03 Graveyard Dust

TWENTY-FOUR

Judge Canonge was not best pleased, after a day in the courtroom hearing all those cases left behind by ill or absconding colleagues, to be summoned from his own packing yet again to the Cabildo. Nevertheless, half an hour after Constable LaBranche left the watch room where January, Mamzelle Marie, Gabriel, and Isaak waited, the deep golden voice could be heard through the open doors in the arcade.

"Ridiculous? Of course it's ridiculous! If the man had had the sense God gave a goat he'd have seen there was something amiss in the confession... What have we here?" The Judge squinted around the grimy semidark of the watch room, then touched his hat brim. "Madame Paris."

Mamzelle Marie nodded like a queen.

"Your Honor." The young man got shakily to his feet, aided by the stick January had cut for him out by the bayou. "My name is Isaak Jumon. I understand you have convicted my wife, and this man's sister"-he gestured to January-"of my murder."

The Judge's dark eyes flicked from Isaak's face to January's, and he remarked, "You again." He looked back at the young marble carver. "You look like you've been buried, anyway. Sit down, for God's sake. LaBranche, get ilris boy some brandy. I never liked that jiggery-pokery with your brother and his mysterious carriage rides in the middle of the night. And I understand some poor bastard has been buried under your name. Where have you been?"

"In the care of a good couple named Weber." Jumon glanced self-consciously around him at the various guards in the room, then sipped from the glass he'd been handed. "Germans, who spoke no English. They feared moreover they would be sent back to Bavaria if they spoke of my presence in their house. They found me, soaked to the skin and dying, close by the gates of the Old Cemetery, and took me in, though they believed me to be stricken with the cholera."

"Weber worked with me at Charity early in the month," January explained. He had not been asked to sit, and though his head had cleared considerably with the walk back to town he felt weak and a little shaky, and still half-expected to see snakes moving in the corners when he wasn't paying attention. "Members of the City Council were at pains to impress upon all of us there that there WAS no epidemic, and especially that no mention was to be made of cholera."

"That idiot Bouille," said Canonge. "As if the pilots of the steamboat on the river don't carry the news. Though with that imbecile Blodgett giving cry in the newspapers I don't blame the Council for acting like a bunch of ninnies. They'd arrest the Samaritan on the road to Jericho for operating an unlicensed hack service, belike. I take it," he added, studying Isaak's drawn face and emaciated shoulders by the glare of the oil lamp in its socket above, "that cholera wasn't your problem."

Jumon shook his head. "As it happened, I had nursed Monsieur Nogent's wife during the cholera the summer before last. I know the symptoms, and I knew that, similar as my own were, I had been poisoned, I think with arsenic. I was lucky to survive."

"Do you know who administered the arsenic?"

Jumon was silent for a time. "I think now that it has to have been Dr. Yellowjack. At the time-and I am ashamed to say it-I thought that it was through some agency of my mother's. I was-I was upset, and very frightened, and I thought all sorts of things about her that cannot have been true. I went to Dr. Yellowjack's house, you understand, to ask his help against her..."

"Thus putting yourself remarkably in accord with your good wife as to the proper way of dealing with the lady," remarked Canonge grimly. "Far be it from me to speak ill of a man's mother to his face, but Madame Jumon makes Lady Macbeth appear doting by comparison, and amateurish to boot."

January stepped unobtrusively back to Abishag Shaw's desk, and leaned his weight on the corner of it, his knees abruptly weak. His body ached and although the mere thought of food was nauseating, he felt overwhelmed with a desperate craving for sweets. The air in the watch room felt stifling, like a dirty liquid in his lungs and throat, and he wondered if the hallucinations were returning. Everything seemed suddenly distant, like a Rembrandt painting-the judge's craggy face in lamplight and shadow, the straggling curls of Jumon's hair, the buttons on Gabriel's shirt. "I was naturally appalled-horrified-to see poor young Madame Coughlin in such a place," Jumon was saying. "And her daughter, too. She told me she had come there only to ask Dr. Yellowjack's help. I had not imagined she could be so superstitious as to believe that his potions and gris-gris would 'change her luck,' as she said. She swore that she was perfectly safe, but the more I thought of it, the more uneasy I became. I begged her to do nothing foolish, or without consulting my uncle..."

