Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard (24 page)

Stillness again.

“If we can't get a witness about what happened here, at least there's no one to keep us from seeing what there is to be seen.”

“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” Hannibal coughed, one hand holding himself upright against the crumbling stucco and the other pressed to his side. “If you ever find out how to make consumption good by thinking, please let me know. I've been trying for years. Did you ever track down the map your cut-armed friend brought to Isaak, by the way? Find where the meeting place was, if it was a meeting place?”

“I'm sure it was.” January waited, listening, watching the alley from which the cat had fled. A hundred feet away, on Rue Bourbon, music jangled and men quarreled over their cards in the gambling halls that still ran full-open, but here the stillness was weirdly complete. Only the croaking of the frogs in the gutters sounded-ouaouarons, the slaves called them, not proper French grenouilles-and the roar of the cicadas around the streetlamps. “But with whom, and for what purpose-that's another matter.”

In time, satisfied with the hush, he stepped from shelter and led the way across the street, holding close under his arm the dark leather bundle of his medical bag. The Jumon town house rose above them, somehow more isolated than a plantation would have been, perhaps because even when the family was absent, a plantation was never empty. There were always the hands in the quarters, children's voices, the clack of axes, and the smell of animals. Here there was nothing but the lingering stench of gunpowder and hooves burning somewhere, and the gutters' unending stink. January walked calmly, unhurried. Though curfew had long ago sounded, only some twenty Guards held night watch in the French town. By the sound of it, the taverns of Rue Bourbon would be occupying most of their attention.

“I went out there this morning,” he continued, as they concealed themselves again in the dense arch of shadow that was the carriageway. “It was pretty clear from Railspike's description that that map showed the waste ground out past the Protestant cemetery and the end of Gravier's canal. There's a little bayou there, and an oak with a twisted-back limb. Old Michie Crippletree, we used to call it. All the slaves used it for a meeting place, because everyone knew it. I expect whites who grew up around here knew it, too.”

Hannibal drew a pair of thin-nosed pliers and a length of bent wire from his pocket and set to work on the carriage-gate lock. “And did you find the teacup Mathurin Jumon served Isaak the arsenic in?”

“I found a teacup with arsenic stains in it,” replied January gravely, his eyes moving ceaselessly up and down the dark streets: “I didn't attach much importance to it because the teacup was Sevres pdte dur instead of Palissy ware. Oh, and there was a copy of Laurence Jumon's will impaled on the tree trunk with an Arabian dagger, and one of Isaak's visiting cards. Why do you ask?”

“Just curious. And up she comes.” He pushed the wrought-iron gate inward a little, then closed it behind them, pulling out the black ribbon that tied his hair to bind the gate loosely shut again. “Was the visiting card also impaled on the tree trunk with a dagger?”

“On the other side of the tree,” extemporized January, scratching a lucifer and shielding the candle he took from his bag. “Separate dagger.”

“Also Arabian?”

“Venetian.” Their whispers echoed in the arch of the flagged carriageway. “Quattrocento. Cellini, I think.”

“Cellini made good daggers.” Hannibal nodded wisely. “An excellent choice. Tasteful.”

“Which would argue that it had to have been Mathurin. I mean, I can't see Hubert Granville having the refinement to buy a Cellini dagger.” They emerged into the dark courtyard, the closed and shuttered bulk of the slave quarters looming before them against the sooty sky. The fountain muttered softly; the candlelight showed up a cat's eyes, hunting frogs among the banana plants. “A point, my friend. A most distinct point.”

“All daggers,” said January, in a tone of deep solemnity, “have a point,” and Hannibal went into a fit of coughing from trying to stifle a laugh.

From the courtyard there was no way to break into the shop, but whatever had been there, January guessed, had been cleared out for the new tenant: JOSEF BRAEDEN, he had seen the legend inscribed on the door. DENTIST. For a few minutes he held his breath, as he and Hannibal moved into the center of the brickpaved space; it was always possible that one or two of the slaves had been left behind to watch the house. But Madame Cordelia, it appeared, would not lessen her comfort in the Mandeville house-or else she was unwilling to let any of her servants remain unsupervised in the city for two months. No light flared in any of the rooms that opened from the galleries that rose above the kitchen. No voice called out, demanding who was there, and when January and Hannibal climbed to check them, the rooms were vacant and stripped of their simple goods.

