Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard (19 page)

“Gone?” Olympe frowned, reaching her hands through the bars to take January's. Her fingers felt thin, callused, and knotted; her face appeared more gaunt even than it had on Saturday under a tignon that, though clean, was already damp with sweat.

“Cleared out and gone, Mamzelle Marie says. Calabash, seashell, cats, money. . . . But I found a tricken bag in my room last night when I came home.”

“Hidden?” asked Olympe. “Or out where you could see it?”

“Hidden in the bed.”

Her eyes narrowed, dark with uneasiness. “Voodoos sometimes have more than one house,” she said after a time. “Especially if they've been around awhile. And a man may hire more than one voodoo to warn you away, or to put the death fix on. Have you checked under the steps? Or in the yard, for places where something may have been buried?”

January shook his head.

“There's fever here.” She lowered her voice, leaning close to the bars. “Not in this cell, but in the one on the end of the gallery. The Guards will beat us, if word of it gets out. It's just jail fever, they say, not yellow jack. But last night I saw him. I saw the fever walking along the gallery, like a ghost made of smoke and sulfur. He's here, Bronze John. Mamzelle Marie, she's burning green candles for me every day, and bringing me fever herbs.”

January remembered the candle he had lit in the Cathedral only that morning, for Olympe's forgiveness in the eyes of God. “We'll get you out,” he promised, squeezing her fingers again. “Did Célie Jumon tell you anything about where Isaak might have gone in trouble? Or anything about his uncle Mathurin? Brother Antoine seems to think Uncle Mathurin might have been the one to do Isaak harm.” Considering the neat columns of money ranged along the edge of the desk, Mathurin had certainly been able to afford to hire Killdevil Ned.

“I know nothing of him.” She removed her fingers from his, to scratch her arm. Though Gabriel brought her clean cloths every day, January could see the fleas on her bright tignon and the white sleeve of her blouse. “He has dealings with the voodoo doctors sometimes, I know, but then many white men have.”

January supposed that if a respectable young matron could hide herself in the Cathedral to meet Dr. Yellowjack, it was nothing for a Creole gentleman to make arrangements with him for the secrets of his business rivals, or for girls like those who'd passed him in the gate at Congo Square. From another cell on the gallery he heard the hoarse voice of Mad Solie panting, “M'sieu! M'sieu! Tell them! When you leave this place tell them that I didn't kill those children! It was my father and my hushand that killed them! They tried to force me to do it but I wouldn't listen, I wouldn't do it!”

And another woman's weary voice, “Will somebody shut her up before she starts Screamin' Peg off again?”

“They're trying to murder me in here! They come into the cell every night, and stand at my feet, and whisper to me, whisper to me, holding my children's little heads in their hands!”

“What about you?” he asked Olympe. “Are you all right here?”

She sighed, and shook her head. “I'm as well as I can be. You know me. I can sleep through anything, and some of the girls here let me have one of the beds. When Gabriel brings me food, I share it around. I tell their fortunes, too, though I don't always tell the truth.” She glanced back over her shoulder at the shapeless indistinct shadows of the cell. “Gabriel brought me a letter from Paul; said it came with a little money that Michie Drialhet advanced him. He says he'll be back . . .”

“Monsieur Janvier?”

January had heard the creak of footfalls approaching on the gallery stairs, but hadn't thought much of it. The recollection of Killdevil Ned, however, had lurked in the hazy interstices between last night's waking and sleepthe knife descending, the memory of his own physical weakness, helpless against the mountain man's strength. As a result he nearly fell over the gallery rail, leaping back. The graying little man who had spoken to him recoiled, equally startled, from this extreme reaction, and someone in the next-door cell hooted with laughter and yelled, “Got a guilty conscience, Sambo?”

“Please excuse me,” begged the little man, removing his rather aged beaver and holding it over his heart. “I'm terribly sorry if I startled you. It is Monsieur Benjamin Janvier, isn't it?”

January felt as if there were a dozen north Mexico trappers concealed in every cell along the Cabildo's upper gallery, taking a bead on him with their rifles. . . .

But he couldn't say so to the man who stood in front of him, thin-shouldered and diffident, in a rather bright green long-tailed coat and pantaloons of an unlikely buttercup hue. “I'm he, yes.”

