03 Graveyard Dust

SEVENTEEN

"I've thought it prudent, on the occasions of my past two visits to Madame Celie, to lend her books." Rose Vitrac pretended not to see the arm January offered her as they skirted the muck of puddles that constituted the Place d'Armes, using her hand instead to hold up her flowered foulard skirts. "Not novels, of course, though Celie loves them-she and Isaak used to read to one another in the evenings. Evidently Notre-Dame de Paris was the first fiction she'd ever read. Papa Gerard is rather strict about that. I lent her St. Lambert's Cat?chisme Universel yesterday. In an hour or so, after Papa Gerard has had time to cool down, I'll go by the shop and ask its return." They spent the hour in Hannibal's room, filling him in on the events of the trial. "Let's just hope our friend Vilhardouin made good notes for his defense," remarked Hannibal, his thin, husky voice fairly steady and his words only barely slurred. Propped on every pillow and folded blanket in the house, he actually looked a little better than he had the previous night. His violin lay on the bed close to his knees, and the room was redolent of the black coffee January had made for them all, and of herbed steam. "Papa Gerard must be just this side of apoplexy." Paul had invited January to the Corbier house for supper again that night, an invitation January had turned down; when he walked Rose to the gate he met Gabriel, bearing a crock of beans and rice.

"We got too much," argued the boy, when January tried to tell him to take it back for his family. "Papa figured this would take care of you and Hannibal both for a couple days." It would, and in the absence of other income-The Knights would not be finished until Monday at least-it was all that was likely to sustain them. January felt like a parasite but didn't argue very hard. He and Hannibal dealt with classical Greek syntax and the absurdities of Aristophanic logic until the creak of the yard gate alerted January to Rose's return. He stepped out on the gallery, only for the pleasure of watching her cross the yard: an absurd joy, he knew, more suited to some fair-haired Ivanhoe than to a respectable musician of forty-one. She moved like an egret in her strangely awkward grace, and paused in the middle of the yard to hold up a thick blue book. "I'm surprised Papa let her learn to read at all," remarked January dourly, as Rose halted at the top of the gar?onni?re steps to kick off the mud-crusted pattens that protected her shoes. "You wrong him." Rose steadied herself on the gallery railing. "Easy to do, I admit. Monsieur Gerard may be hot-tempered and opinionated, but he's very concerned that his daughter have every advantage-every advantage a woman of color in this country is allowed, at any rate. So many white men assume that any woman of color is a courtesan, or would become one immediately if offered money-an assumption they'd kill another man for, if he made it of their sisters. Papa Gerard wanted Celie to make a respectable marriage. No girl is able to do that if there's the slightest question about her reputation. And he wanted her to be able to manage her household, and her husband's financial affairs, to the best advantage. And he isn't a fool. He knows that if a woman is widowed she must be able to support herself. For that it does help if one is able to read."

She followed January into Hannibal's room and took the chair he brought up for her, clearing some of the mess of foolscap and Greek lexicons from a corner of the fiddler's bed to take his own seat.

January was silent, remembering for the first time his own mother asking St. Denis Janvier to send her a tutor, so that she could learn to read. Livia had carried it with a high hand and turned it into a demand, as if it were a polite accomplishment and not a necessity, but he realized now that had her protector died in the first year or two of her placage, she might have had no recourse but prostitution for herself, and hard labor for the children she would have been unable to educate. Rose propped her spectacles more firmly onto her nose, opened the back cover of the Cat?chisme Universel, and took out a folded note.

Celie,

I am alive and wel but I canot come back to town just yet. Stil I love you and I must see you. Come to were the 3 rypreses stand at the end of Bayoo Profit tonite at midnite, or Thursday nite at midnite. I wil wait for you there. Do not for any reason tell your father or the lawer. You may bring with you that you can trust, but only one. Yore loving husbund, Isaac Jomone "So much for the fortune Laurence Jumon spent on his son's education," remarked Hannibal, leaning around to look over January's shoulder. "If Antoine spells that badly I wonder Granville hired him."

"It's a page torn out of the back of a book." January held the heavy, soft-textured paper up to the light slanting in through the door. "Octavo size-one of the blanks at the front or back to make up the signatures. Look where it's yellowed around three sides? But my main question is, Why would Isaak write to Celie in English?"

