03 Graveyard Dust

TEN

"Ben, darling, I know you and Olympe were right and I was wrong about Madame Lalaurie last Spring, but don't you think you're letting what happened affect your judgment just a little?" Dominique judiciously spread two gowns on her bed and studied them: pale yellow mullmuslin frothed with layer upon layer of white lace and a clear lettuce-green tulle trimmed with plum-colored bows. "Do you think the waist on the green is a bit high, Ben? They're wearing them lower this year."

Having come to manhood at a time when women wore clinging high-waisted gauze gowns with virtually nothing under them, January thought all women dressed like idiots these days, his dear friend Rose Vitrac not excepted. He knew better, however, than to say so. "The lower waist is more becoming."

"I think so, too. And I never did like those silly aprons." His sister cast aside the green tulle and with it apparently all recollection of her ecstasies last year on the subject of the dress's ornamental, lace-trimmed apron. There was more in her of her mother than Dominique would care to admit. "I mean, why would Mathurin Jumon keep his nephew locked up in his attic for five days? Why not just poison him the night he got him into his evil clutches? Wouldn't Grand-mere Jumon have something to say about it? Or the servants?"

"Grand-mere Jumon isn't well," said January. "And she's seventy years old-I doubt she's been up in those attics for years."

He seated himself on the rocking chair of red cypress that stood near the open window. Beyond, in the cottage's yard, his sister's cook, Becky, emerged from the kitchen with a stack of white porcelain dishes balanced in her hands; set them down on the bench under the gallery; and commenced to wrap each in newspaper, laying them in a wooden crate at her side. Straw littered the flagstones all around her. Knowing what the kitchen at his mother's house was like on Mondays, with the washtub boiling all day and a cauldron of red beans set for good measure over the back of the long-burning fire, January completely understood the decision to risk getting rained on by doing the packing outside.

Back at his mother's, Bella was doing her packing outdoors, too.

Most of the wealthy brokers, landlords, and bankers who could afford to do so rented cottages on the lakefront during the summer season, in Milneburgh or Mandrville or Spanish Fort. Many, as Mathurin Jumon had said, were already gone. Though it was only a short train ride from Milneburgh to the city, many also rented cottages-or at least rooms or suites of rooms-for their colored plac?es, especially if there were children involved. With the steadily advancing summer heat, the stink rising from the gutters and the summer infestations of every insect from fleas to mosquitoes to roaches and palmetto bugs, to say nothing of the risk of fever, people had been leaving New Orleans since early June.

Soon, January reflected, there would be "no one at all left in town," as the wealthy Parisians had lamented at the balls where he'd played. No one a wealthy person would know, anyway. Only the poor.

No wonder the property owners of the town were having, as Shaw would call them, conniption fits. "And then again, Madame Cordelia may very well have been in on it," January went on, as Dominique began the endless process of selecting pelerines, stockings, tignons, reticules, fans, gloves, petticoats, and shoes to go with the yellow ensemble. "That would let Mathurin establish an alibi by going to Mandeville. And it would be easy to bring Isaak to the house in the first place: the men at the Widow Puy's all agree that Isaak received a note of some kind on Friday afternoon."

"And so he arrived at the house and the woman who has just finished trying to wrest his inheritance from him in the courts hands him a cup of opium-laced coffee and says, Oh, cher, drink this." Dominique turned with her arms full of lace. "Which reminds me, have you tried the coffee they serve at the Cafe Venise on Rue du Levee? They put cocoa in it, I think, and hazelnut liqueur-really excellent, although Mama says they only do that because they buy inferior beans.

Still, I'm going to get some hazelnut liqueur and experiment with it, for Henri. I'm told they sell a really excellent hazelnut liqueur at... Oh, thank you, Th?r?se," she added, as her maid entered and set on the marble top of the bureau a tray bearing two glasses of lemonade. Th?r?se looked at January, looked at the chamber's dishabille-Dominique had pulled two more frocks from the chifforobe and laid them out in a fluffy meringue of petticoats-and met her mistress's eye with a patient and disapproving sigh. Men, even brothers, had no place in a woman's bedroom, particularly not men of color.

