Barbara Hambly - 03 Graveyard Dust

"He's well?" There was a note of wistfulness in the man's voice.

"Yes. Thin and exhausted, but well. He-was at a loss," January went on carefully, "-as to why Mademoislle Coughlin and her mother were in that place. He knew they were protegees of yours, but evidently he knew them only in their... respectable incarnations. And he knew nothing to your discredit." He couldn't have said why he tried not to hurt this big, clumsy man, who could love neither women nor men. Crippled from childhood by a woman who could find no other way to deal with her own terrors but to bind everything in her power, tighter and tighter, until they could not escape her control...

Jumon sighed. "Thank you for that discretion. Could I have had a son, I would have wanted him to be Isaak. Laurence was lucky there. Though God knows neither of us was ever very lucky with women. But of course if I'd had a son I'd have made a-a horror of raising him." January was silent.

What were the first causes of wretchedness like this? he wondered. Maybe Isaak was right, to cut through the bloodied iron bands of the past and say, You are still my father. You are still my uncle. I understand that you could not help what you did to my brother, my mother...

Forgiveness is stronger than the graveyard dust of the past.

For Isaak it was, maybe, not knowing that his uncle's sins had gone far beyond Antoine. January knew that even had he himself been so ignorant in similar circumstances, it would have been beyond him.

He said, "Yellowjack was arrested yesterday, for kidnapping and attempting to murder my nephew and yours. It's only a matter of time, I think, until they find Madame Coughlin-she left New Orleans the day after Madame Celie's arrest. Once the City Guards start looking it will be easy to trace him as the man who hired Nash. You can do what you want about that, but Nash badly wounded a man in mistake for me, a young man named Pedro Lachaise, who had a mother and sisters to support."

"Dear God." Jumon passed a hand over his face. "I seem to have done nothing but ill." His jaw tightened. "I will make it good. I hope you believe me." He looked up at January, who said nothing. "I never set out to do wrong. That is..." He hesitated. "I suppose I never set out to do anything. I have heard that... that Monsieur Gerard was arrested as well over an altercation."

"I've spoken to judge Canonge about that," said January. "He agrees that in view of the mitigating circumstances the penalty can be commuted to a fine."

Jumon nodded. For another few minutes he sat quietly, his head in his hands, the candleflame glowing over the strong coarse fingers, the warm gold of his simple rings. The light in the quarters across the yard had been put out. In the trees the cicadas kept up their eerie throbbing cry, the frogs peeping a heavy bass-note line. By the stars, visible above the dark loom of the trees, it was very late, and morning would come soon, bringing with it all the matters of the day: justice, and movement, and the unveiling of the lethal secrets of the past.

Now was still the time of the loa, and dreams; stillness, and the dead, who see things differently from the living.

Jumon sighed. "Have you a place to stay for the remainder of the night, M'sieu Janvier? I doubt any boats are returning across the lake until daybreak and I understand that summer is not a good time for musicians. And I feel I owe you something for having warned me, in spite it all. If you have concerns about spending the night under the roof of a man who paid to have you killed, I understand them, and I'll gladly foot the bill at a lodging house of your choice."

"My sister would call me a fool," said January. "Mamzelle Marie as well, maybe. But I trust you." Mathurin Jumon smiled, suddenly and with surprised sweetness, and stretched out his hand for the bell.

Mathurin Jumon walked with January down to the wharves first thing in the morning and paid his fee on the ferry; he stood waving on the dock as the flat-bottomed craft pulled away. Only later did January realize why the man performed this courtesy. Over a dozen people would afterward attest that Jumon had been alive and well when January left Mandeville. Returning home, Cordelia Jumon's surviving son put the barrel of one of his English dueling pistols into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

On the desk in his study his mother's footman found a holograph will leaving the sum of five hundred dollars to Pedro Lachaise's mother and sisters, with a further twelve hundred left in trust to Benjamin January to locate, purchase, and free Zoe Jumon. To Antoine Jumon, he left two thousand dollars in a trust to be administered by Isaak Jumon; to Isaak and Celie, three thousand, with the stipulation that if the said Isaak, or the said Antoine, were claimed as property by anyone, all the money would go to Celie absolutely. And to Benjamin January, Jumon left a rustic-ware platter and ewer wrought in the shape of seashells and crayfish, the work of Bernard Palissy.

Everything else of which he died possessed he willed to his mother, who did not attend his funeral.

January attended it, with Isaak and Celie. Black-bordered postings had been put up, not only in the city itself but in Milneburgh and Mandeville and Spanish Fort. A handful of the wealthy Creole businessmen who had taken refuge there for the summer appeared, suffcient at least to carry the coffin and to absorb some of the terrible echoing silence of the mortuary chapel as the priest read out the words of the service. Though not more than a dozen cases of yellow fever had occurred after the end of June, the graveyard was ringed with burning smudges, the stink of gunpowder and burning hooves almost drowning the charnel stench.

"Seven hundred and fifty dollars, Mathurin Jumon paid me to carve a trophy of arms for his brother," Basile Nogent said, coming out of the chapel's rear door beside January and watching the slim black-clothed pair follow the coffin at a respectful distance toward the oven tombs let into the cemetery wall. Afternoon sun hammered the sheets of standing water left by that morning's rain. Crayfish crept along their verges, making January remember with a shiver the young man entombed behind the slab from which Isaak Jumon's name had not even been eradicated yet. "Now the mother sends us word-in a letter from her solicitor, no less, as though Isaak were no kin of hers-saying just to add Mathurin's name to the block. A hard woman." He shook his head. "A hard woman."

January remembered the strips of blood-crusted sheet in the dark of the attic, the small circumference of the cut bonds. A child's head. A child's wrists. Maybe two children. Laurence, at least, when grown, had been able to take a mistress, and father children of his own, even if in the test he had sided against them-had sided with the man who had been his partner in that childhood nightmare of terror and adoration. January watched Nogent walk away, but did not join him. Since his childhood, he had never felt comfortable about funerals in the daylight. "He really die of the cholera?" A tall, thin figure emerged from between the tombs, disreputable hat in hand and the filth of three days' travel crusted on his boots.

"I have no way of knowing." January had heard the truth from Isaak, and via letter from Dominique, who'd had it from Therese's second cousin Roul's lady friend, who was sister to Madame Cordelia Jumon's hairdresser, Helene.

"Mighty auspicious timing, given what that Dr. Yellowjack's had to say of the man." Shaw spit, the tobacco disappearing into the soupy brown muck of graveyard earth. "May not all be true, of course. And that gal Zoe, she swore up and down that Mathurin was good and kind to just about everyone he met, even if, as she said, there was an illness in his heart about ' certain things.' She didn't say which things." "You found her, then."