Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard (5 page)

He turned and walked away into the stacks of bricks, walked quickly, as if armed men sought him nearer the fire. Once he looked back, and saw Olympe naked in the dark King's arms.

The drums mocked him as he fled.

In the morning he had gone to Mass, confessed to the sin of idolatry, and burned before the Virgin's altar the first of a holocaust of candles, one by one over the next twenty-three years, for the pardon and salvation of his sister's soul.

“Why did you run away?”

Olympe, sitting in the rude chair Lieutenant Shaw had dragged over into the corner of the Cabildo's stone-flagged watch room for her, glanced up with a twist of scorn to her mouth, black eyes jeering. For an instant January was eighteen years old again, seeing her in the firelight of the brickyard. Her face hadn't changed much in the intervening years, except to lose what girlish roundness it had ever possessed. The wry quirk of her mouth was the same, over the slightly prominent front teeth; the sharp little chin had the same way of tucking sideways with the thrust of her jaw.

“Someday some white man's gonna sell you the whole city of Philadelphia, the Russian Crown Jewels thrown in for lagniappe,” she said. “You are the most trusting man I ever did meet and worrying after you keeps me awake all night.” And as she spoke she raised her arm from her lap and made the manacle chain jangle with a single mocking flick of her wrist.

“Where have you been?”

“Poisoning Isaak Jumon,” she retorted, her eyes not leaving his. January looked away in shame. Her mouth softened a little-which it wouldn't have, back when she was sixteen-and she added, “Or maybe helping a friend. Which do you think?”

January grinned and replied, “Poisoning Isaak Jumon,” and though the joke probably wasn't very funny Olympe burst out laughing, showing where childbirth had cost her two of her side teeth. Paul Corbier, standing behind her with his hands on her shoulders, looked shocked.

The sealed cold quiet, the iron stiffness that January remembered from Olympe's girlhood, broke and showed underneath the woman he'd met upon his return eighteen months ago: an angry woman gentled and softened by Paul Corbier's unquestioning love and the happiness she'd had with her children. When Lieutenant Shaw had brought her out of the cells she'd been like a wary animal, silent and cold and withdrawn-the girl he had known before his departure for France. Maybe that was why he'd spoken to her as he had.

“I'm sorry,” he said now. “But they're going to want to know.” He nodded to the watch room's main desk. Lieutenant Abishag Shaw, looking as usual like a scarecrow who'd dressed in a high wind and poor light, was engaged in quiet conversation with the sergeant, pausing every now and then to spit in the general direction of the sandbox in the big room's corner.

The oil lamps in their iron brackets along the walls had been put out; the smell of the burnt oil lingered. The wide doors stood open onto the arcade that fronted the Place d'Armes and from across that dusty square came the dim wakening clamor of the levees, stevedores loading crates of coffee and dry goods, books and cheeses, vinegar, corks, and pigs of lead, for transhipment up the river. They worked as swiftly as they could before the day turned hot, their voices a rough distant barking against the morning calm. Seagulls squawked and screamed at one another over the market garbage. The yammer of house slaves and market-women joined them, bargaining over tomatoes and peaches and bananas in the fruit stands that bordered the Place. In the courtyard behind the prison, whose doors were open also into the big square guardroom, a boy climbed the gallery stairs to dole breakfast to the prisoners, pressing himself against the rail as men in the blue uniforms of city lamplighters brought down from the cells the first of the slaves who'd been caught out without passes, to be whipped at the pillory.

Olympe's mouth hardened, and Paul Corbier reached out to take her hand. “I was helping a friend who had asked my help,” she told them quietly. “As for Isaak Jumon, his wife, Célie, came to me Friday, a week ago today. She asked me to make a gris-gris against Isaak's mother, Geneviève. Isaak's father was a white man, and left Isaak property when he died last year; left it to Isaak, not to Geneviève or to Isaak's brother Antoine, who lives with Geneviève still. Geneviève claimed that the property was hers; that Isaak was her slave, and all he inherited came to her. . . .”

“Her slave?”

Olympe shrugged. January wondered if the contempt in her face was at Geneviève's greed or at his naivete. “Don't ask me the why of it,” she said. “But she got a judge to write out a warrant distraining Isaak as her property, and he fled, Célie says. So she came to me for a gris-gris, and I gave her one.”

“What kind of gris-gris?”

The dark glance slid sidelong at him. “I didn't send her home with poison, if that's what you're thinking, brother.”