"He wouldn't." Rose gestured with the Cat?chisme, and January now saw that one of the blank pages at the end, and the marbled inner cover paper, were lined with neat, small handwriting.

"Here's what Celie writes."

Dear Madamoiselle Vitrac, thank you, thank you so very much for helping me. I do not know what to do. I found this note last night, lying on my window sill, with Isaak's gold signet ring. I do not know how it came there, but whoever sent it must know that Papa does not allow me to receive letters. I do not think that this is Isaak's hand, though if he had been sick or injured he might write differently. He speaks some English but cannot write it easily; I cannot think of any reason that he would write in it, rather than in French. But if it is Isaak I must go to him. Please, I beg you, help me to get out of the house tonight and speak to him. Papa would let me communicate with no one yesterday, and I could not think how to get word to you. Would your friend Monsieur Janvier consent to accompany me to the place? I will tell Papa that Monsieur Nogent has not been well-though he was in the courtroom this morning-and I beg you to come this evening and say that he wishes to see me again. I am distracted and do not know what to do. Yours, Celie.

"Interesting," said January. "It explains the way she looked at court this morning, but I wonder if it's a coincidence that the letter came the day before the trial." He sniffed at the paper. Imbued with a conglomerate stench of dirt, smoke, and turpentine, it held no scent obliging enough to be in any way distinctive or remarkable. "Cheap ink and a pen cut with something less sharp than a penknife by someone who hasn't had much practice in splitting the point. Look at the way the h in Thursday drags and smears, and the m and the n in midnite. Whatever Isaak's abilities to spell in English, I should imagine he knows at least how to cut a pen."

"Not to speak of spelling his own name," interjected Hannibal. "In other words, it's a trap." "Looks like it." January held the paper to the light. "Now, who do we know who's small enough to pass for Madame Celie in the darkness of the cipriere at night?"

In the end they got Gabriel to do it, balanced perilously on a borrowed pair of pattens that added three inches to his height and wearing a dark-blue tignon stuffed and padded out to bring the top of his silhouette up another four. "Oh, M'sieu," he squeaked, holding out his arm to his uncle for balance as he minced around his mother's parlor in one of her borrowed dresses, "Please lend me your arm! I feel faint!" And amid gales of laughter from his siblings he brought the back of his hand to his forehead in imitation of the frailer Creole belles. "Can't I wear at least a little rouge, Papa? I can't be a real belle without rouge."

"You're there to lure these people into the open, not seduce them," said January flatly. "It'll be so dark we'll be lucky to find the place, let alone have them find us." He checked the oil in the dark lantern that stood on the parlor table, then the load of the completely illegal pistol he'd brought to the house thrust through the waistband at the back of his trousers.

"I don't like this," said Paul. Like January, he had changed into his darkest calico shirt, and since no man of color was permitted to carry so much as a cane, let alone a rifle or the colichemarde, he had armed himself with the stoutest chunk of hardwood in his workshop, a mahogany chair leg whose carved top was as big around as his biceps. Quiet grimness had settled on his face, and January realized suddenly that he would very much not like to ever get on the wrong side of this man.

"Nor do I." January kept his voice low to exclude the boy, who was flirting and mugging with the Sunday-for-Church fan his older sister had no use for during the rest of the week. "But if we're to learn anything this man must be trapped. And there isn't a woman I know who I'd put in this position." According to Rose, who had visited Celie just after dinner, the girl had been dissuaded from accompanying them only by Rose's flat refusal to be party to getting her out of her father's house. At Rose's height it was out of the question for her to personate Celie, even had January been willing to let her, and Hannibal's extensive list of the gamer prostitutes of his acquaintance-both male and female-who would have undertaken the disguise had been useless in the face of January's utter inability to pay anyone to take the risk, even at the minimal rates that some of them charged for their time and services. That left Gabriel.

