03 Graveyard Dust bj-3

by Barbara Hambly

  Behind him the roof leaked noisily. Peering through into the attic's sepia gloom, January saw a mattress and a drapery of frayed mosquito-bar. A dozen stacks of books were all arranged on planks laid down between the rafters above the thin ceiling of the room below, placed so that the leaks dripped between them. "You know the man?"

  Hannibal coughed again and withdrew a bottle of opium from under the blanket's folds. "Edward Nash, hight Killdevil among the mountain men for his affection for that particular tipple: If I had a thousand sons, the first human principle I should teach them would be, to forswear thin potations. Damn," he added, taking a swig, and held the bottle up to the light. "Speaking of thin potations... They swear to me they don't steal it, but they do. They think I don't notice when they water it." He coughed again, the deep racking shudder of tuberculosis, and leaned against the frame of the door, jaw tight with sudden pain.

  "God knows what those girls want with opium," he went on after a moment in his hoarse, light voice, "considering the poison they peddle by the gallon downstairs. I don't know what I'd have done if they hadn't shown up. I left the lovely Kentucky in charge of the situation. Ungallant, but I thought it best." His eyes slipped closed; in the rainy light, his face looked deathly. "Still..." And the dark eyes flicked open again, (symbols unavailable) as the maggot said to the King of France. Our Mr. Nash came to town in May with four years' worth of fox and beaver pelts, his own and those of his partners back in Mexico. He sold the lot for close to three thousand dollars and started drinking. And gambling. He did some of both here, but mostly over at the Flesh and Blood on Tchoupitoulas Street. I've never seen one man get so drunk so quickly and stay sitting up so long after he should charitably have been put to bed. Charitably at least for the local Paphians, who would have access to the inner pockets that the gamblers missed. Keep thy foot out of brothels, thy hand out of plackets, thy pen from lenders' books... In any case he's been hanging around town ever since, trying to raise sufficient funds to get back to Santa Fe and face his associates with some semblance of honor."

  January was silent. He saw again the chicken foot, the graveyard dust. The child holding out to him the folded note in the street. "I gather," he said at last in a mild voice, "that someone suggested to Mr. Nash a means by which he could redeem himself." And he related the incident of the boy and the blank note. "Olympe's husband is leaving town today-he has to feed his family and go when work is offered. Anyone would have known that. And seen me stand up in the court yesterday morning."

  "That's crazy." Hannibal took another sip of opium and worked the cork back into the bottle. "Who'd want to have your sister hanged? I mean, if you're going to go after a voodooienne, why not tackle Mamzelle Marie? Who'd want to see the death of what appears to be a perfectly innocent sixteen-year-old girl?"

  "I don't know," said January grimly. "But somebody does. Do you suppose the lovely Miss Williams and her equally lovely friends might be able to ascertain more details of Mr. Nash's current employment?"

  "I don't see why not. I doubt he'll be in much of a mood to talk to the Fair Maid of Lexington herself-when last I saw them together Kentucky had bitten a sizable chunk from his left ear and was hammering him over the head with a slungshot-but the thing about the Swamp is, that everyone knows someone who knows someone. Rather like Oxford University in that sense...

  But that can't have been the reason you came here, surely?"

  "No." January rubbed his short-cropped hair to shake some of the rainwater out of it. "Though I was on my way to see you. Which brings me to the favor," he went on, "that I wanted to ask of you."

  The Bank of Louisiana stood on Rue Royale, a massive structure of Doric pillars and imposing facade set back from the street, within a few steps of the Merchants' Bank, the United States Bank, and the Louisiana State Bank. Grouchet's, a small eating house that catered to the better-off among the free colored, stood next to the Merchants' Bank across the street. Slightly more expensive than could be afforded by junior clerks at any of the. banks, at a quarter to one on a Saturday afternoon it was not crowded. From its front windows, January had a splendid view of the front doors of the Bank of Louisiana and of Hannibal Sefton, loitering before the windows of The Sign of the Magnolia pretending to admire boots.

