Graveyard Dust

by Barbara Hambly

  “Maman, don’t be like that.” Another man would have said it bracingly, or impatiently, or teasingly. Mathurin Jumon was coaxing, and behind the coaxing, just a hint of plea. This woman could hurt him still. As January’s mother could hurt him, if he let her. “You know I’d never.…”

  The pair passed inside. January returned to the gallery. A few minutes later the butler hurried through and out to the kitchen, to return with a tea tray: fresh white roses in a silver vase. “I gave Michie Jumon your note, sir, but no telling how long they’ll be having tea before M’am goes up.”

  They have arrested Dr. Yellowjack. Mathurin had sold everything he could to raise money to keep Lucinda Coughlin and her partner silent—including a woman he was “fond of,” Zoë. Yet he remained at his mother’s side, drinking tea, until she was ready to let him go.

  It was midnight when the rear door of the house opened, and Mathurin Jumon stepped out.

  “Monsieur Janvier.”

  His face was an old man’s. Dead, lined with exhaustion and defeat and despair. A fighter driven to his knees and looking at the spear. He held out a gloved hand as January rose.

  “Please sit down.” He brought up another wicker chair for himself. “I trust Télémaque made you comfortable?”

  “Very. Yes, sir.”

  They sat in silence for a moment, face-to-face, the candles burning between, above the black-covered volume of Hamlet.

  “Did you know it was me,” said January at last, “whom Killdevil Ned was hired to kill?”

  Jumon sighed. “I—I guessed. I saw him near the cemetery, on the day of Isaak’s funeral. And I saw you there. I didn’t—I didn’t know for certain. Only that I was to take money to the Flesh and Blood and give it to him. But there was no one else at the funeral who—who was connected with—with the voodoos.”

  “Then it was Yellowjack who told you what to do.”

  Jumon looked a little surprised. “Of course. Who else? …”

  “I thought maybe Madame Coughlin.”

  In candlelight even the most ashen pallor will appear rosy, but horror flared in the big man’s eyes. “Madame—Madame Coughlin? …” He half-rose, then put a hand on the table’s edge to steady himself, and sank again into his chair.

  January took the carved horse from his pocket, and laid it on the black-bound book. “Your nephew met both Abigail and Lucinda Coughlin at the house of Dr. Yellowjack on St. John’s Eve,” he said. “Isaak was coming to you to tell you the child was in danger.…”

  “Abigail?” Jumon’s voice was barely a whisper. “Abi … she was alive?” His voice stumbled, fumbling for words. “Well? What evening …St. John’s Eve?” His hands trembled, and looking at his eyes, January understood then that Lucinda Coughlin had not been Jumon’s mistress.

  Only his procuress.

  There was no way he could keep that realization out of his face.

  “Dear God.” The big man shut his eyes. “Dear God.” His words came out like a confession wrung through the tightening of an Inquisitorial garrote. “They—told me—she died. That she … That I …”

  January was silent, filled with such a rush of comprehension, of enlightenment and revulsion and rage, that he could not sort what he felt into words.

  Dr. Yellowjack will get anything a man wants.

  Mademoiselle Coughlin would not be joining us after all …

  The little horse lying on the table in the firelight.

  And Antoine Jumon, hands trembling as he reached for the square black bottle of the only forgetfulness he could find. Eyes defeated as he whispered, He’s clever with investments; and the look in his mother’s face. My uncle Mathurin is a consummately evil man, M’sieu.

  Antoine is … fanciful.…

  January closed his fist very hard under the table, understanding why Geneviève had severed her ties with a protector who would have supported her for life.

  Jumon was weeping, mouth pulled into a shape that no human mouth was meant to assume, struggling for silence as a drowning man struggles for breath. It was this that caused January to stay.

  “Isaak is alive, you know,” he said, more gently than he had thought he was going to speak. “He came to your house in town that night. Zoë thought he had the cholera and was so fearful of what your mother would say …”

  “Oh, dear God.” At the mention of his mother, January thought that the white man flinched.