Jumon's voice retreated from January's mind, distancing itself, like the disconnected images of lamplight and blackness. "... began to rain as I made my way toward my uncle's house... feared more than anything that that poor woman would be lured or forced into something which would cut her off utterly from the help of decent people... Innocent child..." Innocent indeed.

"The symptoms struck me halfway there. I guessed at once what they were, from the metallic taste in my mouth, and from all I had heard of the voodoos. Had not Zoe been in the shop itself, sweeping up for my grandmother's new tenants, I doubt anyone within the courtyard would have heard me, for I did not have the strength to turn the gate key. I'm afraid I don't remember much, Your Honor, but I know that twice or three times she went out into the carriageway and listened, fearing that Grandmother would have heard something."

January listened with only a fragment of his mind to Jumon's account of Antoine's visit, reeling drunk on opium; of Zoe's growing panic and terror about what Grandmere Jumon would do if she found her son's slave had admitted a man sick with the cholera to her home; of the bout of pneumonia that had kept Isaak bedfast and delirious for weeks after the Webers found him. "As soon as I was a little recovered I sent a message to Dr. Yellowjack," Isaak was saying. "He replied that I must come to him at once, without notifying my wife or anyone else of my whereabouts. There must have been some evil going on at Yellowjack's house of which I was ignorant, for on my arrival I was overpowered-he had a gun, but he could have done it barehanded, as weak as I was-and imprisoned in the attic, with this young man here." He nodded to Gabriel with a smile.

"That old man was snake-bit pretty bad," put in LaBranche. "That was smart work on January's part..." He looked around for January, spotted him in the gloom by the wall, and nodded in his direction. "The sawbones here says January, and Mamzelle-er-M'am Laveau-sure enough saved his life. Yellowjack's one tough old nigger and that's for sure. His lawyer, he says. He wants to see his lawyer."

"I still don't understand what part the man played in the villainy." Young Jumon rubbed one thin hand over his face. "Unless-no harm came to poor Madame Coughlin, surely? Or to Mademoiselle Abigail?"

January said, "As far as I know, they're well." Canonge glanced over at him, as if he heard something in the quickness of that reply, but held his peace. "He gave you food at the voodoo dance, then."

Isaak nodded. "He was one of half a dozen, really, sir. I gather there's always food at the dances.

Mostly coarse fare, like congris and rice, or pralines, or sugar in the cane. Everyone seemed to be-"

"Isaak!"

Celie broke from between the Guards who had escorted her in, and threw herself into her husband's arms. "Isaak! Oh, God, oh, God!..."

The Guards released Olympe at the same time. She caught her son in her arms, holding him in tight ferocious silence, head bent over his. She breathed in, once, like the tearing loose of the foundations of her soul.

"Celie!" cried Isaak desperately, and clutched his wife close.

"I'm all right." Gabriel's voice was muffled by the circle of his mother's arms. "I wasn't scared. I knew Uncle Ben would come get me."

January shut his eyes, and couldn't help himself. He laughed.

At Olympe's house, later that night, he ate grits and syrup-the only things he wanted or could stomach-and slept for an hour or two on a truckle bed they rolled out for him in the children's room. But while dark still lay on the city he rose and made his way to the turning basin in quest of Natchez Jim. The bargees said Jim had gone downriver for wood, so January walked out along the Bayou Road, five miles through the insect-drumming scorch of the morning to Spanish Fort. There he inquired around the wharves for a skiff bound for Mandeville, and hired himself to help load and unload crates of champagne in trade for passage across the lake. His back and arms still hurt, and he knew he'd be stiff that night, but it was good beyond words to be able to do the work. The power of the voodoos-of Mamzelle Marie, and John Bayou, and all the great ones of New Orleans-lay in secrets. January had seen how the nets of their intelligence lay like spiderweb over the town; had seen the look in Vachel Corcet's eyes, when the lawyer had offered his unwilling services to Olympe. To a greater or lesser extent, everyone played with secrets: his mother, Dominique, Madeleine Mayerling, his mother's gossiping friends... Traded them like counters in a game of loo.

