03 Graveyard Dust bj-3

by Barbara Hambly

  Anyone who has seen them together..."

  "According to young Master Antoine," said January carefully, "his brother died in 'a wealthy house,' a big house to which he-that is Antoine-had never been. Might Isaak have been trying to make his way here when he was taken ill?"

  As if, he thought, there were two houses in New Orleans-or in Louisiana or the rest of the continent for that matter-that boasted Palissy water pitchers. Dis ingenuity on Jumon's part? The desk might have been moved, and the small chair in the corner had upholstery of crimson and gold and the look of a piece that needed a cushion, but even befuddled on opium Antoine couldn't have missed the portrait that dominated the room.

  "I have thought of that." Jumon's heavy brow darkened with distress. "I will never forgive myself for being away that week. I was only across the lake in Mandeville, seeing to opening our house there-the weather here doesn't suit my mother in the summertime. Doesn't suit anyone, for that matter," he added with a swift, cynical grin. "Isaak must have tried to send me word that he was in trouble. I've made inquiries, but the Duplessises next door have already left town for the summer, and the Viellards on the other side are on their plantation now, of course. And Isaak had a key to the gate. He would have come here, to Zoe. If indeed," he added, "Antoine's testimony is accurate." He shook his head. "Antoine is, as I've said, a fanciful boy."

  He looked up quickly as something dark moved in the brightness of the courtyard, and again his whole face transformed with his smile. "Mama! " He got to his feet; January also. "How are you this afternoon? Are you rested from Mass?"

  Her voice was cool and flat as February ice in the Paris streets. "I'll manage." From behind a veil of the finest black lace January felt himself touched by the briefest of cold gazes and dismissed.

  Cordelia Jumon brought a black-bordered white handkerchief to her lips, and coughed.

  "Mama, forgive me for my delay here." Uncertainty flawed Jumon's attempt at a good-humored chuckle as he bent over her hand. It was strange, thought January, to see so physically formidable a man with a look in his eye like a jack hare listening for the distant belling of the pack.

  "Benedict is just now getting the carriage."

  "Tell him not to trouble himself." That flat alto held nothing: no warmth, no caring, not even reproach; but the woman's slim erect body was a silent sable curse. "By the time we reach Milneburgh it will scarcely have been worth the journey, and I see that you have other matters to attend to this afternoon."

  She coughed again, more heavily, and turned to leave. Jumon caught her arm: she flinched as though he'd struck her. "Oh, Mama, forgive me, I'm so sorry..."

  "It's nothing." She massaged the joint, fingers trembling, while her son stood with his big hands hovering uncertainly. She waited for a moment, as if to give him time to explain himself-there was in her stance, and the way she held her head, the echo of Genevi?ve and Antoine. Reproach at his inebriation, and the unspoken welcome of the weapon his weakness gave her. Then she turned like a dead queen's ghost and moved back toward the stairway that led up to the gallery.

  "Mama, please." Jumon strode after her without a backward glance. Well, thought January, one didn't ask pardon or leave of a colored guest, after all. He watched them as Madame Jumon mounted the stair, Jumon's voice drifting back in flat snippets of echo: "Please don't be angry."

  "I'm not angry, son."

  "You are. I can see you are."

  "I only thought-and perhaps this is no longer true, but I can only go on what you have told methat when you requested me to accompany you to Milneburgh for dinner we should have time enough to enjoy ourselves along the lakeshore."

  "Mama, it was you who wanted to dine with the Picards."

  January felt a twinge of pity as the voices died away into the loggia, knowing perfectly well that with a woman like Madame Jumon-or his own mother-pointing out that something was her idea and not your own was merely an invitation to frozen silence, followed by an equally glacial agreement and an unspoken, You know that this is only lip service and so do I. Are you satisfied, my son? The only way to win was to walk away.

  This, obviously, Jumon didn't do, for he did not return to the office. Somewhere in the house, January thought, the scene was being played out: exhausting, hashed-over, filled with unspoken feelings and unsaid words, like the quarrel of lovers whose love has soured to poison but not yet died. But to leave would be impolite and might well alienate a man whose help he'd need if he was to free Olympe-if the man wasn't the one who'd put her in prison in the first place. The one who'd paid Munbo Oba, and Killdevil Ned. So he remained, standing, for he had not been given permission to sit down again... Appalling, what habit could do.