  “Zoë got a cab, we think, and fetched Antoine to be with him,” continued January. “And cared for him in the empty shop until, as she thought, he died. Then she took his body away, probably using one of the wheelbarrows left by the movers. She may have tried to dump the body in the canal, or near the cemeteries; he was found by a couple on Basin Street just outside the Old Cemetery wall. They nursed him through the effects of the poisoning and the pneumonia he took that night from lying in the wet. Either Lucinda Coughlin or Dr. Yellowjack must have feared that Isaak might have reached his wife that night. Might have gotten word to her, or asked her to get word to you about Lucinda Coughlin being at Yellowjack’s house.…”

  “Yellowjack.” Mathurin raised his head, and carefully blotted his eyes with a handkerchief of spotless linen. “It was Yellowjack. Madame Coughlin isn’t—that is, I didn’t think her very intelligent, but now I realize I don’t know her, never knew her.” He carefully refolded the linen, tucked it in his breast pocket, giving his whole attention to it so as to avoid January’s eyes. “But Yellowjack …” His breath expelled in a whisper, like a bitter laugh or a sob.

  “I don’t know if you can understand,” he said after a time. “Well, that’s a foolish thing to say, because I know you can’t understand—and I think I should be hard-put to keep from doing violence to any man who could understand. Who could do the things that I have done. I don’t understand.”

  He raised his head, meeting January’s eyes, and in the bloodshot irises, the broken veins that laced the man’s nose, January saw the reflection of Antoine’s Black Drop and Smyrna nepenthe. “I have tried—all my life I have tried to … to love normally. To love women. Or even young men. But every time I’d find myself … incapable. And telling myself that twelve wasn’t really so different from fourteen. The girls on the levee, or down by the basin, do start at that age, you know, and younger. And ten wasn’t really so different from twelve. I am an evil man, I know that, but I did try to atone. I always paid the children money they didn’t have to show to Yellowjack, or to their parents if they had them.”

  “So you got them from Yellowjack?”

  Jumon nodded. “He is—a devil. Looking back now I see he must have set it up from the start. With the Coughlin woman, that is, and … and Abigail. Not that he appeared to have a thing to do with either of them. Madame Coughlin came to me with impeccable letters of introduction, purporting to be newly widowed and desperately in need of assistance. I said I would do what I could for her, and that evening, about sunset, the child Abigail came—with some story about how she’d slipped away while her mother was resting—and pleaded with me to help her mother.…”

  His eyes, his hands squeezed shut, thrusting the memory away. Or reliving it? January thought about Gabriel, and Chouchou. White man or not, he thought, I would have killed him, if I had known this, and he had come near them. Killed him and taken the consequences.

  “God knows how I found the self-control to send her back home untouched,” whispered Mathurin. “Because I did. She was so obviously sheltered, so obviously loved. What a jape! Because of course that only made me want her, which they must have known. And every time Madame Coughlin would come to my office, so that ways and means could be found for her to support herself, the child was always with her, asking to sit on my knee, calling me her favorite uncle and her dearest bel-ami. Have you seen her? Beautiful as an angel, sweet as cherries in cream.”

  January remembered the woman in the dimness of the Cathedral, the beautiful girl-child peeping around the side of her skirts. It has to work. “Yes,” he said
softly. “I’ve seen her.”

  Jumon’s finger traced the flying caparisons of the dainty little horse, caressed the curlicues of mane. He did not look up. “And I dreamed of her at night,” he went on, his voice almost a whisper. “Even now, much as I know that what I do is evil, I cannot feel that it is …so very bad. At least not while I’m doing it. I see in your face how this disgusts you, but please believe that never at any time did I … did I want to be this way.”

  “Did Laurence know?”

  Jumon shivered. For an eternity he did not reply, and into January’s mind came that dark little cupboard below the roof-slates of the house on Rue St. Louis, the makeshift bonds and gags crusted with blood decades old.

  “Laurence and I,” said Jumon slowly, “went through … a great deal together, when we were children. Mother …” He couldn’t finish. Only sat looking out into the darkness beyond the gallery railing, where even the lights of the kitchen had been quenched. One candle burned in the quarters above. January wondered which of the slaves would be awake so late, reading a newspaper, maybe, or mending a shirt.

