Barbara Hambly - 03 Graveyard Dust

"I am a voodoo." Olympe looked gravely up at Shaw. "Believe what you will, Lieutenant. I-and indeed almost any voodoo you speak to in this town-work more in herbs of healing than in poisonings. The whites who come creeping veiled to our doors to ask for love potions or tricken bags-or partners for their lusts sometimes-they have no idea who we are or what we are. In any case the girl C?lie told me, Not a death spell. She's a good girl, confirmed and goes to church." In the past, January thought, Olympe would have given those last five words a derisive twist; now she simply stated them as a fact. Perhaps, he thought, because now she, too, had a daughter.

"I gave her a ball of saffron, salt, gunpowder, and dog filth, tied in black paper, to leave in Genevi?ve Jumon's house and another in her shop. Saturday night when the moon was full I took and split a beef tongue and witched it with silver and pins and guinea peppers, and buried it in the cemetery with a piece of paper bearing Genevi eve's name. That was all that I did. And in truth I didn't need even to do that. The woman's evil and greed themselves will call down grief on her, with no doing of mine. About Isaak I know nothing. Are you so certain that he is dead?"

Shaw's pale brows raised, the gray eyes beneath them suddenly sharp and wary. "Why do you ask that, M'am?"

"Have you seen his body?"

"Where is she?" shouted a voice behind them. "What have you done with her? Pigs! Bastards!

Murderers!" January turned in time to see a heavy set little man stumble through the Cabildo's outer doors, his well-cut gray coat awry and his eyes burning with rage and grief. "Have you no pity? No shame?" He flung himself at the nearest Guard, who happened to be Shaw, seizing him by the lapels and shaking him to and fro. Shaw, who January knew could have broken his assailant's neck with very little trouble, raised no hand to thrust him back, and a well-dressed tall gentleman dashed through the door in the next moment, followed by a small, plump lady whose dove-gray silk tignon matched her dress.

"Fortune," she cried, wringing her mitted hands, as the well-dressed gentleman seized Shaw's attacker and pulled him away. "Fortune, no!"

"Really, Monsieur G?rard, you must be more careful of how you step! You might have injured this gentleman, falling into him as you did..."

"Gentleman?" The heavyset man twisted against the firm grip, face flushed dusky with rage.

Though the peacemaker had spoken English-stressing the word falling as if that would alter what everyone in the room had just seen-Monsieur G?rard shouted in French, "These-these Americans dare to traduce my daughter and you say-"

"Of course it was an accident, sir." Still speaking English, the pacifier turned an apologetic smile upon Shaw, who was methodically straightening his coat. Not, thought January, that any amount of straightening would improve the appearance of that wretched garment. "Certainly Monsieur G?rard is most aware of the difference in your stations and also of the penalties attached to a man of color striking a white man such as yourself. Please accept my client's apologies, Captain. I am Cl?ment Delachaise Vilhardouin, representing Monsieur G?rard and his daughter in this regrettable affair. I pray your indulgence for my client, who speaks no English."

The woman-clearly Madame G?rard-had caught up with the group now, and was holding her husband's other arm, sobbing "Fortune, Fortune, what could I do? They came at night, you would not return from Baton Rouge till the morning, they had a warrant for her arrest..."

G?rard himself was silent, chest heaving and dark eyes smoldering. From the open doorway a woman's voice could be heard, shrieking crazily, "He's trying to kill me! My husband-my fatherthey killed all my children, smothered them one by one! Please, please, someone believe me!..."

A chorus from the other cells snarled out, like the cacophony of Hell. "I'll smother you if you don't shut up!"

" Stuff her mouth, somebody! "

"Can't a body get a drink in this stinkin' bug hole?"

Beside him, January saw Olympe's jaw harden, her only change in expression. When he himself had been locked in the Cabildo, the shouting of the mad, sharing the cells with the thieves and murderers and common drunks, had added an edge of horror to the crawling fetor of the nights.

