Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard (43 page)

He knelt, and scanned the threshold of the bridge. If someone had crossed who'd come through the marshy lands to the west, they'd done so without leaving wet footprints. Shutting the lantern slide, January stepped down from the bridge, panting, and crouched in a clump of pine. In the stillness, and the black thick fog, his mind felt clearer. Had Isaak Jumon, like Papa Legba, been a figment of whatever had been dumped into the stove?

But the carved horse on the table . . . the child's toy that Isaak had carved. That told him those final few things he had not known.

That was what Isaak had seen in Dr. Yellowjack's house on St. John's Eve. He would not even have had to see Lucinda or Abigail Coughlin, although the woman had almost certainly seen him. Of course, he'd be horrified to see his uncle's two delicately protected protegees there. Of course he'd risk his own freedom, to go back to town and tell his uncle that the woman and her daughter were there, and in danger. . . .

But in that case, why wasn't Isaak dead? If in fact he hadn't been a hallucination? Had he been a prisoner there, all those weeks? The idea was surely even more absurd than incarceration in the Jumon town house. January remembered the emaciated face, the way the young man had clutched at the table. Surely Dr. Yellowjack would have been better off to kill him immediately? If...?

A voice screamed in the darkness, “Let me alone!” Hoarse panting breath, and the clash and rustle of young cane trampled. Water splashed. Dr. Yellowjack cried, “Get up and run you young bastard or I'll burn you! I swear I'll tear you to pieces with hot irons. . . .”

“I am,” whispered Ben's nephew's voice, gasping in the last extremities of exhaustion and pain. “Please . . . don't. . . .”

The hissing rattle of cane, the slither of mucky earth. January forced himself to remain still. He knew that if he moved, if he went out into the wilderness of mist and darkness, Yellowjack would hear him, turn aside, and he'd be lost. Only if the wangateur thought the bridge was safe would he cross.

Papa Legba, lord of bridges. . . . Virgin Mary, help us. . . .

“Come on!”

“Please . . .” A broken whimper that twisted January's soul to hear.

I'll kill him. For hurting that boy, I'll feed the cat with his heart.

“Come on!”

“. . .coming . . .”

He saw them in the mists. Yellowjack had a lantern, the glow of it bobbing, jerking in the choking vapors around them, glinting on the black heron-hackle in his hat. By its light January saw Gabriel, limping, staggering, falling, and trying to rise. His hands were tied behind him, and there was a rope around his neck, a rope that the voodoo-man jerked and dragged as a vicious child would drag at a puppy on a lead. Gabriel fell, sobbing, and braced himself, trying to keep from being strangled as Yellowjack dragged him along the shell path toward the bridge.

“Get up!” The voodoo-man turned back. January could see he had a knife in his hand. Yellowjack tried to haul the boy to his feet again, but Gabriel was clearly at the end of his strength. The boy half-rose, then, with a cry, collapsed as his left leg buckled beneath him. “Please-my leg. . . .”

Yellowjack cursed him and stuck the knife in his belt, reached to grab his shoulders with both hands.

Gabriel writhed like a snake and rammed his head into the man's groin. At the same instant January sprang forward, yelling, “Gabriel! Roll clear!” and flung himself on Yellowjack's back. His weight slammed the smaller man to the ground; the lantern bounced away.

“He's got a poison sticker!” yelled Gabriel from the darkness, and January sprang back as he felt Yellowjack wriggle and lunge. Yellowjack twisted from beneath him and fled up onto the bridge, January ripping loose a pistol from his belt to follow. Yellowjack was yards ahead of him on the bridge, mists already closing around him, when he stopped, and threw up his hands.

“No!”

Just for an instant, January thought he saw clearly the silhouette in the darkness and the fog: thought he saw the outline of a top hat, the gleam of spectacles, the white glimmer of bones. What Yellowjack believed he saw-Baron Cemetery or something else-January never knew. But the wangateur veered from the end of the bridge where the dark form waited, and flung himself over the edge, into the water. The dark form vanished into the mist again, and January doubled back, sprinting to catch Yellowjack if he emerged from the water on this side of the bayou.

Mist and water roiled, and he heard another cry. He saw something heave itself from the water on the far side and snatched up the lantern in time to see Yellowjack scramble, stumbling, out of the bayou on the far side, and limp across the marshy ground for the trees, half a mile away.

