03 Graveyard Dust

FOUR

January's mother and the younger of his two sisters were in the parlor of his mother's pink stucco house on Rue Burgundy when he reached it again. The two women sat side by side on the sofa, a mountain of lettuce-green muslin cascading over their knees; the jalousies were closed against the full strength of the sunlight, which lay across them in jackstraws of blazing gold. Ten o'clock was just striking from the Cathedral, and the gutters outside steamed under the hammer of the morning heat. Entering through the back door, January shed his black wool coat-that agonizing badge of respectability-hi s gloves, and his high-crowned hat and bent to kiss first the slim straight elderly beauty, then the white man's daughter who had from her conception been the favored child.

"What do you know about Genevi?ve Jumon, Mama?" He brushed with the backs of his fingers the smooth green-and-pink cheek of her coffee cup where it sat on a table at her side. "May I warm this for you? Or yours, Minou?"

"Trashy cow," said his mother, and bit off the end of her thread.

His sister Dominique gave him a brilliant smile. "If you would, thank you, p'tit."

The coffee stood warming over a spirit lamp on the sideboard in the dining room. The French doors were open onto the yard, and he saw Bella, his mother's ser vant, just coming out of the garqonniere above the kitchen, where January had slept since his return from Paris. On plantations, the gar?onni?re that traditionally housed the masters' sons were separate buildingsthe custom of a country, January remembered from his childhood at Bellefleur, that preferred to pretend that those young men weren't making their first sexual experiments with the kitchen maids. Among the plac?es in the city the motivation was reversed: few white men wished to sleep under the same roof as a growing young man of color, even if that young man was that protector's own flesh and blood. Since January's return a year and a half ago, Bella had resumed her habit of sweeping the gar?onni?re and making his bed, in spite of the fact that January conscientiously kept his own floor swept and daily made his own bed.

His efforts in that direction, he understood, could never meet Bella's standards. Presumably, should St. Martha, holy patroness of floor sweepers and bed makers, descend from Heaven and perform these tasks, Bella would still detect dust kittens and wrinkled corners.

"I hope you're not going to mix yourself up in that scandal of your sister's," said his mother, when he returned with three cups of coffee balanced lightly in his enormous hand.

It was the first time in eighteen months that he'd heard his mother refer to the existence of any sister other than Dominique. The first time, in fact, since before Lou isiana had been a state. She raised plum-dark eyes to meet his, bleakly daring him to say, She's your daughter, too. Child, as I am a child, by that husband who was a slave on Bellefleur Plantation-the man whose name you've never spoken.

It was astonishing, the pain his mother could still inflict on him, if he let her.

Instead he said, casually, "Olympe has asked my help, Mama, yes. And I knew you'd never forgive me if I didn't at least go down to the Cabildo this morning to try to find out why Genevi?ve Jumon's daughter-in-law would hate her enough to put a gris-gris on her."

His mother's eyes flared with avid curiosity, but she caught herself up stiffly and said, "Really, Benjamin, I'm surprised at you. Of all the vulgar trash. And Dominique, that isn't yarn you're sewing with, I can see that buttonhole across the room."

Livia Levesque was a widow nearing sixty and still beautiful, slim and straight as a corset-stay in her gown of white-and-rose foulard. She had worn mourning for exactly the prescribed year for the sake of St.-Denis Janvier, who had died while January was a student at the Hotel Dieu in Paris; later had worn it not a day longer for her husband Christophe Levesque, a cabinetmaker of color whom January recalled only as one of her many male acquaintances during her days of placage. Black, she had declared on several occasions, did not suit her complexion. Her father had been white, though she had to January's recollection never even speculated as to who he might have been. Her daughter by St.-Denis Janvier had added to her mother's exotic beauty the lightness of skin and silky hair so admired by white men and by many of the free colored as well. Dominique glanced worriedly sidelong at her mother, apprehensive of a scene, and then said "Poor Paul! And the children-are they all right? Shall I send over Th?r?se to help?" "You'll do nothing of the kind," snapped her mother. "That girl of yours doesn't do her own work for you, let alone looking after some laborer's children, not that she'd have the faintest idea how to go about it. As for Genevi?ve Jumon, I'm not surprised her daughter-in-law wanted to do her ill-I'm astonished the girl didn't poison her instead of her son. A more grasping, mealy-mouthed harpy you'd never have the misfortune to meet. She's been above herself for years, for all that she started out as one of Antoine Allard's cane hands."

