Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard Read Online Free Page A

from the pain. Hannibal swung into a lilting solo air, embroidering effortlessly as January lowered his throbbing arms to his thighs to rest. Like a bird answering a slightly drunk muse, Jacques took up the thread of music on his cornet. Uncle Bichet came in third on the cello, the round lenses of his spectacles flashing in the gaslight, an odd contrast to the tribal scarring on his thin old face. At intervals in his harangue against those who conspired to ruin the local real estate market with rumors of plague, Pritchard watched them dourly; watched, too, the unobtrusive door to the back stairs. January wished the Colonel buried alive in graveyard dust.
    “Lemonade only, you understand?” January heard him say to Aeneas, when after a purgatorial eternity of heat and tobacco stench and aching muscles the clock at last sounded two. “Mrs. Pritchard will be over in the kitchen to weigh up the leftover chicken and pastries. I don't want the lot of you gorging on them or passing them out to those musicians. And I won't have them wasted. Mrs. Pritchard . . .”
    His voice lifted in a preemptory yap. His wife-who might have been presumed to have earned a little privilege on the night of her own birthday ball-turned with a sigh from the farewell embraces of her friends.
    “He's quite right,” said the Widow Redfern, who had wormed her way-Mr. Greenaway doglike in tow-into the Creole group of ladies. “I find one always has to count the champagne bottles after a party, and measure the sugar. It's really quite prudent of your husband . . .”
    “Américaines,” murmured Madame Jumon, flashing a humorous grimace as she kissed Mrs. Pritchard warmly on her unpowdered cheeks and took her departure on her son's black-banded arm. “What can one do?”
    Gabriel was waiting in the kitchen. He was a tall boy, slim like his mother, January's sister Olympe, and handsome as his father, who was an upholsterer with a shop on Rue Douane. He had, too, his father Paul's sunny goodness of heart. As January crossed from the back gallery to the kitchen he could see his nephew, through the wideflung windows, helping Aeneas and the kitchen maid clean up endless regiments of crystal wineglasses, champagne glasses, water glasses; dessert forks, coffee spoons, teaspoons, dessert spoons; platters, salvers, pitchers, creamers, tureens; a hundred or more small plates of white German china painted with yellow roses, half again that many napkins of yellow linen.
    Above the foulness of the privies on the hot night air, the dense stink of Camp Street's uncleaned gutters, from around the corner of the stables January could still catch the whiff of drying blood.
    “Uncle Ben!”
    “You look like you been pulled through the mangle and no mistake.” Aeneas set aside the mixing bowl he was drying and unstoppered a pottery jar of ginger water.
    “Danny, bring Michie Janvier a cup.” The little waiter fetched it; Gabriel discreetly supported January's elbow while January raised it to his lips. “You ever want to hire this boy out as a cook, you come speak to me about it, hear?”
    “I'll do that.” January returned the cook's grin, then studied the inside of the empty cup with mock gravity and measured with the fingers of his other hand the distance from the rim to the damp line the liquid had left. “Looks like a gill and a half I drank. You want to mark that down for the Colonel's records, in case he gets after you for where it went?”
    Aeneas laughed. “Me, I'm just thanking God there's no way for him to measure the air in here, or he'd sure be after us about what your nephew breathed since eleven o'clock. Kitta, you got all the saucers in?”
    They had to know, thought January, looking at the kitchen maid Kitta, the watchful-eyed little Dan bringing still more champagne glasses and yellow-flowered plates back from the house. He saw how they smiled at one another and how the little man relaxed when the woman touched his hand.
    Which of them, he