Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard (44 page)

The Guards released Olympe at the same time. She caught her son in her arms, holding him in tight ferocious silence, head bent over his. She breathed in, once, like the tearing loose of the foundations of her soul.

“Celie!” cried Isaak desperately, and clutched his wife close.

“I'm all right.” Gabriel's voice was muffled by the circle of his mother's arms. “I wasn't scared. I knew Uncle Ben would come get me.”

January shut his eyes, and couldn't help himself. He laughed.

At Olympe's house, later that night, he ate grits and syrup-the only things he wanted or could stomach-and slept for an hour or two on a truckle bed they rolled out for him in the children's room. But while dark still lay on the city he rose and made his way to the turning basin in quest of Natchez Jim. The bargees said Jim had gone downriver for wood, so January walked out along the Bayou Road, five miles through the insect-drumming scorch of the morning to Spanish Fort. There he inquired around the wharves for a skiff bound for Mandeville, and hired himself to help load and unload crates of champagne in trade for passage across the lake. His back and arms still hurt, and he knew he'd be stiff that night, but it was good beyond words to be able to do the work.

The power of the voodoos-of Mamzelle Marie, and John Bayou, and all the great ones of New Orleans-lay in secrets. January had seen how the nets of their intelligence lay like spiderweb over the town; had seen the look in Vachel Corcet's eyes, when the lawyer had offered his unwilling services to Olympe. To a greater or lesser extent, everyone played with secrets: his mother, Dominique, Madeleine Mayerling, his mother's gossiping friends. . . . Traded them like counters in a game of loo.

Shaw would be returning to town within a day or so. Dr. Yellowjack would be questioned before that, and would almost certainly tell where Lucinda Coughlin could be found.

And if I'm wrong about who was whose cat's paw in this, thought January grimly, I'm sure Olympe will see to it that my tombstone reads, What an Idiot.

But once a secret was out, there was never any calling it back.

So he helped load crates in the blazing heat and sat in the stern while the boat's owner set and plied the sails across the flat steely waters. January had brought bread and honey and cheese from Olympe's house, but the boatman shared sausage and rice with him, and they talked of this and that-the boatman's white father had given him the craft, and set him up in the business, rather than pay for an education he would have been hard put to find a use for. January wasn't so sure that this wasn't a better course. In all of his life he'd made more money as a musician than as a surgeon. Yet he felt a kind of tired anger, insofar as he was capable just then of feeling anything, that this should be so.

In Mandeville they unloaded, and on the boatman's advice January sought out a grocery in town run by a woman of color. She let him bathe and change clothes in her shed. The long twilight was just beginning when he made his way, clothed in black coat and top hat and the respectability of the free colored, to the Jumon house.

An old house, perched like so many Creole houses on six-foot piers of brick and built in the shape of a U to trap the breezes from the lake. Gardens surrounded it, box hedges and topiary snipped neat as masonry walls. French doors and brises stood open to show the honeyed candlelight within. January went around to the back and sent in his card with a boy who was scrubbing vegetables in the loggia by the kitchen. In time the graying butler who had admitted him to the town house came down the back steps.

“Monsieur Jumon is out for the evening, M'sieu.” The butler inclined his head politely, but despite his calm he had a nervous look to him. As anyone would, thought January, whose master was selling up. “I doubt he will return before eleven.”

“I'll wait, if it's all right,” he replied. “I think he'll want to speak with me.”

The butler brought paper and pen to the enclosed rear gallery, and a branch of candles, for the garden trees blocked out much of the fading evening light. January wrote,

Monsieur Jumon

Please excuse this intrusion, and my rudeness in calling on you at such an hour, but the matter is one of gravest importance. Dr. Yellowjack has been arrested. I will await your convenience.

Benjamin Janvier

The butler brought him lemonade and, a little later, congris with bits of ham neatly arranged around it, which led January to deduce that whoever else had been sold off, Zeus still reigned in the kitchen. It was obvious to him that the household had been reduced. The same woman who stood at the table just outside the laundry room pressing napkins later fetched water from the cistern for the cook to soak red beans, and when the sun went down, January could see that there were only the two of them in the kitchen, which was lit from within by candles and the glow of the hearth.

