03 Graveyard Dust

THIRTEEN

"I never thought I'd thank God the rich all leave town by the end of June." January put his head out of the narrow passway between houses, scanned the still silence of Rue St. Louis. By the dim reflection of the oil lamp at the next intersection all was still; a heavy stillness rank of heat and stench and mosquito whine. A cat darted from an alley, bolted across the street, vanished.

Stillness again.

"If we can't get a witness about what happened here, at least there's no one to keep us from seeing what there is to be seen."

"There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." Hannibal coughed, one hand holding himself upright against the crumbling stucco and the other pressed to his side. "If you ever find out how to make consumption good by thinking, please let me know. I've been trying for years. Did you ever track down the map your cut-armed friend brought to Isaak, by the way?

Find where the meeting place was, if it was a meeting place?"

"I'm sure it was." January waited, listening, watching the alley from which the cat had fled. A hundred feet away, on Rue Bourbon, music jangled and men quarreled over their cards in the gambling halls that still ran full-open, but here the stillness was weirdly complete. Only the croaking of the frogs in the gutters sounded-ouaouarons, the slaves called them, not proper French grenouilles-and the roar of the cicadas around the streetlamps. "But with whom, and for what purpose-that's another matter."

In time, satisfied with the hush, he stepped from shelter and led the way across the street, holding close under his arm the dark leather bundle of his medical bag. The Jumon town house rose above them, somehow more isolated than a plantation would have been, perhaps because even when the family was absent, a plantation was never empty. There were always the hands in the quarters, children's voices, the clack of axes, and the smell of animals. Here there was nothing but the lingering stench of gunpowder and hooves burning somewhere, and the gutters' unending stink. January walked calmly, unhurried. Though curfew had long ago sounded, only some twenty Guards held night watch in the French town. By the sound of it, the taverns of Rue Bourbon would be occupying most of their attention.

"I went out there this morning," he continued, as they concealed themselves again in the dense arch of shadow that was the carriageway. "It was pretty clear from Railspike's description that that map showed the waste ground out past the Protestant cemetery and the end of Gravier's canal. There's a little bayou there, and an oak with a twisted-back limb. Old Michie Crippletree, we used to call it. All the slaves used it for a meeting place, because everyone knew it. I expect whites who grew up around here knew it, too."

Hannibal drew a pair of thin-nosed pliers and a length of bent wire from his pocket and set to work on the carriage-gate lock. "And did you find the teacup Mathurin Jumon served Isaak the arsenic in?"

"I found a teacup with arsenic stains in it," replied January gravely, his eyes moving ceaselessly up and down the dark streets: "I didn't attach much importance to it because the teacup was Sevres pdte dur instead of Palissy ware. Oh, and there was a copy of Laurence Jumon's will impaled on the tree trunk with an Arabian dagger, and one of Isaak's visiting cards. Why do you ask?"

"Just curious. And up she comes." He pushed the wrought-iron gate inward a little, then closed it behind them, pulling out the black ribbon that tied his hair to bind the gate loosely shut again.

"Was the visiting card also impaled on the tree trunk with a dagger?"

"On the other side of the tree," extemporized January, scratching a lucifer and shielding the candle he took from his bag. "Separate dagger." "Also Arabian?"

"Venetian." Their whispers echoed in the arch of the flagged carriageway. "Quattrocento. Cellini, I think."

"Cellini made good daggers." Hannibal nodded wisely. "An excellent choice. Tasteful." "Which would argue that it had to have been Mathurin. I mean, I can't see Hubert Granville having the refinement to buy a Cellini dagger." They emerged into the dark courtyard, the closed and shuttered bulk of the slave quarters looming before them against the sooty sky. The fountain muttered softly; the candlelight showed up a cat's eyes, hunting frogs among the banana plants. "A point, my friend. A most distinct point."

"All daggers," said January, in a tone of deep solemnity, "have a point," and Hannibal went into a fit of coughing from trying to stifle a laugh.

