Barbara Hambly - 03 Graveyard Dust

Mathurin hastening from the room to assuage her pique. Now, Mama..."

Had Madame Cordelia become reconciled? Or was she still treating her son with frozen politeness tempered by martyred courage?

What could Mathurin possibly have given or promised or written to a woman like Lucinda Coughlin that would give her power to make him cross his mother's wishes? Zoe's sale argued a fearful desperation. Reaching into his coat pocket, January brought out the carved horse that had lain on the table in Dr. Yellowjack's house. He turned it to the candles, admiring again the carved roses in its mane and tail-no bigger than the straw flowers on Jumon's prized Palissy plates-and the flare of the little hooves. Of course the child would keep it with her.

The butler crossed through the gallery and out to the kitchen, to return a few minutes later with smudges against the mosquitoes, and a cup of chicory coffee. "You comfortable here, sir?"

January nodded. "Perfectly, thank you," he answered. "Might I trouble you for a few more candles, to read while I wait? Kitchen candles will do."

The butler smiled, relieved. "No trouble about that, sir. Kitchen candles is all I could let you have, Michie Jumon having gotten particular about economy, at least where it doesn't show. He even burns tallow in his study now, and his room, or else burns the ends of Madame's beeswax."

He shook his head. "Madame never will have any but the best beeswax, and fresh every day: forty candles in her bedroom and a hundred in the drawing room, whether she has company or not. They're burning there tonight as we speak, sir, same as always, and both of them away at Madame St. Chinian's for supper."

"Sounds like your Madame won't have any but the best," January remarked, when the butler returned with two more branches of candles, and a packet of halfburned tallow work lights wrapped in a newspaper. "Why, no, sir." The butler kindled the dozen or so wicks in a strong odor of sheep fat. "That's natural, her being the daughter of a French Count, and raised in the palace of the old Kings, and maid-in-waiting to the old Queen. Why, even with Michie Mathurin having to sell up~his valet, and the woman that kept his books in order, and even the housekeeper he was... well, Michie Mathurin was fond of-he wouldn't even ask Madame if she could spare any of her servants. That's Madame's way."

Something changed in the man's eyes: old knowledge, old stories. January folded his hands and looked fascinated, which indeed he was.

"Madame is-a hard woman in some ways," the servant said. "You wouldn't think it to look at her, sir. Like a little china doll. But my daddy, who was butler to her back when M'am Cordelia first married Michie Hercule, he told me things of the way she treated the fieldhands out on Trianon Plantation that would make your hair stand up on end. Michie Laurence was terrified of her up till the day he died, and him a grown man fifty years old."

His fingers, rough-skinned from years of lending a hand with cleaning and swollen with arthritis, rested lightly on the ornate bronze candle holder: pseudo Egyptian, January saw, like all the expensive and outmoded crocodile-footed furniture now consigned to Cordelia Jumon's attic.

"Poor M'am Noemie, that was Michie Laurence's wife, she just got quieter and quieter every day, until she left-and even then she waited till M'am Cordelia was gone from home. Michie Laurence gave her the money for her passage, and, I don't think his mother ever forgave him that. If you ask me, sir, Michie Mathurin still is afraid of her, for all he's always leaving flowers in her room and buying her gowns and diamonds and new sets of dishes every time a boat comes in from France."

January watched thoughtfully as the small, dapper man made his way back into the house. Then from his grip, which he had stowed on the floor at his feet, he brought out the octavo edition of Hamlet he'd brought with him to read:

Nay, but to live

In the rank sweat of an enseamid bed Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love Over the nasty sty And every word of it Hamlet's rage at the mother who had betrayed him by loving another than he.

The room in the attic returned to his mind. The blood on the sheets.

He was still reading when the clatter of hooves rang on the pavement of the carriageway, and a harness jangled in the dark. Rising, he descended the gallery steps, circled the corner of the house to watch them step to the block. Mathurin in the black of mourning, white shirtfront shiny as marble in the lights held aloft by the butler; Madame frail and exquisite in black satin du Barry, cut at the height of Paris fashion. More like a mistress, January thought, than a mother. The diamonds of her bracelet glittered outside the sable gloves. "You can go back if you wish," he heard her say. "I'll manage here somehow alone."

"Maman, don't be like that." Another man would have said it bracingly, or impatiently, or teasingly. Mathurin Jumon was coaxing, and behind the coaxing, just a hint of plea. This woman could hurt him still. As January's mother could hurt him, if he let her. "You know I'd never..."

The pair passed inside. January returned to the gallrry. A few minutes later the butler hurried through and into the kitchen, to return with a tea tray: fresh white roses in a silver vase. "I gave Michie Jumon your note, sir, no telling how long they'll be having tea before M'am goes up."

They have arrested Dr. Yellowjack. Mathurin had sold everything he could to raise money to keep Lucinda Coughlin and her partner silent-including a woman he was "fond of Zoe. Yet he remained at his mother's side, drinking tea, until she was ready to let him go.

It was midnight when the rear door of the house opened, and Mathurin Jumon stepped out.

"Monsieur Janvier."

His face was an old man's. Dead, lined with exhaustion and defeat and despair. A fighter driven to his knees and looking at the spear. He held out a gloved hand as January rose. "Please sit down." He brought up another wicker chair for himself. "I trust Telemaque made you comfortable?" "Very. Yes, Sir."

They sat in silence for a moment, face-to-face, the candles burning between, above the black-covered volume of Hamlet.

"Did you know it was me," said January at last, "whom Killdevil Ned was hired to kill?" Jumon sighed. "I-I guessed. I saw him near the cemetery, on the day of Isaak's funeral. And I saw you there. I didn't-I didn't know for certain. Only that I was to take money to the Flesh and Blood and give it to him. But there was no one else at the funeral who-who was connected with-with the voodoos."

"Then it was Yellowjack who told you what to do." Jumon looked a little surprised. "Of course. Who else?..." "I thought maybe Madame Coughlin."

In candlelight even the most ashen pallor will appear rosy, but horror flared in the big man's eyes. "Madame-Madame Coughlin?..." He half-rose, then put a hand on the table's edge to steady himself, and sank again into his chair.

January took the carved horse from his pocket, and laid it on the black-bound book. "Your nephew met both Abigail and Lucinda Coughlin at the house of Dr. Yellowjack on St. John's Eve," he said. "Isaak was coming to you to tell you the child was in danger..." "Abigail?" Jumon's voice was barely a whisper. "Abi... she was alive?" His voice stumbled, fumbling for words. "Well? What evening... St. John's Eve?" His hands trembled, and looking at his eyes, January understood then that Lucinda Coughlin had not been Jumon's mistress. Only his procuress.

There was no way he could keep that realization out of his face.

"Dear God." The big man shut his eyes. "Dear God." His words came out like a confession wrung through the tightening of an Inquisitorial garrote. "They-told me-she died. That she... That I..." January was silent, filled with such a rush of comprehension, of enlightenment and revulsion and rage, that he could not sort what he felt into words.