  Only it wasn't habit. There were men who'd thrash a black man for "making himself at home in my office" unbidden.

  "Michie Janvier."

  The woman Zoe appeared in the doorway, her smile friendly but neutral, carefully distancing herself from anything that had transpired between master and mistress. "Something's come up that calls Michie Mathurin away. He's sorry he won't be able to come back to you for maybe some hours. Can you come again, another day? He'll send you round a note, saying when will be best."

  The woman had come from the direction of the kitchen, not the house. January guessed she'd seen Jumon and his mother from the kitchen and had deduced from long experience what was taking place. Her smile, and the easy way she spoke, told of long practice in covering for the man.

  Still, there was nothing to say but "Thank you, Mamzelle Zoe," as he donned his high beaver hat.

  '"What do you think of this story about Michie Isaak, Mamzelle?" he asked, as she walked him across the fancy brickwork of the fountained court and through the carriageway, where grooms hitched a pair of matched grays (Bishopped, he'd heard his mother say derisively, and indeed the off-wheeler did look considerably older than its partner) to a carriage lacquered cobalt and black.

  "About his being brought to a big house to die? I know Michie Jumon heard nothing from his neighbors, but sometimes folks hear things that their masters don't."

  Her glance ducked away from his. "Oh, no, sir. That is-Michie Isaak came here many a time, with Mamzelle Celie. Not to the house, of course, because of Madame. But Madame was here that night, and all the other servants. Someone would have heard, if he'd tried to come in."

  She curtsied deeply, as they stepped through the archway and onto the brick banquette of Rue St.

  Louis. "I gives you good day, sir." Her smile was friendly and completely unreadable. Then she turned and disappeared into the shadows behind Laurence Jumon's expensive carriage-team, glimpsed once more as a swift flash of redand-purple tignon in the sunlight of the courtyard beyond, then gone.

  NINE

  January looked around him at the quiet street. As Jumon Ii:td said, half the town houses were shuttered, and the knockers taken down from the doors, the planters long since gone back to their acres, the bankers and brokers fled to cottages and cooler breezes by the lake. Dragonflies darted and whirred above the sparkle of the gutters. lsaak had a key, thought January. He might not have been strong enough to use it, though. And if he went to the quarters above the kitchen, every servant in the place would hear.

  But lsaak had been there. Somehow, somewhere... He took a step or two down the brick banquette and scanned the street again.

  Even the shops in the ground floors had a deserted look, as if this were Boston, where they kept the Sabbath like good Protestants thought it should be kept. The only activity, indeed, was on the shop floor of the Jumon house itself. The shop there was old-fashioned, with small square panes of glass in the window like the dark little boutiques he'd seen in Paris, fitted up before the Revolution and before one could obtain large panes of glass. These panes had been painted with letters of red and gold, which a young workman was now patiently scraping away:

  LIOTTE, FINE WINES AND BRANDIES.

  January strolled to the shop door, looked past the young man into the large, empty sa
lon. Even the counters had been removed, leaving only bits of sawdust and straw on the floors. A few stray chairs, a table, and a couple of wheelbarrows; old-fashioned chandeliers and sconces; a smell of varnish and soap. Of course, there would be no gas laid on in a building this old. Through a door at the back, a smaller chamber could be glimpsed, and the edge of a brick fireplace. "Excuse me."

  January addressed the workman in his most Parisian French. "Monsieur Jumon told me that I might have a look at the shop floor."

  Virgin Mary don't let him come out right about now. Given what January knew of his own quarrels with his mother he knew he was probably safe.

  "Go right on ahead," said the young man with a grin, pausing in his work. "You with Michie Braeden? Dentist what's movin' in?"

  "He's commissioned me, yes. I won't be but a moment."

  "She led me through a dark hall, to a smaller chamber, lit with a fireplace..."

  The flue would communicate, January guessed, with that in the rear parlor above. Straw mats had been laid down to protect the floors. More were piled in a corner.

