Barbara Hambly - 03 Graveyard Dust

At the sight of her a hot stab of lust went through January's flesh, disconcerting and urgent. A woman caught his arm, a young girl barely older than Olympe, panting, sweating, smiling, and pulling at him. "Dance with me," the girl gasped. "Dance:..."

January thrust her from him. He was eighteen, and unmarried; and if not precisely pure, he was as chaste as he could stand to be, knowing that he could afford to take no wife if he got a girl with child. But it's all right, something said in his mind-the loa, maybe, or the Devil, or his own lustful needing. In the morning neither of you will know the other's name. It's all in our hands, not yours.

He turned and walked away into the stacks of bricks, walked quickly, as if armed men sought him nearer the fire. Once he looked back, and saw Olympe naked in the dark King's arms.

The drums mocked him as he fled.

In the morning he had gone to Mass, confessed to the sin of idolatry, and burned before the Virgin's altar the first of a holocaust of candles, one by one over the next twenty-three years, for the pardon and salvation of his sister's soul.

"Why did you run away?"

Olympe, sitting in the rude chair Lieutenant Shaw had dragged over into the corner of the Cabildo's stone-flagged watch room for her, glanced up with a twist of scorn to her mouth, black eyes jeering. For an instant January was eighteen years old again, seeing her in the firelight of the brickyard. Her face hadn't changed much in the intervening years, except to lose what girlish roundness it had ever possessed. The wry quirk of her mouth was the same, over the slightly prominent front teeth; the sharp little chin had the same way of tucking sideways with the thrust of her jaw.

"Someday some white man's gonna sell you the whole city of Philadelphia, the Russian Crown Jewels thrown in for lagniappe," she said. "You are the most trusting man I ever did meet and worrying after you keeps me awake all night." And as she spoke she raised her arm from her lap and made the manacle chain jangle with a single mocking flick of her wrist.

"Where have you been?"

"Poisoning Isaak Jumon," she retorted, her eyes not leaving his. January looked away in shame.

Her mouth softened a little-which it wouldn't have, back when she was sixteen-and she added,

"Or maybe helping a friend. Which do you think?"

January grinned and replied, "Poisoning Isaak Jumon," and though the joke probably wasn't very funny Olympe burst out laughing, showing where childbirth had cost her two of her side teeth.

Paul Corbier, standing behind her with his hands on her shoulders, looked shocked.

The sealed cold quiet, the iron stiffness that January remembered from Olympe's girlhood, broke and showed underneath the woman he'd met upon his return eighteen months ago: an angry woman gentled and softened by Paul Corbier's unquestioning love and the happiness she'd had with her children. When Lieutenant Shaw had brought her out of the cells she'd been like a wary animal, silent and cold and withdrawn-the girl he had known before his departure for France.

Maybe that was why he'd spoken to her as he had.

"I'm sorry," he said now. "But they're going to want to know." He nodded to the watch room's main desk. Lieutenant Abishag Shaw, looking as usual like a scarecrow who'd dressed in a high wind and poor light, was engaged in quiet conversation with the sergeant, pausing every now and then to spit in the general direction of the sandbox in the big room's corner.

The oil lamps in their iron brackets along the walls had been put out; the smell of the burnt oil lingered. The wide doors stood open onto the arcade that fronted the Place d'Armes and from across that dusty square came the dim wakening clamor of the levees, stevedores loading crates of coffee and dry goods, books and cheeses, vinegar, corks, and pigs of lead, for transhipment up the river. They worked as swiftly as they could before the day turned hot, their voices a rough distant barking against the morning calm. Seagulls squawked and screamed at one another over the market garbage. The yammer of house slaves and market-women joined them, bargaining over tomatoes and peaches and bananas in the fruit stands that bordered the Place. In the courtyard behind the prison, whose doors were open also into the big square guardroom, a boy climbed the gallery stairs to dole breakfast to the prisoners, pressing himself against the rail as men in the blue uniforms of city lamplighters brought down from the cells the first of the slaves who'd been caught out without passes, to be whipped at the pillory.

Olympe's mouth hardened, and Paul Corbier reached out to take her hand. "I was helping a friend who had asked my help," she told them quietly. "As for Isaak Jumon, his wife, C?lie, came to me Friday, a week ago today. She asked me to make a gris-gris against Isaak's mother, Genevi?ve.

Isaak's father was a white man, and left Isaak property when he died last year; left it to Isaak, not to Genevi?ve or to Isaak's brother Antoine, who lives with Genevi?ve still. Genevi?ve claimed that the property was hers; that Isaak was her slave, and all he inherited came to her..."

"Her slave?"

Olympe shrugged. January wondered if the contempt in her face was at Genevieve's greed or at his naivete. "Don't ask me the why of it," she said. "But she got a judge to write out a warrant distraining Isaak as her property, and he fled, Celie says. So she came to me for a gris-gris, and I gave her one."

"What kind of gris-gris?"

The dark glance slid sidelong at him. "I didn't send her home with poison, if that's what you're thinking, brother."

"Yet there was poison in the house." Lieutenant Shaw ambled to them, hands in the pockets of his sorry green coat and greasy, light brown hair hanging down over his bony shoulders. He spoke French with a kind of clumsy fluency, ungrammatical as a fieldhand's and spattered with English misconstruction. "That was arsenic in one of them tins as we took off yore shelf, M'am Corbier, and monkshood in another, and the doctor I took them jars to says that was antimony in the third."

"Then why don't you arrest my brother as well?" asked Olympe in a reasonable voice. "He carries arsenic in his bag, when he works in the Hospital during the fever season. Salts of mercury, too, and foxglove, that can stop the heart. Arrest the doctor that told you the contents of those jars. I'll bet he has all that and more in his office."

"My friend is a healer, Lieutenant Shaw." Mamzelle Marie, who had entered quietly through the open doors of the arcade, made her way with leisurely grace to them and regarded the gawky Kentuckian with a mixture of amusement and insolence. "As a healer, Olympe, like her brother, has obligations to secrecy. Should a young girl give birth out of wedlock, she must trust that her midwife will not spread word of it. Must a slave who has slipped out of his master's thrall for an evening, and met with some injury, risk his life by letting the wound go untended for fear of a beating into the bargain?" She added, with the barest touch of mocking malice, "That might lose the owner money, were the slave to die. You wouldn't want that, sir."

"No, M'am." Shaw met the voodooienne's gaze calmly, arms folded over his chest. "And I do understand M'am Corbier's not wantin' to say where she was nor why she tried to run away the minute officers of the law showed up in her house. It's just that it looks bad, and it's gonna look worse when the state prosecutor asks her about it in open court." He scratched under the breast of his coat with fingers like stalks of cane. "That's all. M'am."

January glanced across at Olympe, wondering if indeed she had been outside Colonel Pritchard's house last night. She would not do that which she saw to be evil. But what was evil in her eyes?