03 Graveyard Dust bj-3

by Barbara Hambly

  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 Mademoislle Coughlin and her mother were in that place. He knew they were protegees 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 Celie'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 Gerard 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 it 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 surprised 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 Zoe Jumon. To Antoine Jumon, he left two thousand dollars in a trust to be administered by Isaak Jumon; to Isaak and Celie, 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 Celie absolutely. And to Benjamin January, 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 Celie. 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, suffcient at least to carry the coffi
n 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. "He really die of the cholera?" A tall, thin figure emerged from between the tombs, disreputable hat in hand and the filth of three days' travel crusted on his boots.

  "I have no way of knowing." January had heard the truth from Isaak, and via letter from Dominique, who'd had it from Therese's second cousin Roul's lady friend, who was sister to Madame Cordelia Jumon's hairdresser, Helene.

  "Mighty auspicious timing, given what that Dr. Yellowjack's had to say of the man." Shaw spit, the tobacco disappearing into the soupy brown muck of graveyard earth. "May not all be true, of course. And that gal Zoe, she swore up and down that Mathurin was good and kind to just about everyone he met, even if, as she said, there was an illness in his heart about ' certain things.' She didn't say which things." "You found her, then."

  The policeman nodded. "Clear up to Ouachita Parish, she was. Sold to a man name of Dedman. Nice enough feller, and seemed to treat her decent. Let me talk to her out in the kitchen. She didn't have a whole lot to add to what Isaak's told you. The cab feller had already left by the time she figured Isaak was gone, and Antoine was laid out colder'n a mackerel-bet he didn't mention he had a bottle of opium in his pocket that he was swiggin' right through his brother's mortal struggle. That Zoe's a big strappin' gal, and even in full health Isaak wasn't much heavier'n a flour-barrel. Like you guessed, there was a sort of cart or wheelbarrow in the shop, from bringin' in the floor mats. She used it twice, once to haul Isaak out'n there and again for Antoine. In the rain and the dark, and scared as she was about M'am Cordelia comin' down, she was kind of hurried over Isaak. She wept when she told me about it, said she'd never have done it, 'cept for bein' scared of what M'am Jumon would do." January said dryly, "She had reason to be."

  "Well now, by all I hear, M'am Cordelia's mellowed some with age." Shaw spit again, at a roach the length of his finger, ambling down the side of a nearby tomb. "I understand when she was runnin' Trianon by herself, she kept discipline by bakin' the troublemakers in the brick ovens behind the house, or buryin' 'em up to their necks in the dirt for six, seven days. That kind of reputation buys you good service for a long time."

  January remembered Mathurin Jumon's anxious, coaxing voice, Now, Mother, don't be like that... "That it does," he said softly. "That it does."

  "But comin' back through Natchez," went on Shaw, scratching absently under the breast of his coat, "who should I see at the American Flag Hotel but them dear long-lost friends of mine, Lucinda and Abigail Coughlin. Turned out pretty as a pair of angels and actin' like little Abby hadn't never screamed and faked dead in her life." January's glance cut sidelong, and met the chilly enigmatic gray eyes.

  "They was waitin' for word from Yellowjack, seemingly." Shaw watched as the priest made the sign of the cross above the body, the men slid the shrouded form up into the rented holding-tomb-Laurence having a few months left to run before his year and a day's undisturbed occupancy of the family vault was up. "I understand now there was some certain amount of foolery with a pig's bladder full of blood, and the most heartrendin' death throes this side of a Bulwer-Lytton novel, and then somebody comin' around askin' somebody else for a whole lot of money not to say nuthin' about what had happened. I didn't speak to 'em-bein' shy of the ladies, you understand, and not knowin' at the time they was wanted for anything specific down here-but I sort of hinted to the Sheriff there to keep an eye on those two. I guess it's about time I headed back on up there again."

  "Would it accomplish anything?" January thought with distaste of Blodgett and his notebook, of the elegant dark-haired gentleman amid his rustic ware and his books. Shaw shrugged. "Might save the next man some grief."

  The mourners were scattering, holding handkerchiefs before their noses as they hastened along the muddy paths. Lingering by the narrow hole in the cemetery wall to watch the sexton's men cement a marble square over the opening, the priest made the sign of the cross.

  " 'In my father's house there are many mansions,' " quoted Abishag Shaw quietly, and folded his long arms. "And it may so be God has an understandin' that we don't, of how much a man can do with the hand he's dealt." He made his ambling way down the path between the tombs, hastening a little to catch up with Isaak and Celie.

  Turning, January went quietly back into the church. In my father's house there are many mansions. January lit a candle and set it before the feet of the Virgin, among the holocaust of waxlights always to be found there in the fever season. A handful of nuns from the Ursuline Convent grouped before the sixth Station of the Cross; their voices a soft murmuring in the gloom.

  "Lead us not into temptation... Deliver us from evil..." And what-else, January wondered, was there to ask of God?

  Quietly he walked to the rear, where the old statue of St. Peter stood, battered and shabby and soon to be replaced. An old man in a robe, with a beard and a bunch of keys. As January knelt at the rear bench, self-conscious and a little embarrassed, he noticed two or three pralines, a slice of pound cake, and a couple of cigars had been left on the base of the statue; another slice of pound cake and a dozen or more silver half-reale bits were tucked into the corners behind the railing. To let those still in fear know prayers do get heard.

  In my father's house there are many mansions. And in those many rooms, armoires containing, perhaps, many different suits of clothes. Maybe even a top hat and a pair of spectacles, for the benefit of those who didn't believe white men in long robes.

  He saw in his mind Olympe in the darkness, swaying with silent ecstasy, the bride of the god of her understanding. Saw the hot yellow sun on the dust of Congo Square, and the stir and blend of life along its verges: the smell of gumbo and pralines, the laughter of flirtation, the murmur of talk as men sought healing or advice or just the money to make it through another day. Why wouldn't God like the smell of rum and cigars as well as that of incense? Waiting for the nuns to finish and depart, he counted out the beads of his own rosary, and thought, Blessed Virgin Mary, forgive me for my sins against my sister. You know-and Jesus Christ your son knows-more than I do about what lies in the human- heart. Pray for me to be healed of my pride.

  When the sisters were finished and he was alone in the chapel, January got quietly to his feet. Reaching into the pocket of his black coat, he brought out a slice of pound cake, wrapped in a scrap of the Louisiana Gazette. This he opened up, and laid the whole at the feet of the old man with the beard and the keys. "Thank you," he said, to the silence of the church.

  Coming out of the chapel he glimpsed Mar
ie Laveau in her seven-pointed tignon in the cemetery, kneeling beside a tomb. She might have been praying, but he suspected she was simply digging graveyard dust.

  A second cortege arrived at the chapel as January left the cemetery gates, the undertaker's men going ahead bearing a black velvet pall and eight wax candles like ship's masts, flames pale in the hot still afternoon. Several dozen men followed, all those American businessmen who had not already fled the city, red-tipped wax tapers in their hands. Against the black of their coats the long white scarves of the pallbearers reminded January of bandages, where had he seen bandages, he wondered, wrapping skeletons who danced? He shook the thought away. Carriage after carriage drew up, black plumes nodding on the heads of the horses. A black-lacquered coffin was taken down and borne past him, draped and padded in velvet and crepe and trailed by Pere Eugenius and a bevy of chanting choirboys. Only when the widow followed, supported by Elaine Destrehan and Marion Desdunes, did January realize who the dead man was.