“Yet there was poison in the house.” Lieutenant Shaw ambled to them, hands in the pockets of his sorry green coat and greasy, light brown hair hanging down over his bony shoulders. He spoke French with a kind of clumsy fluency, ungrammatical as a fieldhand's and spattered with English misconstruction. “That was arsenic in one of them tins as we took off yore shelf, M'am Corbier, and monkshood in another, and the doctor I took them jars to says that was antimony in the third.”

“Then why don't you arrest my brother as well?” asked Olympe in a reasonable voice. “He carries arsenic in his bag, when he works in the Hospital during the fever season. Salts of mercury, too, and foxglove, that can stop the heart. Arrest the doctor that told you the contents of those jars. I'll bet he has all that and more in his office.”

“My friend is a healer, Lieutenant Shaw.” Mamzelle Marie, who had entered quietly through the open doors of the arcade, made her way with leisurely grace to them and regarded the gawky Kentuckian with a mixture of amusement and insolence. “As a healer, Olympe, like her brother, has obligations to secrecy. Should a young girl give birth out of wedlock, she must trust that her midwife will not spread word of it. Must a slave who has slipped out of his master's thrall for an evening, and met with some injury, risk his life by letting the wound go untended for fear of a beating into the bargain?” She added, with the barest touch of mocking malice, “That might lose the owner money, were the slave to die. You wouldn't want that, sir.”

“No, M'am.” Shaw met the voodooienne's gaze calmly, arms folded over his chest. “And I do understand M'am Corbier's not wantin' to say where she was nor why she tried to run away the minute officers of the law showed up in her house. It's just that it looks bad, and it's gonna look worse when the state prosecutor asks her about it in open court.” He scratched under the breast of his coat with fingers like stalks of cane. “That's all. M'am.”

January glanced across at Olympe, wondering if indeed she had been outside Colonel Pritchard's house last night. She would not do that which she saw to be evil. But what was evil in her eyes?

“I am a voodoo.” Olympe looked gravely up at Shaw. “Believe what you will, Lieutenant. I-and indeed almost any voodoo you speak to in this town-work more in herbs of healing than in poisonings. The whites who come creeping veiled to our doors to ask for love potions or tricken bags-or partners for their lusts sometimes-they have no idea who we are or what we are. In any case the girl Célie told me, Not a death spell. She's a good girl, confirmed and goes to church.” In the past, January thought, Olympe would have given those last five words a derisive twist; now she simply stated them as a fact. Perhaps, he thought, because now she, too, had a daughter.

“I gave her a ball of saffron, salt, gunpowder, and dog filth, tied in black paper, to leave in Geneviève Jumon's house and another in her shop. Saturday night when the moon was full I took and split a beef tongue and witched it with silver and pins and guinea peppers, and buried it in the cemetery with a piece of paper bearing Geneviève's name. That was all that I did. And in truth I didn't need even to do that. The woman's evil and greed themselves will call down grief on her, with no doing of mine. About Isaak I know nothing. Are you so certain that he is dead?”

Shaw's pale brows raised, the gray eyes beneath them suddenly sharp and wary. “Why do you ask that, M'am?”

“Have you seen his body?”

“Where is she?” shouted a voice behind them. “What have you done with her? Pigs! Bastards! Murderers!” January turned in time to see a heavyset little man stumble through the Cabildo's outer doors, his well-cut gray coat awry and his eyes burning with rage and grief. “Have you no pity? No shame?” He flung himself at the nearest Guard, who happened to be Shaw, seizing him by the lapels and shaking him to and fro. Shaw, who January knew could have broken his assailant's neck with very little trouble, raised no hand to thrust him back, and a well-dressed tall gentleman dashed through the door in the next moment, followed by a small, plump lady whose dove-gray silk tignon matched her dress.

“Fortune,” she cried, wringing her mitted hands, as the well-dressed gentleman seized Shaw's attacker and pulled him away. “Fortune, no!”

“Really, Monsieur Gérard, you must be more careful of how you step! You might have injured this gentleman, falling into him as you did....”

