Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard (33 page)

She nodded. “Abigail. I've met them over at Monsieur Mathurin's two or three times since Christmas.”

“And Lucinda's a blond woman?” Hannibal coughed again, deep racking shudders, and groped under his pillow for the opium bottle. He sank back, white-faced, against the cushions, his breath stertorous, but a curious bright gleam in his dark-circled eyes. “Flax blond? Your height, but slim? About your age?”

“That's Mrs. Coughlin,” said Madame Mayerling. She took the teacup from the bedside lest it spill. “A very sweet woman, from the little I saw of her. Maybe too strict with her daughter, who seemed a bit of a minx. Mrs. Coughlin had difficulty in finding employment of any kind in a shop, you understand, because she couldn't leave Abigail alone, but I understand they were arranging to have the girl put in the Ursulines convent during the day at school. She's a little young for it . . .”

“And the first time she opened her mouth she'd probably blow the roof off the building,” said Hannibal. He took another sip of opium. “I've heard that child swear. She could take the paint off a gate at fifty paces and make a muleskinner faint.”

Madame Mayerling, Augustus, and January all regarded him in stunned silence.

“Lucinda Coughlin,” said Hannibal, “is one of the most active-certainly one of the speediest-prostitutes on Girod Street, and if her daughter's still virgin I'll turn in my fiddle and become a monk. The pair of them got me drunk and turned my pockets out at the Brown Meg the day before Christmas and left me facedown in the gutter on Tchoupitoulas Street. Thank God it wasn't raining.”

“Are you sure we're talking about the same Lucinda Coughlin?”

“If we're not,” said Hannibal, “there are not only two ladies by that name, but each has an adorable looking little five-year-old daughter named Abigail. Possible, as Aristotle would say, but partaking of the improbable-possible rather than otherwise. Myself, I'd say our friend Uncle Mathurin is being set up.” He coughed. Augustus, who was nearest him, caught his shoulders to steady him as the spasms doubled him over. He was a long way, thought January worriedly, from being out of the woods.

“You'd better rest,” he said, as he and the sword master eased their friend back against the pillows.

A smile flicked at one corner of the graying mustache. “I don't seem to have any choice about that. To sleep, perchance to dream. . . .” Hannibal closed his eyes, and was asleep as if he'd been struck over the head.

January and Madeleine Mayerling walked out onto the gallery together, leaving her husband by the bed. “I don't suppose you know where this Madame Coughlin is supposed to live?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I only saw her twice, at Monsieur Mathurin's, when I went to call about the subscriptions for the St. Roche Society Ball.” She worked her hands back into her gloves. “All he told me was that she was a woman he was helping, financially and in a business way. He asked me whether any of my aunt Alicia's relatives were in need of a governess or a companion. The situation was complicated, he said, by Abigail's youth, as the child could not be left alone. But the very fact that he'd be seeking such a position for her-with his relatives and friends, I mean-tells me that he is ignorant of what she is, if in fact what Hannibal says is true. And in any case”-she made a wry grimace-“this is Monsieur Mathurin we're talking about.”

“A model of rectitude,” said January softly. “Impervious to Cupid's darts.”

For a moment his eyes met those of the woman he had taught. Then because he had been trained from earliest childhood never to look into a white person's eyes especially not those of a woman-he glanced aside. But the silence lay between them anyway, matters that were not discussed between women and men.

At length, gazing carefully out over the rain-pocked puddles of the yard, Madame Mayerling said, “If you're wondering whether Monsieur Mathurin's tastes are unorthodox-I haven't heard it. Men of that persuasion often approach Augustus,” she added, without irony. “But that doesn't mean there isn't something afoot. And if there is scandal broth brewing, should Isaak have seen something, or learned something . . .”

“Yes,” said January. “The only problem is that if Isaak went where I think he went after he left the Turkey Buzzard Saloon, there's no way that Lucinda Coughlin could have gotten anywhere near him.”

January considered the matter through the rainy afternoon, between bouts of trying to capture some of Aristophanes' absurd lyricism and frame the worst of that playwright's jokes into something a publisher could print without fear of prosecution. Propped on his mound of pillows Hannibal slept, waxen and skeletal. Two or three times January produced his stethoscope from his desk drawer and listened to Hannibal's chest. But though the faint, wheezy rattle of consumption was always present, there was no sign of pneumonia, which given Hannibal's general state of health would almost certainly finish him. Useless to hope, however, that the fiddler would be in shape to make inquiries in the Swamp concerning the double life of Lucinda Coughlin anytime soon.