She shrugged, exactly as if she herself hadn't worked in the fields before St.-Denis Janvier bought her. "She's had nothing but ill to say about Fortune G?rard since he rented the shop floor of Jeanne-Fran?oise Langostine's house for his business-he sells coffee and tea, and charges two pennies the pound more than Belasco over on Rue Chartres-that she wanted, not that she's ever made a hat that didn't look as if a squadron of dragoons had been sacking a florist's." She opened the top of a heavy-pleated sleeve and produced a white paper sack of what turned out to be goose down, which she carefully shook into the space between the outer sleeve and its thin gauze lining, so that the sleeve rapidly assumed the appearance of a gigantic pillow. After ten years of marriage to a dressmaker, January was familiar with the style, and he still marveled at the sheer ugliness of it.

"I daresay she was good-looking enough that Laurence Jumon bought her of Allard, back during the war, for four hundred and seventy-five dollars," his mother went on, "but that's nothing to give herself airs about. Allard's asking price was six hundred and fifty and Jumon bargained him down. Jumon always did drive a warm bargain." No thought seemed to enter her head that St.-Denis Janvier must have bargained with her former master in just such a manner. All January could do was shake his head over the detail and comprehensiveness of her knowledge of everybody's business in town. He wondered if Marie Laveau bought information from her. If not, she should.

"Wasn't it Laurence Jumon who bought those matched white horses last fall?" Dominique fit a gold thimble onto the end of her middle finger. "With the black-and-yellow carriage?" "They looked like fried eggs on a plate," replied her mother. "And they'd been bishopped. In any case grays are a stupid thing to get in a town that's hip deep in mud ten months of the year. That's all the good they did him; forty days after he laid out the money they were pulling his hearse." She began to set the sleeve into place with neat, tiny stitches, and January marveled again at the linguistic convention that termed white horses "grays." Typical, too, that his mother had adopted it: most slaves just called them white.

"So why did C?lie Jumon buy a gris-gris from Olympe?" asked Dominique, eager as a child. "And why do they think the gris-gris ended up poisoning Isaak instead of Genevi?ve?" "Olympe says the gris-gris had nothing to do with Isaak's death, that it wasn't poison at all," said January. "What I'm trying to learn now is, where was Isaak Jumon between Thursday, when Genevi?ve swore out a warrant distraining him as her slave-" "Oh, shame!" cried Dominique.

"Sounds like her," remarked Livia Levesque.

"-and his death on Monday night. Not to mention such things as why Jumon didn't leave a sou to Genevi?ve, which he didn't."

"She'd have poisoned the boy herself, I wager, out of spite." "Mama, surely not!"

"Could she have? Isaak would be staying as far away from Genevi?ve as he could. He didn't take refuge with C?lie's parents..."

"He wouldn't have anyway," said Minou, gathering a length of mist-fine point d'esprit over the head of the other sleeve. "Monsieur G?rard never liked Madame Jumon, even before the shop rental incident, because of her 'former way of life.' He was mortified nearly to death when his precious daughter C?lie married her son. Although after thirteen years you'd think Monsieur G?rard would forget about Genevi?ve being a plac?e. I mean, everyone else has, and he's always polite to Iph?g?nie and Phlosine and me when we come into his shop. Although just the other day he said to Phlosine-"

"Thirteen years?" January set down his cup. "Thirteen years? I thought... I mean, I know Jumon never married, so there was no reason for him to put his plac?e aside..."

"No reason? That hypocritical moneybox, no reason? And it wasn't he that left her," Livia added, returning her attention to the sleeve. "She left him, or rather bade him leave, for she kept the house and the furniture and all he'd given her. And Jumon did marry, two years after that, to get control of his mother's plantation I daresay, which she wasn't going to turn loose to any man who hadn't done his duty by the family and given her a grandson. Not that it did him the slightest bit of good, or her, either. She went to Paris. The wife, I mean."

"Wait a minute-What?" It was unheard of for a plac?e to leave her protector. "Genevi?ve left Jumon? Why?"

"Jealous," snapped his mother. "She heard there was marriage in the wind." "Oh, don't be silly, Mama, you don't know that! " protested Minou. "And no one-I mean, we all know..." She hesitated, looking suddenly down at her sewing, and a dark flush rose under the matte fawn of her skin.

