Graveyard Dust Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF

  BARBARA HAMBLY

  GRAVEYARD DUST

  “From the highborn Creoles to the uncivilized Americans, Hambly knows all their secrets and brings them all to life.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “In the mystery world, it’s a very good thing to find Graveyard Dust on your bookshelf. Its rich evocation of New Orleans in 1834 … will linger long in your memory.… It’s a New Orleans we’ve never known, but is somehow all too familiar. Trained as a historian, Hambly has rooted Graveyard Dust firmly in the reality of the times—and then created a cast of characters that makes it soar.”

  —The Times-Picayune, New Orleans

  “Hambly continues to dramatize problems of race and class through her trademark exotic settings and situations—including the most florid courtroom fireworks you’ve ever seen—all building to the revelation of a powerfully imagined … killer.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Splendid … Hambly [possesses a] rich sense of history … [and a] warmly human touch.”

  —Booknews from The Poisoned Pen

  “A richly detailed murder mystery with a little bit of voodoo mixed in for flavor. Don’t miss this powerful series.”

  —MLB News

  “A sumptuous read, full of the colorful sights and sounds of 19th-Century New Orleans. Hambly has researched the era well, and the reader is treated to a journey back in time as well as a first-rate mystery.”

  —Romantic Times

  FEVER SEASON

  A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE

  BOOK OF THE YEAR

  “A notable writer of mystery fiction … This one grips the reader from start to finish.”

  —The Washington Times

  “A haunting story of injustice.… An eye-opening look into a little-known period in U.S. history.”

  —MLB News

  A FREE MAN OF COLOR

  “Magically rich and poignant … In scene after scene, researched in impressive depth and presented in the cool, clear colors of photography, Hambly creates an exotic but recognizable environment for January’s search for justice.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “A darned good murder mystery.”

  —USA Today

  “A most sparkling gem … Readers are transported back to a distinctive time and place and introduced to a most unusual protagonist.… New Orleans vividly comes alive.… January is a fascinating hero.”

  —King Features Syndicate

  “An astonishing tour de force … This tense and absorbing drama is full of clever twists, chilling dangers, and unexpected acts of redeeming grace.”

  —Margaret Maron

  Also by Barbara Hambly

  A Free Man of Color

  Fever Season

  And coming soon

  in hardcover from

  Bantam Books:

  SOLD DOWN THE RIVER

  This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.

  NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

  Graveyard Dust

  A Bantam Book

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1999 by Barbara Hambly.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-43456.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Bantam Books.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78529-9

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

  v3.1

  For

  Mary Ann

  Special thanks to those, in New Orleans and elsewhere, who have helped me with this book: to Paul Nevski of Le Monde Créole; to the staff of the Historic New Orleans Collection; to Tim Trahan of Animal Arts in New Orleans; to Priestess Miriam of the Voodoo Spirit Temple; to Greg Osborn of the New Orleans Public Library; to Adrian and Victoria; to Kate Miciak; to Diana Paxson; and always, to George.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Terminology of Voodoo

  Genealogy

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  TERMINOLOGY OF VOODOO

  Since voodoo terms were originally transliterated from various West African languages through creolized French, spelling is a matter of guesswork. I have in most cases used the modern Haitian spellings and names as found in Métraux’s Voodoo in Haiti, the starting point of much of my research.

  The shape and structure of voodoo in Louisiana in the 1830s is something that can only be guessed at. Refugees fleeing the uprisings in Sainte Domingue (the island now divided into Haiti and Santo Domingo) brought extensive voodoo beliefs with them to a land that already had its own variants of these same practices, and much depended on the religion’s interaction with its immediate surroundings. In Haiti, after the black revolution, voodoo became an accepted religion; in Louisiana its evolution was marked by external pressures from the prevailing Christianity and culture. In addition, the voodoo loa tends to proliferate: There are dozens of variations of the spirit Ezili (or Erzuli), of Ogu (Ogou)—Ogu Feray, Ogu Badagri, Ogu Osanyl, and Sen (or San) Jak, Maje and others—of Baron (or Bawon) Samedi or Cemetery, also known as Baron La Croix. I have simplified as much as I can without doing violence to what I understand to be the basic tenets of the religion.