When the woman left, his sister Minou turned back to him. "Or maybe she struck him over the head with a slungshot?" She returned, rather disconcertingly, from her excursion into coffee and romance to the subject at hand. "And then what? Carried him up to the attic herself? Isn't that a little-a little Sir Walter Scott?"

January breathed half a chuckle at the mental image. "Maybe," he replied. "But the fact remains that Isaak was under that roof on the night of the twenty-third and that he died there of poisoning with his wife's name on his lips. And I'm rather curious as to how he came there, and when."

Dominique arched her eyebrows. "You said Th?r?se was related to one of Laurence Jumon's maids?" he asked.

"Oh! " Her face broke into a sunny smile at the thought of an intrigue. "Of course! Cousine Aveline! The one who was having an affair with that awful groom of Monsieur Bouligny's. Do you know, that groom was stealing oats from Bouligny and selling them by the peck to-"

"Could Th?r?se be persuaded to talk to her?"

"P'tit, Th?r?se will talk to anyone about anything! I absolutely can't get a word in! Do these topazes go with the primrose silk, p'tit? There's going to be a ball at the H?tel Pontchartrain on Friday night-Henri's mother is holding one opposite that awful Mrs. Soames-but Henri promised to take me to supper, masked, at the Cafe d'Auberge in Spanish Fort that night, and sometimes candlelight isn't kind to a yellow this bright."

After another hour of Minou's nonstop chatter, and a substantial breakfast of poached eggs, scallops, and grits ("Oh, Becky doesn't mind making it up, p'tit-and I'm absolutely enslaved to her cream sauces"), January made his way to the prison, where under the eye of a City Guard he was escorted once again up to the third-level gallery, to the narrow barred window of Olympe's cell.

Behind her in the dim chamber he could hear women's voices arguing-harsh and foul-tongued English-and the sound of stifled weeping. The smell that breathed from that close hot twilight was unspeakable.

"Gone?" Olympe frowned, reaching her hands through the bars to take January's. Her fingers felt thin, callused, and knotted; her face appeared more gaunt even than it had on Saturday under a tignon that, though clean, was already damp with sweat.

"Cleared out and gone, Mamzelle Marie says. Calabash, seashell, cats, money... But I found a tricken bag in my room last night when I came home."

"Hidden?" asked Olympe. "Or out where you could see it?"

"Hidden in the bed."

Her eyes narrowed, dark with uneasiness. "Voodoos sometimes have more than one house," she said after a time. "Especially if they've been around awhile. And a man may hire more than one voodoo to warn you away, or to put the death fix on. Have you checked under the steps? Or in the yard, for places where something may have been buried?"

January shook his head.

"There's fever here." She lowered her voice, leaning close to the bars. "Not in this cell, but in the one on the end of the gallery. The Guards will beat us, if word of it gets out. It's just jail fever, they say, not yellow jack. But last night I saw him. I saw the fever walking along the gallery, like a ghost made of smoke and sulfur. He's here, Bronze John. Mamzelle Marie, she's burning green candles for me every day, and bringing me fever herbs."

January remembered the candle he had lit in the Cathedral only that morning, for Olympe's forgiveness in the eyes of God. "We'll get you out," he promised, squeezing her fingers again.

"Did C?lie Jumon tell you anything about where Isaak might have gone in trouble? Or anything about his uncle Mathurin? Brother Antoine seems to think Uncle Mathurin might have been the one to do Isaak harm." Considering the neat columns of money ranged along the edge of the desk, Mathurin had certainly been able to afford to hire Killdevil Ned.

"I know nothing of him." She removed her fingers from his, to scratch her arm. Though Gabriel brought her clean cloths every day, January could see the fleas on her bright tignon and the white sleeve of her blouse. "He has dealings with the voodoo doctors sometimes, I know, but then many white men have."

January supposed that if a respectable young matron could hide herself in the Cathedral to meet Dr. Yellowjack, it was nothing for a Creole gentleman to make arrangements with him for the secrets of his business rivals, or for girls like those who'd passed him in the gate at Congo Square.

From another cell on the gallery he heard the hoarse voice of Mad Solie panting, "M'sieu! M'sieu!

Tell them! When you leave this place tell them that I didn't kill those children! It was my father and my hushand that killed them! They tried to force me to do it but I wouldn't listen, I wouldn't doit!"