"We all know men marry?" finished her mother. Dominique drew a steadying breath, and when she raised her head again, wore a cheerful smile. As if, thought January, it mattered little to her that the fat bespectacled young planter who had bought her house for her, and fathered the child who had died last year, would not one day marry, too. "Well, if she's as grasping as you say, she wouldn't have let him go for a little thing like that." She made her voice languid and light. "Hmph," said Livia, unable to have it both ways. "At any rate, that whining nigaude No?mie-his wife-went back to Paris, and Laurence's maman sold up the plantations, and the brother's never had a regular mistress at all, so far as anyone knows." She shrugged. "Laurence Jumon never breathed a peep. When he was sick back in twenty-four he gave Genevi?ve money to buy both their sons from him, in case he died, and they'd still be part of his estate. That mother of his would have sold off her white grandchildren, if she'd ever had any, never mind her colored ones. Jumon and Genevi?ve had parted company by that time, but he paid every penny to educate those boys, not that anything ever came of that. For all the airs Antoine and his mother give themselves Antoine's just a clerk at the Bank of Louisiana. And Isaak..."

Her gesture amply demonstrated what she thought of a boy of education becoming a marble sculptor. "He's as bad as you, Ben, wasting the gifts M'sieu Janvier gave you..." "Not wasting them at all, Mama." January smiled at her. He'd long ago realized that being annoyed at his mother would be the occupation of a lifetime. "M'sieu Janvier paid for my piano lessons as well as for Dr. Gomez to teach me medicine. I think as long as I'm making money at one or the other.. "

"Not much money."

But January refused to fight, though the wound hurt. "So Genevi?ve turned M'sieu Laurence out, because of this engagement-it would have given him control of more property, surely? A plantation?"

Livia looked as if she'd have liked to enlarge on her son's folly and ingratitude, but in the end she could no more resist slandering a rival than a child could resist a sweet. Besides, reasoned January, the conversation could always be brought back around to his shortcomings. "Trianon," said Livia, with spiteful satisfaction. "And another one across the lake. Genevi?ve must have hoped to make free with some of the proceeds. But Madame Cordelia sold them up, and put the money in town lots. If she'd held on-"

"But you see," said Dominique, "Genevi?ve and Isaak have been estranged for just years. Isaak was the only one of the boys who was still friends with their father-and I always thought poor M'sieu Laurence seemed terribly lonely. He'd come to the Blue Ribbon Balls and chat with us girls, and be so gallant and sweet, not like a lot of the gentlemen who look at you so when they don't think you can see, even if the whole town knows you already have a friend. All he wanted to do was dance..."

Livia's sniff was more expressive than many books January had read.

"No, truly, Mama, we can tell." Dominique gently discouraged Madame la Comtesse de Marzipan, the less obese of Livia's two butter-colored cats, from playing with the ribbons she was sewing on the sleeve. "At any rate, when he was taken sick last fall, both Isaak and C?lie visited him every day. At least that's what Th?r?se tells me, and her cousin was one of M'sieu Laurence's maids. When M'sieu Laurence died he left Isaak-oh, I don't know how much money, and some property as well, I think."

"He left him a warehouse at the foot of Rue Bienville, half-interest in his cotton press, a lot on Rue Marais and Rue des Ursulines, which if you ask me isn't worth seven hundred dollars, fifteen hundred dollars' worth of railway shares in the Atlantic and Northeastern, and three thousand dollars cash."

January didn't even bother to inquire where his mother had obtained these figures. He merely whistled appreciatively. "Not bad for a marble carver living in the back of his employer's house. I presume they've only been waiting for the probate."

"Which would have gone through a lot more quickly had not four-fifths of the judges in this city turned tail and fled at the first rumor of fever."

"Well, yes," said Dominique: "But also, M'sieu Laurence's mother contested the will. You are going to do something about it, aren't you, Ben? Not about the will, I mean, but about Olympe being arrested? You can't let them-I mean, they won't really..." She let the words hang her trail off unsaid.

January was silent. Madame la Duchesse de Gateaubeurre prowled idly into the room, levitated effortlessly up onto his knee, and settled her bulk, making bread with her broad soft paws.

"Olympe wouldn't have done such an awful thing!" insisted Dominique. "And as for C?lie G?rard having had anything to do with it-stuff! Why would she have wanted to kill her husband?"

January remembered that sweet-faced child turning away from Shaw, her hand pressed to her mouth with the shock of having confirmed the doubts that had tormented her through the horror of the night. Mamzelle Marie's words rose to his mind: a thousand reasons men will think a woman poisoned a man.

