Barbara Hambly - 03 Graveyard Dust

No more nightmares about his mother going away, as others on the plantation had gone so abruptly away. No more fear that someone would one day say to him, You are going to go live someplace else now-someplace where he knew no one.

All his life, it seemed to him, he had wanted a home, wanted a place where he knew he was safe. He'd been eight. It had taken him a little time to learn to be a free man, to learn the ins and outs of a different station, what was and was not permitted. To learn to speak proper French and not say tote for "carry," or aw when he meant "bien stir. " But throughout the boyhood spent in the gar?onni?re behind the house on Rue Burgundy that St.-Denis Janvier gave his new mistress, throughout the years of schooling in one of the small private academies that catered to the children of white men and their colored plac?es, January had never lost that sense of being, in his heart of hearts, on firm footing. At least the worst wasn't going to happen. At least he wasn't going to be taken away from those he loved.

From "Mutual Promises" they whirled into "A Trip to Paris." The ladies laughed and skipped in their bellshaped skirts, their enormous lace-draped sleeves that stood out ten inches from their arms; gentlemen flirted decorously as they held out white-gloved hands to white-gloved hands. Mr. Greenaway of the pomaded curls hovered protectively around the wealthy Widow Redfern, fetching her crepes and tarts and lemonade and presumably soothing her not-very-evident grief while she talked business with Granville the banker. Granville himself showed surprising lightness of step in dancing with his drab little pear-shaped wife and with every pretty maid and matron on the American side of the room. From the sideline, Mrs. Pritchard watched with resigned envy.

The American ladies all seemed plainer than their French counterparts, duller, an effect January knew wasn't entirely owing to having less sense of dress. No American lady would be seen in public, even at a ball, in the rice powder and rouge that no Creole lady would be seen without. It seemed to him, too, that they laughed less. He supposed if he were a woman married to an American he wouldn't laugh much, either.

St.-Denis Janvier had sent him to study with an Austrian music master, a martinet who had introduced to him the complex and disciplined joys of technique. Music had always been the safe place to which his soul had gone as a child: joining in the work-hollers, picking out harmonies, inventing songs about big storms or his aunt Jemma's red beans or the time Danro from the next plantation had fallen in love with Henriette up at the big house. All of this, Herr Kovald had said, was what savages did, who knew no better. Kovald had played for him that first time the Canon of Pachelbel-and January's soul had entered onto that magic road, that quest for beauty that had no end.

He had studied healing also, and in much the same fashion: first with old Mambo Jeanne at Bellefleur Plantation, who'd showed him and Olympe both where to gather slippery elm, mullein, lady's slipper, and sassafras in the woods. Later he'd been apprenticed to Jose Gomez, a free man of color who had a little surgery down on Rue Chartres. Reading the books Gbmez had of the English surgeons John and William Hunter and watching dissections of sheep and pigs from the slaughterhouses, January had seen no difference between the music that was the life of his soul and the harmonies of blood and organs and bones. And when, finally, the long wars between France and England and the United States were done and it was safe to cross the seas, January had gone to Paris, to study surgery at the Hotel-Dieu.

He'd been admitted to the College of Surgeons there and had continued to work at the clinic, unable to go into private practice either in Paris or in New Orleans. To be sure, free surgeons of color practiced in both cities, but they were invariably of a polite walnut snuff, or hue. January had long accepted the fact that no American, and few Frenchmen, were ready to trust their lives to someone who so much resembled a pantomime-show Sultan's Ethiopian door guard.

"At least here in Paris one is free," Ayasha had said to him, Ayasha who had fled her father's harim in Algiers rather than be wed against her will. "And no one can take that from you."

Ayasha had worked in Paris as a seamstress since the age of fourteen. By the time January met her, she owned her own shop.

No one can take that from you.

Except, of course, January had discovered, Monsieur le Cholera.

It would be two years in August since he had returned home and found Ayasha dead.

Since then he had discovered that he had progressed not one step farther than that terrified slave boy on BelleAeur Plantation, in terms of what life could and could not take away.

It was June. A deadly time in New Orleans.

"That's absolute nonsense," blustered a railway speculator in a dark gray coat. "Tom Jenkins says he's been down the river almost to the Belize and there hasn't been a sign of yellow jack, much less the cholera, anywhere in the countryside."

"Not in the countryside, no." Dr. Ker of the Charity Hospital took a glass of champagne from the little waiter's tray with a polite nod of thanks. "On the whole the cholera isn't a disease of the countryside. We've had two cases of yellow fever here in the city."

"Two?" Granville snorted. "Well, there's a reason to turn tail and run, by gosh! Are you sure they were yellow fever, Doctor? Dr. Connaud-he's my physician, and a splendid fellow with a knife, just splendid!-says it isn't possible that there should be epidemics three summers in a row."

"It's the newspapers," declared Colonel Pritchard. "Damned journalists'll print anything that'll sell their filthy rags. They don't care about the local businesses, or what it does to a city's property values if word gets around there's fever. All they think about is getting a few more copies sold.

As for you, Dr. Ker, I'm sure you'll find if you open those two so-called fever victims up that there's some kind of reason for the same symptoms..."

Was that what young Gabriel had walked from Rue Douane in the old French town to tell him?

January wondered. What he wouldn't tell the servants of this stranger's house? That Olympe was sick? Or her husband, Paul? One of the other children?

Yellow fever? Cholera?

Not cholera, he prayed desperately. Blessed Virgin, please, not that.

And while his arms trembled with fatigue, and his heart squeezed with dread, and he felt as if someone were trying to pry his shoulder blades loose with crowbars, he skipped through moulinets, bris?s, cross-passes, and olivettes, as lightly as a happy child running in a meadow of flowers. A wave of faintness passed over him; he concentrated on ballottes and glissades, on the glittering protection of the music's beauty that could almost carry his mind away from the pain.

Hannibal swung into a lilting solo air, embroidering effortlessly as January lowered his throbbing arms to his thighs to rest. Like a bird answering a slightly drunk muse, Jacques took up the thread of music on his cornet. Uncle Bichet came in third on the cello, the round lenses of his spectacles flashing in the gaslight, an odd contrast to the tribal scarring on his thin old face. At intervals in his harangue against those who conspired to ruin the local real estate market with rumors of plague, Pritchard watched them dourly; watched, too, the unobtrusive door to the back stairs.

January wished the Colonel buried alive in graveyard dust.

"Lemonade only, you understand?" January heard him say to Aeneas, when after a purgatorial eternity of heat and tobacco stench and aching muscles the clock at last sounded two. "Mrs.

Pritchard will be over in the kitchen to weigh up the leftover chicken and pastries. I don't want the lot of you gorging on them or passing them out to those musicians. And I won't have them wasted. Mrs. Pritchard..."