  Then Jumon shook his head, and said again, “Mother,” in a soft defeated voice, as if that explained something, at least to his own heart.

  He drew in his breath again, and let it go in a sigh. “I’m sorry,” he said. “My brother … Laurence may have known. We never spoke about it. Once we were adults we never spoke of … certain things. And now that I think about it, it may be that Dr. Yellowjack held off putting his little scheme in train until after Laurence … died.”

  Because Laurence would have been more capable of scenting a fraud? wondered January. Or because after his death you were lonelier than before? Robbed of the one who had been your companion in that bleak black prison-room upstairs, your only champion against the lover-demon of your childhood whose portrait still decorates every room in your house?

  We live not how we wish to, but how we can.

  “In any case,” said Jumon, “it’s clear that Yellowjack has been behind this … this fraud … all along, pulling the strings like a puppeteer. He got opium for me, and arranged for me to bring the child to his house by the bayou.”

  “And when you were there,” said January slowly, “something went wrong.”

  Jumon nodded. “The child must be a … a consummate actress. I …” He shook his head, shivering at the memory. “He asked for money, to cover things up. I gave it to him and he asked for more. You say—you say Isaak saw her on the night of the twenty-third?”

  January inclined his head, thinking, What of those who weren’t ‘consummate actresses’? What of those for whom you weren’t a pigeon for plucking, but just the latest man their pimps made them pull up their skirts for? He thought of Gabriel again and felt sick.

  “And—my nephew is alive?”

  “Yes. When he recovered from the pneumonia he communicated with Yellowjack, who evidently told him he’d be able to get his mother’s order of distrainment canceled. Weber—the man who found him—was a doctor in Germany; another poisoning, there where he could see its onset and effects, could not have been passed off. Isaak went out to Bayou St. John Thursday night—he’s lucky he was still alive when Madame Laveau and I arrived the next day, seeking my nephew.”

  “He’s well?” There was a note of wistfulness in the man’s voice.

  “Yes. Thin and exhausted, but well. He—was at a loss,” January went on carefully, “—as to why Mademoiselle Coughlin and her mother were in that place. He knew they were protégées of yours, but evidently he knew them only in their …respectable incarnations. And he knew nothing to your discredit.” He couldn’t have said why he tried not to hurt this big, clumsy man, who could love neither women nor men. Crippled from childhood by a woman who could find no other way to deal with her own terrors but to bind everything in her power, tighter and tighter, until they could not escape her control …

  Jumon sighed. “Thank you for that discretion. Could I have had a son, I would have wanted him to be Isaak. Laurence was lucky there. Though God knows neither of us was ever very lucky with women. But of course if I’d had a son I’d have made a—a horror of raising him.”

  January was silent.

  What were the first causes of wretchedness like this? he wondered. Maybe Isaak was right, to cut through the bloodied iron bands of the past and say, You are still my father. You are still my uncle. I understand that you could not help what you did to my brother, my mother.… Forgiveness is stronger than the graveyard dust of the past.

  For Isaak it was, maybe, not knowing that his uncle’s sins had gone far beyond Antoine. January knew that even had he himself been so ignorant in similar circumstances, it would have been beyond him.

  He said, “Yellowjack was arrested yesterday, for kidnapping and attempting to murder my nephew and yours. It’s only a matter of time, I think, until they find Madame Coughlin—she left New Orleans the day after Madame Célie’s arrest. Once the City Guards start looking it will be easy to trace him as the man who hired Nash. You can do what you want about that, but Nash badly wounded a man in mistake for me, a young man named Pedro Lachaise, who had a mother and sisters to support.”

  “Dear God.” Jumon passed a hand over his face. “I seem to have done nothing but ill.” His jaw tightened. “I will make it good. I hope you believe me.” He looked up at January, who said nothing. “I never set out to do wrong. That is …” He hesitated. “I suppose I never set out to do anything. I have heard that … that Monsieur Gérard was arrested as well over an altercation.…”

  “I’ve spoken to Judge Canonge about that,” said January. “He agrees that in view of the mitigating circumstances the penalty can be commuted to a fine.”

