Barbara Hambly - 03 Graveyard Dust

"Trouble over to the Queen of the Orient Saloon, sir." The man saluted.

"It's nine o'clock in the mornin'," said Shaw wonderingly, and shoved his verminous hat back on his head. "Iff n you'll excuse me, Maestro..."

He set off at a long-legged run.

January stood for a time in the sunlight of the Cathedral steps, watching him go. By this time, he thought, Olympe would have been returned to her cell, and he had had enough, for the time being, of Fortune Gerard's rage and Clement Vilhardouin's oil-smooth suaveness. He pushed open the Cathedral door, stepped through into the cool still gloom.

All that remained of the morning Mass was the smell of smoke and wax, and a market-woman telling her beads. A woman got quickly up from one of the benches usually reserved for the less prosperous of the free colored, a white woman in a pale blue gown, cornsilk hair braided unfashionably under a cottage bonnet. She was very American, prim and bare of a Creole lady's paint, and there was a hunted nervousness to her huge blue eyes as she retreated from him, drawing her child to her side.

More to it, thought January, than simply not seeing the person whom she clearly expected: a fear that was startled at shadows. He'd removed his hat already, so he dipped in a little bow and asked in his best English, "May I help you, Madame?"

Her gloved hand went quickly to her lips. "I-That is-No." She shook her head quickly, and looked around her at the shadowy dimness of the great church. "It is all right to sit here, is it not?"

"Of course it is;" said January. He'd encountered Protestants who seemed to believe Catholics sacrificed children on the altars of the saints.

The child peeked around her mother's skirts, guinea-gold curls dressed severely up under a small brown hat, sensible-and suffocating-brown worsted buttoned and tailored over the hard lines of a small corset; tiny brown gloves on tiny hands. She at least showed no fear, either of him or of this echoing cavern of bright-hued images and flickering spots of light. "The nuns won't come and get me," she whispered conspiratorially, "will they?"

January smiled. "I promise you," he told the child. "Nuns don't come and get anyone."

The mother tugged quickly on her daughter's hand, to shush her or discourage conversation with a black man and a stranger. January bowed again, and went to the Virgin's altar, and though money was tight and would be tighter-Pritchard had indeed, as Aeneas had warned, docked his pay last night-he paid a penny for a candle, which he lit and placed among all those others that marked prayers for mercy rather than justice. Holy Mother, forgive her, he prayed, his big fingers counting off the cheap blue glass beads of the much-battered rosary that never left him. Don't hold it against Olympe's soul that she turned from you and your Son. Don't punish her for making little magics as she does. For serving false gods.

The woman's soft voice drew his attention. Looking back, he saw the person she had come here to meet. A small man, wiry and thin; a ferret face whose features spoke of the Ibo or Congo blood. He wore a shirt of yellow calico, and a leather top hat with a bunch of heron-hackle in it.

A blue scarf circled his waist-a voodoo doctor's mark, Olympe had said when she'd pointed the man out to January in the market one day, the same way the seven-pointed tignon was the sign of the reigning Queen.

January heard the woman say, "It has to work," and the man replied, "It'll work." He handed her something that she swiftly slipped into her bag.

Sugar and salt and Black Devil Oil to bring a straying lover home? Black wax and pins, to send an unwanted mother-in-law away?

It has to work.

The howl of a steamboat's whistle shrilled through the Cathedral as the woman opened the door.

She disappeared with her beautiful golden-haired child into the square, the voodoo-man watching-Dr. Yellowjack, Olympe had said his name was-as she walked away. When time enough had elapsed that their departures would not be too close, he, too, took his leave. January stayed for a long time, praying for his sister's soul while the candle he had lighted flickered before the Queen of Heaven's feet.

January's mother and the younger of his two sisters were in the parlor of his mother's pink stucco house on Rue Burgundy when he reached it again. The two women sat side by side on the sofa, a mountain of lettuce-green muslin cascading over their knees; the jalousies were closed against the full strength of the sunlight, which lay across them in jackstraws of blazing gold. Ten o'clock was just striking from the Cathedral, and the gutters outside steamed under the hammer of the morning heat. Entering through the back door, January shed his black wool coat-that agonizing badge of respectability-hi s gloves, and his high-crowned hat and bent to kiss first the slim straight elderly beauty, then the white man's daughter who had from her conception been the favored child.

"What do you know about Genevi?ve Jumon, Mama?" He brushed with the backs of his fingers the smooth green-and-pink cheek of her coffee cup where it sat on a table at her side. "May I warm this for you? Or yours, Minou?"

"Trashy cow," said his mother, and bit off the end of her thread.

His sister Dominique gave him a brilliant smile. "If you would, thank you, p'tit."

The coffee stood warming over a spirit lamp on the sideboard in the dining room. The French doors were open onto the yard, and he saw Bella, his mother's ser vant, just coming out of the garqonniere above the kitchen, where January had slept since his return from Paris. On plantations, the gar?onni?re that traditionally housed the masters' sons were separate buildingsthe custom of a country, January remembered from his childhood at Bellefleur, that preferred to pretend that those young men weren't making their first sexual experiments with the kitchen maids. Among the plac?es in the city the motivation was reversed: few white men wished to sleep under the same roof as a growing young man of color, even if that young man was that protector's own flesh and blood. Since January's return a year and a half ago, Bella had resumed her habit of sweeping the gar?onni?re and making his bed, in spite of the fact that January conscientiously kept his own floor swept and daily made his own bed.

His efforts in that direction, he understood, could never meet Bella's standards. Presumably, should St. Martha, holy patroness of floor sweepers and bed makers, descend from Heaven and perform these tasks, Bella would still detect dust kittens and wrinkled corners.

"I hope you're not going to mix yourself up in that scandal of your sister's," said his mother, when he returned with three cups of coffee balanced lightly in his enormous hand.

It was the first time in eighteen months that he'd heard his mother refer to the existence of any sister other than Dominique. The first time, in fact, since before Lou isiana had been a state. She raised plum-dark eyes to meet his, bleakly daring him to say, She's your daughter, too. Child, as I am a child, by that husband who was a slave on Bellefleur Plantation-the man whose name you've never spoken.

It was astonishing, the pain his mother could still inflict on him, if he let her.

Instead he said, casually, "Olympe has asked my help, Mama, yes. And I knew you'd never forgive me if I didn't at least go down to the Cabildo this morning to try to find out why Genevi?ve Jumon's daughter-in-law would hate her enough to put a gris-gris on her."

His mother's eyes flared with avid curiosity, but she caught herself up stiffly and said, "Really, Benjamin, I'm surprised at you. Of all the vulgar trash. And Dominique, that isn't yarn you're sewing with, I can see that buttonhole across the room."