  Some loa:

  Ogu (or Ogou)—warrior spirit of justice, often depicted as a soldier; frequently identified with Saint James the Greater

  Shango—blacksmith spirit, also warrior; a spirit of iron and fire

  Ezili (or Erzuli)—spirit of womanhood, in various incarnations a mother and an Aphrodite flirt

  Baron Samedi (or Baron Cemetery)—lord of the dead, often depicted as an obscene trickster, lord of the Guédé

  Guédé—family of dark and dangerous spirits, spirits of power and death

  Papa Legba (or Limba)—ruler of the crossroads, of doorways and bridges, and of transition states; he is the first loa petitioned in Haitian ritual, that he may open the doors for the other loa to pass through

  Damballah-Wedo—the sacred serpent, spirit of the rainbow and of water; called also the Zombi-Damballah

  Bosou—bull spirit of potency and strength

  The loa may possess worshipers of either their own identified gender, or the opposite, and may possess them to various degrees. Some “horses,” as the possessed are called, do not remember things said and done during their possession; the woman I talked to wh
o had been possessed by Ogu said she was perfectly aware of herself, but observing: craving cigars, for instance (which Ogu loves, though the woman possessed was a nonsmoker), and rum.

  Other voodoo terms:

  vèvès—complex designs drawn on the ground to focus or summon the loa

  hougan—voodoo priest or “king” in old New Orleans terminology

  mambo—voodoo priestess or “queen”

  gris-gris—an amulet or charm

  tricken bag—amulet made of several ingredients sewn together in a bag, usually a gris-gris of ill luck or malice

  wanga (or ouanga)—spell

  wangateur or root-doctor—magician, sorcerer

  congris—mixture of black-eyed peas and rice, a favored food of the loa

  ONE

  African drums in darkness sullen as tar.

  Rossini’s “Di tanti palpiti” unspooling like golden ribbon from the ballroom’s open windows.

  Church bells and thunder.

  Benjamin January flexed his aching shoulders and thought, Rain coming. Leaning on the corner of Colonel Pritchard’s ostentatious house, he could smell the sharp scent in the hot weight of the night, hear the shift in the feverish tempo of the crickets and the frogs. The dim orange glow of an oil lamp fell through the servants’ door beside him, tipping the weeds beyond the edge of the yard with fire.

  Then the air changed, a cool flash of silkiness on his cheek, and he smelled blood.

  The drums knocked and tripped, dancing rhythms. Fairly close to the house, he thought. This far above Canal Street the lots in the American suburb of St. Mary were large, and few had been built on yet. Ten feet from kitchen, yard, and carriage house grew the native oaks and cypresses of the Louisiana swamps, as they had grown for time beyond reckoning. January picked out the voices of the drums, as on summer nights like this one in his childhood he’d used to tell frog from frog. That light knocking would be a hand drum no bigger than a vase, played with fast-tripping fingertips. The heavy fast thudding was the bamboula, the log drum—a big one, by the sound. The hourglass-shaped tenor spoke around them, patted sharply on both sides.

  One of the men on the plantation where January had been born had had one of those. He’d kept it hidden in a black oak, back in the ciprière, the swamp beyond the cane fields. Forty years ago, when the Spanish had ruled the land, for a slave to own a drum was a whipping offense.

  “Not meaning to presume, sir.” Aeneas, Colonel Pritchard’s cook, stepped from the kitchen’s gold-lit arch and crossed the small yard to where January stood at the foot of the back gallery stairs. “But I’d be getting back up to the ballroom were I you.” A stout man of about January’s own forty-one years, the cook executed a diffident little half bow as he spoke. It was a tribute to January’s status as a free man, though the cook was far lighter of skin. “Colonel Pritchard’s been known to dock a man’s pay, be he gone for more than a minute or two. I seen him do it with a fiddle player, only the other week.”