He never made it. As January ran across the bridge he saw the man fall, and saw a dark shape stride from the mists toward him, a shape that resolved itself into a tall woman in a tignon with seven points. How either he or Yellowjack could have mistaken her for Baron Cemetery January didn't know-a final dream-shape born of poison and smoke-but when he reached Yellowjack's side, it was indeed Mamzelle Marie who knelt there.

The wangateur was gasping, clutching at the wet weeds in terror and pain. A knife gleamed in Mamzelle Marie's hand as she looked up at January in the lamp light. “Snake,” she said. “In the water.” She took January's lantern from him and held it close, and slashed an X in Yellowjack's already swelling arm.

“He thought you were Baron Cemetery,” said January uncertainly. “He saw you in the fog on the bridge.” Mamzelle Marie looked up with blood on her lips where she'd sucked clean the wound of its poison. Dried blood crusted her temple where Yellowjack had struck her from the gallery of the house. “I was never on the bridge,” she said. “I came around over the bayou a ways back, and through the cipriere.”

January walked back the half-dozen paces required to shine a lucifer's dim quick flare on the bayou. He saw the sleek zigzagged backs, the arrowing ripples of wake as they swam away. Water moccasins, two of them, six feet long, the largest he had ever seen.

Footsteps crunched on the shells of the bridge. The rope still dangled from Gabriel's neck and his hands were still bound but he wasn't limping. In fact he walked with his usual jaunty stride.

“The Grand Zombi's her friend,” said the boy, without a trace of the pitiful agony that had rent his voice only two minutes before. Without a trace of surprise, either. “'Course all the snakes in the bayou would go after Yellowjack, once she told them to. He was really stupid to try and swim.”

Judge Canonge was not best pleased, after a day in the courtroom hearing all those cases left behind by ill or absconding colleagues, to be summoned from his own packing yet again to the Cabildo. Nevertheless, half an hour after Constable LaBranche left the watch room where January, Mamzelle Marie, Gabriel, and Isaak waited, the deep golden voice could be heard through the open doors in the arcade.

“Ridiculous? Of course it's ridiculous! If the man had had the sense God gave a goat he'd have seen there was something amiss in the confession. . . . What have we here?” The Judge squinted around the grimy semidark of the watch room, then touched his hat brim. “Madame Paris.”

Mamzelle Marie nodded like a queen.

“Your Honor.” The young man got shakily to his feet, aided by the stick January had cut for him out by the bayou. “My name is Isaak Jumon. I understand you have convicted my wife, and this man's sister”-he gestured to January-“of my murder.”

The Judge's dark eyes flicked from Isaak's face to January's, and he remarked, “You again.” He looked back at the young marble carver. “You look like you've been buried, anyway. Sit down, for God's sake. LaBranche, get ilris boy some brandy. I never liked that jiggery-pokery with your brother and his mysterious carriage rides in the middle of the night. And I understand some poor bastard has been buried under your name. Where have you been?”

“In the care of a good couple named Weber.” Jumon glanced self-consciously around him at the various guards in the room, then sipped from the glass he'd been handed. “Germans, who spoke no English. They feared moreover they would be sent back to Bavaria if they spoke of my presence in their house. They found me, soaked to the skin and dying, close by the gates of the Old Cemetery, and took me in, though they believed me to be stricken with the cholera.”

“Weber worked with me at Charity early in the month,” January explained. He had not been asked to sit, and though his head had cleared considerably with the waIk back to town he felt weak and a little shaky, and still half-expected to see snakes moving in the corners when he wasn't paying attention. “Members of the City Council were at pains to impress upon all of us there that there WAS no epidemic, and especially that no mention was to be made of cholera.”

“That idiot Bouille,” said Canonge. “As if the pilots of the steamboat on the river don't carry the news. Though with that imbecile Blodgett giving cry in the newspapers I don't blame the Council for acting like a bunch of ninnies. They'd arrest the Samaritan on the road to Jericho for operating an unlicensed hack service, beIike. I take it,” he added, studying Isaak's drawn face and emaciated shoulders by the glare of the oil lamp in its socket above, “that cholera wasn't your problem.”

Jumon shook his head. “As it happened, I had nursed Monsieur Nogent's wife during the cholera the summer before last. I know the symptoms, and I knew that, similar as my own were, I had been poisoned, I think with arsenic. I was lucky to survive.”