A sharp rapping at the door drew Paul away into the front bedroom. "Are we ready?" January heard Augustus Mayerling ask, through the opened French door. "I received your message," added the fencing master, as he came through into the back parlor and handed January one of the two firearms he carried, an English shotgun. "I regret to say that Madame Mayerling is not yet returned from Mandeville. She should be here tomorrow. What is the affair tonight?" As they set out along Rue des Ramparts toward the Bayou Road January filled the Prussian in on the events of the trial, including the note and his observations thereon. "It hasn't escaped me," he added, "that a mountain man like Killdevil Nash would cut quills with a skinning-knife and would barely remember how to do it into the bargain. It might be that this is a trap for me rather than for Madame Celie. But if that's the case there's definitely something deep going on, because Madame Celie identified that signet ring as her husband's."

At Rue de L'H?pital they turned north, passing the dark brick bulk of the Orphanage as the trees around them grew thicker, and the leaden armadas of clouds from the Gulf sailed onward to assail the moon.

"The other thing that letter does," went on January in a low voice, "or almost does, is exonerate Mathurin Jumon-if the concern he expressed at the trial hasn't already. Why have Killdevil Ned send a note in clumsy English when Jumon could compose one in well-spelled French?" "Why?" said Mayerling logically. "Because Madame Celie would almost certainly recognize Jumon's handwriting." Gabriel skipped and hurried along beside the men, skirts gathered in one hand and pattens swinging from the other; the dim slits and spots of light that leaked from January's lantern splashed the water in the ditches, and the sword master's scarred, beaky face, with fugitive gold.

"And if this trap is for you instead of for her, my friend, you could not fail to do so."

"Maybe," murmured January.

"Or it may simply be that our friend Killdevil thought this up on his own. Jumon has been in Mandeville this past week, I believe, and only returned for the trial. Monsieur Nash may not have been able to get in touch with him. In either case," Mayerling went on, hefting the Manton rifle he carried over one bony shoulder, "I advise that you waste no time in hanging the lantern on a tree limb at the appointed place, and that both of you stand well back from it, and as far apart as you can and still be visible to one another."

January obeyed these instructions when they reached the northern end of the narrow tributary of Bayou St. John, which terminated in a sort of trench or basin sur rounded by cypresses, hackberries, and long-leaved willows bending like princesses to trail their hair in the inky water.

The prospective ambushees had taken the precaution of leaving the Corbier house at nine in the evening, so as to be at the rendezvous well before midnight; time enough for Gabriel to assume his pattens and totter into the clearer space a little inland from the basin amid the trees with the air of an ingenue playing Juliet. Paul stationed himself in a clump of palmettos just behind his son-having first cautiously prodded the spiny-leaved thicket and shone the light there to evict any snakes-and Augustus took up a position on the other side of the clearing in a stand of tall reeds.

Clouds had covered the moon while the little parry had been on the clamshell road along Bayou St. John, but now chinks and cracks of moonlight dappled down through the overhanging trees to spangle the black still waters with pale light.

January checked his watch-it was barely eleven-and settled down to wait.

Gradually the frogs, which had fallen silent around them, set up their croaking again, bullfrog and tree frog and the tiny shrill brill-brill of the gray frog, the squeak of crickets and then the deep, metallic throb of the cicadas. Mosquitoes whined in January's ears. He slapped at them, fully aware that it was an exercise in futility-they'd only come back in thirty seconds, and they did.

Something flickered in the darkness overhead; he saw moonlight silver the back of a flying squirrel, gliding silently down from the top of a white oak tree and out of sight into shadows.

The pale shape that was Gabriel, in his skirts and his tignon, fidgeted against the dark backdrop of the trees, and scratched his hip. January sighed. He'd warned the boy that no lady ever scratched herself under any circumstances but couldn't do so again without being overheard, if there were anyone to overhear. Palmetto bugs the length of January's fingers roared around the light of the lantern, hanging from its limb, and crept across the bare ground beneath. Somewhere, distantly, January heard the tap-tap-tap of African drums.

They used to talk to each other, the plantations, January heard in his mind his father's voice, deep as it was in dreams, in a darkness like this, the dark of the cipriere.

And the villages where the runaways went to hide, out in the desert, out in the cipriere, where the whites couldn't go-they'd use the drums, too. The men who'd been priests, and wise men, back in Africa, they ran away and became wangateurs and voodoo doctors. They'd set traps for the fool. ish, made with snake venom and poisons. And they'd get the loa to watch the bounds of the village, too: Bosou and Ogu, Omulu the smallpox god and the Baron Cemetery. They'd give them rum and tobacco, and they'd tell them, "Kill anyone who comes near these places..."

