Barbara Hambly - 03 Graveyard Dust

Three spaces gapped in the confusion, like teeth knocked out in a fight. "It's got to been some other voodoo," said Gabriel reasonably. "He poisoned this oku and made the Guards think Mama did it. That's all."

"Has to have been," corrected his father, with an uneasy glance at the woman, perhaps worried that his son had so casually spoken the word voodoo in the presence of Mamzelle Marie. "And we don't know that. "

But the Voodoo Queen said only, "Olympe is a good woman." Marie Laveau's voice was deep, rich as fine coffee, and her French without the slurred patois of slaves and the poor. She was a woman who had only to sit in a room to be the focus of attention. Like a fire she seemed to radiate both heat and light. "Whatever she might do, she would not do a thing that she saw to be evil."

January noticed that Marie Laveau did not say, That's impossible. Nor did Paul Corbier.

"They must have been watching the house, waiting for her to come home," Corbier went on after a moment. "She hadn't even taken off her coat when two men came across the street, white men.

She saw them and tried to run out the back door, but your friend Lieutenant Shaw"-he glanced at January apologetically-"was in the yard already, waiting for her."

"She bit him," said Gabriel. That certainly sounded like Olympe. "I hope it turns poison and he dies."

"What did they say?" January tried to put from him the memory of the two times he himself had been in the Cabildo, but he saw the fear of that prison in his brother in-law's helpless eyes. "Who do, they say she killed? A white man?"

Olympe's big gray cat, Mistigris, flowed into the parlor from the street and jumped into Mamzelle Marie's lap. Iujke silence January heard Gabriel's older sister Zizi-Marie in the rear bedroom, whispering to the younger children tales of Compair Lapin and Bouki the Hyena. One of them began to cry, instantly hushed by the older girl's voice.

"They claim she killed a young man named Isaak Jumon," said Mamzelle Marie, her long hand stroking the gray cat's head. There was no emotion in her voice, as if the woman of whom she spoke were not someone she would rise from her bed at two in the morning to help. "He was the son of Laurence Jumon, that died this summer past of the fever. His mother was Genevi?ve, that was Jumon's slave and then his plagee. Genevi?ve has a house on Rue des Ramparts these days, and a hat shop there. Does well, I am told."

She scratched Mistigris's chin, and the big torn, evidently forgetting his usual custom of biting anyone who touched him, closed ecstatic eyes.

"Isaak was nineteen." Lightning flashed in the tarblack sky, then a long slow grumble of thunder.

"He worked with Basile Nogent the marble carver, and had just married C?lie G?rard, the coffee seller's daughter, back at the end of May. They lived behind Nogent's shop. Isaak hadn't had anything to do with his mother in many years."

"Did they say why she killed him?" asked January. "I assume they're saying someone paid her to doit."

"No one paid her." Paul glanced swiftly at his son. "She wouldn't kill for pay, not a colored man, not a white man, nobody! "

There was silence.

Corbier turned to Mamzelle, his face working with concern and fear. "Can you help us?" he asked. "Do anything? Learn anything? Or you, Ben? You have friends in the Guards." Paul was a man of deep goodness, but without Olympe's brilliance. Not a man, thought January, to know how to fight the law.

"I know one man in the Guards," January corrected him quietly. "And if he was the one who came and arrested Olympe, it's because he thinks she's guilty. But I'll find out what I can."

"I also." Mamzelle Marie got to her feet, a movement both languid and filled with energy, like a cat's. Or a snake's. "But the ink bowl can only tell me so much. And I won't learn anything faster than morning, when you'll be able to go to the Cabildo and ask her things yourself." Thunder sounded again, hard on the heels of the flash this time. January said, "If we're to get to our homes dry we'd best leave now. May I escort you to your door, Mamzelle?"

"There's nothing in the night that frightens me," she replied. "If you'll bear me company as far along as your mother's house it will serve."

From the packed-earth banquette of Rue Douane, January looked back and saw Paul close up the parlor shutters, then the doors behind them. The shutters were fast, but the doors still open, in the front bedroom on the other side of the house, and slits of muddy-gold candle glow shone through the jalousies. Zizi-Marie and the younger children would be huddled together still on their parents' bed. The light grew momentarily stronger, as Paul and Gabriel entered with another candle, then snuffed out in increments to darkness. Paul Corbier would not sleep that night.

For a time January and the woman walked in silence, the fetid night clogged with the pungence of rotting garbage. The city contractors who cleaned the gutters were dilatory at best, even up on Rue Chartres and Rue Royale, where the rich had their dwellings. Here dead dogs floated, swollen, in water that whined with mosquitoes. Oily streetlamp glow shone yellow on the backs of the huge roaches that lumbered across their path, or on the frogs that hunted them. Once a City Guard in his blue coat passed on the other side of the street and glanced their way, but decided not to notice them. January wondered whether the man had simply counted the points of Mamzelle Marie's tignon and thought better of it.

As he walked he thought of a skinny little girl, like a coal-black spider, spitting on St.-Denis Janvier's polished calfskin shoes at that first meeting, then fleeing without a word. Don't hurt her, their mother's protector had said quickly. She's just a child, and afraid. But Olympe, January knew, had never feared anything in her life.

It wasn't until they stopped at the throat of the passway that led back to the rear yard of his mother's pink stucco cottage on Rue Burgundy-the cottage St.-Denis Janvier had given her thirty-three years ago-that January asked softly, "Is there any reason you know of, that they'd think my sister poisoned this Jumon boy?"

It was not something he could have asked in the presence of the man who loved Olympe, or of her children.

Marie Laveau tilted her head, and regarded him with those mocking sibyl eyes. She knew everything, they said. She read your dreams. More to the point, January knew she listened to everything, watched everything; learned from the market-women who was buying what and meeting whom; from the rag pickers what they found in the garbage and the gutters outside the big town houses on Rue Chartres and behind the American mansions on Nyades Street; from the maids and laundresses of every wealthy family in town what stains they found on whose sheets. The slaves of bankers and brokers and planters from the Belize to Natchez sold her letters, or names whispered by night, or combings of their owners' hair; and as a hairdresser herself, to white and colored alike, she heard still more. She was queen of secrets, paid sometimes in money and sometimes in kind. And this was, not all she was.

But she only answered, "There's a thousand reasons men will think a woman poisoned a man. Don't you know that, Michie Ben?"

Thunder shivered the night again, lightning limning the roofs around them, and the sudden cold breath of storm made the seven points of her tignon nod and flicker. She added, "Mostly men don't understand."

He saw the dark winds lift and ripple her dark skirts as she passed along the banquette in the direction of Rue St. Anne, and the swaying light of the next intersection splashed her briefly with color, blue and orange and red. Then she was gone.

There was a brickyard on Rue Dumaine, back in the days before the war with England, where the slaves of the town would meet at night. Sometimes it was only to talk or to sell things pilfered from their owners-a chicken, a shirt, a bundle of half-burned candles, a bottle of American whisky poured artfully off the tops of the master's supplies. But sometimes, after the whites were asleep, the drums would speak in the darkness.