A brief visit to the local livery stable had already informed January that the six Jumon horses were gone. On the other side of the courtyard, the inevitable garçonniere

lay above the office where January had spoken to Mathurin Jumon, reached by a narrow stair. “A Chubb,” whispered Hannibal, fingering the lock as January handed him the long-bladed scalpels, the forceps, and the bulletprobe he'd brought, along with his mother's kitchen candles, in his bag. “I figured Grand-mere Jumon for a locker-upper.”

“With the jewels she wears?” breathed January back. “We'll be lucky if we can get into the main house.”

“We should have gotten Dago Crimms to help us. He'd have kept his mouth shut, and he wouldn't have taken much.” The fiddler's hands were shaking as he worked with the picks, and he stopped twice, once to press his hand to his side to still his coughing, and again to take a cautious sip of opium. In the narrow yellow glow of the candle his face was set and lined with pain.

“It would only take one item traced back to us,” said January grimly, “for all of us to be in a lot more trouble than we are.”

“Oh, Dr. Yellowjack's generally pretty careful where he fences his plunder. Yellowjack's Dago's receiver,” Hannibal added.

“Savvy old bastard. Works it all up through Natchez. Never lets himself come into view at all-always uses a cat's-paw of some kind, tells one person one thing, another another. . . . Which is the way not to get caught. And here we are.” The latch gave under his hand. “Like ladies and moneyed relatives, it's all in how you ask.”

There was a library on the floor immediately above the office, and above it, two small bedrooms. Holding the candle aloft, January had an impression of a beautiful desk of Syrian work, inlaid shell and colored woods in ebony, of gold-stamped books on the shelves instead of the workaday ledgers downstairs, of chairs under Holland covers. On desk and mantel, and locked behind the glass fronts of cabinet shelves, platters, ewers, tureens gleamed in the tiny flame: exquisite glazes, fantastic and intricately accurate shapes. Snailshells, salamanders, fish so meticulously rendered, January could tell a drum from a bass; strawberry leaves, clover, lettuces, worms. Nothing that anyone these days would remotely describe as goad taste, thought January, studying a bowl sculpted in the likeness of a forest floor-ferns, mosses, pebbles, tiny flowers, small snakes, and pillbugs all exact. But a garden of bizarre delight all the same.

Another portrait of Madame Cordelia Jumon smiled from behind a protective draping of gauze, and drawing this aside, January gazed up for a moment into the long, delicate face, the haughty nose, and the dark eyes beneath a snowy extravaganza of high-piled, rose-swagged hair. Lapdogs peeped from beneath the flounces of a green Court gown wider than its wearer was tall. He tried to picture this girl-for she seemed no more than sixteen-operating a plantation such as the one on which he'd been born.

He'd heard someone-his mother? Dominique?-mention in passing Hercule Jumon's decease when the two boys were small. That would have put it somewhere in the nineties. After the fall of the King, anyway. This lovely, Court-raised girl, left a widow in her teens, would have had no home to return to. In his mind he heard Celie Jumon's voice: Papa never knew what happened to them....

“Well, it answers one question anyway,” remarked Hannibal, as they made cursory investigations of each garçonniere bedroom, then passed along the gallery to the rear of the main house. “Why Laurence's wife left. That bedroom of his doesn't look like it's ever been cleared out. Not that any woman in her senses would share quarters with Grand-mere Jumon, but I'm sure living in the garçonniere wasn't what she had in mind, either.”

“I don't see how she could have kept her son from taking up residence in the main house once he'd married.” January held the candle close as Hannibal knelt to study the lock on the shutters that covered the central door. Another Chubb, bright against the yellow paint. By the marks in the woodwork, the house had had half a dozen different locks in its some fifty years of existence.

“Allow me to introduce you to my aunt Boadicaea one day. I'll bet she kept him out in the garçonniere at Trianon, too, wife or no wife. My guess-just watching her with Mathurin at the balls-is that she was jealous.” January remembered Mathurin's voice, calling out desperately for his mother to wait. Mama, please. . . . Did Laurence's voice have that tone as well? Had he always turned first to his mother, to see what she said? Did he leave his wife standing, as Mathurin had left January, to hurry after Maman when she was in a taking? Certainly he had left Madame Cordelia in charge of the household, the keys, the stores, the servants. The money, though in marrying he had automatically gained a share of the family affairs. Maybe he'd thought things would change, after he was wed.