From the courtyard there was no way to break into the shop, but whatever had been there, January guessed, had been cleared out for the new tenant: JOSEF BRAEDEN, he had seen the legend inscribed on the door. DENTIST. For a few minutes he held his breath, as he and Hannibal moved into the center of the brickpaved space; it was always possible that one or two of the slaves had been left behind to watch the house. But Madame Cordelia, it appeared, would not lessen her comfort in the Mandeville house-or else she was unwilling to let any of her servants remain unsupervised in the city for two months. No light flared in any of the rooms that opened from the galleries that rose above the kitchen. No voice called out, demanding who was there, and when January and Hannibal climbed to check them, the rooms were vacant and stripped of their simple goods.

A brief visit to the local livery stable had already informed January that the six Jumon horses were gone. On the other side of the courtyard, the inevitable gar?onni?re lay above the office where January had spoken to Mathurin Jumon, reached by a narrow stair. "A Chubb," whispered Hannibal, fingering the lock as January handed him the long-bladed scalpels, the forceps, and the bulletprobe he'd brought, along with his mother's kitchen candles, in his bag. "I figured Grand-mere Jumon for a locker-upper."

"With the jewels she wears?" breathed January back. "We'll be lucky if we can get into the main house."

"We should have gotten Dago Crimms to help us. He'd have kept his mouth shut, and he wouldn't have taken much." The fiddler's hands were shaking as he worked with the picks, and he stopped twice, once to press his hand to his side to still his coughing, and again to take a cautious sip of opium. In the narrow yellow glow of the candle his face was set and lined with pain. "It would only take one item traced back to us," said January grimly, "for all of us to be in a lot more trouble than we are."

"Oh, Dr. Yellowjack's generally pretty careful where he fences his plunder. Yellowjack's Dago's receiver," Hannibal added.

"Savvy old bastard. Works it all up through Natchez. Never lets himself come into view at ail-always uses a cat's-paw of some kind, tells one person one thing, another another... Which is the way not to get caught. And here we are." The latch gave under his hand. "Like ladies and moneyed relatives, it's all in how you ask."

There was a library on the floor immediately above the office, and above it, two small bedrooms. Holding the candle aloft, January had an impression of a beautiful desk of Syrian work, inlaid shell and colored woods in ebony, of gold-stamped books on the shelves instead of the workaday ledgers downstairs, of chairs under Holland covers. On desk and mantel, and locked behind the glass fronts of cabinet shelves, platters, ewers, tureens gleamed in the tiny flame: exquisite glazes, fantastic and intricately accurate shapes. Snailshells, salamanders, fish so meticulously rendered, January could tell a drum from a bass; strawberry leaves, clover, lettuces, worms.

Nothing that anyone these days would remotely describe as goad taste, thought January, studying a bowl sculpted in the likeness of a forest floor-ferns, mosses, pebbles, tiny flowers, small snakes, and pillbugs all exact. But a garden of bizarre delight all the same.

Another portrait of Madame Cordelia Jumon smiled from behind a protective draping of gauze, and drawing this aside, January gazed up for a moment into the long, delicate face, the haughty nose, and the dark eyes beneath a snowy extravaganza of high-piled, rose-swagged hair. Lapdogs peeped from beneath the flounces of a green Court gown wider than its wearer was tall. He tried to picture this girl-for she seemed no more than sixteen-operating a plantation such as the one on which he'd been born.

He'd heard someone-his mother? Dominique?-mention in passing Hercule Jumon's decease when the two boys were small. That would have put it somewhere in the nineties. After the fall of the King, anyway. This lovely, Court-raised girl, left a widow in her teens, would have had no home to return to. In his mind he heard Celie Jumon's voice: Papa never knew what happened to them...