And another woman's weary voice, "Will somebody shut her up before she starts Screamin' Peg off again?"

"They're trying to murder me in here! They come into the cell every night, and stand at my feet, and whisper to me, whisper to me, holding my children's little heads in their hands!"

"What about you?" he asked Olympe. "Are you all right here?"

She sighed, and shook her head. "I'm as well as I can be. You know me. I can sleep through anything, and some of the girls here let me have one of the beds. When Gabriel brings me food, I share it around. I tell their fortunes, too, though I don't always tell the truth." She glanced back over her shoulder at the shapeless indistinct shadows of the cell. "Gabriel brought me a letter from Paul; said it came with a little money that Michie Drialhet advanced him. He says he'll be back..."

"Monsieur Janvier?"

January had heard the creak of footfalls approaching on the gallery stairs, but hadn't thought much of it. The recollection of Killdevil Ned, however, had lurked in the hazy interstices between last night's waking and sleepthe knife descending, the memory of his own physical weakness, helpless against the mountain man's strength. As a result he nearly fell over the gallery rail, leaping back. The graying little man who had spoken to him recoiled, equally startled, from this extreme reaction, and someone in the next-door cell hooted with laughter and yelled, "Got a guilty conscience, Sambo?"

"Please excuse me," begged the little man, removing his rather aged beaver and holding it over his heart. "I'm terribly sorry if I startled you. It is Monsieur Benjamin Janvier, isn't it?" January felt as if there were a dozen north Mexico trappers concealed in every cell along the Cabildo's upper gallery, taking a bead on him with their rifles...

But he couldn't say so to the man who stood in front of him, thin-shouldered and diffident, in a rather bright green long-tailed coat and pantaloons of an unlikely buttercup hue. "I'm he, yes." The visitor produced a card. "The Widow Paris said I might find you here, when I came to speak with Madame Corbier," he said. "Please pardon my presenting myself with no better introduction than this."

Yuchel Corcet, fine. Attorney at Law 350RuePlauche "I'm afraid if you're here to speak to Madame Corbier you've been misinformed," said January.

"We have no way of paying you."

But Olympe, resting her elbows on the sill of the narrow window, only studied the sagging face in its frame of carefully pomaded curls and for the first time a slow smile touched her eyes.

"P'tit," she said to January, "there's something you don't understand about Mamzelle Marie." She extended her hand to Corcet. "I thank you, M'sieu Corcet. Mamzelle-the Widow Paris-told you my brother's started making inquiries already about this?"

"She did, yes." Corcet's eyes shifted and he wet his lips with a mouselike pink tongue. Working for Marie Laveau was clearly not something that overwhelmed him with delight. January wondered what the Voodoo Queen had said to the attorney to cause him to offer his services gratis. "And that someone is evidently determined not to let him pursue the investigation. If you have a few minutes to bring me up to date on what you might have learned?..."

Together, January and Olympe told him all they knew, while the Guard spit tobacco over the gallery railing and a voice in the courtyard below intoned, "Theseus Roualt, you are hereby sentenced to five lashes with a whip, to be paid for by your master William Roualt..."

"It's clear to me that, whatever feelings of affection he professes-and whether or not he actually had anything to do with the murder-Mathurin Jumon has a stake in his nephew's death," said January at last. "And he has an equal financial stake in seeing that Isaak's bride doesn't inherit, either. A wife's claims on a dead man's property are clear. But in the absence of that wife, if it comes down to a court battle over' close to five thousand dollars between a dead man's dead father's white brother and that same dead father's colored former mistress, I suspect I know which way that verdict is going to go."

"And Mathurin can't get rid of C?lie," remarked Olympe bitterly, "without he gets rid of me as well."

"Conversely," remarked Corcet, turning his hat brim in soft, nervous hands gloved with yellow kid, "if you are cleared, Madame Corbier, Madame C?lie will be cleared as well-hence the attempts against your brother. I wonder if Clement Vilhardouin has experienced similar difficulties?"

"Not likely we're going to find out," said January. "Though it would tell us something if he has."