Shaw would be returning to town within a day or so. Dr. Yellowjack would be questioned before that, and would almost certainly tell where Lucinda Coughlin could be found. And if I'm wrong about who was whose cat's paw in this, thought January grimly, I'm sure Olympe will see to it that my tombstone reads, What an Idiot. But once a secret was out, there was never any calling it back.

So he helped load crates in the blazing heat and sat in the stern while the boat's owner set and plied the sails across the flat steely waters. January had brought bread and honey and cheese from Olympe's house, but the boatman shared sausage and rice with him, and they talked of this and that-the boatman's white father had given him the craft, and set him up in the business, rather than pay for an education he would have been hard put to find a use for. January wasn't so sure that this wasn't a better course. In all of his life he'd made more money as a musician than as a surgeon. Yet he felt a kind of tired anger, insofar as he was capable just then of feeling anything, that this should be so.

In Mandeville they unloaded, and on the boatman's advice January sought out a grocery in town run by a woman of color. She let him bathe and change clothes in her shed. The long twilight was just beginning when he made his way, clothed in black coat and top hat and the respectability of the free colored, to the Jumon house.

An old house, perched like so many Creole houses on six-foot piers of brick and built in the shape of a U to trap the breezes from the lake. Gardens surrounded it, box hedges and topiary snipped neat as masonry walls. French doors and brises stood open to show the honeyed candlelight within. January went around to the back and sent in his card with a boy who was scrubbing vegetables in the loggia by the kitchen. In time the graying butler who had admitted him to the town house came down the back steps.

"Monsieur Jumon is out for the evening, M'sieu." The butler inclined his head politely, but despite his calm he had a nervous look to him. As anyone would, thought January, whose master was selling up. "I doubt he will return before eleven."

"I'll wait, if it's all right," he replied. "I think he'll want to speak with me."

The butler brought paper and pen to the enclosed rear gallery, and a branch of candles, for the garden trees blocked out much of the fading evening light. January wrote, Monsieur Jumon Please excuse this intrusion, and my rudeness in calling on you at such an hour, but the matter is one of gravest importance. Dr. Yellowjack has been arrested. I will await your convenience.

Benjamin Janvier The butler brought him lemonade and, a little later, congris with bits of ham neatly arranged around it, which led January to deduce that whoever else had been sold off, Zeus still reigned in the kitchen. It was obvious to him that the household had been reduced. The same woman who stood at the table just outside the laundry room pressing napkins later fetched water from the cistern for the cook to soak red beans, and when the sun went down, January could see that there were only the two of them in the kitchen, which was lit from within by candles and the glow of the hearth.

A viper in her bosom, an adder, a beast who was always selfish... Just how much had Mathurin Jumon told his mother, of why he had to sell those few servants who were his and not those of the family? Always cruel to her, always delighted in hurting her...

Mathurin hastening from the room to assuage her pique. Now, Mama..."

Had Madame Cordelia become reconciled? Or was she still treating her son with frozen politeness tempered by martyred courage?

What could Mathurin possibly have given or promised or written to a woman like Lucinda Coughlin that would give her power to make him cross his mother's wishes? Zoe's sale argued a fearful desperation. Reaching into his coat pocket, January brought out the carved horse that had lain on the table in Dr. Yellowjack's house. He turned it to the candles, admiring again the carved roses in its mane and tail-no bigger than the straw flowers on Jumon's prized Palissy plates-and the flare of the little hooves. Of course the child would keep it with her.

The butler crossed through the gallery and out to the kitchen, to return a few minutes later with smudges against the mosquitoes, and a cup of chicory coffee. "You comfortable here, sir?"

January nodded. "Perfectly, thank you," he answered. "Might I trouble you for a few more candles, to read while I wait? Kitchen candles will do."