"Well, it answers one question anyway," remarked Hannibal, as they made cursory investigations of each gar?onni?re bedroom, then passed along the gallery to the rear of the main house. "Why Laurence's wife left. That bedroom of his doesn't look like it's ever been cleared out. Not that any woman in her senses would share quarters with Grand-mere Jumon, but I'm sure living in the gar?onni?re wasn't what she had in mind, either."

"I don't see how she could have kept her son from taking up residence in the main house once he'd married." January held the candle close as Hannibal knelt to study the lock on the shutters that covered the central door. Another Chubb, bright against the yellow paint. By the marks in the woodwork, the house had had half a dozen different locks in its some fifty years of existence.

"Allow me to introduce you to my aunt Boadicaea one day. I'll bet she kept him out in the gar?onni?re at Trianon, too, wife or no wife. My guess-just watching her with Mathurin at the balls-is that she was jealous." January remembered Mathurin's voice, calling out desperately for his mother to wait. Mama, please... Did Laurence's voice have that tone as well? Had he always turned first to his mother, to see what she said? Did he leave his wife standing, as Mathurin had left January, to hurry after Maman when she was in a taking? Certainly he had left Madame Cordelia in charge of the household, the keys, the stores, the servants. The money, though in marrying he had automatically gained a share of the family affairs. Maybe he'd thought things would change, after he was wed.

"It isn't as if there isn't plenty of room in the house," he said, as Hannibal pulled open the shutters and set to work on the lock that defended the door within.

"Did you see the portraits in the boys' bedrooms?" January nodded. The one in Mathurin's room portrayed Cordelia as Diana at some long-forgotten palace fete, complete with bow and dogs.

The one in Laurence's room had been done later, to judge by the high-waisted gown and the two slaves kneeling allegorically at her feet. He thought about it a moment, then said, "There could be a hundred reasons for him not to have a portrait of his wife in his bedroom."

"There could." Hannibal straightened up, and pocketed his picklocks. Darkness seemed to flow out through the open doors: straw matting, patchouli, frowsry heat. "But I'll bet the same one is at the top of both of our lists."

Four more portraits of Cordelia Jumon adorned the main house. The one in the drawing room was done in golds, to complement the soft apricot walls; the one in the dining room in lighter, brighter hues, befitting the flowered summer chintz of the draperies and the exquisite neo-Gothic furniture of the room. There were two in Madame's bedroom, one of them painted in the past five years, showing enormous Marie sleeves and the bellshaped skirts still in fashion. But all the painters had rendered her face as the face of youth, pink-cheeked, smiling, not much more than seventeen. It wasn't hard to see where Mathurin got his love of collecting. Dresden figurines, Chinese vases, Venetian glass cluttered the marble-topped tables, draped in gauze to protect them from summer flies. Cabinets housed trinkets, statuettes, dried flowers, each item a gem of exquisite taste. Madame's bed, shrouded in Holland, would not have disgraced German royalty, and even through layers of gauze the lusters of the chandeliers winked and twinkled in the invading sliver of light. "Selling the land must have realized a bundle," remarked Hannibal softly. "I imagine Cordelia did it when Laurence's wife left and it was clear there would be no children. All this furniture is only about seven years old. I remember the Gothic craze; look at that table. The dishes in the dining room are new, too."