A viper in her bosom, an adder, a beast who was always selfish. . . . Just how much had Mathurin Jumon told his mother, of why he had to sell those few servants who were his and not those of the family? Always cruel to her, always delighted in hurting her. . . .

Mathurin hastening from the room to assuage her pique. Now, Mama. . . . "

Had Madame Cordelia become reconciled? Or was she still treating her son with frozen politeness tempered by martyred courage?

What could Mathurin possibly have given or promised or written to a woman like Lucinda Coughlin that would give her power to make him cross his mother's wishes? Zoe's sale argued a fearful desperation. Reaching into his coat pocket, January brought out the carved horse that had lain on the table in Dr. Yellowjack's house. He turned it to the candles, admiring again the carved roses in its mane and tail-no bigger than the straw flowers on Jumon's prized Palissy plates-and the flare of the little hooves. Of course the child would keep it with her.

The butler crossed through the gallery and out to the kitchen, to return a few minutes later with smudges against the mosquitoes, and a cup of chicory coffee. “You comfortable here, sir?”

January nodded. “Perfectly, thank you,” he answered. “Might I trouble you for a few more candles, to read while I wait? Kitchen candles will do.”

The butler smiled, relieved. “No trouble about that, sir. Kitchen candles is all I could let you have, Michie Jumon having gotten particular about economy, at least where it doesn't show. He even burns tallow in his study now, and his room, or else burns the ends of Madame's beeswax.” He shook his head. “Madame never will have any but the best beeswax, and fresh every day: forty candles in her bedroom and a hundred in the drawing room, whether she has company or not. They're burning there tonight as we speak, sir, same as always, and both of them away at Madame St. Chinian's for supper.”

“Sounds like your Madame won't have any but the best,” January remarked, when the butler returned with two more branches of candles, and a packet of halfburned tallow work lights wrapped in a newspaper. “Why, no, sir.” The butler kindled the dozen or so wicks in a strong odor of sheep fat. “That's natural, her being the daughter of a French Count, and raised in the palace of the old Kings, and maid-in-waiting to the old Queen. Why, even with Michie Mathurin having to sell up--his valet, and the woman that kept his books in order, and even the housekeeper he was . . . well, Michie Mathurin was fond of-he wouldn't even ask Madame if she could spare any of her servants. That's Madame's way.”

Something changed in the man's eyes: old knowledge, old stories. January folded his hands and looked fascinated, which indeed he was.

“Madame is-a hard woman in some ways,” the servant said. “You wouldn't think it to look at her, sir. Like a little china doll. But my daddy, who was butler to her back when M'am Cordelia first married Michie Hercule, he told me things of the way she treated the fieldhands out on Trianon Plantation that would make your hair stand up on end. Michie Laurence was terrified of her up till the day he died, and him a grown man fifty years old.”

His fingers, rough-skinned from years of lending a hand with cleaning and swollen with arthritis, rested lightly on the ornate bronze candle holder: pseudo Egyptian, January saw, like all the expensive and outmoded crocodile-footed furniture now consigned to Cordelia Jumon's attic.

“Poor M'am Noemie, that was Michie Laurence's wife, she just got quieter and quieter every day, until she left-and even then she waited till M'am Cordelia was gone from home. Michie Laurence gave her the money for her passage, and, I don't think his mother ever forgave him that. If you ask me, sir, Michie Mathurin still is afraid of her, for all he's always leaving flowers in her room and buying her gowns and diamonds and new sets of dishes every time a boat comes in from France.”

January watched thoughtfully as the small, dapper man made his way back into the house. Then from his grip, which he had stowed on the floor at his feet, he brought out the octavo edition of Hamlet he'd brought with him to read:

Nay, but to live

In the rank sweat of an enseamid bed

Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love Over the nasty sty

And every word of it Hamlet's rage at the mother who had betrayed him by loving another than he.

The room in the attic returned to his mind. The blood on the sheets.