  Hubert Granville emerged from the bank's bronze doors. His corpulent bulk was surprisingly natty in a coat of snuff brown superfine, his red-blond hair carefully pomaded and combed. He extended a thick hand from beneath the shelter of the porch and, finding that the rain had ceased, stepped out, but did not don his hat, for a woman followed immediately behind him. She would have been tall even without the pattens that protected her shoes from the mud, and though January couldn't see her face clearly at the distance, she carried herself like a woman of beauty. Her gown of black mourning crepe showed off a ripe, matronly figure; her tignon matched the dress in hue and trimmings and even at that distance seemed to him one of the most elaborately decorated he'd ever seen on a woman of color.

  No veil. Full crepe, no veil usually meant a child or a parent recently deceased, not a husband-no widow in her senses would swelter in the crepe of first mourning past the moment when she could dispense with veils...

  The woman glanced back at the bank, asking a question. Whatever Granville replied, it was reassuring. The banker held out his arm, the woman took it, and together they proceeded down Rue Royale in the direction of the Magasin de Commerce.

  Shortly thereafter, as the Cathedral clock sounded one, the clerks of the bank emerged. Young men with flourishing side-whiskers and elderly gentlemen in steel rimmed spectacles, dressed-as January had taken care to dress upon his return from the Swamp-in the tailed coats, embroidered waistcoats, and high-crowned chimney-pot hats that were as wildly inappropriate for New Orleans in the summertime as crepe mourning. January counted them off with his eye: several white men of assorted ages, a free colored far too dark to share parents with the fair-skinned Isaak Jumon, a much-lighter skinned man of thirty at least...

  And there he was. The youngest clerk, looking every day of seventeen and every Caucasian atom of a quadroon, arrayed in a nip-waisted black frock coat of the boldest cut and three black silk waistcoats, one over the other, jet buttons gleaming at a hundred feet away... And there was Hannibal, strolling over to him, casual and polite, coat brushed, long hair braided in an oldfashioned queue, and new gloves of black kid on his hands. January could see when the fiddler handed Antoine the card of one Quentin Rafferty-Hannibal had a collection of cards, neatly separated into those that specified an occupation and those that did not-and the most recent copy of the New York Herald he'd had in his attic, pointing out two or three articles he claimed to have written under various pseudonyms. And he could see, by the boy's tilted head and the angle of his shoulders, that Antoine Jumon was buying every ounce of that particular load of goods. Hannibal could be astonishingly convincing when he tried.

  "... wouldn't be printed in New Orleans, so there's no worry about that," the fiddler was saying a few moments later, as he and Antoine Jumon entered Grouchet's. "In fact it's standard policy for our paper to change all the names of a story of this kind. It's the story itself that's the thing, my friend, the... the piquancy, the bizarrerie that characterizes the streets of any city, that particularly Gothic strangeness that makes true human experience so much more curious than the borrowed effusions of mere art. Don't you agree?"

  "It's true," said Antoine earnestly. January had moved his seat from the window to a table farther in and so had to admire the adroit way in which Hannibal steered the boy to a chair from which January could watch his face while he spoke. "You know, I've often thought that true experience, seen through a mind attuned and sensitized, is far more satisfying than anything one could read or see. But I never thought"-he turned his face away a little, his brow suddenly twisting in grief-"my brother..."

  "Tell me about it," urged Hannibal, and nudged the boy's crepe-scarved top hat-which Antoine had set on the table, where it blocked the vi
ew of his restless hands-out of January's line of sight. Antoine had been reading in his own room-a gar?onniere-above the household offices-at his mother's house on Rue des Ramparts, on the night of Monday, the twenty-third of June. It was very late, and raining heavily, when he heard knocking on his door. "There was a woman there, sir, a woman of color, masked and wearing a hooded cloak. She asked me if my name was Antoine Jumon, and I said yes; she asked if I had a brother named Isaak, and I said yes. She asked, where was my mother? I said I didn't know. I thought she must be in the house asleep. The woman said, 'If you love your brother, come with me. Hurry, there is no time to lose.'" "Did she speak French or English?" asked Hannibal, and the boy looked up, surprised. "French, of course." It didn't seem to occur to him to wonder why the purported Mr. Rafferty, of a New York newspaper, would have been carrying on the entire conversation in French. Antoine had gone into the main house, but his mother was not in her bed. His guide would not be stayed, however, and urged him into a fiacre waiting in the street. "I did not see the coachman's face, M'sieu, because of the rain. We drove-hours it seemed-in the darkness, before she ordered the coach to halt and led me out. I had only confused impressions of a great, dark house looming over us with a single candle burning in one upper window, watching us like some malignant eye. She took me through a dark antechamber, to a small, bare room where my brother lay dying on a rude mattress laid on the floor beside the fire."