C?lie, Isaak Jumon had said. And died.

"I don't know," he said thoughtfully. "Maybe I ought to find that out."

"I knew about the will, yes." Basile Nogent rested his forehead for a moment on his knuckles, against the shoulder of an infant angel carved to look like a white boy. The sculptor was small and middle-aged and had the sad thinness to him that sometimes befalls men when their wives die. The empty silence of the other side of the little cottage, the stillness of the yard where the kitchen doors gaped dark and deserted, told its own story. January knew that thinness, that shadow in the eyes. It was what had driven him from Paris, what had driven him back to the strange land of his tangled birth roots and the only family he had.

It was clear to him, as if he had read it in a book, that Isaak and Celie had been this man's family. And now Isaak was gone.

"Isaak never spoke much about his family to me," Basile Nogent said, in the hoarse rough voice of a consumptive. "He told me once that he wanted to put them behind him and, another time, that he forgave them, both father and mother, for what they were, for what neither could help being."

He shook his head. "An old quarrel, he said. And I understood that it was a pain that he-that Isaak-knew he had to overcome. He saw his father many times, and his uncle Mathurin. He'd meet them near the coffee stands at the market, or in a cafe on the Place d'Armes; sometimes he'd go by the big house on Rue St. Louis and sit in the courtyard and talk. It is not good when families divide like that, for whatever reason. There." He pointed to the marble block of a half-carved tombstone, like a classical trophy-of-arms: sword, shield, wreath, and cloak. A graven ribbon looped the sword hilt, bearing the legend JUMON. "Mathurin Jumon commissioned that last September, at his brother's death."

A quirk of irony broke the grief of that wrinkled face, and he ran one thumb-a knob of muscle like a rockover the curls of the cherub's temple. "There is a species of insanity that strikes when a will is read. I have wrought marble for forty years..." His gesture expanded to touch the two rooms of his little shop, to the doors that opened into a yard filled with yet more images still: a dog, sleeping on a panoply of arms; two putti struggling, laughing, over a bunch of grapes; Athene with her owl reading a book. "As three-quarters of what I do is to decorate graves, I see people every week who have just heard wills read." His breath whispered what might at another time in his life have been a laugh, and he coughed again. "I always told Isaak that when I die I'm going to be like the savage Indians and have everything piled up in a big pyre and burned with me."

The sculptor again briefly closed his eyes. Did he think he could hide the thought that went across them? wondered January. The grief that asked, Who do I have to leave it to anyway? And the same, he thought, could be said of himself. And for an instant the memory came back to him, suddenly and agonizingly, as if he had found Ayasha's body yesterday; as if he had never seen that picture in his mind before this moment. As if he had not awakened every morning for twenty-two months in bed alone. Ayasha dead.

He still couldn't imagine how that could be possible. Couldn't imagine what he would do with the remainder of his life.

"He was-a good boy." Nogent's voice broke into January's grief, like a physical touch on his arm. "A good young man." The rain that had been falling since early afternoon, while January had been on the streetcar to the American faubourg of St. Mary to teach his three little piano students there, finally lightened and ceased; a splash of westering sunlight spangled the puddles in the yard.

"Tell me about Thursday," said January. "About the day they came for him."

Nogent sighed again, as if calling all his strength from the core of his bones to do work that had to be done. "Thursday," he said. "Yes." He led January to the back of the shop, where the light struck a simple block of marble. At first glance the headstone seemed unadorned save for the name, LIVAUDAIS. But sculpted over the block was what appeared to be a veil of lace, the work so exquisitely fine that the very pattern of the lace was reproduced, draped half over the name, the name readable through it-a truly astonishing piece. "We were working on this for old Madame Livaudais. Two-two City Guards came with the warrant. Isaak put aside his chisel and looked at it, and said, 'This is ridiculous.' Very calmly, just like that. To the men he said, 'I see my mother has decided to waste everyone's time. Please excuse me for just a moment while I get my coat and let my wife know where I'll be.' Cool-cold as the marble itself. But the way he touched the block"-Nogent mimicked the gesture, resting his palm for a moment on the flowered delicacy of the counterfeit lace's edge, holding it there, bidding it farewell-"I knew."