  Easy to obtain a sheet from the laundry, a cushion, and a pitcher from Mathurin's office-too much risk of being heard by the other slaves, to slip into the kitchen... A large cabinet of dark walnut, its baroque multiplicity of tiny drawers and compartments speaking of dentistry rather than wine, had already been moved in. It filled one wall.

  The town-house bedrooms would be two floors above. There wasn't even a window looking back into the court. This close to Rue Bourbon it would be easy to find a hack, even at midnight...

  January smiled and bestowed a half-reale he couldn't spare on the sign painter, then made his leisurely way across the street to Au Cheval de la Lune, a tiny shop that sold laces, fans, perfumes, and books. "Pardon me," he said, bowing, "but you wouldn't happen to know where"he fished hastily in his mind for what the wine Tierchant's sign had said on the hundreds of occasions he'd passed it over the last eighteen months-"M'sieu Guliotte has moved to, would you?

  I was told he had a small stock of vintage St. Macaire for sale."

  The woman behind the counter replied at once, "M'sieu Guliotte's opening again on Rue Conde, between St. Philippe and Ursulines. But that won't be for another two weeks."

  "Good heavens," said January, in a tone of surprise, "when did he move out?" "Just not even two weeks ago," she answered. "They had the place cleared out within two days, getting it ready for new tenants to move in on the first. A dentist, a nice German gentleman." January remained a few minutes more, chatting leisurely with the shopkeeper, who like everyone else had late custom this time of year. He saw the blue carriage with its dazzling white team emerge from the gate and trot smartly away up the street, saw servants come out and close the gate behind. Stepping out onto the banquette once more, he studied the tall, pale blue town house, uncommunicative in the flat smoky glare of afternoon. Remembering another respected scion of a Creole family who had kept slaves chained in the attic. The torn and twisted muscles of his shoulders throbbed as he rubbed them, and his gaze followed the thin colonnettes, the dark latticework of the galleries, up to the dormers in the roof, barred windows like half-shut eyes. Madame Cordelia Jumon was over seventy, consumptive, and frail, for all her lively brilliance. Almost certainly a woman to take to her bed as soon as the dinner candles were snuffed, and to stay there.

  And Mathurin Jumon had been in Mandeville the night Isaak Jumon had died. Thoughtfully, January donned his hat again and walked slowly up Rue St. Louis, toward the growing tap and rattle of the drums that had begun to beat in Congo Square. A man's voice called out high and free, "Dansez calinda! " and the pulse of drums responded, drawing at the marrow of January's bones. "Higha! " sang out a voice, "lllalagaluj assay!" "Fligha!"

  "Zaj assay chumbo!" "Higha."

  Men and women clustered the paling fence that surrounded Congo Square, the dusty open space ringed with plane trees, separated from the turning basin by a couple of seedy-looking shacks and from the cemetery wall by only a few muddy streets. Artisans and shopkeepers in their best black or blue coats, new-come from evening Mass at the Chapel of St. Antoine, brushed elbows with Irish shopgirls and chaca laundresses in calico dresses, idlers angling for a look at the dark, half-naked figures swaying and leaping in the Square itself. A few stalls remained of the market that the place had once been, back among the trees: someone was making gumbo at a few pistareens per bowl; a woman sold pralines from a tray, and another, gingerbread, soft and sweet: estomac mulittres they were called. Gritty smoke caught January across the eyes as he edged his way toward the gate.

  Oh, yes yes, Mamzelle Marie, She knows well li Grand Zombi. Oh, yes yes, Mamzelle Marie, He come here to make gris gris.

  And there she was. Head rolling as she danced, body sending off waves of electricity, like the madness in the summer air before the coming of a storm. Dominating them, drawing them, focusing upon herself the crazy leap of the music-Power.

  And January, watching her, knew it was true. Whatever Power was, Marie Laveau had something beyond her web of secrets, something beyond loyalties, love, or fear. Charisma, the old Greeks had called it; the god, Plato had said. Whites would have termed it insolence. Power.

