Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard (32 page)

“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 of 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 Cafe des Exiles, 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.

“King snake,” said January, as the mottled brown-and-blue tail whipped away out of sight. “Mambo Jeanne on Bellefleur used to tell us that king snakes have powerful spines and can kill any other snake just by wrapping around it and crushing all its bones.”

“I knew there was a reason I never went beyond Rampart Street.” Hannibal looked around him at the still greennesses of cypress and loblolly pine, sweat already running down his face from the contained heat among the trees. “I didn't know all this was out here. Rather like discovering the maids' dormitory in my aunt Rowena's house.”

“King snake's nothing to worry about.” January scouted the knots and clumps of underbrush where Omulu and Baron Cemetery had lurked in wait last night. “You can tell a poison snake's trail because it's wavy; the safe ones leave a straight track like a ruler.”

“Must be awkward for them when they come to a puddle. Over flood, over fire. . . .”

January found the deep print of Paul's big boots, and where the mahogany chair leg had scraped the willow trunk against which it had rested. In a clump of reeds, nearer than he'd thought it had been last night, he found the narrow neat marks of Mayerling's English boots. On the other side of the bayou he found what he sought: broken twigs, and the soft brown leaves of last summer's oaks pressed down into the wet ground. Looking back through the trees across the narrow green water he saw Hannibal in the middle of the clearing, just where Gabriei had stood last night. The fiddler was blithely continuing with Act Two of A Midsummer Night's Dream as if he expected the spotted snakes with double tongue, thorny hedgehogs, newts, and blindworms to be listening in the deeper green silences of the cipriere.

Not long-legged spinners nor beetles black, thought January uneasily, turning to listen to that green invisibility. Bosou and Ogu and Agassu, watching with red ageless eyes; the demon Onzoncaire and the bleeding sheep-head sacrificed to Omulu; the rainbow serpent coiled under the reeds. And behind them the dimmer manitou spirits of the Choctaw and Chickasaw, exiled but still listening, angry at their people's dead and wanting blood.

Killdevil Ned Nash was here, thought January. Or someone was. And had decided not to try it.

Did he see us? Know there was more than one?

Or was there some other reason? Something else he saw? He moved along closer to the edge of the water, picking his way carefully among the reeds. Gnats whirled up in clouds; wasps and dragonflies, hanging over the water, flickered away in eerie silence.

He found the marks of bare feet about four yards from the farthest signs of Killdevil's moccasin scuffs. Two men-one of them with enormous feet, larger than January's own-and someone who could have been either a boy or a woman. The marks came up out of the bayou itself, and hugged cover with the expert caution of those who knew the country well.

Thunder whispered overhead, low and close, a lion's growl. Wind whipped at the oak leaves and the long gray beards of moss. The cricket cries increased in the dense green air, as if the whole world were suddenly compressed by the coming of the rain.

January crossed back over the bayou on the rummage of deadfalls and cypress knees that had taken him, more or less dry shod, over the still green water in the first place. With the wind snaking in his long hair and his pale face skull-like with exhaustion and illness, Hannibal had the look of a wood-elf himself in the sudden dimming of the storm light.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes spout

Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks! You sullferous and thought-executing fires, vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts. . . .

“Do you feel it?” He swung around as soon as January was near. “The watchers in the woods? Be not afeared, the isle is full of noises . . .”

January nodded. Looking back across the bayou to where the reeds grew thick, he understood whole and suddenly why Ti Jon had lied to him, and where Isaak Jumon had been between the twenty-first of June and the twenty-third, and whom he had gone to meet beside the crooked tree near the Bayou Gravier. Oaks and willows, reeds and hackberries made matte walls of greens, dark and drenched with the rain; the beryl water was still, save for the growing and spreading circles of the falling drops. The air breathed the smoky odor of rot, and the waiting tension of the Congo drums.

“Indeed it is,” he said softly. “Indeed it is.”

Augustus and Madeleine Mayerling were sitting on the gallery steps outside the garçonniere when Hannibal and January returned. “I abase myself with chagrin at having failed you,” said the fencing master, shedding his waspwaisted coat and rolling up his fine linen sleeves as January helped Hannibal to lie down on Bella's bed. The fiddler had made it most of the way back from the ciprierre in the rain, but exhaustion had claimed him as they'd passed the cemeteries; arms aching, January had halfdragged him up the stairs. Madeleine Mayerling, a full-bosomed, beautiful woman with dark hair wound into fanciful knots and ringlets, measured herbs into the little china pot of the veilleuse as her husband of six months went down to the cistern for water, and scratched a lucifer on the striking paper to kindle the flame underneath.

“Orell Greenaway put a bullet through Clement Vilhardouin this morning at six,” Mayerling said, returning with the dripping pail and shaking the rain out of his hair. “Vilhardouin died an hour and a half ago.”

“Majnun,” said January, in Arabic-fool. Mayerling's scarred face showed no change of expression, but the long upper lip pressed taut. “As you say. I'm told he spent all of yesterday evening in the woods at the end of Erato Street, shooting at playing cards nailed to the trees there: I am pleased to report the entire Court of Spades still enjoys excellent health. The surgeon Greenaway hired-that idiot Bernard over on Rue Bourbon-bled Vilhardouin and dosed him with calomel by the cupful, but I doubt he would have survived in any event. I hope he had a partner on Madame Celie's case?”

“None.”