But to go into the Swamp himself would mean death. January thought he had glimpsed Nash within the French town, watching him, and had begun to fancy that the market-women crossed over Rue Royale when they saw him coming. Shaw might possibly help him, but there had been no word from Shaw.

Far off a steamboat moaned, down at the foot of Canal Street. Otherwise the world was silent, save for the silvery voice of the rain. The downpour ended at sunset, and heat and blue twilight deepened in the room, and he went and dragged the mattress of his bed from his own room into a corner of Hannibal's, then went back and brought the mosquito-bar as well. Useless, maybe. The fiddler was too far gone now to provide him with anything in the way of protection. But January had dreamed last night of the demon Omulu, and of red eyes watching him from within a sheep skull clotted with dry blood and ants. Waking, he had had to fight the desperate urge to tear mattress and pillows and bedding to pieces lest there be feathers in them twisted into the shape of a rooster or a cat. Lying in the darkness he had tried to think of all the places in the room where balls of black wax and graveyard dust might be secreted.

And that way lay madness.

Coming out onto the gallery again, with the sky glowing lapis behind a streaky battlefield of leftover clouds, of smudge smoke and steamboat soot, he saw, far down at the end of Rue Burgundy, the white moon stand above the town's low roofs, a baroque pearl, only a day or two from full. And he remembered the big man with the cut-off stump of an arm, laughing with white teeth as he spoke to Mamzelle Marie in the heat and dust of Congo Square; the shine of sun and sweat on the bare ribs of the men in red loincloths, and the bare feet of the women beneath their short petticoats.

He left the shutters open for as long as he could into the evening, working on his Greek under the mosquitobar by the light of candles. When at last he barred and barricaded them, and slept, he dreamed of dark ships beneath hot gibbous moons, spirits clinging in the rigging and watching the low green coast of the New World grow before them with flaming eyes.

In the morning Hannibal was still resting quietly. In gloom clear and still as blue topaz January dressed and went to Mass, where he encountered Mamzelle Marie just emerging from the confessional. He wondered what it was that she said to the priest. Coming out, January fell into step with a man named Natchez Jim, who had a wood boat on the levee and another, smaller craft in which he ferried people and goods back and forth across the lake.

The two men had coffee and gingerbread together on a bench outside the market; and Jim said, to January's request, “Whatever I can do that will help. Your sister's gris-gris has saved my life from the river, many a time.”

From a market-woman January bought a fancy box of estomac muldtre, and went home to change his clothes. Hannibal still slept peacefully. January found a piece of gilt paper and some ribbon, to wrap the ginger cakes, in his mother's storeroom and spent another ten minutes at his desk, with “Baron von Metzger's” cold-pressed parchment stationery, composing a note to Miss Abigail Coughlin “from your very dear uncle Charles.” He made his way by circuitous detours to the line of oyster huts that fringed the levee where Jim waited with his boat; and though he never saw Killdevil Nash, he knew the man waited for him, watching in the half-deserted quiet of the streets. Only when he and Jim maneuvered Jim's lugger out from among the flatboats and keelboats tied in a tangle around the giant river queens did he relax, as the current took them in the open water and swept them fast downstream.

“It would be just about there, that General Jackson rode along to look at the upper line of his men,” January said, pointing to the trees just beyond the white house and carefully laid gardens of one of the many Macarty plantations. “He came out of the fog, like a ghost in a dream on his gray horse, leaning from the saddle to shake this man's hand or that.”

“It drove my papa wild, hearing about that fight,” remembered Jim with a reminiscent grin. The river breeze stirred all the tattered pickaninny braids of his long hair.

“He was all for the British, of course, saying they'd keep the Americans out.” Gulls wheeled and yarked above the sunflash on the browned steel of the river; a line of pelicans swooped down low, precise as if they practiced the maneuver in their spare time. “Not that Papa had any use for Napoleon, either, you understand. `What's that Italian ever done but make more curfews and more code noir and more taxes so that he can fight his boneheaded wars? ”' He imitated an old man's growling mo kiri mo vini French, and richly laughed; January laughed, too. “'Pox on 'em all,' he'd say.”

