Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard Read Online Free Page B

wondered, had sent for the voodoo-man?
    Or woman.
    January glanced down at Gabriel and saw the shaky relief in the boy's smile. Of course he wouldn't have told these people about sickness, if it was the cholera. That was a good way to get a thrashing from a man like the Colonel, freeborn or not. How dare you go around scaring my servants with your lies? Most Americans didn't understand the difference between free coloreds and black slaves.
    “Thank you for looking after him,” January said. “We'll be bidding you good night.” He put a hand on Gabriel's shoulder and guided him from the kitchen and into the shadows of the yard.
    Behind them Aeneas called out, "You mind how you go.
    That'll be all we need, thought January. Some officious member of the City Guard demanding to see our papers. `Are you aware that it's two in the morning? That the cannon in the Place d'Armes fired off at ten to warn people like you“-meaning both blacks and colored-”to be off the street?"
    He glanced back at the kitchen. The other musicians had already gone. By the grubby topaz glow of a dozen smoky tallow candles, the cook, the menservants, and the kitchen maid Kitta had recommenced the Augean task of washing every dish, fork, and sparkling bit of hollowware. Little Dan carried a yoke of pails to the cistern; firelight leapt over Aeneas's sweaty face as he fanned up the flames under the boiler to heat it. In the ballroom's four long windows the white beauty of the gaslight dimmed and disappeared. Carriage wheels creaked and slopped in the muddy street, and voices called a final good-bye: French. The Americans had left a full thirty minutes ago. A moment later Mrs. Pritchard emerged from the rear door of the house, carrying a candlestick; she murmured, “Soir” to January and Gabriel as they passed from the kitchen's lights into the dark side yard that led around to the stilldeeper darkness of the street.
    There was no sound around them now save the gulping of the frogs, the incessant whine of mosquitoes, the drum of the cicadas in the trees. He asked softly, “What is it?”
    Not the cholera. Please, Blessed Mary Ever-Virgin, not the cholera.
    “It's Mama.” Gabriel's bright smile, the cheerfulness he'd shown in the presence of the servants, dissolved, showing the fear in his eyes. “The City Guards came and got her. They say she done murder-killed a man.”

TWO
     
    January's first thought was, She was out there after all. Blood and rum and graveyard dust.
    And then, Don't be silly. Even if curses had such power, that dust was laid down only three hours ago.
    Olympia Snakebones, the voodoos called her.
    “This has to be a mistake.” Paul Corbier poured coffee from the blue earthenware pot on the sideboard in the cottage's rear parlor, and carried cups to the table. Though it was near three in the morning the shutters stood wide to Rue Douane, and music from a ball still in progress-Creoles, without a doubt-down on Rue Bourbon mingled on the gluey darkness with the cicadas' eerie roar. “I know Olympe. She would not have done this.”
    January said nothing. Neither did the woman who sat opposite him, a tall woman whose serpent eyes accorded strangely with the skirt and blouse of blue calico, such as the market-women wore. Like all women of color she kept her hair covered, as the law required; but like all free women of color she turned the simple headscarf demanded by a white man's law into a fantasia of folds and pleats whose hue and complexity rivaled the flowers of the field. Alone among the women of color she had worked her tignon into seven points, like a halo of brightcolored flame points around her strong-boned Indian face. By this she was known, the crown of the city's reigning Voodoo Queen.
    “I know it sounds foolish,” Corbier went on. “She has the knowledge, and she has-had-the things in the house.” He nodded through the archway that separated the dining room from the front half of the parlor. The candles on the