Beyond a final twist of upstairs corridor a stair no wider than a ladder ascended, and dust powdered down around them as January pushed up the attic trapdoor, glimmering in the light. It was above the level of habitation that the house's age showed. Waist-thick cypress beams supported the slates of the roof, pegged together without nails, the num bers still visible where the Senegalese house carpenters had assembled them. Dust and time and darkness congealed in three stifling slant-roofed chambers, chambers crammed to bursting, it seemed, with everything the two Jumon boys and their mother had ever owned. Trunks, crates, boxes, barrels held every garment they had ever worn, every gimcrack and knickknack that had ever caught their fancy, down to expensive French toysincluding one of those toy guillotines that had been so popular in Paris in the nineties-and tin after empty, bright-colored tin that had once contained sweets. Newspapers and old books stacked the corners; armoires in outmoded styles bulged with dresses equally unfashionable; bolts and rolls of damask, brocade, taffeta silk still lay in the paper they'd been sold in, colors that had once been the high kick of fashion, out of style even before they could be made up. Sets of dishes, at least six of them, Limages and Crown Derby and Sevres edged in gold; a Chippendale dining room table and chairs and another carved with the crocodile feet and sphinxes popular during Napoleon's reign. Boys' shoes, dozens of pairs, in a box, graded in sizes, worn and outgrown; wineglasses packed in straw. In another box, rusted chains. January nearly dropped them, repelled: spiked collars, such as some masters still put on disobedient slaves. Manacles and irons kinked and clotted together in a lump with dirt and oxidation.

"That isn't surprising." Hannibal led the way into the central and largest of the attic's three chambers. "A young girl like that, left a widow on a plantation, might feel she had to enforce discipline however she could." He coughed in the dust, and took another swig of opium. "We've both seen worse."

A wedding veil and dried bouquet, done up in tissue. An intricately wrought wreath of someone's hair.

The third attic was the smallest, crammed like the others. January shone the light carefully over the secret shut trunk lids, the tight-nailed cases, the piles of books and newspapers thick with dust. "You couldn't have kept anyone up here," remarked Hannibal, scraping the unsullied dust on the floor with the toe of his boot. "Not without leaving a sign."

January knelt, squinting and peering at the dust on the floor, on the trunks: years' worth of it, decades. Under the layer of grime the floor was scratched. The attic seemed the smallest because its three sides, where the hip of the roof ran down to the floor, had at some time in the past been boarded across, forming smaller storage areas too low to enter without kneeling. Two of these were simply latched. The third, the smallest, across the downstream end of the house, was locked, with an old-fashioned sash-ward lock, the only lock in the house that hadn't been replaced or renewed.

"You can't say she kept him in the cupboard," protested Hannibal. "Anyway, it would have disturbed the dust if it had been opened, and you can see it hasn't."

"Open it anyway," said January. "I want to broaden my outlook."

He wasn't sure what he expected to find there. Bottles of arsenic, perhaps, or Isaak Jumon's clothes. He knelt, and crawled a little way in on all fours, holding the candle before him, and the smell rose up around him and made his flesh shrink on his bones.

An old faint stink ground into the wood of the floorboards, attenuated by time: piss, and waste, which even cleaned up cannot ever be completely eradicated. All the attics had stunk of mice and rats. This was different. Someone had been kept up here, long ago.

He angled the candle's light into the black awful space's farthest corners, and spiders edged away, indignant at the interruption of their affairs. The dead husks of withered palmetto bugs made long black streaks of shadow.

The floor was scratched a little, old scratches. All around the lock, the wood of the door was scraped, as if someone had ground at it patiently, hopelessly, with a chip of metal or a bit of stone, or maybe the edge of a ring, in an effort to get free. Drips and spatters and little squiggles stained the floor, black with age, amid a paler brown mottling, puddle after puddle after puddle, cleaned up but never cleaned up enough. Something lay in the farthest corner, where the roof met the floor, and January stretched on his belly to pull it out, mouse-chewed and dropping a clatter of rodent pellets as he brought it to him. It was only a rag, knotted hard in a circle and then later cut with what looked like scissors, so that the knot remained. Opposite the knot, the tough, damasked linen was stained black. January touched the cut ends together. The circle they made wasn't quite fourteen inches around. Too small to have gagged an adult.

"There's more of them back here," said Hannibal quietly.

January backed out of the cupboard, to see his friend sitting on the floor near the high-piled trunks and boxes, hands filled to overflowing with chunks and scraps and bights of sheet, cut and knotted, wrinkled, stained with mouse-piss and blood.

