or to Mademoiselle Abigail?”
January said, “As far as I know, they’re well.” Canonge glanced over at him, as if he heard something in the quickness of that reply, but held his peace.
“He gave you food at the voodoo dance, then.”
Isaak nodded. “He was one of half a dozen, really, sir. I gather there’s always food at the dances. Mostly coarse fare, like congris and rice, or pralines, or sugar in the cane. Everyone seemed to be—”
“Isaak!”
Célie broke from between the Guards who had escorted her in,
and threw herself into her husband’s arms. “Isaak! Oh, God, oh, God! …”
The Guards released Olympe at the same time. She caught her son in her arms, holding him in tight ferocious silence, head bent over his. She breathed in, once, like the tearing loose of the foundations of her soul.
“Célie!” cried Isaak desperately, and clutched his wife close.
“I’m all right.” Gabriel’s voice was muffled by the circle of his mother’s arms. “I wasn’t scared. I knew Uncle Ben would come get me.”
January shut his eyes, and couldn’t help himself. He laughed.
At Olympe’s house, later that night, he ate grits and syrup—the only things he wanted or could stomach—and slept for an hour or two on a truckle bed they rolled out for him in the children’s room. But while dark still lay on the city he rose and made his way to the turning basin in quest of Natchez Jim. The bargees said Jim had gone downriver for wood, so January walked out along the Bayou Road, five miles through the insect-drumming scorch of the morning to Spanish Fort. There he inquired around the wharves for a skiff bound for Mandeville, and hired himself to help load and unload crates of champagne in trade for passage across the lake. His back and arms still hurt, and he knew he’d be stiff that night, but it was good beyond words to be able to do the work.
The power of the voodoos—of Mamzelle Marie, and John Bayou, and all the great ones of New Orleans—lay in secrets. January had seen how the nets of their intelligence lay like spiderweb over the town; had seen the look in Vachel Corcet’s eyes, when the lawyer had offered his unwilling services to Olympe. To a greater or lesser extent, everyone played with secrets: his mother, Dominique, Madeleine Mayerling, his mother’s gossiping friends.… Traded them like counters in a game of loo.
Shaw would be returning to town within a day or so. Dr. Yellowjack would be questioned before that, and would almost certainly tell where Lucinda Coughlin could be found.
And if I’m wrong about who was whose cat’s-paw in this, thought January grimly, I’m sure Olympe will see to it that my tombstone reads, What an Idiot.
But once a secret was out, there was never any calling it back.
So he helped load crates in the blazing heat and sat in the stern while the boat’s owner set and plied the sails across the flat steely waters. January had brought bread and honey and cheese from Olympe’s house, but the boatman shared sausage and rice with him, and they talked of this and that—the boatman’s white father had given him the craft, and set him up in the business, rather than pay for an education he would have been hard put to find a use for. January wasn’t so sure that this wasn’t a better course. In all of his life he’d made more money as a musician than as a surgeon. Yet he felt a kind of tired anger, insofar as he was capable just then of feeling anything, that this should be so.
In Mandeville they unloaded, and on the boatman’s advice January sought out a grocery in town run by a woman of color. She let him bathe and change clothes in her shed. The long twilight was just beginning when he made his way, clothed in black coat and top hat and the respectability of the free colored, to the Jumon house.
An old house, perched like so many Creole houses on six-foot piers of brick and built in the shape of a U to trap the breezes from the lake. Gardens surrounded it, box hedges and topiary snipped neat as masonry walls. French doors and brisés stood open to show the honeyed candlelight within. January went around to the back and sent in his card with a boy who was scrubbing vegetables in the loggia by the kitchen. In time the graying butler who had admitted him to the town house came down the back steps.
“Monsieur Jumon is out for the evening, M’sieu.” The butler inclined his head politely, but despite his calm he had a nervous look to him. As anyone would, thought January, whose master was selling up. “I doubt he will return before eleven.”
“I’ll wait, if it’s all right,” he replied. “I think he’ll want to speak with me.”
The butler brought paper and pen to the enclosed rear gallery, and a branch of candles, for the garden trees blocked out much of the fading evening light. January wrote,
Monsieur Jumon—
Please excuse this intrusion, and my rudeness in calling on you at such an hour, but the matter is one of gravest importance. Dr. Yellowjack has been arrested. I will await your convenience.
Benjamin Janvier
The butler brought him lemonade and, a little later, congris with bits of ham neatly arranged around it, which led January to deduce that whoever else had been sold off, Zeus still reigned in the kitchen. It was obvious to him that the household had been reduced: The same woman who stood at the table just outside the laundry room pressing napkins later fetched water from the cistern for the cook to soak red beans, and when the sun went down, January could see that there were only the two of them in the kitchen, which was lit from within by candles and the glow of the hearth.