"Does Monsieur Jumon strike you as the kind of man who would murder his nephew-and cause his nephew's bride to be hanged-for money?" asked Corcet. "He appears to have plenty of it already, if his mother's jewelry, carriage, clothing, and house in Mandeville are any indication.

He does a great deal of charity work, you know, in a quiet way: settling annuities on deserving invalids, for instance. He has provided for the education of a number of young people who might not otherwise be able to afford it. Mathurin Jumon does not appear to be an evil-intentioned man. Or a man who would kill for gain."

Olympe snorted with derision. "Charity work. There's half a dozen of the most charitable men and women in this town send their slaves down to be whipped if they pass the time of day with a milk seller in the kitchen door. Two of'em I know of wash the cuts out with salt brine afterward. And worse things," she added, with a glance at her brother, who had nearly lost the use of his arms through an encounter with a white woman renowned for her charity. "Hmm." January watched the sunlight on the plastered wall fade, and tried not to hear the crack of the rawhide in the court below him, and the whipped man's stifled cries. He thought again about those neat stacks of coin. Anonymous. Concealed power, able to act for good or for ill. "And it may be," he said, "that a white man wouldn't consider a colored one to have the same rights of inheritance, even in the face of the law. But no, he did not impress me as a killer. But I'm almost certain Isaak died in his house. Now, by his account Antoine isn't to be entirely trusted, but I doubt Antoine could have made up a description of a seventeenth-century rustic-ware pitcher. We'll know more, of course, after our sister's maid has talked with one of the Jumon servants."

Leaving the Cabildo with the clouds gathering overhead, January started to turn along Rue Chartres, and so to his mother's house again. But as he stepped out from beneath the arcade, the bright-painted sign above a chocolate shop drew his attention. Tables had been set out before it on the Place d'Armes and for a moment he stood watching the proprietress, a lively, pretty woman in her thirties, boldly flirting with a man in a steamboat captain's gold-trimmed cap. Turning, January crossed before the Cathedral, hands in the pockets of the rather worse-for-wear corduroy jacket he'd bought many years ago in Paris, and made his way in a leisurely fashion-his mother's house would still be a wilderness of trunks, packing materials, and laundry-to a stationery store in the Rue Conde. From there he sought out a table near the coffee stand by the vegetable market, where he composed a note.

My dearest Madame Metoyer Please forgive the presumption of this communication, but I understand that you are acquainted with a young lady by the name of Babette Figes, whom I have seen, in your company, at the Blue Ribbon Balls at the Salle d'Orl?ans. I have attempted, unsuccessfully, to attain an introduction to Mademoiselle Babette through her sister Marie-Eulalie; would it be possible to come to an understanding with you on the subject? If you will so kindly permit me, I will look for you at the next Ball to be given.

Until then,

Your obedient servant, Baron Herzog von Metzger After a moment's consideration he applied a lucifer to the sealing wax he'd purchased along with the sheet of coldpressed paper, and pressed one of his jacket's elaborate buttons into the resulting crimson blot.

The maidservant at Bernadette Metoyer's cottage on Rue St. Philippe was duly impressed with January's tale of the besotted Baron-"I can't imagine what Marie-Eulalie was thinking of, to snub a man like that! " From there, it being midafternoon and laundry day, an offer to assist in the wringing of sheets and petticoats, and the maneuvering of tubs and buckets of hot water from the sweltering kitchen was gratefully accepted. January shed his trimly cut, albeit shabby, jacket, glad that he'd worn one of his old and threadbare linen shirts to Dominique's that morning instead of a rougher-looking calico, gritted his teeth against the agony in his back and spoke his best Parisian French, with a slight German accent as befit a European nobleman's house servant. It was an easy transition from commonplaces to conversation to confidences.

"Lord, no, Michie Athanase, that was keeping company with Mamzelle Bernadette, he gave her this house and five hundred dollars when he married Mamzelle Cournaud. I remember the day he signed over the deed, and Mamzelle Bernadette crying her eyes out saying how she's going to kill herself, praying God for strength to carry on, just till he walked out the door. Then she stands up with this big old grin on her face and throws her arms around me..."

"A strong-hearted woman, Mademoiselle Lucy. My master's mother, you know, she saved the family plate from Napoleon's armies..." January had been a musician in Paris for ten years.