"There's a whole cache of them behind the trunks. As if she just cut them off, and shoved them out of sight. "

January turned them over in his fingers, disgust and loathing rising like physical nausea in him as he identified which bonds had to have been tied around wrists not more than an inch in diameter, which had bound ankles, or been gags. No chicken foot, no beef tongue sewed up around silver and guinea peppers, no black wax and graveyard dust, had ever touched him with what he felt now: the sense of evil in its purest and most gruesome form.

He said, "Let's get out of here. I've seen enough." From halfway up Rue St. Louis he looked back at the house, tall and impenetrable, shrouded in its galleries between tall impenetrable neighbors.

For some reason it reminded him of the square brick tombs in the cemetery, names scriven on the marble of those who slept there forever: rotting bones, for the most part, shoved back into corners until time would compound them forever with the earth. At a horse trough outside a grocery on Rue Dauphine he stooped to wash from his hands the filth of the attic's floor, black streaks like graveyard dust in the starlight.

It was five days before January heard from Th?r?se. Having made the journey to Milneburgh once to jog his sister's memory on the subject, he didn't feel able to do so again. In any case he could ill spare either the train fare or the time. For two days he worked at his translation of The Knights attempting to deal tactfully with jokes about wrestling coaches and such lines as: Lying, stealing, and having a receptive arse are all absolute necessities for a political career... Had that bookseller ever read this play?

And every day, working at his desk, January would smell it, the bitter stench of hair and hooves and gunpowder burning, where someone had made smolder pots in a courtyard to disperse fever from the air. Walking back from Rose's rooms in the evening, he passed Dufillio's apothecary on Rue Chartres and saw that the show globes on display-enormous alembics and bulbous jars of colored liquid, blue and green and crimson in equal proportion most of the year-were now uniformly filled with red, a glowing warning to those travelers who came off the steamboats and walked about the city in the mosquito-whining dusk. There were fewer women in the markets, fewer stevedores even among the diminished numbers along the levee; fewer children played in the packed earth of the Place d'Armes. The Guards, when he went to the Cabildo in the mornings to see Olympe, hovered near to watch and listen, and hustled him and Gabriel quickly out. It seemed to him that the prisoners were very quiet.

On Wednesday a note reached him from Dr. Ker, asking his help at Charity Hospital with fever cases.

In two days, nearly a hundred had been brought in, mostly impoverished Germans and Irish from the shacks where Girod and Perdido Streets petered out into the marshes behind the town. For two days January worked late into the nights, wiping down bodies flushed with jaundice, making saline draughts, watching in helpless frustration as the various volunteer physicians of the town administered whatever remedies they considered appropriate for a disease as mysterious as death itself bleeding, emetics, "heroic" doses of calomel and mercury ("If their gums don't bleed, it ain't enough to work"), plasters that raised blisters on the emaciated flesh. Sometimes their patients recovered, damaged kidneys releasing bloodblack urine in a flood. Sometimes they died. And with every new case brought in, with every wrung and wasted corpse January helped carry down to the courtyard for the dead-carts, he thought, Not the cholera. We can deal with the yellow jack if the cholera doesn't return.

The Louisiana Gazette ran an editorial furiously denouncing the white-livered cowards who fled the city-the healthiest spot in the nation! at the rumor of a little summer fever. Pere Eugenius, meeting January late one evening in the brick corridor of the hospital, remarked dryly that members of the City Council had requested that the Cathedral not toll the passing bells, "Lest folks coming through on the steamboats get the wrong impression." Twice Burton Blodgett was ejected from the hospital's courtyard at the request of Councilman Bouille, when the journalist showed signs of trying to get up conversations with the volunteers who worked the wards. On the second occasion, Bouille-who had been in and out of the hospital all day in an effort to accommodate Ker's requests for help and to assure the staff that there was, in fact, no epidemic-all but wrested the journalist away from a plump German gentleman named Weber, who had been a physician in Bavaria but was insufficiently versed in French or English to have much of a practice in New Orleans. "There is no cholera, understand?" He almost shouted the words at the German. " Uerstehen? Der ist nein... You make-him understand," the Councilman ordered January, who happened to be nearby. "And you! " Bouille added, turning in fury to the loitering reporter and snatching the notebook from his hand. "Sniffing about where you have no business, seeking scandal and panic, like a muckraker hoping to stir up treasure from the bottom of a pool by fouling it for all who rely upon it for sustenance! All you care about is your miserable rag-no, not even that, but your wretched name, your delight in seeing ' Our Correspondent' in print! "