  Jumon nodded. For another few minutes he sat quietly, his head in his hands, the candleflame glowing over the strong coarse fingers, the warm gold of his simple rings. The light in the quarters across the yard had been put out. In the trees the cicadas kept up their eerie throbbing cry, the frogs peeping a heavy bass-note line. By the stars, visible above the dark loom of the trees, it was very late, and morning would come soon, bringing with it all the matters of the day: justice, and movement, and the unveiling of the lethal secrets of the past.

  Now was still the time of the loa, and dreams; stillness, and the dead, who see things differently from the living.

  Jumon sighed. “Have you a place to stay for the remainder of the night, M’sieu Janvier? I doubt any boats are returning across the lake until daybreak and I understand that summer is not a good time for musicians. And I feel I owe you something for having warned me, in spite of all. If you have concerns about spending the night under the roof of a man who paid to have you killed, I understand them, and I’ll gladly foot the bill at a lodging house of your choice.”

  “My sister would call me a fool,” said January. “Mamzelle Marie as well, maybe. But I trust you.”

  Mathurin Jumon smiled, suddenly and with surprising sweetness, and stretched out his hand for the bell.

  TWENTY - FIVE

  Mathurin Jumon walked with January down to the wharves first thing in the morning and paid his fee on the ferry; he stood waving on the dock as the flat-bottomed craft pulled away. Only later did January realize why the man performed this courtesy. Over a dozen people would afterward attest that Jumon had been alive and well when January left Mandeville. Returning home, Cordelia Jumon’s surviving son put the barrel of one of his English dueling pistols into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  On the desk in his study his mother’s footman found a holograph will leaving the sum of five hundred dollars to Pedro Lachaise’s mother and sisters, with a further twelve hundred left in trust to Benjamin January to locate, purchase, and free Zoë Jumon. To Antoine Jumon, he left two thousand dollars in a trust to be administered by Isaak Jumon; to Isaak and Célie, three thousand, with the stipulation that if the said Isaak, or the said Antoine, were claimed as property by anyone, all the money would go to Célie absolutely. And to Benjamin Ja
nuary, Jumon left a rustic-ware platter and ewer wrought in the shape of seashells and crayfish, the work of Bernard Palissy.

  Everything else of which he died possessed he willed to his mother, who did not attend his funeral.

  January attended it, with Isaak and Célie. Black-bordered postings had been put up, not only in the city itself but in Milneburgh and Mandeville and Spanish Fort. A handful of the wealthy Creole businessmen who had taken refuge there for the summer appeared, sufficient at least to carry the coffin and to absorb some of the terrible echoing silence of the mortuary chapel as the priest read out the words of the service. Though not more than a dozen cases of yellow fever had occurred after the end of June, the graveyard was ringed with burning smudges, the stink of gunpowder and burning hooves almost drowning the charnel stench.

  “Seven hundred and fifty dollars, Mathurin Jumon paid me to carve a trophy of arms for his brother,” Basile Nogent said, coming out of the chapel’s rear door beside January and watching the slim black-clothed pair follow the coffin at a respectful distance toward the oven tombs let into the cemetery wall. Afternoon sun hammered the sheets of standing water left by that morning’s rain. Crayfish crept along their verges, making January remember with a shiver the young man entombed behind the slab from which Isaak Jumon’s name had not even been eradicated yet. “Now the mother sends us word—in a letter from her solicitor, no less, as though Isaak were no kin of hers—saying just to add Mathurin’s name to the block. A hard woman.” He shook his head. “A hard woman.”

  January remembered the strips of blood-crusted sheet in the dark of the attic, the small circumference of the cut bonds. A child’s head. A child’s wrists. Maybe two children. Laurence, at least, when grown, had been able to take a mistress, and father children of his own, even if in the test he had sided against them—had sided with the man who had been his partner in that childhood nightmare of terror and adoration. January watched Nogent walk away, but did not join him. Since his childhood, he had never felt comfortable about funerals in the daylight.