The butler smiled, relieved. "No trouble about that, sir. Kitchen candles is all I could let you have, Michie Jumon having gotten particular about economy, at least where it doesn't show. He even burns tallow in his study now, and his room, or else burns the ends of Madame's beeswax."

He shook his head. "Madame never will have any but the best beeswax, and fresh every day: forty candles in her bedroom and a hundred in the drawing room, whether she has company or not. They're burning there tonight as we speak, sir, same as always, and both of them away at Madame St. Chinian's for supper."

"Sounds like your Madame won't have any but the best," January remarked, when the butler returned with two more branches of candles, and a packet of halfburned tallow work lights wrapped in a newspaper. "Why, no, sir." The butler kindled the dozen or so wicks in a strong odor of sheep fat. "That's natural, her being the daughter of a French Count, and raised in the palace of the old Kings, and maid-in-waiting to the old Queen. Why, even with Michie Mathurin having to sell up~his valet, and the woman that kept his books in order, and even the housekeeper he was... well, Michie Mathurin was fond of-he wouldn't even ask Madame if she could spare any of her servants. That's Madame's way."

Something changed in the man's eyes: old knowledge, old stories. January folded his hands and looked fascinated, which indeed he was.

"Madame is-a hard woman in some ways," the servant said. "You wouldn't think it to look at her, sir. Like a little china doll. But my daddy, who was butler to her back when M'am Cordelia first married Michie Hercule, he told me things of the way she treated the fieldhands out on Trianon Plantation that would make your hair stand up on end. Michie Laurence was terrified of her up till the day he died, and him a grown man fifty years old."

His fingers, rough-skinned from years of lending a hand with cleaning and swollen with arthritis, rested lightly on the ornate bronze candle holder: pseudo Egyptian, January saw, like all the expensive and outmoded crocodile-footed furniture now consigned to Cordelia Jumon's attic.

"Poor M'am Noemie, that was Michie Laurence's wife, she just got quieter and quieter every day, until she left-and even then she waited till M'am Cordelia was gone from home. Michie Laurence gave her the money for her passage, and, I don't think his mother ever forgave him that. If you ask me, sir, Michie Mathurin still is afraid of her, for all he's always leaving flowers in her room and buying her gowns and diamonds and new sets of dishes every time a boat comes in from France."

January watched thoughtfully as the small, dapper man made his way back into the house. Then from his grip, which he had stowed on the floor at his feet, he brought out the octavo edition of Hamlet he'd brought with him to read:

Nay, but to live

In the rank sweat of an enseamid bed Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love Over the nasty sty And every word of it Hamlet's rage at the mother who had betrayed him by loving another than he.

The room in the attic returned to his mind. The blood on the sheets.

He was still reading when the clatter of hooves rang on the pavement of the carriageway, and a harness jangled in the dark. Rising, he descended the gallery steps, circled the corner of the house to watch them step to the block. Mathurin in the black of mourning, white shirtfront shiny as marble in the lights held aloft by the butler; Madame frail and exquisite in black satin du Barry, cut at the height of Paris fashion. More like a mistress, January thought, than a mother. The diamonds of her bracelet glittered outside the sable gloves. "You can go back if you wish," he heard her say. "I'll manage here somehow alone."

"Maman, don't be like that." Another man would have said it bracingly, or impatiently, or teasingly. Mathurin Jumon was coaxing, and behind the coaxing, just a hint of plea. This woman could hurt him still. As January's mother could hurt him, if he let her. "You know I'd never..."

The pair passed inside. January returned to the gallrry. A few minutes later the butler hurried through and into the kitchen, to return with a tea tray: fresh white roses in a silver vase. "I gave Michie Jumon your note, sir, no telling how long they'll be having tea before M'am goes up."

They have arrested Dr. Yellowjack. Mathurin had sold everything he could to raise money to keep Lucinda Coughlin and her partner silent-including a woman he was "fond of Zoe. Yet he remained at his mother's side, drinking tea, until she was ready to let him go.

It was midnight when the rear door of the house opened, and Mathurin Jumon stepped out.