The movement of his eyes pointed back to the kitchen building that lay athwart the end of the yard. A little flight of stairs ascended to the rooms above, a gar?onni?re and chambers that would have belonged to household servants, had there been any. "He went up to the rooms they had, over the kitchen there. I kept the Guards talking, led them away from the doors here so they would not see. He must have gone up the scaffolding of the cistern-you see it there in the corner?and over the wall into the next courtyard, and so out onto Rue St. Philippe and gone. He didn't tell C?lie; only that he was going with them. The Guards must have waited here for him twenty minutes before they went to look. I think he did that so C?lie wouldn't be accused of helping a runaway to escape. Even then, he thought of her."

"May I see?"

Nogent followed him out into the yard and to the cistern, where, sure enough, January found the scuffing and scrape marks on the frame of the scaffolding that held up the enormous coopered barrel in a corner of the yard. Like most yards in the French town, Nogent's was hemmed by a high wall, brick faced with stucco that had fallen out in patches, affording handholds. The fringe of resurrection fern along the top seemed to be broken, as if by passage of a body going over, but with the new growth already flourishing it was impossible to tell. January made a move to scramble up himself and see, but the lancing pain in his arms as he lifted them brought him up short.

"And the night of the twenty-third?" he asked, turning back to the old sculptor. "The night he died? Was young Madame Jumon here then?"

"That animal Shaw asked the same." Nogent spoke without rancor-animal was in fact one of the more polite terms by which members of the French and free colored communities referred to Americans. "And I tell you what I told him. Madame C?lie and I had supper together, here in the house, just as dusk fell. Then I went to bed. I tire more easily than I used to, you understand."

He coughed again, and January knew that what he said was true. He wondered if, like the fiddler Hannibal, Nogent welcomed Morpheus with a spoonful of laudanum for the pain.

"It was threatening rain all evening, M'sieu. I cannot imagine Madame C?lie would have ventured forth. Then, too, she had the habit of remaining indoors at night, in the hopes that Isaak would come, or send word."

"So C?lie was by herself in the gar?onni?re here?"

"Yes. But, of course, this animal would have a witness. And when she had none-and she a married lady whose husband was away!-he said, Ah, she is a murderess,' and placed her under arrest. "

January's eye traveled over the brick-paved yard, still puddled from the afternoon's downpour.

The soft, pitted pavement would hold no track, of course, to show whether C?lie Jumon had remained in place that night. And it had rained, not once but many times, as always in New Orleans in June.

"How long had Isaak Jumon been with you, M'sieu Nogent?" he asked.

"Two years," replied the sculptor. "Nearly three. He was truly a son to me."

"Do you know any who would want Isaak Jumon dead? Who would wish him ill?"

"Ah." Nogent was silent, his head bowed, his hand on the scaffolding of the cistern, the subliminal movements of his fingers defining and redefining its shape and grain. Then, "Who would want Isaak dead, M'sieu? I don't know. His father's mother, Madame Cordelia Jumon-I think she would have rejoiced in his death. She did what she could to take his inheritance away from him in the courts. His mother-Well, I never thought that her claim of him as her slave would hold up in court." Nogent shook his head. "But what mother would harm her son?"

What mother would try to have him declared her slave?

What mother would refuse to speak of, or to, her elder daughter who disobeyed, all those many years ago? "He was a good boy, M'sieu. Not what people say, 'Oh, he was a good boy...' But he had a great goodness in him, a goodness of soul. Did they speak of when he would be buried?

Of who would carve the plaque on his tomb? That mother of his..."

"No," said January quietly. "No body has yet been found. That's another thing I'm trying to track down. If he was in trouble, was there anyone Isaak would have gone to? He was missing for four days before his death."

"It depends on the trouble," Nogent said at last. "His uncle Mathurin, I would think. Perhaps his father-in-law. But they both loved C?lie. If either of them knew a single thing of this crime, they would not suffer her to be accused. She is... a girl of great sweetness, M'sieu. And great forbearance. She is a girl who does not get angry; but that night, when she'd heard all that his mother had done with the warrant, and the Guards out looking for him, and an advertisement in the paper calling him a runaway slave... she came into the kitchen where I was sitting, and she kicked the side of the hearth, kicked it and kicked it and kicked it, not saying a word, because she was well-taught and well-bred, but with tears of anger running down her face. Whoever has said that she had anything, anything to do with his death is a fool."

January was silent, thinking about the young man dying in the big house alone, the young man who whispered, I have been poisoned. And then, C?lie. And died.