“Monsieur Trepagier-my first husband, as you know, Monsieur,” said Madame Mayerling, “engaged in two duels while we were married.” She crossed the little room in a rustle of claret-colored skirts, a steaming cup of herb tisane cradled in her hands. “This in spite of the fact that the next year's crop was already mortgaged and not yet in the ground, and in the event of his death I-and the children that I had then-would have been left destitute. The man he fought, and killed, was in a similar case, and I knew his wife. It was that which made me finally stop believing that he would ever offer me even the protection that the law demands.”

“I would not love thee, dear, so well, ” quoted Hannibal, cocking a sardonic glance up from his pillows, “loved I not honor more.”

“Goodness gracious me.” Madame Mayerling widened her velvet-brown eyes and held the cup at arm's length above him, “I have accidentally spilled every drop of this scalding hot tisane over poor Monsieur Sefton's head.”

Hannibal lifted his hands in surrender. “Now mark me how I will undo myself-”

“See that you do, then.” She handed him the cup and settled in the chair that Mayerling held for her. Whatever could be said of her first husband, thought January, this second, odd marriage agreed with her. The haunted grimness of her widowhood had been replaced by a kind of zesty humor that he had not even seen in her girlhood. It was as if the subdued calm of her early years itself had been a façade, a defense against fate penetrated only by the ferocity with which she pursued her music. She wore now the look in her eyes comparable only to that of a young child presented with a large dish of Italian ice and a spoon: as if, at twenty-eight, she were finally permitted to be young.

“I spent Wednesday afternoon at tea with Madame Cordelia Jumon,” she said a short time later, after January had gone down to the kitchen to fetch up the spirit kettle and remains of his mother's coffee beans. “We used to make jokes-my girlfriends and cousins and I-about how Monsieur Mathurin Jumon would never marry because he could never find a woman who would spoil him the way his mother spoiled him, calling him `my lover' and `my cabbage' and all those other things as if he were still in dresses. Years, as far back as I can remember. And now-poof !” She gestured as if drawing back from an explosion.

“A viper in her bosom; an adder; a beast who was always selfish, always cruel to her, always delighted in hurting her, even from the time he was a little child-this from a woman I heard with my own ears telling how he and his brother used to sleep in her bed with her, they loved her so much. Madame Cordelia would tell my father in detail about how she used to tell Monsieur Mathurin and his brother to pick out the most wretched little beggar child they saw, and she would give alms, saying that it was her gift to them so they would go to Heaven because of her. I remember she'd go on for hours-she saw my mother fairly often when I was a child-about what Monsieur Laurence and Monsieur Mathurin must be thinking about her when they were apart, and would ask them about what they'd been thinking about her at such-and-such a time.”

Hannibal coughed. “Makes Monsieur positively Lear-like.”

“I'd have run from home screaming,” Mayerling flatly.

A thought crossed January's mind: a black locked cupboard in an attic, a bloodied strip of sheet. “Maybe they tried,” he said.

Hannibal's gaze crossed his, but the young woman went on, “In any case, now none of that has ever happened. Mathurin was always an unnatural brute. He never cared for her, always sought ways to hurt her and slight her-the teacups we were drinking out of were Sevres ware, Louis XVI, fifty dollars apiece! She was wearing girandole earrings the size of chandeliers!”

“Did she say why he was selling up?”

Madame Mayerling shook her head. “But so far he's put on the market not only the carriages and horses and Gerard sound said Augustus slaves that you heard of but one of the properties that went to him in the settlement when they sold up Trianon, a warehouse at the foot of Julia Street. Madame Cordelia says he's given her some tale about investing in slaves to be let out, but he'd have to be buying an army of them. In any case what he isn't spending the money on is the black peau de soie she feels is critical to her standing in society-one can't be properly respectful to the dead, apparently, in plain paramatta-and getting her carriage reupholstered.”

There was silence, save for the drumming of rain on the roof, and the muffled bubbling of the water over the spirit lamp. January measured out the ground coffee and added it to the water, nipped chunks of sugar from the loaf and arranged them neatly in a saucer on a folded napkin. “Mathurin can't be spending that much on rustic ware. It sounds as though he were being blackmailed.”

“I thought of that,” remarked Mayerling, who was, after the manner of fencing instructors, idly experimenting with Italianate redoubles with a coffee spoon. “If there'd been a run on a bank or a plunge in stocks, one would hear, and I've gambled with the man. He never plays beyond what one would spend on an evening's entertainment in some other pursuit.”

“It's a shame,” said his wife. “Because he has done a great deal of good.”

“I've heard that,” said January. “I've heard also that he has dealings with the voodoo doctors from time to time-over what, I don't know. What does his mother say of his charities?”

“Not much. They're usually people steered to him by the St. Margaret Society, or through Pere Eugenius, though I think Mrs. Coughlin and her daughter, Abigail, came to him through a mutual friend.”

“Coughlin?” Hannibal straightened from his pillows. “Lucinda Coughlin?”

“You know her?” Madame Mayerling regarded him in surprise. “A Philadelphia woman; her husband died of the fever last year. Monsieur Mathurin has been helping her find respectable employment, and giving money toward her daughter's schooling.”

“Little girl about five years old?” Hannibal held out his hand to indicate a height of about three feet. “Honeycolored curls and big brown eyes? Looks like she came out from under a hill in Ireland somewhere?”