He was still reading when the clatter of hooves rang on the pavement of the carriageway, and a harness jangled in the dark. Rising, he descended the gallery steps, circled the corner of the house to watch them step to the block. Mathurin in the black of mourning, white shirtfront shiny as marble in the lights held aloft by the butler; Madame frail and exquisite in black satin du Barry, cut at the height of Paris fashion. More like a mistress, January thought, than a mother. The diamonds of her bracelet glittered outside the sable gloves. “You can go back if you wish,” he heard her say. “I'll manage here somehow alone.”

“Maman, don't be like that.” Another man would have said it bracingly, or impatiently, or teasingly. Mathurin Jumon was coaxing, and behind the coaxing, just a hint of plea. This woman could hurt him still. As January's mother could hurt him, if he let her. “You know I'd never. . . .”

The pair passed inside. January returned to the galIrry. A few minutes later the butler hurried through and into the kitchen, to return with a tea tray: fresh white roses in a silver vase. “I gave Michie Jumon your note, sir, no telling how long they'll be having tea before M'am goes up.”

They have arrested Dr. Yellowjack. Mathurin had sold everything he could to raise money to keep Lucinda Coughlin and her partner silent-including a woman he was “fond of” Zoe. Yet he remained at his mother's side, drinking tea, until she was ready to let him go.

It was midnight when the rear door of the house opened, and Mathurin Jumon stepped out.

“Monsieur Janvier.”

His face was an old man's. Dead, lined with exhaustion and defeat and despair. A fighter driven to his knees and looking at the spear. He held out a gloved hand as January rose.

“Please sit down.” He brought up another wicker chair for himself. “I trust Telemaque made you comfortable?”

“Very. Yes, Sir.”

They sat in silence for a moment, face-to-face, the candles burning between, above the black-covered volume of Hamlet.

“Did you know it was me,” said January at last, “whom Killdevil Ned was hired to kill?”

Jumon sighed. “I-I guessed. I saw him near the cemetery, on the day of Isaak's funeral. And I saw you there. I didn't-I didn't know for certain. Only that I was to take money to the Flesh and Blood and give it to him. But there was no one else at the funeral who-who was connected with-with the voodoos.”

“Then it was Yellowjack who told you what to do.”

Jumon looked a little surprised. “Of course. Who else? . . .”

“I thought maybe Madame Coughlin.”

In candlelight even the most ashen pallor will appear rosy, but horror flared in the big man's eyes. “Madame-Madame Coughlin? . . .” He half-rose, then put a hand on the table's edge to steady himself, and sank again into his chair.

January took the carved horse from his pocket, and laid it on the black-bound book. “Your nephew met both Abigail and Lucinda Coughlin at the house of Dr. Yellowjack on St. John's Eve,” he said. “Isaak was coming to you to tell you the child was in danger. . . .”

“Abigail?” Jumon's voice was barely a whisper. “Abi . . . she was alive?” His voice stumbled, fumbling for words. “Well? What evening . . . St. John's Eve?” His hands trembled, and looking at his eyes, January understood then that Lucinda Coughlin had not been Jumon's mistress.

Only his procuress.

There was no way he could keep that realization out of his face.

“Dear God.” The big man shut his eyes. “Dear God.” His words came out like a confession wrung through the tightening of an Inquisitorial garrote. “They-told me-she died. That she . . . That I . . .” January was silent, filled with such a rush of comprehension, of enlightenment and revulsion and rage, that he could not sort what he felt into words.

Dr. Yellowjack will get anything a man wants. Mademoiselle Coughlin would not be joining us after all . . .

The little horse lying on the table in the firelight. And Antoine Jumon, hands trembling as he reached for the square black bottle of the only forgetfulness he could find. Eyes defeated as he whispered, He's clever with investments; and the look in his mother's face. My uncle Mathurin is a consummately evil man, M'sieu.

Antoine is . . . fanciful. . . .

January closed his fist very hard under the table, understanding why Genevieve had severed her ties with a protector who would have supported her for life.

Jumon was weeping, mouth pulled into a shape that no human mouth was meant to assume, struggling for silence as a drowning man struggles for breath. It was this that caused January to stay.

“Isaak is alive, you know,” he said, more gently than he had thought he was going to speak. “He came to your house in town that night. Zoe thought he had the cholera and was so fearful of what your mother would say . . .”

“Oh, dear God.” At the mention of his mother, Janttary thought that the white man flinched.