There's a thousand reasons men will think a woman poisoned a man.

But which woman? January walked along Rue Dumaine in the wet, gathering dusk. Who else could give "no good account of themselves" on the night of Isaak Jumon's death?

In the Place d'Armes, gulls squabbled with pelicans over the garbage of the fruit stands while the women closed up their shops. The brick arcades of the market were dark save for lanterns around the coffee stand, and the world smelled of wet sewage, coffee, and the slow black rivers of soot disgorged by the steamboats into the sullen sky. A snatch of song touched him, where a lateworking gang heaved cords of wood aboard the Missourian:

Kimbebo, nayro, dilldo, kiro,

Stimstam, formididdle, all-a-board-la rake...

African words, the wailing rhythm a thing of the bones and the heart rather than the mind.

Rose Vitrac was in her room above and behind a grocery on Rue de la Victoire, a slim gawky woman dressed neatly in contrast to the assortment of slatterns and market-women occupying the rest of the building. As January's shadow darkened the doorway, she raised her head from the pile of Latin examinations that had overflowed her small desk onto bed, spare chair, and floor.

"Ignorant little toads," she remarked dispassionately and propped her gold-rimmed spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of her nose. Half a dozen candles burned in a cheap brass branch on the desk, different lengths and colors, bought half-consumed from the servants of the rich. "Why don't Creoles bother to educate their children? Or make certain they're actually studying what their tutors are paid to teach? Here's one who seems to think Cicero was merely something that was served at Roman banquets."

"I'm sure if Mark Antony could have arranged it he would have been."

"You have a point. I hope you've come to seduce me into dinner at a gumbo stand somewhere along the levee. I think if I read many more of these I shall go out into the street and start killing young boys at random, and such things give one a terrible reputation, even in this part of town."

Rose Vitrac had owned and taught at her own school for young ladies of color, before a combination of financial ill luck, yellow fever, and the determined enmity of one of her investors over her assistance to a runaway slave had conspired to ruin her. She now eked a kind of living from translating Latin and Greek for a small bookshop on Rue d'Esplanade, and correcting examination papers for two of the boys' schools in town. "Not much of a living," she admitted ruefully, as she and January descended the gallery stairs, "but decidedly superior to prostitution or sewing."

Or marriage, she didn't add-and she would have, once, January reflected, walking beside her along Rue Marigny. She was a woman who had been hurt badly by men, once upon a time, and deep in her heart still mistrusted them, sometimes in spite of herself.

There is time. January moved his aching shoulders. And given my own possibility of earning anything like a living in the near future, maybe it's just as well. Next month it would be two years since Ayasha's death. Seeing that shadow in Basile Nogent's tired eyes, the darkness of that empty house, had uncorked inside him once again that blood-colored river of pain, and he felt obscurely guilty, walking along the levee in contentment with Rose.

Ayasha, I haven't forgotten.

The time would come for them, he knew. Fate and God and Monsieur le Cholera permitting. But when he wcrkr in the night with the memory of a woman beside him, it was Ayasha's body he sought; it was Ayasha's hair he sometimes imagined he could smell in the moonlight. But love for Rose had not made the pain grow less.

Over seven cents' worth of jambalaya from a market stand, Rose listened to January's account of the past eighteen hours: what he'd learned from his mother and sister, what he'd seen at the jail, and all Nogent had said. "Here's the advertisement Genevi?ve Jumon put in the Courier Friday," he said, spreading it out where the lantern glare fell on the tabletop. "Considering my mother's attitude about money maybe it's just as well I was in Paris when St.-Denis Janvier died, and that he didn't have much to leave me. Is there a chance you can get close to C?lie Jumon? Talk to her?

My sister says her father won't let someone of Dominique's stamp near her."

"And I have a more respectable appearance?" Rose peered at him over the tops of her spectacles, amused. "Well, I'll certainly try. But the one I think we need to talk to at once is Monsieur Antoine Jumon. That little scene in 'a house where he'd never been before' and mysterious servants smacks a little too much of penny dreadfuls for my taste."

"Shaw seems to have accepted it," said January thoughtfully. "Or at least his superiors did."

"Once the complaint was brought I can't see how they can have done otherwise. The boy is goneand there's a good deal of money involved. And a witness."

"How very providential for Genevi?ve."

"Would you climb into a coach-and-four with masked bravos, or however it was he went there?

Antoine seems a singularly trusting boy."