  "Did you know he was dying?" asked Hannibal gently, looking up from the notebook in which he was jotting. The boy's mouth trembled with distress.

  "His face-ah, God! He was in terrible pain, white and ghastly; he vomited and... and could not contain his bowels, though the servant woman there had cleaned him, and there was not much more in him to void. Hehe said, I have been poisoned, Antoine, in a terrible voice, as if his throat were scraped and raw."

  His eyes squeezed shut, and his black-gloved hands began to shake in earnest. "Please excuse me," muttered Antoine after a moment. "I-I am not well. My constitution is weak.

  "Perhaps this will help a little?" Hannibal held out to him the square black bottle from his pocket.

  "I am myself not of strong constitution."

  Antoine's eye fell on the bottle, and January could see that the boy recognized the shape of it at once: Kendal Black Drop, triple-strength tincture of the best Turkish opium, brewed by a Quaker family named Braithwaite at eleven shillings the bottle. And he could see the gratefitl, gentle light in Antoine Jumon's eyes. "Thank you," said the boy. "Thank you very much, sir."

  And took a slug that would have felled a horse. "There isn't that much more to tell," said Antoine, after a moment. "I was-I was much affected, so much so that I could barely speak. I clung to my brother's hand and wept. He tried to speak to me, tried to tell me something, over and over, I don't know how long I was there.

  Time seemed to stand still, to stretch and to shrink. There was a fire in the grate; sometimes all that I could hear was the rain, and the hissing of the coals, and all I could do was stare at the goldwork patterns in the red velvet of the pillow beneath my brother's head, and the way the firelight made jewels of the sweat on his brow. The woman servant there brought me water in a pitcher of fantastic make, like a-like a lettuce, with serpents and insects peering and slipping among the dark leaves. Evil! Horrible! I poured the water out when she turned away. My brother whispered again, I have been poisoned Then he said, Mother, and Tell her, and Celie... Celie was my brother's wife, M'sieu, married only a month. And then-and then he died."

  He looked aside again, covering his mouth with his hand. Hannibal signaled the young woman in the kitchen door to bring them coffee, and waited while Antoine took a sip.

  "I'm sorry," said Antoine after a moment, and drew a deep breath. "Isaak fell limp in my arms, M'sieu. After a little time the woman servant helped me to my feet, led me from the room. I-I was led out, led by the hand into a-a waiting fiacre... It was still pouring rain, M'sieu, and the carriage-the carriage stopped, I knew not where, and the coachman bade me get down. After that I wandered long, long through the rain, hours it seemed; turning corners here and there among dark houses and still darker stands of trees. At long last I saw lights before me, and made my way to them. They were the riding lights on the masts of ships in the river, and so at length I was able to find my way home. It was dawn, and my mother was awake and waiting for me. And I told her that my brother was dead."

  To which Genevi?ve doubtless responded, thought January dourly, with a discreetly stifled whoop of joy.

  "But this is shocking." Hannibal added a dollop of opium to the boy's coffee. "Astonishing! Do you-forgive me for asking-do you have any idea who might have poisoned him? Had he enemies?"

  Antoine's voice sank to a whisper. "He was surrounded by them." January had to strain to hear.