"Monsieur Janvier."

His face was an old man's. Dead, lined with exhaustion and defeat and despair. A fighter driven to his knees and looking at the spear. He held out a gloved hand as January rose. "Please sit down." He brought up another wicker chair for himself. "I trust Telemaque made you comfortable?" "Very. Yes, Sir."

They sat in silence for a moment, face-to-face, the candles burning between, above the black-covered volume of Hamlet.

"Did you know it was me," said January at last, "whom Killdevil Ned was hired to kill?" Jumon sighed. "I-I guessed. I saw him near the cemetery, on the day of Isaak's funeral. And I saw you there. I didn't-I didn't know for certain. Only that I was to take money to the Flesh and Blood and give it to him. But there was no one else at the funeral who-who was connected with-with the voodoos."

"Then it was Yellowjack who told you what to do." Jumon looked a little surprised. "Of course. Who else?..." "I thought maybe Madame Coughlin."

In candlelight even the most ashen pallor will appear rosy, but horror flared in the big man's eyes. "Madame-Madame Coughlin?..." He half-rose, then put a hand on the table's edge to steady himself, and sank again into his chair.

January took the carved horse from his pocket, and laid it on the black-bound book. "Your nephew met both Abigail and Lucinda Coughlin at the house of Dr. Yellowjack on St. John's Eve," he said. "Isaak was coming to you to tell you the child was in danger..." "Abigail?" Jumon's voice was barely a whisper. "Abi... she was alive?" His voice stumbled, fumbling for words. "Well? What evening... St. John's Eve?" His hands trembled, and looking at his eyes, January understood then that Lucinda Coughlin had not been Jumon's mistress. Only his procuress.

There was no way he could keep that realization out of his face.

"Dear God." The big man shut his eyes. "Dear God." His words came out like a confession wrung through the tightening of an Inquisitorial garrote. "They-told me-she died. That she... That I..." January was silent, filled with such a rush of comprehension, of enlightenment and revulsion and rage, that he could not sort what he felt into words.

Dr. Yellowjack will get anything a man wants. Mademoiselle Coughlin would not be joining us after all...

The little horse lying on the table in the firelight. And Antoine Jumon, hands trembling as he reached for the square black bottle of the only forgetfulness he could find. Eyes defeated as he whispered, He's clever with investments; and the look in his mother's face. My uncle Mathurin is a consummately evil man, M'sieu. Antoine is... fanciful...

January closed his fist very hard under the table, understanding why Genevi?ve had severed her ties with a protector who would have supported her for life.

Jumon was weeping, mouth pulled into a shape that no human mouth was meant to assume, struggling for silence as a drowning man struggles for breath. It was this that caused January to stay.

"Isaak is alive, you know," he said, more gently than he had thought he was going to speak. "He came to your house in town that night. Zoe thought he had the cholera and was so fearful of what your mother would say..." "Oh, dear God." At the mention of his mother, Janttary thought that the white man flinched.

"Zoe got a cab, we think, and fetched Antoine to be with him," continued January. "And cared for him in the empty shop until, as she thought, he died. Then she took his body away, probably using one of the wheelbarrows left by the movers. She may have tried to dump the body in the canal, or near the cemeteries; he was found by a couple on Basin Street just outside the Old Cemetery wall. They nursed him through the effects of the poisoning and the pneumonia he took that night from lying in the wet. Either Lucinda Coughlin or Dr. Yellowjack must have feared that Isaak might have reached his wife that night. Might have gotten word to her, or asked her to get word to you about Lucinda Coughlin being at Yellowjack's house..." "Yellowjack." Mathurin raised his head, and carefully blotted his eyes with a handkerchief of spotless linen. "It was Yellowjack. Madame Coughlin isn't-that is, I didn't think her very intelligent, but now I realize I don't know her, never knew her." He carefully refolded the linen, tucked it in his breast pocket, giving his whole attention to it so as to avoid January's eyes. "But Yellowjack..." His breath expelled in a whisper, like a bitter laugh or a sob. "I don't know if you can understand," he said after a time. "Well, that's a foolish thing to say, because I know you can't understand-and I think I should be hard-put to keep from doing violence to any man who could understand. Who could do the things that I have done. I don't understand."

He raised his head, meeting January's eyes, and in the bloodshot irises, the broken veins that laced the man's nose, January saw the reflection of Antoine's Black Drop and Smyrna nepenthe. "I have tried-all my life I have tried to... to love normally. To love women. Or even young men. But every time I'd find myself... incapable. And telling myself that twelve wasn't really so different from fourteen. The girls on the levee, or down by the basin, do start at that age, you know, and younger. And ten wasn't really so different from twelve. I am an evil man, I know that, but I did try to atone. I always paid the children money they didn't have to show to Yellowjack, or to their parents if they had them." "So you got them from Yellowjack?"

Jumon nodded. "He is-a devil. Looking back now I see he must have set it up from the start. With the Coughlin woman, that is, and... and Abigail. Not that he appeared to have a thing to do with either of them. Madame Coughlin came to me with impeccable letters of introduction, purporting to be newly widowed and desperately in need of assistance. I said I would do what I could for her, and that evening, about sunset, the child Abigail came-with some story about how she'd slipped away while her mother was resting-and pleaded with me to help her mother..." His eyes, his hands squeezed shut, thrusting the memory away. Or reliving it? January thought about Gabriel, and Chouchou. White man or not, he thought, I would have killed him, if I had known this, and he had come near them. Killed him and taken the consequences. "God knows how I found the self-control to send her back home untouched," whispered Mathurin. "Because I did. She was so obviously sheltered, so obviously loved. What a jape! Because of course that only made me want her, which they must have known. And every time Ma4i:nrie Coughlin would come to my office, so that ways and means could be found for her to support herself, the child was always with her, asking to sit on my knee, calling me her favorite uncle and her dearest bel-ami. Have you seen her? Beautiful as an angel, sweet as cherries in cream." January remembered the woman in the dimness of the Cathedral, the beautiful girl-child peeping around the aide of her skirts. It has to work. "Yes," he said softly. "I've seen her." Jumon's finger traced the flying caparisons of the dainty little horse, caressed the curlicues of mane. He did not look up. "And I dreamed of her at night," he went on, his voice almost a whisper. "Even now, much as I know that what I do is evil, I cannot feel that it is... so very bad.

At least not while I'm doing it. I see in your face how this disgusts you, but please believe that never at any time did I... did I want to be this way."

"Did Laurence know?"

Jumon shivered. For an eternity he did not reply, and into January's mind came that dark little cupboard below the roof-slates of the house on Rue St. Louis, the makeshift bonds and gags crusted with blood decades old.

"Laurence and I," said Jumon slowly, "went through... a great deal together, when we were children. Mother..." He couldn't finish. Only sat looking out into the darkness beyond the gallery railing, where even the lights of the kitchen had been quenched. One candle burned in the quarters above. January wondered which of the slaves would be awake so late, reading a newspaper, maybe, or mending a shirt.

Then Jumon shook his head, and said again, "Mother," in a soft defeated voice, as if that explained something, at least to his own heart.

He drew in his breath again, and let it go in a sigh. "I'm sorry," he said. "My brother... Laurence may have known. We never spoke about it. Once we were adults we never spoke of... certain things. And now that I think about it, it may be that Dr. Yellowjack held off putting his little scheme in train until after Laurence... died."

Because Laurence would have been more capable of scenting a fraud? wondered January. Or because after his death you were lonelier than before? Robbed of the one who had been your companion in that bleak black prison-room upstairs, your only champion against the lover-demon of your childhood whose portrait still decorates every room in your house?

We live not how we wish to, but how we can.

"In any case," said Jumon, "it's clear that Yellowjack has been behind this... this fraud... all along, pulling the strings like a puppeteer. He got opium for me, and arranged for me to bring the child to his house by the bayou."

"And when you were there," said January slowly, "something went wrong."

Jumon nodded. "The child must be a... a consummate actress. I..." He shook his head, shivering at the memory. "He asked for money, to cover things up. I gave it to him and he asked for more. You say-you say Isaak saw her on the night of the twenty-third?"

January inclined his head, thinking, What of those who weren't 'consummate actresses'? What of those for whom you weren't a pigeon for plucking, but just the latest man their pimps made them pull up their skirts for? He thought of Gabriel again and felt sick.

"And-my nephew is alive?"

"Yes. When he recovered from the pneumonia he communicated with Yellowjack, who evidently told him he'd be able to get his mother's order of distrainment canceled. Weber-the man who found him-was a doctor in Germany; another poisoning, there where he could see its onset and effects, could not have been passed off. Isaak went out to Bayou St. John Thursday night-he's lucky he was still alive when Madame Laveau and I arrived the next day, seeking my nephew. "

"He's well?" There was a note of wistfulness in the man's voice.

"Yes. Thin and exhausted, but well. He-was at a loss," January went on carefully, "-as to why Mademoislle Coughlin and her mother were in that place. He knew they were protegees of yours, but evidently he knew them only in their... respectable incarnations. And he knew nothing to your discredit." He couldn't have said why he tried not to hurt this big, clumsy man, who could love neither women nor men. Crippled from childhood by a woman who could find no other way to deal with her own terrors but to bind everything in her power, tighter and tighter, until they could not escape her control...

Jumon sighed. "Thank you for that discretion. Could I have had a son, I would have wanted him to be Isaak. Laurence was lucky there. Though God knows neither of us was ever very lucky with women. But of course if I'd had a son I'd have made a-a horror of raising him." January was silent.

What were the first causes of wretchedness like this? he wondered. Maybe Isaak was right, to cut through the bloodied iron bands of the past and say, You are still my father. You are still my uncle. I understand that you could not help what you did to my brother, my mother...

Forgiveness is stronger than the graveyard dust of the past.

For Isaak it was, maybe, not knowing that his uncle's sins had gone far beyond Antoine. January knew that even had he himself been so ignorant in similar circumstances, it would have been beyond him.

He said, "Yellowjack was arrested yesterday, for kidnapping and attempting to murder my nephew and yours. It's only a matter of time, I think, until they find Madame Coughlin-she left New Orleans the day after Madame Celie's arrest. Once the City Guards start looking it will be easy to trace him as the man who hired Nash. You can do what you want about that, but Nash badly wounded a man in mistake for me, a young man named Pedro Lachaise, who had a mother and sisters to support."

"Dear God." Jumon passed a hand over his face. "I seem to have done nothing but ill." His jaw tightened. "I will make it good. I hope you believe me." He looked up at January, who said nothing. "I never set out to do wrong. That is..." He hesitated. "I suppose I never set out to do anything. I have heard that... that Monsieur Gerard was arrested as well over an altercation."

"I've spoken to judge Canonge about that," said January. "He agrees that in view of the mitigating circumstances the penalty can be commuted to a fine."

Jumon nodded. For another few minutes he sat quietly, his head in his hands, the candleflame glowing over the strong coarse fingers, the warm gold of his simple rings. The light in the quarters across the yard had been put out. In the trees the cicadas kept up their eerie throbbing cry, the frogs peeping a heavy bass-note line. By the stars, visible above the dark loom of the trees, it was very late, and morning would come soon, bringing with it all the matters of the day: justice, and movement, and the unveiling of the lethal secrets of the past.

Now was still the time of the loa, and dreams; stillness, and the dead, who see things differently from the living.

Jumon sighed. "Have you a place to stay for the remainder of the night, M'sieu Janvier? I doubt any boats are returning across the lake until daybreak and I understand that summer is not a good time for musicians. And I feel I owe you something for having warned me, in spite it all. If you have concerns about spending the night under the roof of a man who paid to have you killed, I understand them, and I'll gladly foot the bill at a lodging house of your choice."

"My sister would call me a fool," said January. "Mamzelle Marie as well, maybe. But I trust you." Mathurin Jumon smiled, suddenly and with surprised sweetness, and stretched out his hand for the bell.