"Maybe he's too young to remember being a slave." January sipped his coffee and watched the line of municipal gutter cleaners being escorted back along Rue du Levee toward the Cabildo for the night. "Witness or no witness, I want to know what happened to Isaak's body. Obviously it wasn't chucked out into the road. Even the gutter cleaners would have noticed that."

"Well..." Rose looked doubtfully after the retreating coffle. "If you say so."

"Unless they find it, the state's case is practically non-existent. There's no proof he was poisoned, so they'll have to set Olympe and Madame Celie free."

Behind the small thick ovals of glass, the gray-green eyes flicked to his, then away. Eloquent silence as she stirred her coffee, laid down the spoon with a tiny clink. "You don't think so?"

The eyes touched his again, then again dodged away. "Your sister is a voodoo," said Rose, after a long silence.

January opened his mouth to say, What does that have to do with anything? And closed it again.

He knew exactly what that had to do with it. "Who's going to be on that jury, Ben?" she went on.

"Slaves, who don't automatically cry Devil-worshipers when they walk past Congo Square on a Sunday afternoon? Freedmen, who've been to the voodoo dances themselves and-and presumably have seen enough of what goes on there not to be blinded by just the name and the rumor? I assume there are good voodoos and bad voodoos, the same way there are good Christians and bad Christians. But do you think any white jury is going to think of that?"

January was silent, remembering the candle he'd lit that morning, the prayer he'd prayed for his sister's soul. Framed in her spotless white tignon, Rose's long, oval face had a bitter weariness to it, a kind of tired anger. "Maybe I'm wrong," she said. "Maybe whites-and colored, too-don't automatically believe calumny. But I was driven out of my business by rumors and lies, Ben. I'm a-a pauper now, at least in part because people don't ask questions about what they hear.

"Down in the Barataria country where I grew up, there are miles of what we call the trembling lands: miles of sawgrass and alligator grass and cattails, miles where plants have matted together like blankets spread upon the waters-but it's still water underneath. Sometimes you can get out of it just filthy and embarrassed and looking for a dry place to scrape yourself clean. Sometimes you don't get out of it at all."

She stood. "Forgive me, Ben. Maybe those giants I see all around me are really only windmills after all. But be careful." She clasped his hand, and walked away into the dwindling crowds of the market arcade, as nine o'clock struck from the Cathedral.

Candles glowed in his mother's parlor, shutters and French doors open onto the street to reveal a small cluster of her cronies drinking coffee. The musical babble of their voices reached him on the banquette: "Of course, Prosper Livaudais was paying her husband's valet to let her know the minute the husband was out of town..." "They say the baby's a miniature of the Mar?and boy..

." "And where she got the money for that new tilbury is anybody's guess..."

January made his way down the passway between her house and the next, ducking through the narrow gate at the end and into the little yard. The kitchen, too, had all its shutters thrown wide, illuminated from within like a stage to display Bella washing up the supper pans. "Could you leave the stove hot long enough for me to boil some water for a bath?" he asked, and Bella pursed her wrinkled lips and nodded.

"If you hurry," she said. "I'm heatin' water already for Warn Livia's bath, but you know how she gets about extra wood burned."

January knew how his mother got. "I'll be down to haul the water in two shakes of a lamb's tail."

He climbed the steps at a lope, working his way gingerly out of the black woolen coat; for weeks after his injury he hadn't even been able to put it on without assistance, or to get himself into a shirt. He still needed help sometimes if he had to dress in a hurry. A fencing master he knew had given him exercises, to be performed faithfully every evening, to strengthen the weakened muscles, and although the thought of lifting and rotating two ten-pound scale weights made him flinch he knew he'd better do it while the water heated. It would, he reflected, make the bath afterward more than ever a joy.

The gar?onni?re was dark, doors and shutters left open to the cool of the night. As he crossed the threshold something gritted underfoot, as if gravel or sand had spilled there.

What on earth? Bella kept the place so clean the threshold cursed your foot.

In his small desk he found lucifers and scratched one by touch in the dark. As he put flame to candlewick he saw that Bella had been in to remake the bed to her own satisfaction after he'd made it up that morning.

In the middle of the blanket lay a severed chicken foot, claws curled like a withered demon hand.

He looked back at the threshold. His foot had scuffed it out of shape, but he saw that a cross had been drawn there, in salt mixed with crumbling dark earth that he knew instinctively was graveyard dust.