In the dark beneath the trees it was easy to remember the stories his father and the other men of the plantation had told him, about Ogu with the lightning in his eyes, and Omulu, whose real name was Shapannan that you were never supposed to say, and the Platt-Eye Devil that gobbled up the unwary in the dark. Tales about the Damballah serpent, the rainbow serpent, that smelled like watermelon; tales about the lizards that would come on you when you slept and count your teeth so that you'd die; tales about witches who could change skins with the jackals or kill a man just by drawing a finger across the threshold of his house.

Like the chop of an ax the frogs fell silent, and January checked his watch. It was quarter to twelve.

He listened, straining every sense to concentrate, to pick apart the tiniest clues. Remembering the glisten of the knife slashing down on him, that pale furious face and filthy beard. Gabriel, he thought, I shouldn't have brought you here... This is absurd. This is absurd. No sound, save for the lapping of the bayou around the cypress knees. Sweat trickled down his cheeks and temples in the dense heat. Do I call out? Do I let him know we know he's here?

The night held its breath. Somewhere in the darkness there was a rustle, a startled movement that made January flinch, then stillness again. A fox? Killdevil Nash? The Platt-Eye Devil? The white eyeless thing that hunted him through the cipriere of his dreams?

Six feet away on the other side of the lantern's light Gabriel scratched again.

After some twenty minutes January glanced at his watch twice, trying to appear casual-the frogs began their peeping again. How long had it taken, he wondered, for them to start up after he and his bodyguard had arrived? He cursed himself for not taking note. Did this mean the ambusher had come and gone, or did it only mean Killdevil was a hunter, lying still? How long would it take for a skilled hunter's eyes to adjust, so that he could take aim at a black man in dark clothes, or a lightskinned boy, standing in the shadows among the trees?

Sweat crawled down his face. Mosquitoes sang in his ears and he dared not move to strike at them-a fear Gabriel evidently didn't share, but at least, thank God, the boy didn't speak. January checked his watch again.

At ten minutes to one, another sharp rustling nearly shot January out of his skin, but it was only Augustus emerging from the reeds. "The Devil fly away with it. He won't be back."

"You saw him?"

"I heard something, a little after midnight, coming and then going. Only morning can show us what the tracks have to tell."

Gabriel came running over, pattens in hand. "I thought somebody was gonna shoot at us." He sounded disappointed.

The fencing master sighed. "Stand over there," he instructed, pointing back at the tree near where Paul was collecting the lantern. "I'll shoot at you, if that will make your evening complete."

They walked back in silence through the woods and the marshy stands of hackberry and pussy willow, to the stone bridge where Bayou M?tairie ran into Bayou St. John. A City Guard stopped them at the corner of the Bayou Road and Rue de l'H?pital, but after one quick lantern flash over the sword master's pale cold narrow face and cropped fair hair, the man went away. Evidently men of color bearing weapons were acceptable if accompanied by a white, whose servants they were presumed to be.

"Will you come in for something?" said Paul, when they reached the house on Rue Douane once again. In direct contravention of the instructions he had left in parting, his daughters were both still wide awake, the parlor shutters left open to make a long rectangle of candlelight in the dense indigo dark. Nearly drowned by the stench of the gutters and the grit of plague smudges, a thread of coffee scent drifted on the air.

Mayerling shook his head. "You have your work to do in the morning. Me, I am off to meet that geistesschwach Vilhardouin and his seconds at the Cafe des Exiles, so that he and Herr Greenaway can take shots at one another over who shall fetch punch for Madame Redfern. It fills me with deep sorrow to contemplate the future of human civilization."

And he strolled jauntily away down Rue Douane, an angular figure with two rifles balanced easily over one shoulder. The light from the oil lamps that swung above the intersections glanced off the silky beaver of his high-crowned hat.

January waited for him until nine the following morning, but when he made no appearance-he had said he would come by eight-he and Hannibal set out to retrace the route of the previous night. January felt serious misgivings about dragging the fiddler into this, compounded by his conviction that Hannibal would be worse than useless in the event of an attack, but Shaw had not yet returned from Baton Rouge and he might need a white witness to anything he found. Clouds were gathering fast; at this season it rained most afternoons, and it was the walk of an hour and a half to Bayou Profite.