  A seven-foot king snake coiled her body, writhed with the writhing of the dance. Smoke from the gumbo pot veiled her in the dapple glare of sun and plane-tree leaves; and she smiled, drinking something from the air of the Square, from the somber joy of the dancers, as they drank in the Power from her.

  Close by him January heard someone say, "See there? That's her. Marie Laveau. That's the Voodoo Queen." The hammer-and-lift of the drumming, the wailing, the dance filled the Square: bone-deep, groin-deep, souldeep. Pain and memory, loss and hope, weariness and exultation at having survived another day.

  "What are they doing, Mama?" asked a child.

  "They're dancing, dear. That's how Negroes dance."

  Men stripped to bandanna loincloths, bells jangling around their ankles, turning the women under their arms. Graceful movements, serpentine as those of the woman on the boxes, absolutely alien to the waltz or the Lancers or the bright beauty of contredanse. Others danced alone, feet planted, bodies swaying, or stepped gaily, highly, in patterns half-remembered, half-invented, faces intent with relief or release, or beaming with joy. Eerie, wailing, the voices rose and fell like storm wind over the Atlantic, like the far-off jangling of chains.

  "Why do they dance like that, Mama?" The little boy was probably thinking about his own experiences with stern-voiced teachers and white gloves and pumps that pinched.

  They dance that way to forget that they have to step o the banquette to let YOU pass Young Massa.

  They dance that way to forget that they, or those they love, can be sold off like two-year-old colts and taken someplace to be worked to death if their new owner chooses, for no better reason than that their owner wants a new buggy.

  They dance that way so they don't kill themselves from despair. Sir.

  It was not, of course, a real voodoo dance: Only a get-together, with food pitched in to be shared around, and catching-up on the week. Information-Mamzelle Marie's wealth-was in a lesser way the currency of them all. When you're powerless, chained, and naked, you pay a great deal of attention to the doings of those whose whims can take from you what little security you might have. Around the edges under the trees, men threw dice in the shade or chatted up women; here and there sat the voodoo doctors, the root men, the wangateurs.

  January recognized Dr. Yellowjack among them, with his glazed leather hat and aigrette of heron-hackle, and with him others Olympe had pointed out in the street: Dr. Brimstone and Dr.

  Chickasaw; and the scar-faced, terrifying John Bayou. People came up to them to speak, or sought out the women in many-pointed tignons or snakebone necklaces, to have their fortunes read. He wondered which of those was Mambo Oba, and what Mamzelle Marie would have to tell him of her. What had looked, at the time, like a simple matter of voodoo rivalry had become a
hundred times more dangerous-whoever had paid Mambo Oba had almost certainly also paid Killdevil Ned.

  My reputation will never recover if I go in. January glanced around him. Any of the people in the mostly white crowd outside the fence could be a prospective em ployer, if not a giver of parties then a parent of children whom they might not want to take piano lessons from a man who'd been seen at the dancing in Congo Square. But Mamzelle Marie would have seen him-at six feet three, with his high beaver hat, he was unmissable in any crowd-and would know if he sought her out in private later, that he had drawn a line for himself at speaking to her here. So he worked his way to the gate, where a blue-uniformed City Guard idled with his cudgel and cutlass, and passed through. Two young women lounged, panting and shiny, in little more than a few kerchiefs covering thier breasts and wrought into skirts. But their faces held none of the blind ecstasy that had filled Olympe's that night at the brickyard; they chatted through the palings with two young white men in the long-tailed coats and bright waistcoats of clerks. As January edged through the gate, one of the clerks gave the girls some money, and they slithered out past him as he went in.

  Laundresses? Seamstresses? he wondered. Slaves making a few reales they needn't show their masters? His old distaste for the voodoo dances returned.

  Still, he worked his way through the dancers to the crowd around Mamzelle Marie. Men would dance up to her, touch her hand, sometimes kiss her extended wrist, or the shining scales of the snake she held. Women would clasp her hand, or sometimes her ankle, as she swayed on her platform of boxes. A woman selling pralines in the crowd put two of them on the edge of the platform, like an offering. There were other offerings, on the platform and on the ground near the serpent's cage-dishes of congris or rice, cigars, copper, and silver coins. A piece of pound cake on a plate. The ground around the boxes was wet with rum.