Every tale and anecdote and bit of gossip he'd ever heard there-not to mention substantial blocks of Stendhal and Balzac-flowed easily to his tongue.

"Course, M'am Cournaud I hear is melancholy..:."

"My master's wife, the Baroness, is the same. In fact she suffers a periodic delusion that she is pregnant with half a dozen rabbits...".

"Maybe she's witched! " Lucy's dark eyes widened, and January felt, as he had when a young man illegally shooting in the cipriere, that satisfied moment of whole ness: a deer stepping exactly into a clearing, unaware of his presence.

"I understand that there are such sorcerers here?"

She flung up her hands, her round face beaming. "Lord, aren't there! "

"In fact I heard that there was such a gathering only a few weeks ago. Have you ever been to such?"

Lucy crossed herself quickly, but there was a flicker in her eyes. "Lord, no, Mamzelle Bernadette wouldn't let me go. She had her sisters over that night, playing cards, and even playing for pennies and bits she lost close to fifty dollars! "

"I didn't think respectable ladies of this town-I mean honest shopkeepers, like your mistress-had so much money to game with."

"My, when you've been in town a bit longer, Michie Gustave, you'll learn! Mamzelle Bernadette's sister Blanche couldn't play much, being like Mamzelle a woman in business-she has a hat shop over by Rue des Ursulines-but her other sister Virginie, that's plac?e with young Michie Guichard, and Marie-Toussainte and Marie-Eulalie, they could just gamble with the money their protectors give them..."

"I think I've seen your mistress's sister's hat shop," said January. "Aux Fleurs Jolies, with the pink sign?..."

"Oh, no, that's M'am Genevieve's, on Rue des Ramparts. But she was here, too." And Lucy giggled. "For a few minutes, anyway."

January leaned his elbow on the doorway-his arms felt as if they were about to drop off at the shoulder-and gave her his most interested and (he hoped) most charming grin.

"She didn't even take off her hat." The maid chuckled. "And my, what a hat! Good thing M'am Genevi?ve didn't meet no Guards, or she'd 'a been arrested sure, for wearing such a hat! With a crown this high, and roses, and lace off the back of it... She hadn't hardly come through the door when a carriage comes up in the street, and she gives everybody a kiss and says, Now, remember I was here all night! And off she goes with Michie Granville that runs the Bank of Louisiana!"

"Monsieur Granville!" January managed to look both startled and hugely entertained. "Why, M'sieu le Baron took dinner with him and his wife the other day. He said a more united couple would be difficult to find."

"Oh, he's quite the man." Lury twinkled in a way that made January wonder exactly how far afield the banker's fancies had taken him. "He kept company with Mamzelle Bernadette, back when he was President of the Union Bank, and with her sister Blanche after Blanche parted company with Michie Lisle. He has a little house out on that new canal, on Constitution Place, that his wife doesn't know about. That's where I think they went, Warn Genevi?ve and Michie Granville." And she simpered, pleased with herself.

Walking back to his mother's house through the slanting rain, January mentally calculated where the new development had gone in along Florida Walk last year. Constitution Place, if he remembered correctly, lay just over a mile from the Jumon town house on Rue St. Louis. The rain grew heavier. Thunder growled over the river. As he dodged along the banquette from one gallery overhang to the next, January found himself glancing back over his shoulder or around him at the passways and carriageways between the houses on Rue Burgundy, wondering which of them concealed a man with a rifle. Which of those empty houses, shuttered tight now while their owners were at the lake, could be used for an ambush? The trappers who hunted in the Mexican Territories could shoot the head off a squirrel at a hundred yards: his aching shoulders cringed under the wet corduroy and he found himself stopping and starting, hurrying and slowing, as if that would somehow save him.

Times were slow. Tomorrow would be the Culver girls' last lesson for the summer, before the family went hack to their native Philadelphia to avoid the fever. In a way he was glad-he felt safer within the French town-but he knew already his mother was not going to abate one dime of the rent she charged him to live in the room he'd occupied as a boy. If she wasn't demanding an extra dollar a week toward household provisions while she herself was enjoying lakefront breezes in Milneburgh, he knew it would cost him nearly that to feed himself. His remaining savings were slender. That morning's breakfast at Dominique's had been uncomfortably close to a cadge, and his skin crawled with embarrassment at the thought.