"Thorough brush, thorough brier, " quoted Hannibal, pausing to disentangle his coat skirts for the dozenth time from a tangle of hackberry thorns. "Over park, over pale... My uncles never would take me shooting with them; I always would stop and ask questions about why mushrooms grew in circles and what kinds of birds nested in the tree hollows. I'd get the poachers to take me out at night with them to watch rabbits. I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, where oxlips and the nodding violet grows... Of course there weren't any snakes in County Mayo," he added, stepping back rather quickly.

"King snake," said January, as the mottled brown-and-blue tail whipped away out of sight.

"Mambo Jeanne on Bellefleur used to tell us that king snakes have powerful spines and can kill any other snake just by wrapping around it and crushing all its bones."

"I knew there was a reason I never went beyond Rampart Street." Hannibal looked around him at the still greennesses of cypress and loblolly pine, sweat already running down his face from the contained heat among the trees. "I didn't know all this was out here. Rather like discovering the maids' dormitory in my aunt Rowena's house."

"King snake's nothing to worry about." January scouted the knots and clumps of underbrush where Omulu and Baron Cemetery had lurked in wait last night. "You can tell a poison snake's trail because it's wavy; the safe ones leave a straight track like a ruler."

"Must be awkward for them when they come to a puddle. Over flood, over fire..."

January found the deep print of Paul's big boots, and where the mahogany chair leg had scraped the willow trunk against which it had rested. In a clump of reeds, nearer than he'd thought it had been last night, he found the narrow neat marks of Mayerling's English boots. On the other side of the bayou he found what he sought: broken twigs, and the soft brown leaves of last summer's oaks pressed down into the wet ground. Looking back through the trees across the narrow green water he saw Hannibal in the middle of the clearing, just where Gabriei had stood last night. The fiddler was blithely continuing with Act Two of A Midsummer Night's Dream as if he expected the spotted snakes with double tongue, thorny hedgehogs, newts, and blindworms to be listening in the deeper green silences of the cipriere.

Not long-legged spinners nor beetles black, thought January uneasily, turning to listen to that green invisibility. Bosou and Ogu and Agassu, watching with red ageless eyes; the demon Onzoncaire and the bleeding sheep-head sacrificed to Omulu; the rainbow serpent coiled under the reeds. And behind them the dimmer manitou spirits of the Choctaw and Chickasaw, exiled but still listening, angry at their people's dead and wanting blood.

Killdevil Ned Nash was here, thought January. Or someone was. And had decided not to try it.

Did he see us? Know there was more than one?

Or was there some other reason? Something else he saw? He moved along closer to the edge of the water, picking his way carefully among the reeds. Gnats whirled up in clouds; wasps and dragonflies, hanging over the water, flickered away in eerie silence.

He found the marks of bare feet about four yards from the farthest signs of Killdevil's moccasin scuffs. Two men-one of them with enormous feet, larger than January's own-and someone who could have been either a boy or a woman. The marks came up out of the bayou itself, and hugged cover with the expert caution of those who knew the country well.

Thunder whispered overhead, low and close, a lion's growl. Wind whipped at the oak leaves and the long gray beards of moss. The cricket cries increased in the dense green air, as if the whole world were suddenly compressed by the coming of the rain.

January crossed back over the bayou on the rummage of deadfalls and cypress knees that had taken him, more or less dry shod, over the still green water in the first place. With the wind snaking in his long hair and his pale face skull-like with exhaustion and illness, Hannibal had the look of a wood-elf himself in the sudden dimming of the storm light.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes spout Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks! You sullferous and thought-executing fires, vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts...

"Do you feel it?" He swung around as soon as January was near. "The watchers in the woods? Be not afeared, the isle is full of noises..."

January nodded. Looking back across the bayou to where the reeds grew thick, he understood whole and suddenly why Ti Jon had lied to him, and where Isaak Jumon had been between the twenty-first of June and the twenty-third, and whom he had gone to meet beside the crooked tree near the Bayou Gravier. Oaks and willows, reeds and hackberries made matte walls of greens, dark and drenched with the rain; the beryl water was still, save for the growing and spreading circles of the falling drops. The air breathed the smoky odor of rot, and the waiting tension of the Congo drums.