"I care, sir," retorted Blodgett, drawing himself up to his full height in the glare of the gallery lamps, "about the First Amendment of the Constitution-and also the laws of this city that guard a citizen against theft of his prop; rry." He held out his hand for the notebook.

Bouille ripped the pages from it and threw them to the wet bricks of the courtyard. "Citizen?

Citizen?"

"He is a citizen and a taxpayer." Dr. Ker descended the gallery stair and crossed the courtyard quickly to the growing knot of volunteers, medical students, and surgeons. "The notebook is his property-and in fact, Charity Hospital is public property-"

"Easy for you to say," snapped the Councilman, a wiry little French Creole who had been in three duels that January knew about. "You are not a native. You have no stake, you do not care what businessmen and investors in the rest of the world think of our city. You, an enemy of this nation!

But I assure you, I will report your attitude to the Council, and you"-he turned on Blodgett again"The editors of every paper in this city will hear, not only from me but from other members of the Council, members whose assistance and advertising they may require in future-"

"City Councilman Bouille says that there has been no cholera," translated January quietly, to the thoroughly alarmed German. "And he would appreciate it if you do not speak on the subject to anyone. This is how panic and rumor start, which can ruin businesses."

"People in the rest of the world, even in the rest of the United States, they do not understand our city," Bouille stormed, cheeks mottled with rage. "They have only to see words like fever and cholera and they panic, like fools, like women, like children!" He stepped aside to avoid two volunteers carrying a dead man to the gate. "They think, 'New Orleans is a dangerous place!' And it is not. It is the most healthful spot in the world. As its true inhabitants know! You shall hear from the Council," he ranted at Dr. Ker, "your editors shall hear from the Council," he continued, whirling again on Blodgett, who had stood this whole time like a man who perceives himself about to be martyred for Justice's sake, "and you, sir, shall hear from my-"

"I think it would be best if I had a few words with Mr. Blodgett outside," said Ker firmly, and took the reporter's arm in his hand, nearly dragging him toward the hospital gates. Bouille looked as if he would follow and complete his challenge, but it began to rain again, a driving black downpour that cleared the court in moments.

Encountering January later in the fever ward, Ker muttered, "I don't hold with dueling as a rule, but there are people for whose sake one is almost willing to sacrifice one's principles."

January laughed. "Don't lower your standards, sir. Bouille isn't worth it."

The doctor laughed in turn, and went upstairs, to the small ward where two women had just been brought in, vomiting and with a number of other symptoms that bore a fearful resemblance to the scourge that had swept the city two summers before.

Returning home late, January found a note from Dominique, delivered at some time the previous day by being pushed under the gar?onni?re door. It said simply-or as simply as any communication from Dominique ever said anything-that due to social exigencies of the most pressing kind, Th?r?se had not been at liberty to make the journey to Mandeville to inquire after her cousin Aveline until Wednesday. Upon arrival in that charming resort (its advantages over Milneburgh cataloged in full, with speculation appended concerning the cost of Mandeville real estate and Henri Viellard's abilities and inclination to purchase a cottage there), Th?r?se had discovered that Aveline had been sold. Th?r?se, who during her last visit with Aveline had been severely twitted on the subject of serving "a woman who ain't no better than she should be," considered that this served Aveline right. ^