Graveyard Dust

by Barbara Hambly

  “I’m surprised Papa let her learn to read at all,” remarked January dourly, as Rose halted at the top of the garçonnière steps to kick off the mud-crusted pattens that protected her shoes.

  “You wrong him.” Rose steadied herself on the gallery railing. “Easy to do, I admit. Monsieur Gérard may be hot-tempered and opinionated, but he’s very concerned that his daughter have every advantage—every advantage a woman of color in this country is allowed, at any rate. So many white men assume that any woman of color is a courtesan, or would become one immediately if offered money—an assumption they’d kill another man for, if he made it of their sisters. Papa Gérard wanted Célie to make a respectable marriage. No girl is able to do that if there’s the slightest question about her reputation. And he wanted her to be able to manage her household, and her husband’s financial affairs, to the best advantage. And he isn’t a fool. He knows that if a woman is widowed she must be able to support herself. For that it does help if one is able to read.”

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

  January was silent, remembering for the first time his own mother asking St.-Denis Janvier to send her a tutor, so that she could learn to read. Livia had carried it with a high hand and turned it into a demand, as if it were a polite accomplishment and not a necessity, but he realized now that had her protector died in the first year or two of her plaçage, she might have had no recourse but prostitution for herself, and hard labor for the children she would have been unable to educate.

  Rose propped her spectacles more firmly onto her nose, opened the back cover of the Catéchisme Universel, and took out a folded note.

  Celie,

  I am alive and wel but I canot come back to town just yet. Stil I love you and I must see you. Come to were the 3 cypreses stand at the end of Bayoo Profit tonite at midnite, or Thursday nite at midnite. I wil wait for you there. Do not for any reason tell your father or the lawer. You may bring somone with you that you can trust, but only one.

  Yore loving husbund,

  Isaac

  “So much for the fortune Laurence Jumon spent on his son’s education,” remarked Hannibal, leaning around to look over January’s shoulder. “If Antoine spells that badly I wonder Granville hired him.”

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

  “He wouldn’t.” Rose gestured with the Catéchisme, and January now saw that one of the blank pages at the end, and the marbled inner cover paper, were lined with neat, small handwriting. “Here’s what Célie writes.”

  Dear Madamoiselle Vitrac, thank you, thank you so very much for helping me. I do not know what to do. I found this note last night, lying on my window sill, with Isaak’s gold signet ring. I do not know how it came there, but whoever sent it must know that Papa does not allow me to receive letters. I do not think that this is Isaak’s hand, though if he had been sick or injured he might write differently. He speaks some English but cannot write it easily; I cannot think of any reason that he would write in it, rather than in French. But if it is Isaak I must go to him.

  Please, I beg you, help me to get out of the house tonight and speak to him. Papa would let me communicate with no one yesterday, and I could not think how to get word to you. Would your friend Monsieur Janvier consent to accompany me to the place? I will tell Papa that Monsieur Nogent has not been well—though he was in the court room this morning—and I beg you to come this evening and say that he wishes to see me again. I am distracted and do not know what to do. Yours, Célie.

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

  “Not to speak of spelling his own name,” interjected Hannibal. “In other words, it’s a trap.”

  “Looks like it.” January held the paper to the light. “Now, who do we know who’s small enough to pass for Madame Célie in the darkness of the ciprière at night?”

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

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

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

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

  That left Gabriel.

  A sharp rapping at the door drew Paul away into the front bedroom: “Are we ready?” January heard Augustus Mayerling ask, through the opened French door. “I received your message,” added the fencing master, as he came through into the back parlor and handed January one of the two firearms he carried, an English shotgun. “I regret to say that Madame Mayerling is not yet returned from Mandeville. She should be here tomorrow. What is the affair tonight?”

  As they set out along Rue des Ramparts toward the Bayou Road January filled the Prussian in on the events of the trial, including the note and his observations thereon. “It hasn’t escaped me,” he added, “that a mountain man like Killdevil Nash would cut quills with a skinning-knife and would barely remember how to do it into the bargain. It might be that this is a trap for me rather than for Madame Célie. But if that’s the case there’s definitely something deep goi
ng on, because Madame Célie identified that signet ring as her husband’s.”

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

  “The other thing that letter does,” went on January in a low voice, “or almost does, is exonerate Mathurin Jumon—if the concern he expressed at the trial hasn’t already. Why have Killdevil Ned send a note in clumsy English when Jumon could compose one in well-spelled French?”

  “Why?” said Mayerling logically. “Because Madame Célie would almost certainly recognize Jumon’s handwriting.” Gabriel skipped and hurried along beside the men, skirts gathered in one hand and pattens swinging from the other; the dim slits and spots of light that leaked from January’s lantern splashed the water in the ditches, and the sword master’s scarred, beaky face, with fugitive gold. “And if this trap is for you instead of for her, my friend, you could not fail to do so.”

  “Maybe,” murmured January.

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

  January obeyed these instructions when they reached the northern end of the narrow tributary of Bayou St. John, which terminated in a sort of trench or basin surrounded by cypresses, hackberries, and long-leaved willows bending like princesses to trail their hair in the inky water. The prospective ambushees had taken the precaution of leaving the Corbier house at nine in the evening, so as to be at the rendezvous well before midnight; time enough for Gabriel to assume his pattens and totter into the clearer space a little inland from the basin amid the trees with the air of an ingenue playing Juliet. Paul stationed himself in a clump of palmettos just behind his son—having first cautiously prodded the spiny-leaved thicket and shone the light there to evict any snakes—and Augustus took up a position on the other side of the clearing in a stand of tall reeds. Clouds had covered the moon while the little party had been on the clamshell road along Bayou St. John, but now chinks and cracks of moonlight dappled down through the overhanging trees to spangle the black still waters with pale light.

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

  Gradually the frogs, which had fallen silent around them, set up their croaking again, bullfrog and tree frog and the tiny shrill brill-brill of the gray frog, the squeak of crickets and then the deep, metallic throb of the cicadas. Mosquitoes whined in January’s ears. He slapped at them, fully aware that it was an exercise in futility—they’d only come back in thirty seconds, and they did. Something flickered in the darkness overhead; he saw moonlight silver the back of a flying squirrel, gliding silently down from the top of a white oak tree and out of sight into shadows.

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

  They used to talk to each other, the plantations, January heard in his mind his father’s voice, deep as it was in dreams, in a darkness like this, the dark of the ciprière. And the villages where the runaways went to hide, out in the desert, out in the ciprière, where the whites couldn’t go—they’d use the drums, too. The men who’d been priests, and wise men, back in Africa, they ran away and became wangateurs and voodoo doctors. They’d set traps for the foolish, made with snake venom and poisons. And they’d get the loa to watch the bounds of the village, too: Bosou and Ogu, Omulu the smallpox god and the Baron Cemetery. They’d give them rum and tobacco, and they’d tell them, “Kill anyone who comes near these places.…”

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

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

  He listened, straining every sense to concentrate, to pick apart the tiniest clues. Remembering the glisten of the knife slashing down on him, that pale furious face and filthy beard. Gabriel, he thought, I shouldn’t have brought you here.… This is absurd. This is absurd.

  No sound, save for the lapping of the bayou around the cypress knees. Sweat trickled down his cheeks and temples in the dense heat. Do I call out? Do I let him know we know he’s here?

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

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

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

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

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

  “You saw him?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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