"Indeed it is," he said softly. "Indeed it is."

Augustus and Madeleine Mayerling were sitting on the gallery steps outside the gar?onni?re when Hannibal and January returned. "I abase myself with chagrin at having failed you," said the fencing master, shedding his waspwaisted coat and rolling up his fine linen sleeves as January helped Hannibal to lie down on Bella's bed. The fiddler had made it most of the way back from the ciprierre in the rain, but exhaustion had claimed him as they'd passed the cemeteries; arms aching, January had halfdragged him up the stairs. Madeleine Mayerling, a full-bosomed, beautiful woman with dark hair wound into fanciful knots and ringlets, measured herbs into the little china pot of the veilleuse as her husband of six months went down to the cistern for water, and scratched a lucifer on the striking paper to kindle the flame underneath. "Orell Greenaway put a bullet through Clement Vilhardouin this morning at six," Mayerling said, returning with the dripping pail and shaking the rain out of his hair. "Vilhardouin died an hour and a half ago."

"Majnun," said January, in Arabic-fool. Mayerling's scarred face showed no change of expression, but the long upper lip pressed taut. "As you say. I'm told he spent all of yesterday evening in the woods at the end of Erato Street, shooting at playing cards nailed to the trees there: I am pleased to report the entire Court of Spades still enjoys excellent health. The surgeon Greenaway hired-that idiot Bernard over on Rue Bourbon-bled Vilhardouin and dosed him with calomel by the cupful, but I doubt he would have survived in any event. I hope he had a partner on Madame Celie's case?" "None."

"Monsieur Trepagier-my first husband, as you know, Monsieur," said Madame Mayerling, "engaged in two duels while we were married." She crossed the little room in a rustle of claretcolored skirts, a steaming cup of herb tisane cradled in her hands. "This in spite of the fact that the next year's crop was already mortgaged and not yet in the ground, and in the event of his death I-and the children that I had then-would have been left destitute. The man he fought, and killed, was in a similar case, and I knew his wife. It was that which made me finally stop believing that he would ever offer me even the protection that the law demands."

"I would not love thee, dear, so well, " quoted Hannibal, cocking a sardonic glance up from his pillows, "loved I not honor more."

"Goodness gracious me." Madame Mayerling widened her velvet-brown eyes and held the cup at arm's length above him, "I have accidentally spilled every drop of this scalding hot tisane over poor Monsieur Sefton's head."

Hannibal lifted his hands in surrender. "Now mark me how I will undo myself-"

"See that you do, then." She handed him the cup and settled in the chair that Mayerling held for her. Whatever could be said of her first husband, thought January, this second, odd marriage agreed with her. The haunted grimness of her widowhood had been replaced by a kind of zesty humor that he had not even seen in her girlhood. It was as if the subdued calm of her early years itself had been a fa?ade, a defense against fate penetrated only by the ferocity with which she pursued her music. She wore now the look in her eyes comparable only to that of a young child presented with a large dish of Italian ice and a spoon: as if, at twenty-eight, she were finally permitted to be young.

"I spent Wednesday afternoon at tea with Madame Cordelia Jumon," she said a short time later, after January had gone down to the kitchen to fetch up the spirit kettle and remains of his mother's coffee beans. "We used to make jokes-my girlfriends and cousins and I-about how Monsieur Mathurin Jumon would never marry because he could never find a woman who would spoil him the way his mother spoiled him, calling him 'my lover' and 'my cabbage' and all those other things as if he were still in dresses. Years, as far back as I can remember. And now-poof! "

She gestured as if drawing back from an explosion.

"A viper in her bosom; an adder; a beast who was always selfish, always cruel to her, always delighted in hurting her, even from the time he was a little child-this from a woman I heard with my own ears telling how he and his brother used to sleep in her bed with her, they loved her so much. Madame Cordelia would tell my father in detail about how she used to tell Monsieur Mathurin and his brother to pick out the most wretched little beggar child they saw, and she would give alms, saying that it was her gift to them so they would go to Heaven because of her. I remember she'd go on for hours-she saw my mother fairly often when I was a child-about what Monsieur Laurence and Monsieur Mathurin must be thinking about her when they were apart, and would ask them about what they'd been thinking about her at such-and-such a time."