The visitor produced a card. “The Widow Paris said I might find you here, when I came to speak with Madame Corbier,” he said. “Please pardon my presenting myself with no better introduction than this.”

Yuchel Corcet, fmc.

Attorney at Law

350 Rue Plauche

“I'm afraid if you're here to speak to Madame Corbier you've been misinformed,” said January. “We have no way of paying you.”

But Olympe, resting her elbows on the sill of the narrow window, only studied the sagging face in its frame of carefully pomaded curls and for the first time a slow smile touched her eyes. “P'tit,” she said to January, “there's something you don't understand about Mamzelle Marie.” She extended her hand to Corcet. “I thank you, M'sieu Corcet. Mamzelle-the Widow Paris-told you my brother's started making inquiries already about this?”

“She did, yes.” Corcet's eyes shifted and he wet his lips with a mouselike pink tongue. Working for Marie Laveau was clearly not something that overwhelmed him with delight. January wondered what the Voodoo Queen had said to the attorney to cause him to offer his services gratis. “And that someone is evidently determined not to let him pursue the investigation. If you have a few minutes to bring me up to date on what you might have learned? . . .”

Together, January and Olympe told him all they knew, while the Guard spit tobacco over the gallery railing and a voice in the courtyard below intoned, “Theseus Roualt, you are hereby sentenced to five lashes with a whip, to be paid for by your master William Roualt. . . .”

“It's clear to me that, whatever feelings of affection he professes-and whether or not he actually had anything to do with the murder-Mathurin Jumon has a stake in his nephew's death,” said January at last. “And he has an equal financial stake in seeing that Isaak's bride doesn't inherit, either. A wife's claims on a dead man's property are clear. But in the absence of that wife, if it comes down to a court battle over' close to five thousand dollars between a dead man's dead father's white brother and that same dead father's colored former mistress, I suspect I know which way that verdict is going to go.”

“And Mathurin can't get rid of Célie,” remarked Olympe bitterly, “without he gets rid of me as well.”

“Conversely,” remarked Corcet, turning his hat brim in soft, nervous hands gloved with yellow kid, “if you are cleared, Madame Corbier, Madame Célie will be cleared as well-hence the attempts against your brother. I wonder if Clement Vilhardouin has experienced similar difficulties?”

“Not likely we're going to find out,” said January. “Though it would tell us something if he has.”

“Does Monsieur Jumon strike you as the kind of man who would murder his nephew-and cause his nephew's bride to be hanged-for money?” asked Corcet. “He appears to have plenty of it already, if his mother's jewelry, carriage, clothing, and house in Mandeville are any indication. He does a great deal of charity work, you know, in a quiet way: settling annuities on deserving invalids, for instance. He has provided for the education of a number of young people who might not otherwise be able to afford it. Mathurin Jumon does not appear to be an evil-intentioned man. Or a man who would kill for gain.”

Olympe snorted with derision. “Charity work. There's half a dozen of the most charitable men and women in this town send their slaves down to be whipped if they pass the time of day with a milk seller in the kitchen door. Two of 'em I know of wash the cuts out with salt brine afterward. And worse things,” she added, with a glance at her brother, who had nearly lost the use of his arms through an encounter with a white woman renowned for her charity.

“Hmm.” January watched the sunlight on the plastered wall fade, and tried not to hear the crack of the rawhide in the court below him, and the whipped man's stifled cries. He thought again about those neat stacks of coin. Anonymous. Concealed power, able to act for good or for ill. “And it may be,” he said, “that a white man wouldn't consider a colored one to have the same rights of inheritance, even in the face of the law. But no, he did not impress me as a killer. But I'm almost certain Isaak died in his house. Now, by his account Antoine isn't to be entirely trusted, but I doubt Antoine could have made up a description of a seventeenth-century rustic-ware pitcher. We'll know more, of course, after our sister's maid has talked with one of the Jumon servants.”

Leaving the Cabildo with the clouds gathering overhead, January started to turn along Rue Chartres, and so to his mother's house again. But as he stepped out from beneath the arcade, the bright-painted sign above a chocolate shop drew his attention. Tables had been set out before it on the Place d'Armes and for a moment he stood watching the proprietress, a lively, pretty woman in her thirties, boldly flirting with a man in a steamboat captain's gold-trimmed cap. Turning, January crossed before the Cathedral, hands in the pockets of the rather worse-for-wear corduroy jacket he'd bought many years ago in Paris, and made his way in a leisurely fashion-his mother's house would still be a wilderness of trunks, packing materials, and laundry-to a stationery store in the Rue Conde. From there he sought out a table near the coffee stand by the vegetable market, where he composed a note.