Vilhardouin, himself a highly dandified specimen of Shaw's own race-though probably neither of them would willingly admit such a thing-went on in quiet French, "You must understand, Monsieur G?rard, that this man was only doing his duty in apprehending your daughter. It is the Magistrate of the Court who wrote out the warrant for her arrest, at the complaint of a citizen."

"What citizen?" Fortune Gerard was trembling, tears of fury glistening as he raised his head.

"Show me that citizen! I swear that I will-"

"The citizen what swore out that complaint," interrupted Shaw, and squirted a long stream of tobacco juice in the direction of the sandbox again, a target he couldn't possibly have achieved, "is the mother of the deceased, a M'am Genevi?ve Jumon; the woman this lady claims your daughter paid her to put a hex on." Perhaps, as January's mother had repeatedly asserted, tomcats spoke better French than Lieutenant Shaw, but January noticed that for an upriver backwoodsman he didn't do at all badly with a conditional subjunctive.

Gerard's face seemed to shrink on itself with venom. Had he not been a respectable man of color, well bred and conscious of his position in New Orleans society, he would have spit. As it was he replied, his voice like twisted wire, "My daughter would never have sought the company or assistance of a voodoo Negress poisoner"-his gaze traveled over Olympe in distaste-"for that purpose, or for any other, and I will personally sue the man who says differently. And as for the assertion that my daughter poisoned, or had anything to do with the poisoning of, her husband, a young man of whom I never approved..."

"Papa! " Iron clanked in the courtyard doors. The girl framed in its light took a hasty step toward the group in the corner, then hesitated, glancing for permission at the wiry little lamplighter who escorted her. Shaw beckoned, and the lamplighter, keeping a firm hold on the other end of the chain that manacled the girl's wrists, followed her over. "Papa, is it true?" C?lie Jumon looked frantically from her father to Lieutenant Shaw to Olympe, huge brown eyes swollen in the fragile oval of her face. "They told me-last night they told me... Isaak..." Shaw spit another line of tobacco juice, and said gently, "I'm afraid it is, M'am Jumon." The girl pressed her hand to her mouth, but didn't make a sound. Her sprig-muslin dress was soiled and rumpled from spending the night in filthy straw, but she'd scrubbed her face and hands in the courtyard fountain and rearranged her tignon. In its simple green and-white-striped frame the childish youthfrilness of her face made a dreadful contrast to the horror in her eyes. Rising quickly, January guided the girl to his chair. Her mother fell on her knees beside her, stroking and kissing the shackle bruises on her wrists and weeping in stifled, soundless gasps. The Lieutenant looked around him at the group that was rapidly outgrowing its corner of the watch room: Olympe, her husband, January, and Mamzelle Marie; G?rard, his wife, and C?lie; and the two lamplighter Guards in charge of the prisoners. "Well, at least I won't have to go through this more'n oncet." He sighed philosophically, and scratched his hip. "M'am Jumon, I am sorry, because I know this's gonna be painful for you, but they're gonna want us all over to the Recorder's Court in a minute, and you'd all best know what we're goin' on. "Last Monday night, which was the twenty-third, twenty-fourth June, Isaak Jumon's brother, Antoine, was brought by a servant he didn't recognize to a big house he'd never seed before, where his brother lay dyin'. Antoine says Isaak was far gone when Antoine got there, vomitin' an' clammy an' achin' all over an' pretty much actin' like someone that's been dosed real good with arsenic. Antoine did what he could for his brother-who he hadn't seen in a couple months owin' to a quarrel in the family-with the help of a old mulatto woman who was there, but it warn't no good. Isaak kept tryin' to tell him somethin' but was so sick Antoine couldn't make out what. Once he managed to say, I have been poisoned. Then a little later he said, C?lie, an' died." C?lie looked away. Her mother, numbly stroking the ruin of her frock, tears flowing down her face, seemed barely to have heard.