“Gentleman?” The heavyset man twisted against the firm grip, face flushed dusky with rage. Though the peacemaker had spoken English-stressing the word falling as if that would alter what everyone in the room had just seen-Monsieur Gérard shouted in French, “These-these Americans dare to traduce my daughter and you say-”

“Of course it was an accident, sir.” Still speaking English, the pacifier turned an apologetic smile upon Shaw, who was methodically straightening his coat. Not, thought January, that any amount of straightening would improve the appearance of that wretched garment. “Certainly Monsieur Gérard is most aware of the difference in your stations and also of the penalties attached to a man of color striking a white man such as yourself. Please accept my client's apologies, Captain. I am Clément Delachaise Vilhardouin, representing Monsieur Gérard and his daughter in this regrettable affair. I pray your indulgence for my client, who speaks no English.”

The woman-clearly Madame Gérard-had caught up with the group now, and was holding her husband's other arm, sobbing “Fortune, Fortune, what could I do? They came at night, you would not return from Baton Rouge till the morning, they had a warrant for her arrest....”

Gérard himself was silent, chest heaving and dark eyes smoldering. From the open doorway a woman's voice could be heard, shrieking crazily, “He's trying to kill me! My husband-my father-they killed all my children, smothered them one by one! Please, please, someone believe me! . . .”

A chorus from the other cells snarled out, like the cacophony of Hell. “I'll smother you if you don't shut up!”

“Stuff her mouth, somebody!”

“Can't a body get a drink in this stinkin' bug hole?”

Beside him, January saw Olympe's jaw harden, her only change in expression. When he himself had been locked in the Cabildo, the shouting of the mad, sharing the cells with the thieves and murderers and common drunks, had added an edge of horror to the crawling fetor of the nights.

Vilhardouin, himself a highly dandified specimen of Shaw's own race-though probably neither of them would willingly admit such a thing-went on in quiet French, “You must understand, Monsieur Gérard, that this man was only doing his duty in apprehending your daughter. It is the Magistrate of the Court who wrote out the warrant for her arrest, at the complaint of a citizen.”

“What citizen?” Fortune Gerard was trembling, tears of fury glistening as he raised his head. “Show me that citizen! I swear that I will-”

“The citizen what swore out that complaint,” interrupted Shaw, and squirted a long stream of tobacco juice in the direction of the sandbox again, a target he couldn't possibly have achieved, “is the mother of the deceased, a M'am Geneviève Jumon; the woman this lady claims your daughter paid her to put a hex on.” Perhaps, as January's mother had repeatedly asserted, tomcats spoke better French than Lieutenant Shaw, but January noticed that for an upriver backwoodsman he didn't do at all badly with a conditional subjunctive.

Gérard's face seemed to shrink on itself with venom. Had he not been a respectable man of color, well bred and conscious of his position in New Orleans society, he would have spit. As it was he replied, his voice like twisted wire, “My daughter would never have sought the company or assistance of a voodoo Negress poisoner”-his gaze traveled over Olympe in distaste-“for that purpose, or for any other, and I will personally sue the man who says differently. And as for the assertion that my daughter poisoned, or had anything to do with the poisoning of, her husband, a young man of whom I never approved . . .”

“Papa!” Iron clanked in the courtyard doors. The girl framed in its light took a hasty step toward the group in the corner, then hesitated, glancing for permission at the wiry little lamplighter who escorted her. Shaw beckoned, and the lamplighter, keeping a firm hold on the other end of the chain that manacled the girl's wrists, followed her over. “Papa, is it true?” Célie Jumon looked frantically from her father to Lieutenant Shaw to Olympe, huge brown eyes swollen in the fragile oval of her face. “They told me-last night they told me . . . Isaak . . .”

Shaw spit another line of tobacco juice, and said gently, “I'm afraid it is, M'am Jumon.”

The girl pressed her hand to her mouth, but didn't make a sound. Her sprig-muslin dress was soiled and rumpled from spending the night in filthy straw, but she'd scrubbed her face and hands in the courtyard fountain and rearranged her tignon. In its simple green and-white-striped frame the childish youthfiilness of her face made a dreadful contrast to the horror in her eyes. Rising quickly, January guided the girl to his chair. Her mother fell on her knees beside her, stroking and kissing the shackle bruises on her wrists and weeping in stifled, soundless gasps.

The Lieutenant looked around him at the group that was rapidly outgrowing its corner of the watch room: Olympe, her husband, January, and Mamzelle Marie; Gérard, his wife, and Célie; and the two lamplighter Guards in charge of the prisoners. “Well, at least I won't have to go through this more'n oncet.” He sighed philosophically, and scratched his hip. "M'am Jumon, I am sorry, because I know this's gonna be painful for you, but they're gonna want us all over to the Recorder's Court in a minute, and you'd all best know what we're goin' on.