Barbara Hambly - 03 Graveyard Dust

Dr. Yellowjack will get anything a man wants. Mademoiselle Coughlin would not be joining us after all...

The little horse lying on the table in the firelight. And Antoine Jumon, hands trembling as he reached for the square black bottle of the only forgetfulness he could find. Eyes defeated as he whispered, He's clever with investments; and the look in his mother's face. My uncle Mathurin is a consummately evil man, M'sieu. Antoine is... fanciful...

January closed his fist very hard under the table, understanding why Genevi?ve had severed her ties with a protector who would have supported her for life.

Jumon was weeping, mouth pulled into a shape that no human mouth was meant to assume, struggling for silence as a drowning man struggles for breath. It was this that caused January to stay.

"Isaak is alive, you know," he said, more gently than he had thought he was going to speak. "He came to your house in town that night. Zoe thought he had the cholera and was so fearful of what your mother would say..." "Oh, dear God." At the mention of his mother, Janttary thought that the white man flinched.

"Zoe got a cab, we think, and fetched Antoine to be with him," continued January. "And cared for him in the empty shop until, as she thought, he died. Then she took his body away, probably using one of the wheelbarrows left by the movers. She may have tried to dump the body in the canal, or near the cemeteries; he was found by a couple on Basin Street just outside the Old Cemetery wall. They nursed him through the effects of the poisoning and the pneumonia he took that night from lying in the wet. Either Lucinda Coughlin or Dr. Yellowjack must have feared that Isaak might have reached his wife that night. Might have gotten word to her, or asked her to get word to you about Lucinda Coughlin being at Yellowjack's house..." "Yellowjack." Mathurin raised his head, and carefully blotted his eyes with a handkerchief of spotless linen. "It was Yellowjack. Madame Coughlin isn't-that is, I didn't think her very intelligent, but now I realize I don't know her, never knew her." He carefully refolded the linen, tucked it in his breast pocket, giving his whole attention to it so as to avoid January's eyes. "But Yellowjack..." His breath expelled in a whisper, like a bitter laugh or a sob. "I don't know if you can understand," he said after a time. "Well, that's a foolish thing to say, because I know you can't understand-and I think I should be hard-put to keep from doing violence to any man who could understand. Who could do the things that I have done. I don't understand."

He raised his head, meeting January's eyes, and in the bloodshot irises, the broken veins that laced the man's nose, January saw the reflection of Antoine's Black Drop and Smyrna nepenthe. "I have tried-all my life I have tried to... to love normally. To love women. Or even young men. But every time I'd find myself... incapable. And telling myself that twelve wasn't really so different from fourteen. The girls on the levee, or down by the basin, do start at that age, you know, and younger. And ten wasn't really so different from twelve. I am an evil man, I know that, but I did try to atone. I always paid the children money they didn't have to show to Yellowjack, or to their parents if they had them." "So you got them from Yellowjack?"

Jumon nodded. "He is-a devil. Looking back now I see he must have set it up from the start. With the Coughlin woman, that is, and... and Abigail. Not that he appeared to have a thing to do with either of them. Madame Coughlin came to me with impeccable letters of introduction, purporting to be newly widowed and desperately in need of assistance. I said I would do what I could for her, and that evening, about sunset, the child Abigail came-with some story about how she'd slipped away while her mother was resting-and pleaded with me to help her mother..." His eyes, his hands squeezed shut, thrusting the memory away. Or reliving it? January thought about Gabriel, and Chouchou. White man or not, he thought, I would have killed him, if I had known this, and he had come near them. Killed him and taken the consequences. "God knows how I found the self-control to send her back home untouched," whispered Mathurin. "Because I did. She was so obviously sheltered, so obviously loved. What a jape! Because of course that only made me want her, which they must have known. And every time Ma4i:nrie Coughlin would come to my office, so that ways and means could be found for her to support herself, the child was always with her, asking to sit on my knee, calling me her favorite uncle and her dearest bel-ami. Have you seen her? Beautiful as an angel, sweet as cherries in cream." January remembered the woman in the dimness of the Cathedral, the beautiful girl-child peeping around the aide of her skirts. It has to work. "Yes," he said softly. "I've seen her." Jumon's finger traced the flying caparisons of the dainty little horse, caressed the curlicues of mane. He did not look up. "And I dreamed of her at night," he went on, his voice almost a whisper. "Even now, much as I know that what I do is evil, I cannot feel that it is... so very bad.

At least not while I'm doing it. I see in your face how this disgusts you, but please believe that never at any time did I... did I want to be this way."

"Did Laurence know?"

Jumon shivered. For an eternity he did not reply, and into January's mind came that dark little cupboard below the roof-slates of the house on Rue St. Louis, the makeshift bonds and gags crusted with blood decades old.

"Laurence and I," said Jumon slowly, "went through... a great deal together, when we were children. Mother..." He couldn't finish. Only sat looking out into the darkness beyond the gallery railing, where even the lights of the kitchen had been quenched. One candle burned in the quarters above. January wondered which of the slaves would be awake so late, reading a newspaper, maybe, or mending a shirt.

Then Jumon shook his head, and said again, "Mother," in a soft defeated voice, as if that explained something, at least to his own heart.

He drew in his breath again, and let it go in a sigh. "I'm sorry," he said. "My brother... Laurence may have known. We never spoke about it. Once we were adults we never spoke of... certain things. And now that I think about it, it may be that Dr. Yellowjack held off putting his little scheme in train until after Laurence... died."

Because Laurence would have been more capable of scenting a fraud? wondered January. Or because after his death you were lonelier than before? Robbed of the one who had been your companion in that bleak black prison-room upstairs, your only champion against the lover-demon of your childhood whose portrait still decorates every room in your house?

We live not how we wish to, but how we can.

"In any case," said Jumon, "it's clear that Yellowjack has been behind this... this fraud... all along, pulling the strings like a puppeteer. He got opium for me, and arranged for me to bring the child to his house by the bayou."

"And when you were there," said January slowly, "something went wrong."

Jumon nodded. "The child must be a... a consummate actress. I..." He shook his head, shivering at the memory. "He asked for money, to cover things up. I gave it to him and he asked for more. You say-you say Isaak saw her on the night of the twenty-third?"

January inclined his head, thinking, What of those who weren't 'consummate actresses'? What of those for whom you weren't a pigeon for plucking, but just the latest man their pimps made them pull up their skirts for? He thought of Gabriel again and felt sick.

"And-my nephew is alive?"

"Yes. When he recovered from the pneumonia he communicated with Yellowjack, who evidently told him he'd be able to get his mother's order of distrainment canceled. Weber-the man who found him-was a doctor in Germany; another poisoning, there where he could see its onset and effects, could not have been passed off. Isaak went out to Bayou St. John Thursday night-he's lucky he was still alive when Madame Laveau and I arrived the next day, seeking my nephew. "