03 Graveyard Dust

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: