03 Graveyard Dust

THREE

"Why did you run away?"

Olympe, sitting in the rude chair Lieutenant Shaw had dragged over into the corner of the Cabildo's stone-flagged watch room for her, glanced up with a twist of scorn to her mouth, black eyes jeering. For an instant January was eighteen years old again, seeing her in the firelight of the brickyard. Her face hadn't changed much in the intervening years, except to lose what girlish roundness it had ever possessed. The wry quirk of her mouth was the same, over the slightly prominent front teeth; the sharp little chin had the same way of tucking sideways with the thrust of her jaw.

"Someday some white man's gonna sell you the whole city of Philadelphia, the Russian Crown Jewels thrown in for lagniappe," she said. "You are the most trusting man I ever did meet and worrying after you keeps me awake all night." And as she spoke she raised her arm from her lap and made the manacle chain jangle with a single mocking flick of her wrist.

"Where have you been?"

"Poisoning Isaak Jumon," she retorted, her eyes not leaving his. January looked away in shame.

Her mouth softened a little-which it wouldn't have, back when she was sixteen-and she added,

"Or maybe helping a friend. Which do you think?"

January grinned and replied, "Poisoning Isaak Jumon," and though the joke probably wasn't very funny Olympe burst out laughing, showing where childbirth had cost her two of her side teeth.

Paul Corbier, standing behind her with his hands on her shoulders, looked shocked.

The sealed cold quiet, the iron stiffness that January remembered from Olympe's girlhood, broke and showed underneath the woman he'd met upon his return eighteen months ago: an angry woman gentled and softened by Paul Corbier's unquestioning love and the happiness she'd had with her children. When Lieutenant Shaw had brought her out of the cells she'd been like a wary animal, silent and cold and withdrawn-the girl he had known before his departure for France.

Maybe that was why he'd spoken to her as he had.

"I'm sorry," he said now. "But they're going to want to know." He nodded to the watch room's main desk. Lieutenant Abishag Shaw, looking as usual like a scarecrow who'd dressed in a high wind and poor light, was engaged in quiet conversation with the sergeant, pausing every now and then to spit in the general direction of the sandbox in the big room's corner.

The oil lamps in their iron brackets along the walls had been put out; the smell of the burnt oil lingered. The wide doors stood open onto the arcade that fronted the Place d'Armes and from across that dusty square came the dim wakening clamor of the levees, stevedores loading crates of coffee and dry goods, books and cheeses, vinegar, corks, and pigs of lead, for transhipment up the river. They worked as swiftly as they could before the day turned hot, their voices a rough distant barking against the morning calm. Seagulls squawked and screamed at one another over the market garbage. The yammer of house slaves and market-women joined them, bargaining over tomatoes and peaches and bananas in the fruit stands that bordered the Place. In the courtyard behind the prison, whose doors were open also into the big square guardroom, a boy climbed the gallery stairs to dole breakfast to the prisoners, pressing himself against the rail as men in the blue uniforms of city lamplighters brought down from the cells the first of the slaves who'd been caught out without passes, to be whipped at the pillory.

Olympe's mouth hardened, and Paul Corbier reached out to take her hand. "I was helping a friend who had asked my help," she told them quietly. "As for Isaak Jumon, his wife, C?lie, came to me Friday, a week ago today. She asked me to make a gris-gris against Isaak's mother, Genevi?ve.

Isaak's father was a white man, and left Isaak property when he died last year; left it to Isaak, not to Genevi?ve or to Isaak's brother Antoine, who lives with Genevi?ve still. Genevi?ve claimed that the property was hers; that Isaak was her slave, and all he inherited came to her..."

"Her slave?"

Olympe shrugged. January wondered if the contempt in her face was at Genevieve's greed or at his naivete. "Don't ask me the why of it," she said. "But she got a judge to write out a warrant distraining Isaak as her property, and he fled, Celie says. So she came to me for a gris-gris, and I gave her one."

"What kind of gris-gris?"

The dark glance slid sidelong at him. "I didn't send her home with poison, if that's what you're thinking, brother."

"Yet there was poison in the house." Lieutenant Shaw ambled to them, hands in the pockets of his sorry green coat and greasy, light brown hair hanging down over his bony shoulders. He spoke French with a kind of clumsy fluency, ungrammatical as a fieldhand's and spattered with English misconstruction. "That was arsenic in one of them tins as we took off yore shelf, M'am Corbier, and monkshood in another, and the doctor I took them jars to says that was antimony in the third."

"Then why don't you arrest my brother as well?" asked Olympe in a reasonable voice. "He carries arsenic in his bag, when he works in the Hospital during the fever season. Salts of mercury, too, and foxglove, that can stop the heart. Arrest the doctor that told you the contents of those jars. I'll bet he has all that and more in his office."

"My friend is a healer, Lieutenant Shaw." Mamzelle Marie, who had entered quietly through the open doors of the arcade, made her way with leisurely grace to them and regarded the gawky Kentuckian with a mixture of amusement and insolence. "As a healer, Olympe, like her brother, has obligations to secrecy. Should a young girl give birth out of wedlock, she must trust that her midwife will not spread word of it. Must a slave who has slipped out of his master's thrall for an evening, and met with some injury, risk his life by letting the wound go untended for fear of a beating into the bargain?" She added, with the barest touch of mocking malice, "That might lose the owner money, were the slave to die. You wouldn't want that, sir."

"No, M'am." Shaw met the voodooienne's gaze calmly, arms folded over his chest. "And I do understand M'am Corbier's not wantin' to say where she was nor why she tried to run away the minute officers of the law showed up in her house. It's just that it looks bad, and it's gonna look worse when the state prosecutor asks her about it in open court." He scratched under the breast of his coat with fingers like stalks of cane. "That's all. M'am."

January glanced across at Olympe, wondering if indeed she had been outside Colonel Pritchard's house last night. She would not do that which she saw to be evil. But what was evil in her eyes?

"I am a voodoo." Olympe looked gravely up at Shaw. "Believe what you will, Lieutenant. I-and indeed almost any voodoo you speak to in this town-work more in herbs of healing than in poisonings. The whites who come creeping veiled to our doors to ask for love potions or tricken bags-or partners for their lusts sometimes-they have no idea who we are or what we are. In any case the girl C?lie told me, Not a death spell. She's a good girl, confirmed and goes to church." In the past, January thought, Olympe would have given those last five words a derisive twist; now she simply stated them as a fact. Perhaps, he thought, because now she, too, had a daughter.

"I gave her a ball of saffron, salt, gunpowder, and dog filth, tied in black paper, to leave in Genevi?ve Jumon's house and another in her shop. Saturday night when the moon was full I took and split a beef tongue and witched it with silver and pins and guinea peppers, and buried it in the cemetery with a piece of paper bearing Genevi eve's name. That was all that I did. And in truth I didn't need even to do that. The woman's evil and greed themselves will call down grief on her, with no doing of mine. About Isaak I know nothing. Are you so certain that he is dead?"

Shaw's pale brows raised, the gray eyes beneath them suddenly sharp and wary. "Why do you ask that, M'am?"

"Have you seen his body?"

"Where is she?" shouted a voice behind them. "What have you done with her? Pigs! Bastards!

Murderers!" January turned in time to see a heavy set little man stumble through the Cabildo's outer doors, his well-cut gray coat awry and his eyes burning with rage and grief. "Have you no pity? No shame?" He flung himself at the nearest Guard, who happened to be Shaw, seizing him by the lapels and shaking him to and fro. Shaw, who January knew could have broken his assailant's neck with very little trouble, raised no hand to thrust him back, and a well-dressed tall gentleman dashed through the door in the next moment, followed by a small, plump lady whose dove-gray silk tignon matched her dress.

"Fortune," she cried, wringing her mitted hands, as the well-dressed gentleman seized Shaw's attacker and pulled him away. "Fortune, no!"

"Really, Monsieur G?rard, you must be more careful of how you step! You might have injured this gentleman, falling into him as you did..."

"Gentleman?" The heavyset man twisted against the firm grip, face flushed dusky with rage.

Though the peacemaker had spoken English-stressing the word falling as if that would alter what everyone in the room had just seen-Monsieur G?rard shouted in French, "These-these Americans dare to traduce my daughter and you say-"

"Of course it was an accident, sir." Still speaking English, the pacifier turned an apologetic smile upon Shaw, who was methodically straightening his coat. Not, thought January, that any amount of straightening would improve the appearance of that wretched garment. "Certainly Monsieur G?rard is most aware of the difference in your stations and also of the penalties attached to a man of color striking a white man such as yourself. Please accept my client's apologies, Captain. I am Cl?ment Delachaise Vilhardouin, representing Monsieur G?rard and his daughter in this regrettable affair. I pray your indulgence for my client, who speaks no English."

The woman-clearly Madame G?rard-had caught up with the group now, and was holding her husband's other arm, sobbing "Fortune, Fortune, what could I do? They came at night, you would not return from Baton Rouge till the morning, they had a warrant for her arrest..."

G?rard himself was silent, chest heaving and dark eyes smoldering. From the open doorway a woman's voice could be heard, shrieking crazily, "He's trying to kill me! My husband-my fatherthey killed all my children, smothered them one by one! Please, please, someone believe me!..."

A chorus from the other cells snarled out, like the cacophony of Hell. "I'll smother you if you don't shut up!"

" Stuff her mouth, somebody! "

"Can't a body get a drink in this stinkin' bug hole?"

Beside him, January saw Olympe's jaw harden, her only change in expression. When he himself had been locked in the Cabildo, the shouting of the mad, sharing the cells with the thieves and murderers and common drunks, had added an edge of horror to the crawling fetor of the nights.

Vilhardouin, himself a highly dandified specimen of Shaw's own race-though probably neither of them would willingly admit such a thing-went on in quiet French, "You must understand, Monsieur G?rard, that this man was only doing his duty in apprehending your daughter. It is the Magistrate of the Court who wrote out the warrant for her arrest, at the complaint of a citizen."

"What citizen?" Fortune Gerard was trembling, tears of fury glistening as he raised his head.

"Show me that citizen! I swear that I will-"

"The citizen what swore out that complaint," interrupted Shaw, and squirted a long stream of tobacco juice in the direction of the sandbox again, a target he couldn't possibly have achieved, "is the mother of the deceased, a M'am Genevi?ve Jumon; the woman this lady claims your daughter paid her to put a hex on." Perhaps, as January's mother had repeatedly asserted, tomcats spoke better French than Lieutenant Shaw, but January noticed that for an upriver backwoodsman he didn't do at all badly with a conditional subjunctive.

Gerard's face seemed to shrink on itself with venom. Had he not been a respectable man of color, well bred and conscious of his position in New Orleans society, he would have spit. As it was he replied, his voice like twisted wire, "My daughter would never have sought the company or assistance of a voodoo Negress poisoner"-his gaze traveled over Olympe in distaste-"for that purpose, or for any other, and I will personally sue the man who says differently. And as for the assertion that my daughter poisoned, or had anything to do with the poisoning of, her husband, a young man of whom I never approved..."

"Papa! " Iron clanked in the courtyard doors. The girl framed in its light took a hasty step toward the group in the corner, then hesitated, glancing for permission at the wiry little lamplighter who escorted her. Shaw beckoned, and the lamplighter, keeping a firm hold on the other end of the chain that manacled the girl's wrists, followed her over. "Papa, is it true?" C?lie Jumon looked frantically from her father to Lieutenant Shaw to Olympe, huge brown eyes swollen in the fragile oval of her face. "They told me-last night they told me... Isaak..." Shaw spit another line of tobacco juice, and said gently, "I'm afraid it is, M'am Jumon." The girl pressed her hand to her mouth, but didn't make a sound. Her sprig-muslin dress was soiled and rumpled from spending the night in filthy straw, but she'd scrubbed her face and hands in the courtyard fountain and rearranged her tignon. In its simple green and-white-striped frame the childish youthfrilness of her face made a dreadful contrast to the horror in her eyes. Rising quickly, January guided the girl to his chair. Her mother fell on her knees beside her, stroking and kissing the shackle bruises on her wrists and weeping in stifled, soundless gasps. The Lieutenant looked around him at the group that was rapidly outgrowing its corner of the watch room: Olympe, her husband, January, and Mamzelle Marie; G?rard, his wife, and C?lie; and the two lamplighter Guards in charge of the prisoners. "Well, at least I won't have to go through this more'n oncet." He sighed philosophically, and scratched his hip. "M'am Jumon, I am sorry, because I know this's gonna be painful for you, but they're gonna want us all over to the Recorder's Court in a minute, and you'd all best know what we're goin' on. "Last Monday night, which was the twenty-third, twenty-fourth June, Isaak Jumon's brother, Antoine, was brought by a servant he didn't recognize to a big house he'd never seed before, where his brother lay dyin'. Antoine says Isaak was far gone when Antoine got there, vomitin' an' clammy an' achin' all over an' pretty much actin' like someone that's been dosed real good with arsenic. Antoine did what he could for his brother-who he hadn't seen in a couple months owin' to a quarrel in the family-with the help of a old mulatto woman who was there, but it warn't no good. Isaak kept tryin' to tell him somethin' but was so sick Antoine couldn't make out what. Once he managed to say, I have been poisoned. Then a little later he said, C?lie, an' died." C?lie looked away. Her mother, numbly stroking the ruin of her frock, tears flowing down her face, seemed barely to have heard.

"It's a long way," pointed out January quietly, "from I have been poisoned and C?lie, to I have been poisoned BY C?lie. If you don't mind my mentioning it, sir." He made a genuine effort to keep the anger from his voice, anger over the fear in his brother-in-law's face, over Madame Gerard's tears. He knew it wasn't the Kentuckian's fault.

"I don't mind you mentionin' the matter, Maestro," said the policeman evenly. "Fact remains the boy is dead, and M'am Jumon did go buy somethin' from your sister." Vilhardouin's hand shut restrainingly on Monsieur Gerard's sleeve. "And the fact remains your sister does so happen to have had a big pot of arsenic on a shelf in her parlor, not to speak of makin' a livin' sellin' strange things to people wrapped up in little bits of black paper. No offense meant, M'am. M'am." He nodded respectfully for good measure in Marie Laveau's direction.

The sergeants had begun whipping the errant slaves in the courtyard outside. Celie flinched at the crack of leather on flesh, hid her face when someone-a woman, by the sound of it-cried out, a strangled sound grimly silenced. Men came through the watch room, in the well-cut clothing and beaver hats of professionals, leading after them other men, or sometimes a woman or two, shabbily dressed in castoffs, usually barefoot, the women with their heads modestly covered in tignons. Twenty-five cents a stroke, January remembered-trying to force deafness and ignorance upon a rage that would otherwise have overwhelmed him-for a master to have his property whipped by the City Guards, if he didn't want to do it himself. The sergeant at the desk paused in talk with the Police Chief, to write out a receipt. In the courtyard beyond them two men in the blue uniforms of Guards emerged from a cell on the second gallery, bearing between them a shutter on which a body lay, covered with a blanket. The Guards hustled furtively along the gallery and down the stairs. As they turned a corner the shutter knocked against the newel post and an arm dropped out, limp, yellow as cheese.

Shaw was still explaining something to Monsieur Gerard-probably why a young man's word for a crime had to be accepted over the assertions of a respectable coffee merchant-as January made his way back to the courtyard doors. He intercepted the Guards and their burden as they reached the foot of the stair. "I beg your pardon, Messieurs, but would you mind telling me what this man died of?"

Knowing he'd be coming to the Cabildo that morning he had been careful to don his most respectable clothing: linen shirt, black wool coat, white gloves, gray trousers, and high-crowned beaver hat, the costume of a professional that he wore on those occasions when he volunteered his services to the Hospital and when he played at a ball. The men looked at him and then at one another. "Stabbed," said one in English at the same moment the other said, "Hung himself, poor bastard," in French. January looked down at the blanket, which was ancient and ragged and moving with lice. There was no sign of blood. The man who spoke English added, "We got to be gettin' on."

He watched them move around under the gallery to the little storeroom at the back of the court; watched them close and latch the door. His heart seemed to have turned to ice inside him. He knew, having seen the color of that arm, why they lied.

Glancing behind him, he saw that the Corbiers, Jumons, and officers of the law had left the watch room. Someone took back the chairs in which Olympe and C?lie Jumon had sat; a lamplighter came in from the arcade with a couple of bottles, beer or ale, which he handed to the sergeant at the desk. In the courtyard, a man who was being triced to the pillory suddenly began to thrash and heave like a landed fish, screaming curses at his master, at the men who bound him, at whatever god had ordered the world to be so constituted that this could be done to him. While everyone in the yard-except the man's master-ran to help, January made his way under the galleries to the storeroom, unlatched the door, and stepped noiselessly inside. Most of the time, January knew from past dealings with Lieutenant Shaw, the room was used as a storage place for records and for the shovels and buckets in use by those who cleaned up the gutters of the Place d'Armes. There was a cot in one corner where Guardsmen who sustained injuries in the line of duty could lie down-a situation not uncommon when a steamboat crew or a gang of keelboat ruffians were in town on a spree.

The form on the cot now was not a Guardsman. From beneath the tattered blanket the hand still projected, dangling to the floor, fingers purpling. Another body lay on the floor. Flies roared in every corner of the low ceiling, gathering already in the fluids that trickled slowly into the cracks of the brick floor.

The judas hole in the door let through just enough light to see. January pulled the blankets first from one man, then the other, and looked down into the bloated faces. An ugly orange flush mottled their skin and black vomit crusted their teeth and beards. One had clearly been a British sailor, with bare feet and a tarred pigtail; the other a trapper from the trackless mountains of northern Mexico, buckskin shirt stiff with sweat and filth. Both men already stank in the early summer heat. There was no question what had caused their deaths. He laid the blankets back over their faces, and silently left the room.

January feared he would be too late to hear any of the proceedings of the arraignment-which in any case he knew would be short-but when he hurried into the Presbyt?re building and through the door of the Recorder's Court, the Clerk was still engaged in an angry convocation with Lieutenant Shaw: "... just a minute ago," Shaw was saying mildly.

"The case has been called..."

"It is an outrage!" Gerard put in, fists clenched furiously. "An outrage! There is no truth..."

"I reckon Mr. Vilhardouin"-Shaw pronounced the French name properly, something that always surprised January about the Kentuckian-"just sorta made a stop at the jakes, and he'll be along... . There he is."

At the same moment a voice behind January said coldly, "I beg Monsieur's pardon..." An American voice added, "Get outa that door, boy."

January stepped quickly aside. Vilhardouin jostled brusquely past him, followed closely by a lithe, powerful man whose lower two shirt buttons strained over the slop of his belly beneath a food-stained yellow waistcoat's inadequate hem. As the two men proceeded up the aisle, the sloppy man paused here and there to nod greetings to this man or that: keelboat rousters in slouch hats and heavy boots, spitting tobacco on the floor; filibusters from the saloons along the levee; a gentleman sitting stiff and disapproving beside a shackled slave. The Clerk of the Court glared ferociously and demanded, "What brings you here, Blodgett?" and the man returned a stubbled and rather oily smile.

"It's an open court, Mr. Hardee." Blodgett's voice was gold and gravel, with a drunkard's slurry drawl. "Surely a man can come sit in an open court if he wants to."

As January slid onto the end of the bench beside Paul and Mamzelle Marie, Hardee knocked his gavel on the desk and said, "Are you C?lie Jumon, nee G?rard, wife of Isaak Jumon of this parish?"

She stood, small and pretty in her filthy dress. "I am."

"I object to these proceedings! " Monsieur Vilhardouin sprang to his feet. "Madame Jumon does not understand English and it is a violation of her rights to-"

"Monsieur Vilhardouin," protested the girl, "I understand-"

"Be silent!" ordered her father.

Vilhurdnuin turned back to the Clerk of the Court. "Madame Jumon does not sufficiently understand English to the degree that she can comprehend the charges brought against her."

Two louse-ridden and bewhiskered denizens of the Swamp and Girod Street applauded; a blowsy uncorseted woman hollered "You stand up for your rights, gal! " and Madame G?rard shrank against her husband in revulsion and terror.

A harried-looking notary was called in to translate, and asked in French if C?lie Jumon was in fact C?lie Jumon, then informed her that she was charged with feloniously conspiring to kill and slay Isaak Jumon, her husband, a free man of color of this city, on or about the night of the twenty-third to -fourth of June, and how did she plead? "Not guilty," she said, forcing her voice steady.

"Hell, honey, no shame about it," yelled the blowsy woman, "I killed four myself! " "Silence in the court." The Clerk spit tobacco into the sandbox beside him, a surprising display of fastidiousness given the wholesale expectoration going on all around him. "You are hereby remanded to custody until... Where'd that calendar go?" He shuffled the pages of the ledger handed to him. "Good Lord, who are all these folks? Damn Judge Gravier for leavin' town like this. Puts everybody back. Now Judge Danforth talkin' about goin', too..." "May it please the court." Vilhardouin stood again, somberly handsome in his exquisitely tailored black. "Given that the accused is below legal age, we request that she be released into the custody of her father. "

The Clerk straightened up, and glared at him in annoyance.

"Her father, a householder and taxpayer of this city, stands ready and willing to put up whatever security is required," went on the lawyer. "To be denied this by a Clerk of the Recorder's Court-not even the Recorder himself, who is apparently elsewhere today-What did you say the Recorder's name is, Monsieur Blodgett?"

Blodgett looked up from the notebook in which he was busily scribbling. "Leblanc," he said, in English, and more loudly than was necessary if Vilhardouin was the only one intended to hear. "Clerk's name is Hardee." He made another note.

Vilhardouin turned back to the bench. "Should Mr.-er-Hardee see fit to deny this mercy to both parent and child in Mr. Leblanc's absence, I fear that even the best efforts of Mr. Blodgett here will not suffice to make the story even remotely favorable when it appears tomorrow in the New Orleans Abeille. Mayor Prieur reads the Abeille-the Bee-does he not, Mr. Blodgett?" Blodgett helped himself to his hip flask, and wiped his stubbled underlip. "So he does, Mr. Vilhardouin. So he does."

The Clerk's face blotched an ugly red. He tapped his gavel sharply. "Prisoner is released to the recognizance of her father, Fortune G?rard, a free man of color of this city, on a bail of a thousand dollars, in respect for her tender years. You want me to have that translated into Frenchy, Mr. Vilardwan?" "Yes," said Vilhardouin, unruffled. "Please."

"Monsieur Gerard..." January half-turned on the bench as Gerard, Vilhardouin, Blodgett, Madame G?rard, and the trembling C?lie Jumon moved past them toward the court's outer doors. "If we could pool our information and resources..."

"Get your hands off me, M'sieu." The little man pulled his arm away, although January's fingers had not actually come in contact with his sleeve. His face was cold and set. "I wish nothing to do with you, or your sister; and I tell you that should she attempt to spread calumny against my daughter or imply that she would do so vile a thing as to consult with her on any matter whatsoever, it will go the worse for her and for you all." "Papa..." "Be silent, girl!"

"Are you Olympia Corbier," cut in the Clerk's angry voice, "also known as Olympia Snakebones?

You are accused of conspiring to feloniously kill and slay one Isaak Jumon, a free man of color of this city, how the hell you plead?"

"Not guilty." When their mother beat her, January remembered, she had stood so.

"You're hereby remanded to custody..."

"Sir." January got to his feet. "Sir, my name is Benjamin January, a free man of color, brother to Madame Corbier." He was careful to speak his best and most educated English. "Sir, is there any possibility of releasing my sister into the custody of her husband? She is the mother of small children, and conditions in the Cabildo are such that to remain there would endanger her life.

There were two deaths from yellow fever in the jail last night, goodness knows how many others are infected-"

"That's a lie! " One of the well-dressed gentlemen at the back of the court jerked to his feet.

January recognized Jean Bouille, a member of the City Council, with a couple of chastened slaves in tow. "There is no yellow fever in New Orleans!"

"Who says there is?" The Clerk spit furiously. "There's been no such thing! That reporter gone?

Good. Cuthbert-" He turned to address the Constable of the Court. "This nigger's saying there's people dyin' of yellow jack in the jail, and that isn't true." He turned back, not to January, but glaring out across the other men and women in the courtroom. "It isn't true," he repeated in a loud, harsh voice. "And I better not hear you nor nobody else goin' around sayin' such a lie or you're gonna be in some trouble yourself."

January felt them behind him, glancing at one another, looking at the Constable, thinking about the cells they would return to after leaving this room. The silence was crushing.

"If your sister thinks the jail's so goddam unfit she shouldn't have killed a man. Sit down."

January stood for a moment more, caught between his rage and that silence. He had been a slave and had lived in the quarters until he was eight, old enough to know what all slaves and prisoners know about keeping their mouths shut.

"I said sit down."

He lowered his eyes respectfully and sat.

"And you keep your opinions to yourself, boy, if you don't want to be took up for contempt."

He bowed his head, the flush of fury-heat rising through him almost depriving him of breath.

"Yes, sir."

"Olympia Corbier, you are hereby remanded to custody of the city jail until the seventeenth of July of this year, when you will be tried by the Criminal Court of the State of Louisiana for your crime. Is there a Stefano DiSilva in this room? Stefano DiSilva, you're accused of willfully causin' a disturbance in Mr. Davis's gamblin' parlor on Bourbon Street..."

January caught up with Shaw in the arcade outside. "That wasn't a real wise thing of you to say, Maestro," the Kentuckian remarked mildly. Whatever coolness had tempered the morning was now long gone, the sunlight molten in the Place d'Armes; the crowds around the covered market had thinned. Close by their feet a couple of Chickasaw Indians remained, still peddling powdered sassafras and clay pots from a blanket spread on the Cathedral steps.

"It was the truth."

Shaw spit, and actually got the tobacco juice into the gutter, for a miracle. "I'd be mighty careful who you said that to. What with the hoo-rah concernin' the Bank of the United States, and everybody in a panic about interest, and elections comin' on, and summer business bein' slow generally, there's a lot of folk in this town who wouldn't take kindly to talk of epizootic fevers scarin' away investors." He glanced sidelong as Councilman Bouille stalked out of the Presbyt?re doors and held his silence until he was some twenty feet farther down the arcade. His thin, rather light voice was gentle. "Truth may be a shinin' sword in the hand of the righteous, Maestro, but unless you got one whale of a shield that sword may not do you no good."

January drew in a deep breath, trying to let his rage dissolve. Bouille's slaves trailed at his heels, back across the Cathedral steps and into the Cabildo again. January wondered what the men had done and how many silver bits the Councilman was going to pay over to the city for their "correction." The custom of the country, he told himself, and wondered why he had come back here from Paris. Going insane from grief wouldn't have been as bad as this, surely?

"I take it," he said, "that Isaak Jumon's body was never found?"

The Kentuckian shook his head. "Though I sorta wonder how your sister knowed that, right off as she did. That boy Antoine says he was sent away from this strange house in a carriage and let off someplace he doesn't know where. He wandered around for hours in the pourin' rain, he says, till he got hisself home again. But he did see his brother die. He was real clear on that. And there's a lot of territory to cover, swamps and bayous and canals all around this city where a body coulda been dumped, and we'd never be the wiser. We didn't just light on your sister out of arbitrary malice, you know, Maestro. When I asked her last night where she'd been Monday she wouldn't give no good account of herself, nor could that gal C?lie neither... Yes, what is it?" A Guardsman came running from the Cabildo, calling Shaw's name.

"Trouble over to the Queen of the Orient Saloon, sir." The man saluted.

"It's nine o'clock in the mornin'," said Shaw wonderingly, and shoved his verminous hat back on his head. "Iff n you'll excuse me, Maestro..."

He set off at a long-legged run.

January stood for a time in the sunlight of the Cathedral steps, watching him go. By this time, he thought, Olympe would have been returned to her cell, and he had had enough, for the time being, of Fortune Gerard's rage and Clement Vilhardouin's oil-smooth suaveness. He pushed open the Cathedral door, stepped through into the cool still gloom.

All that remained of the morning Mass was the smell of smoke and wax, and a market-woman telling her beads. A woman got quickly up from one of the benches usually reserved for the less prosperous of the free colored, a white woman in a pale blue gown, cornsilk hair braided unfashionably under a cottage bonnet. She was very American, prim and bare of a Creole lady's paint, and there was a hunted nervousness to her huge blue eyes as she retreated from him, drawing her child to her side.

More to it, thought January, than simply not seeing the person whom she clearly expected: a fear that was startled at shadows. He'd removed his hat already, so he dipped in a little bow and asked in his best English, "May I help you, Madame?"

Her gloved hand went quickly to her lips. "I-That is-No." She shook her head quickly, and looked around her at the shadowy dimness of the great church. "It is all right to sit here, is it not?"

"Of course it is;" said January. He'd encountered Protestants who seemed to believe Catholics sacrificed children on the altars of the saints.

The child peeked around her mother's skirts, guinea-gold curls dressed severely up under a small brown hat, sensible-and suffocating-brown worsted buttoned and tailored over the hard lines of a small corset; tiny brown gloves on tiny hands. She at least showed no fear, either of him or of this echoing cavern of bright-hued images and flickering spots of light. "The nuns won't come and get me," she whispered conspiratorially, "will they?"

January smiled. "I promise you," he told the child. "Nuns don't come and get anyone."

The mother tugged quickly on her daughter's hand, to shush her or discourage conversation with a black man and a stranger. January bowed again, and went to the Virgin's altar, and though money was tight and would be tighter-Pritchard had indeed, as Aeneas had warned, docked his pay last night-he paid a penny for a candle, which he lit and placed among all those others that marked prayers for mercy rather than justice. Holy Mother, forgive her, he prayed, his big fingers counting off the cheap blue glass beads of the much-battered rosary that never left him. Don't hold it against Olympe's soul that she turned from you and your Son. Don't punish her for making little magics as she does. For serving false gods.

The woman's soft voice drew his attention. Looking back, he saw the person she had come here to meet. A small man, wiry and thin; a ferret face whose features spoke of the Ibo or Congo blood. He wore a shirt of yellow calico, and a leather top hat with a bunch of heron-hackle in it.

A blue scarf circled his waist-a voodoo doctor's mark, Olympe had said when she'd pointed the man out to January in the market one day, the same way the seven-pointed tignon was the sign of the reigning Queen.

January heard the woman say, "It has to work," and the man replied, "It'll work." He handed her something that she swiftly slipped into her bag.

Sugar and salt and Black Devil Oil to bring a straying lover home? Black wax and pins, to send an unwanted mother-in-law away?

It has to work.

The howl of a steamboat's whistle shrilled through the Cathedral as the woman opened the door.

She disappeared with her beautiful golden-haired child into the square, the voodoo-man watching-Dr. Yellowjack, Olympe had said his name was-as she walked away. When time enough had elapsed that their departures would not be too close, he, too, took his leave. January stayed for a long time, praying for his sister's soul while the candle he had lighted flickered before the Queen of Heaven's feet.