  "Our grandmother-you understand, M'sieu," he added selfconsciously, "that my brother and I are-I am, he was, M'sieu-men of color, but our father was a wealthy white man of this city. He left my brother considerable property, but owing to... owing to a division in the family, nothing was left to my mother or me. But his mother, M'sieu, our father's mother-she is a terrible woman! She tried to have my brother's inheritance taken away from him before he got it. Yes, and also tried to take that which my father left to his estranged wife, Noemie, who lives in ParisNoemie who hated this country, hated my brother and my mother and me! And the father of the woman that my brother married, he, too, hated my brother. He would have liked to see his daughter a widow, and himself in control of the property she would inherit. And my uncle, my father's brother..."

  Sudden, ugly rage flashed across the boy's gentle eyes. Very softly, Antoine said, "My uncle Mathurin is a consummately evil man, M'sieu. My brother-would not see it. Isaak was-very good, my brother. He forgave, even those who had no business being forgiven. Because Mathurin showed him kindness, he thought that he was kind, and I assure you, M'sieu, that this is not the case. My uncle is a powerful man in this city, M'sieu. He has powerful friends. If my brother died, eventually the property would have gone to him. Had I to name one who would have harmed my brother, M'sieu, I would say that it was he."

  "Antoine."

  The boy whirled, face flooding with guilt. Framed in the doorway of Grouchet's stood the mourning woman January had seen leaving the bank with Hubert Granville.

  At closer range he saw that she had, indeed, been a beauty once. Even if-his mind leapt to the realization as Antoine rose to his feet and stammered, "Mama"-even if she'd started out life as one of Antoine Allard's cane hands.

  January had seen the look in her eyes a thousand times before, at the Hotel-Dieu, at the Charity Hospital-the look as she turned her son's face to the light of the windows, and warily studied his eyes. She did not even try, as the wives of drunks and addicts so frequently do, to pretend she was doing something else. January wondered if Kentucky Williams and the Perdido Street harpies had watered Hannibal's Black Drop to a degree that it wouldn't contract the pupils of Antoine's eyes.

  "I was concerned when you didn't come home," said Genevi?ve Jumon, with false and steady cheerfulness. "You know that I don't like you wandering about the town without letting me know where you'll be." She glanced past her son at Hannibal, who had tucked pad, pencil, and opium bottle out of sight.

  "Mama, this is M'sieu Rafferry, of New York," said Antoine quickly, and just as quickly, Hannibal very slightly shook his head. "He is the-the owner of an art gallery in that city. I sent him some of my sketches and paintings, and he was kind enough to look for me when he came to New Orleans."

  "And very beautiful they are, M'am." Hannibal rose to his feet and bowed gracefully over Madame Jumon's hand. "Your son has a great deal of talent. Unformed, of course, and undirected, but technique is easy to acquire when the heart, the fire, is there..."

  January folded up his newspaper and casually strolled from the cafe.

  "What did you think?" he asked ten minutes later, when Hannibal joined him at the coffee stand i
n the market arcade where he'd supped with Rose last night.

  "You mean other than the fact that our boy is obviously an addict and was just as obviously taking advantage of Mama's absence on the night in question by dosing himself to the verge of insensibility with Smyrna nepenthe? St. John's Eve is just about the shortest night of the year. If he'd driven 'hours' to this mysterious house and wandered around for 'hours' afterward-not to speak of the 'hours' spent staring at snakes in the water pitcher-it would have been noon by the time he got home."

  "There is that," agreed January, who signaled one of the pralinneres with a gesture of his finger.

  Hannibal paid for both pralines-a brown and a white-and handed the remainder of the money back to January. Coffee and soup at Grouchet's, though not overwhelmingly costly, had cut deeply into January's slender resources, and there was still his mother to pay for room and board.

  "Did you notice that it was a woman servant who brought him there, and a woman who attended Isaak-the same woman, maybe? Even at that hour of the night it wouldn't be impossible to hire a hack."

  "A pity Mama put in an appearance before we could get a description out of him." Hannibal checked his notes. "I observe that in addition to Celie's name Isaak also mentioned their mother'sinteresting, given the reason he was in hiding in the first place. And Mama, of course, was absent from home that night. "