My dearest Madame Metoyer

Please forgive the presumption of this communication, but I understand that you are acquainted with a young lady by the name of Babette Figes, whom I have seen, in your company, at the Blue Ribbon Balls at the Salle d'Orleans. I have attempted, unsuccessfully, to attain an introduction to Mademoiselle Babette through her sister Marie-Eulalie; would it be possible to come to an understanding with you on the subject? If you will so kindly permit me, I will look for you at the next Ball to be given.

Until then,

Your obedient servant, Baron Herzog von Metzger

After a moment's consideration he applied a lucifer to the sealing wax he'd purchased along with the sheet of coldpressed paper, and pressed one of his jacket's elaborate buttons into the resulting crimson blot.

The maidservant at Bernadette Metoyer's cottage on Rue St. Philippe was duly impressed with January's tale of the besotted Baron-“I can't imagine what Marie-Eulalie was thinking of, to snub a man like that!” From there, it being midafternoon and laundry day, an offer to assist in the wringing of sheets and petticoats, and the maneuvering of tubs and buckets of hot water from the sweltering kitchen was gratefully accepted. January shed his trimly cut, albeit shabby, jacket, glad that he'd worn one of his old and threadbare linen shirts to Dominique's that morning instead of a rougher-looking calico, gritted his teeth against the agony in his back and spoke his best Parisian French, with a slight German accent as befit a European nobleman's house servant. It was an easy transition from commonplaces to conversation to confidences.

“Lord, no, Michie Athanase, that was keeping company with Mamzelle Bernadette, he gave her this house and five hundred dollars when he married Mamzelle Cournaud. I remember the day he signed over the deed, and Mamzelle Bernadette crying her eyes out saying how she's going to kill herself, praying God for strength to carry on, just till he walked out the door. Then she stands up with this big old grin on her face and throws her arms around me. . . .”

“A strong-hearted woman, Mademoiselle Lucy. My master's mother, you know, she saved the family plate from Napoleon's armies. . . .” January had been a musician in Paris for ten years. Every tale and anecdote and bit of gossip he'd ever heard there-not to mention substantial blocks of Stendhal and Balzac-flowed easily to his tongue.

“Course, M'am Cournaud I hear is melancholy. . : .”

“My master's wife, the Baroness, is the same. In fact she suffers a periodic delusion that she is pregnant with half a dozen rabbits. . . .” .

“Maybe she's witched!” Lucy's dark eyes widened, and January felt, as he had when a young man illegally shooting in the cipriere, that satisfied moment of whole ness: a deer stepping exactly into a clearing, unaware of his presence.

“I understand that there are such sorcerers here?”

She flung up her hands, her round face beaming. “Lord, aren't there!”

“In fact I heard that there was such a gathering only a few weeks ago. Have you ever been to such?”

Lucy crossed herself quickly, but there was a flicker in her eyes. “Lord, no, Mamzelle Bernadette wouldn't let me go. She had her sisters over that night, playing cards, and even playing for pennies and bits she lost close to fifty dollars!”

“I didn't think respectable ladies of this town-I mean honest shopkeepers, like your mistress-had so much money to game with.”

“My, when you've been in town a bit longer, Michie Gustave, you'll learn! Mamzelle Bernadette's sister Blanche couldn't play much, being like Mamzelle a woman in business-she has a hat shop over by Rue des Ursulines-but her other sister Virginie, that's plaçée  with young Michie Guichard, and Marie-Toussainte and Marie-Eulalie, they could just gamble with the money their protectors give them. . . .”

“I think I've seen your mistress's sister's hat shop,” said January. “Aux Fleurs Jolies, with the pink sign? . . .”

“Oh, no, that's M'am Genevieve's, on Rue des Ramparts. But she was here, too.” And Lucy giggled. “For a few minutes, anyway.”

January leaned his elbow on the doorway-his arms felt as if they were about to drop off at the shoulder-and gave her his most interested and (he hoped) most charming grin.