“Do you know who administered the arsenic?”

Jumon was silent for a time. “I think now that it has to have been Dr. Yellowjack. At the time-and I am ashamed to say it-I thought that it was through some agency of my mother's. I was-I was upset, and very frightened, and I thought all sorts of things about her that cannot have been true. I went to Dr. Yellowjack's house, you understand, to ask his help against her. . . .”

“Thus putting yourself remarkably in accord with your good wife as to the proper way of dealing with the lady,” remarked Canonge grimly. “Far be it from me to speak ill of a man's mother to his face, but Madame Jumon makes Lady Macbeth appear doting by comparison, and amateurish to boot.”

January stepped unobtrusively back to Abishag Shaw's desk, and leaned his weight on the corner of it, his knees abruptly weak. His body ached and although the mere thought of food was nauseating, he felt overwhelmed with a desperate craving for sweets. The air in the watch room felt stifling, like a dirty liquid in his lungs and throat, and he wondered if the hallucinations were returning. Everything seemed suddenly distant, like a Rembrandt painting-the judge's craggy face in lamplight and shadow, the straggling curls of Jumon's hair, the buttons on Gabriel's shirt.

“I was naturally appalled-horrified-to see poor young Madame Coughlin in such a place,” Jumon was saying. “And her daughter, too. She told me she had come there only to ask Dr. Yellowjack's help. I had not imagined she could be so superstitious as to believe that his potions and gris-gris would `change her luck,' as she said. She swore that she was perfectly safe, but the more I thought of it, the more uneasy I became. I begged her to do nothing foolish, or without consulting my uncle. . . .”

Jumon's voice retreated from January's mind, distancing itself, like the disconnected images of lamplight and blackness. “. . . began to rain as I made my way toward my uncle's house . . . feared more than anything that that poor woman would be lured or forced into something which would cut her off utterly from the help of decent people. . . . Innocent child. . . .”

Innocent indeed.

“The symptoms struck me halfway there. I guessed at once what they were, from the metallic taste in my mouth, and from all I had heard of the voodoos. Had not Zoe been in the shop itself, sweeping up for my grandmother's new tenants, I doubt anyone within the courtyard would have heard me, for I did not have the strength to turn the gate key. I'm afraid I don't remember much, Your Honor, but I know that twice or three times she went out into the carriageway and listened, fearing that Grandmother would have heard something.”

January listened with only a fragment of his mind to Jumon's account of Antoine's visit, reeling drunk on opium; of Zoe's growing panic and terror about what Grandmere Jumon would do if she found her son's slave had admitted a man sick with the cholera to her home; of the bout of pneumonia that had kept Isaak bedfast and delirious for weeks after the Webers found him.

“As soon as I was a little recovered I sent a message to Dr. Yellowjack,” Isaak was saying. “He replied that I must come to him at once, without notifying my wife or anyone else of my whereabouts. There must have been some evil going on at Yellowjack's house of which I was ignorant, for on my arrival I was overpowered-he had a gun, but he could have done it bare-handed, as weak as I was-and imprisoned in the attic, with this young man here.” He nodded to Gabriel with a smile.

“That old man was snake-bit pretty bad,” put in LaBranche. “That was smart work on January's part. . . .” He looked around for January, spotted him in the gloom by the wall, and nodded in his direction. “The sawbones here says January, and Mamzelle-er-M'am Laveau-sure enough saved his life. Yellowjack's one tough old nigger and that's for sure. His lawyer, he says. He wants to see his lawyer.”

“I still don't understand what part the man played in the villainy.” Young Jumon rubbed one thin hand over his face. “Unless-no harm came to poor Madame Coughlin, surely? Or to Mademoiselle Abigail?”

January said, “As far as I know, they're well.” Canonge glanced over at him, as if he heard something in the quickness of that reply, but held his peace.

“He gave you food at the voodoo dance, then.”

Isaak nodded. “He was one of half a dozen, really, sir. I gather there's always food at the dances. Mostly coarse fare, like congris and rice, or pralines, or sugar in the cane. Everyone seemed to be-”

“Isaak!”

Celie broke from between the Guards who had escorted her in, and threw herself into her husband's arms. “Isaak! Oh, God, oh, God! . . .”