Clear and distant the Cathedral bells chimed for noon Mass, answered from among the trees farther downriver. A steamboat's whistle sounded, and the tiny chime of the Algiers ferry bell. The white bulk of steamboats had given way to the dark-hulled oceangoing vessels of the downstream quays and they in turn to scrubby trees and the wilderness of broken casks, boxes, and garbage along the batture. The levee crowds thinned. Only occasional carriages and horsemen could be seen passing on the shell road. Across the river dark poplars fringed the cane fields of the verret and Marigny plantations, spotted by the red-and-blue flags on the mast of a keelboat, beating its way upstream close to the bank. Among the trees, buildings came into view, an open quadrangle fenced on the riverside with a wrought-iron gate. Natchez Jim put in at the little wharf there, where during the week flour and provisions, soap and gray cloth, ink and mail, and coffee were unloaded, and January thanked him, and walked up the shell path to the gate.

“Oh, I'm afraid Miss Abigail Coughlin did not come to us after all,” said the lay sister, her brow furrowed a little under the broad white band of her veil. She spoke with the accent of Normandy; January wondered what she made of these flat green monotonous coasts, the bougainvillea and Spanish jasmine, after the late cold springs and bare Februarys of that land of apples.

January put on an expression of distress. “My master will be very sorry to hear that,” he said, slipping back into his pocket the note from “Uncle Charles.” “He understood that the child was to be placed here.”

“And so she was.” The woman's wide blue eyes smiled a little with tender reminiscence of what must have been a very pretty and well-spoken little girl. “We were so looking forward to having Abigail with us. But only three days before she was to have come to us we received a note from her sponsor-Monsieur Mathurin Jumon, a very respected gentleman in the city-saying that the health of the child's mother obliged her to leave New Orleans, and take Abigail with her. I do hope it was nothing serious,” added the woman kindly. “Monsieur Mathurin has sponsored four of our pupils here in the past-in fact one of them, Danae Bonfils, is still among us, as a fourth-year, a most sweet and kindly girl. Monsieur Jumon is truly a guardian angel.”

“My master will be most upset,” repeated January. “At one time he was quite fond of Mademoiselle Abigail's mother, but lost track of her when he was called away to Paris. He hasn't seen Mademoiselle Abigail herself since she learned to walk. You wouldn't have a direction for Madame Coughlin herself, would you, Ma'm?”

The sister shook her head. “Though I'm sure Monsieur Jumon would be able to direct you. His house is on Rue St. Louis in town, a tall blue house on the upstream side between Rue Bourbon and Rue Dauphine.”

Across the courtyard behind her January saw two gray-robed sisters shepherd two neat lines of girls, arranged oldest to youngest, like stairsteps: dark Creole curls and fair French locks modestly bonneted in uniform blue, white linen aprons, making the children look like a flock of hurrying birds. The breeze from the river cooled the court a little, and rustled the trees. Better they were here, he thought, than in the smoky and fever-ridden heat of the town.

From his pocket he took the box of cakes, and held it out. “Since I can't locate Mademoiselle Coughlin,” he said, “perhaps the young ladies would like to divide these amongst themselves, Ma'm. They were fresh this morning, and they'll be stale tomorrow.”

Her smile brightened. She was really little more than a girl herself. “They'll be very glad of it.”

“You wouldn't happen to know the day Mademoiselle Abigail was supposed to come here, would you, M'am?” he asked, as she made to close the door. “Michie Charles is only in town for a day or two. We did ask at the house, but Michie Jumon is away in Mandeville, they said. Michie Charles may just ask at the steamboat offices for word of Madame Coughlin going upriver.”

January wasn't entirely certain what he hoped to learn from that piece of information, if anything. And in fact the date of Mathurin Jumon's note to the Mother Superior, which the lay sister went and found out for him-the eighteenth of June-meant nothing to him. The day before Isaak Jumon's distrainment and over a week before the young man had died in his uncle's house.

Still, thought January, as he walked back to the wharf, there was something going on. Not a shred of evidence linked Mathurin Jumon's connection to the vir tuous or not-so-virtuous Lucinda Coughlin, and the death of his nephew in his house. . . . Except that in each transaction a large sum of money was involved.