Barbara Hambly - 03 Graveyard Dust

Livia Levesque was a widow nearing sixty and still beautiful, slim and straight as a corset-stay in her gown of white-and-rose foulard. She had worn mourning for exactly the prescribed year for the sake of St.-Denis Janvier, who had died while January was a student at the Hotel Dieu in Paris; later had worn it not a day longer for her husband Christophe Levesque, a cabinetmaker of color whom January recalled only as one of her many male acquaintances during her days of placage. Black, she had declared on several occasions, did not suit her complexion. Her father had been white, though she had to January's recollection never even speculated as to who he might have been. Her daughter by St.-Denis Janvier had added to her mother's exotic beauty the lightness of skin and silky hair so admired by white men and by many of the free colored as well. Dominique glanced worriedly sidelong at her mother, apprehensive of a scene, and then said "Poor Paul! And the children-are they all right? Shall I send over Th?r?se to help?" "You'll do nothing of the kind," snapped her mother. "That girl of yours doesn't do her own work for you, let alone looking after some laborer's children, not that she'd have the faintest idea how to go about it. As for Genevi?ve Jumon, I'm not surprised her daughter-in-law wanted to do her ill-I'm astonished the girl didn't poison her instead of her son. A more grasping, mealy-mouthed harpy you'd never have the misfortune to meet. She's been above herself for years, for all that she started out as one of Antoine Allard's cane hands."

She shrugged, exactly as if she herself hadn't worked in the fields before St.-Denis Janvier bought her. "She's had nothing but ill to say about Fortune G?rard since he rented the shop floor of Jeanne-Fran?oise Langostine's house for his business-he sells coffee and tea, and charges two pennies the pound more than Belasco over on Rue Chartres-that she wanted, not that she's ever made a hat that didn't look as if a squadron of dragoons had been sacking a florist's." She opened the top of a heavy-pleated sleeve and produced a white paper sack of what turned out to be goose down, which she carefully shook into the space between the outer sleeve and its thin gauze lining, so that the sleeve rapidly assumed the appearance of a gigantic pillow. After ten years of marriage to a dressmaker, January was familiar with the style, and he still marveled at the sheer ugliness of it.

"I daresay she was good-looking enough that Laurence Jumon bought her of Allard, back during the war, for four hundred and seventy-five dollars," his mother went on, "but that's nothing to give herself airs about. Allard's asking price was six hundred and fifty and Jumon bargained him down. Jumon always did drive a warm bargain." No thought seemed to enter her head that St.-Denis Janvier must have bargained with her former master in just such a manner. All January could do was shake his head over the detail and comprehensiveness of her knowledge of everybody's business in town. He wondered if Marie Laveau bought information from her. If not, she should.

"Wasn't it Laurence Jumon who bought those matched white horses last fall?" Dominique fit a gold thimble onto the end of her middle finger. "With the black-and-yellow carriage?" "They looked like fried eggs on a plate," replied her mother. "And they'd been bishopped. In any case grays are a stupid thing to get in a town that's hip deep in mud ten months of the year. That's all the good they did him; forty days after he laid out the money they were pulling his hearse." She began to set the sleeve into place with neat, tiny stitches, and January marveled again at the linguistic convention that termed white horses "grays." Typical, too, that his mother had adopted it: most slaves just called them white.

"So why did C?lie Jumon buy a gris-gris from Olympe?" asked Dominique, eager as a child. "And why do they think the gris-gris ended up poisoning Isaak instead of Genevi?ve?" "Olympe says the gris-gris had nothing to do with Isaak's death, that it wasn't poison at all," said January. "What I'm trying to learn now is, where was Isaak Jumon between Thursday, when Genevi?ve swore out a warrant distraining him as her slave-" "Oh, shame!" cried Dominique.

"Sounds like her," remarked Livia Levesque.

"-and his death on Monday night. Not to mention such things as why Jumon didn't leave a sou to Genevi?ve, which he didn't."

"She'd have poisoned the boy herself, I wager, out of spite." "Mama, surely not!"

"Could she have? Isaak would be staying as far away from Genevi?ve as he could. He didn't take refuge with C?lie's parents..."

"He wouldn't have anyway," said Minou, gathering a length of mist-fine point d'esprit over the head of the other sleeve. "Monsieur G?rard never liked Madame Jumon, even before the shop rental incident, because of her 'former way of life.' He was mortified nearly to death when his precious daughter C?lie married her son. Although after thirteen years you'd think Monsieur G?rard would forget about Genevi?ve being a plac?e. I mean, everyone else has, and he's always polite to Iph?g?nie and Phlosine and me when we come into his shop. Although just the other day he said to Phlosine-"

"Thirteen years?" January set down his cup. "Thirteen years? I thought... I mean, I know Jumon never married, so there was no reason for him to put his plac?e aside..."

"No reason? That hypocritical moneybox, no reason? And it wasn't he that left her," Livia added, returning her attention to the sleeve. "She left him, or rather bade him leave, for she kept the house and the furniture and all he'd given her. And Jumon did marry, two years after that, to get control of his mother's plantation I daresay, which she wasn't going to turn loose to any man who hadn't done his duty by the family and given her a grandson. Not that it did him the slightest bit of good, or her, either. She went to Paris. The wife, I mean."

"Wait a minute-What?" It was unheard of for a plac?e to leave her protector. "Genevi?ve left Jumon? Why?"

"Jealous," snapped his mother. "She heard there was marriage in the wind." "Oh, don't be silly, Mama, you don't know that! " protested Minou. "And no one-I mean, we all know..." She hesitated, looking suddenly down at her sewing, and a dark flush rose under the matte fawn of her skin.

"We all know men marry?" finished her mother. Dominique drew a steadying breath, and when she raised her head again, wore a cheerful smile. As if, thought January, it mattered little to her that the fat bespectacled young planter who had bought her house for her, and fathered the child who had died last year, would not one day marry, too. "Well, if she's as grasping as you say, she wouldn't have let him go for a little thing like that." She made her voice languid and light. "Hmph," said Livia, unable to have it both ways. "At any rate, that whining nigaude No?mie-his wife-went back to Paris, and Laurence's maman sold up the plantations, and the brother's never had a regular mistress at all, so far as anyone knows." She shrugged. "Laurence Jumon never breathed a peep. When he was sick back in twenty-four he gave Genevi?ve money to buy both their sons from him, in case he died, and they'd still be part of his estate. That mother of his would have sold off her white grandchildren, if she'd ever had any, never mind her colored ones. Jumon and Genevi?ve had parted company by that time, but he paid every penny to educate those boys, not that anything ever came of that. For all the airs Antoine and his mother give themselves Antoine's just a clerk at the Bank of Louisiana. And Isaak..."

Her gesture amply demonstrated what she thought of a boy of education becoming a marble sculptor. "He's as bad as you, Ben, wasting the gifts M'sieu Janvier gave you..." "Not wasting them at all, Mama." January smiled at her. He'd long ago realized that being annoyed at his mother would be the occupation of a lifetime. "M'sieu Janvier paid for my piano lessons as well as for Dr. Gomez to teach me medicine. I think as long as I'm making money at one or the other.. "