Hannibal coughed. "Makes Monsieur positively Lear-like."

"I'd have run from home screaming," Mayerling flatly.

A thought crossed January's mind: a black locked cupboard in an attic, a bloodied strip of sheet.

"Maybe they tried," he said.

Hannibal's gaze crossed his, but the young woman went on, "In any case, now none of that has ever happened. Mathurin was always an unnatural brute. He never cared for her, always sought ways to hurt her and slight her-the teacups we were drinking out of were Sevres ware, Louis XVI, fifty dollars apiece! She was wearing girandole earrings the size of chandeliers!"

"Did she say why he was selling up?"

Madame Mayerling shook her head. "But so far he's put on the market not only the carriages and horses and Gerard sound said Augustus slaves that you heard of but one of the properties that went to him in the settlement when they sold up Trianon, a warehouse at the foot of Julia Street.

Madame Cordelia says he's given her some tale about investing in slaves to be let out, but he'd have to be buying an army of them. In any case what he isn't spending the money on is the black peau de soie she feels is critical to her standing in society-one can't be properly respectful to the dead, apparently, in plain paramatta-and getting her carriage reupholstered." There was silence, save for the drumming of rain on the roof, and the muffled bubbling of the water over the spirit lamp. January measured out the ground coffee and added it to the water, nipped chunks of sugar from the loaf and arranged them neatly in a saucer on a folded napkin. "Mathurin can't be spending that much on rustic ware. It sounds as though he were being blackmailed."

"I thought of that," remarked Mayerling, who was, after the manner of fencing instructors, idly experimenting with Italianate redoubles with a coffee spoon. "If there'd been a run on a bank or a plunge in stocks, one would hear, and I've gambled with the man. He never plays beyond what one would spend on an evening's entertainment in some other pursuit." "It's a shame," said his wife. "Because he has done a great deal of good."

"I've heard that," said January. "I've heard also that he has dealings with the voodoo doctors from time to time-over what, I don't know. What does his mother say of his charities?" "Not much. They're usually people steered to him by the St. Margaret Society, or through Pere Eugenius, though I think Mrs. Coughlin and her daughter, Abigail, came to him through a mutual friend."

"Coughlin?" Hannibal straightened from his pillows. "Lucinda Coughlin?" "You know her?" Madame Mayerling regarded him in surprise. "A Philadelphia woman; her husband died of the fever last year. Monsieur Mathurin has been helping her find respectable employment, and giving money toward her daughter's schooling."

"Little girl about five years old?" Hannibal held out his hand to indicate a height of about three feet. "Honeycolored curls and big brown eyes? Looks like she came out from under a hill in Ireland somewhere?"

She nodded. "Abigail. I've met them over at Monsieur Mathurin's two or three times since Christmas."

"And Lucinda's a blond woman?" Hannibal coughed again, deep racking shudders, and groped under his pillow for the opium bottle. He sank back, white-faced, against the cushions, his breath stertorous, but a curious bright gleam in his dark-circled eyes. "Flax blond? Your height, but slim? About your age?"

"That's Mrs. Coughlin," said Madame Mayerling. She took the teacup from the bedside lest it spill. "A very sweet woman, from the little I saw of her. Maybe too strict with her daughter, who seemed a bit of a minx. Mrs. Coughlin had difficulty in finding employment of any kind in a shop, you understand, because she couldn't leave Abigail alone, but I understand they were arranging to have the girl put in the Ursulines convent during the day at school. She's a little young for it..."

"And the first time she opened her mouth she'd probably blow the roof off the building," said Hannibal. He took another sip of opium. "I've heard that child swear. She could take the paint off a gate at fifty paces and make a muleskinner faint."

Madame Mayerling, Augustus, and January all regarded him in stunned silence. "Lucinda Coughlin," said Hannibal, "is one of the most active-certainly one of the speediest-prostitutes on Girod Street, and if her daughter's still virgin I'll turn in my fiddle and become a monk. The pair of them got me drunk and turned my pockets out at the Brown Meg the day before Christmas and left me facedown in the gutter on Tchoupitoulas Street. Thank God it wasn't raining."

^