“It isn't as if there isn't plenty of room in the house,” he said, as Hannibal pulled open the shutters and set to work on the lock that defended the door within.

“Did you see the portraits in the boys' bedrooms?” January nodded. The one in Mathurin's room portrayed Cordelia as Diana at some long-forgotten palace fete, complete with bow and dogs. The one in Laurence's room had been done later, to judge by the high-waisted gown and the two slaves kneeling allegorically at her feet. He thought about it a moment, then said, “There could be a hundred reasons for him not to have a portrait of his wife in his bedroom.”

“There could.” Hannibal straightened up, and pocketed his picklocks. Darkness seemed to flow out through the open doors: straw matting, patchouli, frowsry heat. “But I'll bet the same one is at the top of both of our lists.”

Four more portraits of Cordelia Jumon adorned the main house. The one in the drawing room was done in golds, to complement the soft apricot walls; the one in the dining room in lighter, brighter hues, befitting the flowered summer chintz of the draperies and the exquisite neo-Gothic furniture of the room. There were two in Madame's bedroom, one of them painted in the past five years, showing enormous Marie sleeves and the bellshaped skirts still in fashion. But all the painters had rendered her face as the face of youth, pink-cheeked, smiling, not much more than seventeen.

It wasn't hard to see where Mathurin got his love of collecting. Dresden figurines, Chinese vases, venetian glass cluttered the marble-topped tables, draped in gauze to protect them from summer flies. Cabinets housed trinkets, statuettes, dried flowers, each item a gem of exquisite taste. Madame's bed, shrouded in Holland, would not have disgraced German royalty, and even through layers of gauze the lusters of the chandeliers winked and twinkled in the invading sliver of light.

“Selling the land must have realized a bundle,” remarked Hannibal softly. “I imagine Cordelia did it when Laurence's wife left and it was clear there would be no children. All this furniture is only about seven years old. I remember the Gothic craze; look at that table. The dishes in the dining room are new, too.”

Beyond a final twist of upstairs corridor a stair no wider than a ladder ascended, and dust powdered down around them as January pushed up the attic trapdoor, glimmering in the light.

It was above the level of habitation that the house's age showed. Waist-thick cypress beams supported the slates of the roof, pegged together without nails, the num bers still visible where the Senegalese house carpenters had assembled them. Dust and time and darkness congealed in three stifling slant-roofed chambers, chambers crammed to bursting, it seemed, with everything the two Jumon boys and their mother had ever owned. Trunks, crates, boxes, barrels held every garment they had ever worn, every gimcrack and knickknack that had ever caught their fancy, down to expensive French toysincluding one of those toy guillotines that had been so popular in Paris in the nineties-and tin after empty, bright-colored tin that had once contained sweets. Newspapers and old books stacked the corners; armoires in outmoded styles bulged with dresses equally unfashionable; bolts and rolls of damask, brocade, taffeta silk still lay in the paper they'd been sold in, colors that had once been the high kick of fashion, out of style even before they could be made up. Sets of dishes, at least six of them,

Limages and Crown Derby and Sevres edged in gold; a Chippendale dining room table and chairs and another carved with the crocodile feet and sphinxes popular during Napoleon's reign. Boys' shoes, dozens of pairs, in a box, graded in sizes, worn and outgrown; wineglasses packed in straw. In another box, rusted chains. January nearly dropped them, repelled: spiked collars, such as some masters still put on disobedient slaves. Manacles and irons kinked and clotted together in a lump with dirt and oxidation.

“That isn't surprising.” Hannibal led the way into the central and largest of the attic's three chambers. “A young girl like that, left a widow on a plantation, might feel she had to enforce discipline however she could.” He coughed in the dust, and took another swig of opium. “We've both seen worse.”

A wedding veil and dried bouquet, done up in tissue. An intricately wrought wreath of someone's hair.

The third attic was the smallest, crammed like the others. January shone the light carefully over the secret shut trunk lids, the tight-nailed cases, the piles of books and newspapers thick with dust. “You couldn't have kept anyone up here,” remarked Hannibal, scraping the unsullied dust on the floor with the toe of his boot. “Not without leaving a sign.”