A viper in her bosom, an adder, a beast who was always selfish.… Just how much had Mathurin Jumon told his mother, of why he had to sell those few servants who were his and not those of the family? Always cruel to her, always delighted in hurting her.…
Mathurin hastening from the room to assuage her pique. “Now, Mama.…”
Had Madame Cordelia become reconciled? Or was she still treating her son with frozen politeness tempered by martyred courage?
What could Mathurin possibly have given or promised or written to a woman like Lucinda Coughlin that would give her power to make him cross his mother’s wishes? Zoë’s sale argued a fearful desperation. Reaching into his coat pocket, January brought out the carved horse that had lain on the table in Dr. Yellowjack’s house. He turned it to the candles, admiring again the carved roses in its mane and tail—no bigger than the straw flowers on Jumon’s prized Palissy plates—and the flare of the little hooves. Of course the child would keep it with her.
The butler crossed through the gallery and out to the kitchen, to return a few minutes later with smudges against the mosquitoes, and a cup of chicory coffee. “You comfortable here, sir?”
January nodded. “Perfectly, thank you,” he answered. “Might I trouble you for a few more candles, to read while I wait? Kitchen candles will do.”
The butler smiled, relieved. “No trouble about that, sir. Kitchen candles is all I could let you have, Michie Jumon having gotten particular about economy, at least where it doesn’t show. He even burns tallow in his study now, and his room, or else burns the ends of Madame’s beeswax.” He shook his head. “Madame never will have any but the best beeswax, and fresh every day: forty candles in her bedroom and a hundred in the drawing room, whether she has company or not. They’re burning there tonight as we speak, sir, same as always, and both of them away at Madame St. Chinian’s for supper.”
“Sounds like your Madame won’t have any but the best,” January remarked, when the butler returned with two more branches of candles, and a packet of half-burned tallow work lights wrapped in a newspaper.
“Why, no, sir.” The butler kindled the dozen or so wicks in a strong odor of sheep fat. “That’s natural, her being the daughter of a French Count, and raised in the palace of the old Kings, and maid-in-waiting to the old Queen. Why, even with Michie Mathurin having to sell up—his valet, and the woman that kept his books in order, and even the housekeeper he was …well, Michie Mathurin was fond of—he wouldn’t even ask Madame if she could spare any of her servants. That’s Madame’s way.”
Something changed in the man’s eyes: old knowledge, old stories. January folded his hands and looked fascinated, which indeed he was.
“Madame is—a hard woman in some ways,” the servant said. “You wouldn’t think it to look at her, sir. Like a little china doll. But my daddy, who was butler to her back when M’am Cordelia first married Michie Hercule, he told me things of the way she treated the fieldhands out on Trianon Plantation that would make your hair stand up on end. Michie Laurence was terrified of her up till the day he died, and him a grown man fifty years old.”
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His fingers, rough-skinned from years of lending a hand with cleaning and swollen with arthritis, rested lightly on the ornate bronze candle holder: pseudo-Egyptian, January saw, like all the expensive and outmoded crocodile-footed furniture now consigned to Cordelia Jumon’s attic.
“Poor M’am Noëmie, that was Michie Laurence’s wife, she just got quieter and quieter every day, until she left—and even then she waited till M’am Cordelia was gone from home. Michie Laurence gave her the money for her passage, and I don’t think his mother ever forgave him that. If you ask me, sir, Michie Mathurin still is afraid of her, for all he’s always leaving flowers in her room and buying her gowns and diamonds and new sets of dishes every time a boat comes in from France.”
January watched thoughtfully as the small, dapper man made his way back into the house. Then from his grip, which he had stowed on the floor at his feet, he brought out the octavo edition of Hamlet he’d brought with him to read:
Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseaméd bed,
Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty—
And every word of it Hamlet’s rage at the mother who had betrayed him by loving another than he.
The room in the attic returned to his mind. The blood on the sheets.
He was still reading when the clatter of hooves rang on the pavement of the carriageway, and a harness jangled in the dark. Rising, he descended the gallery steps, circled the corner of the house to watch them step to the block: Mathurin in the black of mourning, white shirtfront shiny as marble in the lights held aloft by the butler; Madame frail and exquisite in black satin du Barry, cut at the height of Paris fashion. More like a mistress, January thought, than a mother. The diamonds of her bracelet glittered outside the sable gloves. “You can go back if you wish,” he heard her say. “I’ll manage here somehow alone.”
Graveyard Dust Page 35