In ordinary circumstances, after the last engagement of the social season-Councilman Soames's Fourth of July Ball in his lakefront summer house-January would have sought what meager employment was offered by the gambling halls, or played an occasional danceable out at the Milneburgh hotels.

But playing in a gambling hall he would be, for all intents and purposes, alone, without backup or defense. And obliged to remain where anyone could see him and come at him, through gruelingly long evening shifts.

And it was a long way back from the lake, once the steam-train ceased running at midnight. "Honestly, Ben, I knew there would be trouble if you took up the cause of that voodooienne," his mother greeted him as he came through the passway at the side of the house and emerged into the yard. That, too, was the result of long childhood training-neither he nor Olympe had ever been permitted to enter the house from the street. "The whole affair has got Bella in such a state she burned the coffee and scorched the back of one of my petticoats."

January stepped through the French doors into the dining room, shed his coat and slapped the water out of his cap. Three crates stood along the wall, among neat piles of old newspapers. His mother, who loudly deplored Dominique's habit of taking everything that might possibly add to her comfort or beautiful appearance when she traveled, would not dream of spending three months without her own coffee set, veilleuse, writing equipment, tea service, wineglasses, sewing box, and music box; her favorite trinkets and backgammon set; not to speak of the crimping-irons, gauffering irons, and other equipment Bella had to bring to care for her mistress's extensive wardrobe. Though Livia owned a cottage on the lakefront, she rented it out every year to a white sugar broker and his family and stayed in two lovely rooms of the small boarding hotel in which she owned a halfinterest: she was currently, January knew, negotiating to buy another cottage. January sighed and made a mental note to confine Les Mesdames-dozing on top of the crates-to the spare room that evening lest the cats disappear when it came time to fetch out their wicker travel boxes. He opened his mouth to say, "That voodooienne is your daughter," but didn't; "I'm sorry, Martian. Bella will get over it when you get out to the lake, you know, and by the time you return, this will all be taken care of."

Livia Levesque glanced sidelong at him, as if to ask how he could remain so cavalier in the face of burnt coffee, and for a moment her eyes were exactly like Olympe's. Then she sniffed and turned away. "Remember to air out all the rooms every day," she said. "The front steps will need to be cleaned as well. You know how filthy the air is, with the steamboats making all their soot and the rain turning it to mud. I truly don't know what this city is coming to. And make sure the gutter in front of the house stays cleared out. Those people the city hires haven't done their job in months. Send me your month's money care of the Hotel Villefranche, as usual. I'll take July's tomorrow morning before I leave."

It would leave him without a picayune-and he knew already she'd let the stores of food run down because she was leaving-but there was a tone in her voice that would not even hear, Can't you let it go for a week? "I'll give it to you now." "No, tomorrow will do."

Returning to the gar?onni?re, he checked the room carefully for further signs of interference; and though he found none, he could not rid himself of the thought that there was some evil there somewhere: the feathers of his pillow twisted into the shape of a rooster or a dog, or a ball of black wax and turpentine secreted under the floor. A white man would hire a killer, he thought. Maybe even hire a voodoo for that first warning. But the second tricken bag-and the sense that there were others, secret words of death-pointed to color.

Mosquitoes whined in the corners of the ceiling, but such was the curdled heat that he couldn't bear to close up the shutters. He spread out the mosquito-bar around the bed, took his candle and checked the inside thoroughly for chance invaders. Bringing several candles in under the bar-though it was still twilight outside, in the room it was now quite dark-he settled down with Wolfs Prolegotnena in Homerum. A decent antidote, he thought, to the eerie shadows of secrets and half-guessed at fears.

When he crossed through the rain to the house again for supper he found a letter by his plate, folded in the old-fashioned way and sealed. "That came for you this morning," said his mother, without glancing up from her perusal of the Louisiana Gazette. The seal was broken. It crossed January's mind for he knew not what reason to wonder if Madame Cordelia Jumon read her son's letters. He unfolded the paper, though he recognized the Italianate beauty of the handwriting on the address.

I have made contact with Madame C?lie Jumon. She and I will meet you at Monsieur Nogent's on Wednesday at noon.

Rose