  January sighed, not surprised. The kitchen’s doors and windows stood wide to the sweltering night, and the nervous glances thrown by the cook, the majordomo, and the white-jacketed waiter toward the house every time one of them cracked a joke or consumed a tartlet that should have gone on the yellow-flowered German china told its own story. “Thank you.” January drew his gloves from his coat pocket and put them on again, white kid and thirty cents a pair, and even that movement caused bolts of red-hot lightning to shoot through his shoulder blades, muscles, and spine. He’d been a surgeon for six years at the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris and knew exactly how heavy a human arm was, but it seemed to him that he’d never quite appreciated that weight as he did now, after an hour and a half of playing quick-fire waltzes and polkas on the piano with an injury that hadn’t healed.

  A shift of the night air brought the smell of smoke again, the knocking of the drums, and the hot brief stink of blood. His eyes met the cook’s. The cook looked away.

  Not my business, thought January, and mounted the stairs. He guessed what was going on.

  The air in the ballroom seemed waxy and thick as ambergris: one could have cut it in slices with a wire. Pomade and wool, spilled wine and the gas lamps overhead, and—because at least two-thirds of the guests were Americans—the acrid sweet sourness of spit tobacco. January edged through the servants’ door and, behind the screen of potted palmettos and wilting vines that sheltered the musicians, sought to resume his seat at the piano as inconspicuously as it was possible for a man six feet, three inches tall; built like a bull; and black as a raw captive new-dragged down the gangplank of a slave ship from the Guinea coast, and never mind the neat black coat, the linen shirt and white gloves, the spotless cravat.

  Hannibal Sefton, who’d been distracting the guests from the fact that there hadn’t been a dance for nearly ten minutes, glanced at him inquiringly and segued from “Di tanti” into a Schubert lied; January nodded his thanks. The fiddler was sheet white in the gaslight and perspiration ran down the shivering muscles of his clenched jaw, but the music flowed gracefully, like angels dancing. January didn’t know how he did it. Since an injury in April, January had been unable to play at any of the parties that made up his livelihood in America—he should not, he knew, be playing now; but finances were desperate, and it would be a long summer. He, at least, he thought, had the comfort of knowing that he would heal.

  Voices around them, rough and nasal in the harsh English tongue January hated:

  “Oh, hell, it’s just a matter of time before the Texians have enough of Santa Anna. Just t’other day I heard there’s been talk of them breakin’ from Mexico.…”

  “Paid seven hundred and thirty dollars for her at the downtown Exchange, and turns out not only was she not a cook, but she has scrofula into the bargain!”

  Colonel Pritchard was an American, and a fair percentage of New Orleans’s American business community had turned out to sample Aeneas’s cold sugared ham and cream tarts. But here and there in the corners of the room could be heard the softer purr of Creole French.

  “Any imbecile can tell you the currency must be made stable, but why this imbecile Jackson believes he can do so by handing the country’s money to a parcel of criminals.…”

  And, ominously, “My bank, sir, was one of those to receive the redistributed monies from the Bank of the United States.…”

  “You all right?” Uncle Bichet leaned around his violoncello to whisper, and January nodded. A lie. He felt as if knives were being run into his back with every flourish of the piano keys. In the pause that followed the lie, while January, Hannibal, Uncle Bichet, and nephew Jacques changed their music to the “Lancers Quadrille,” the drums could be clearly heard, knocking and tapping not so very far from the house.

  You forget us? they asked, and behind them thunder grumbled over the lake. You play Michie Mozart’s little tunes, and forget all about us out here drumming in the ciprière?

  All those years in Paris, Michie Couleur Libre in your black wool coat, you forget about us?

  About how it felt to know everything could be taken away? Father-mother-sisters all gone? Nobody to know or care if you cried? You forget what it was, to be a slave?

  If you think a man has to be a slave to lose everything he loves at a whim, January said to the drums, pray let me introduce you to Monsieur le Choléra and to her who in her life was my wife. And with a flirt and a leap, the music sprang forward, like a team of bright-hooved horses, swirling the drums’ dark beat away. Walls of shining gold, protecting within them the still center that the world’s caprices could not touch.

  In the strange white gaslight, alien and angular and so different from the candle glow in which most of the French Creoles still lived, January picked out half a dozen women present in the magpie prettiness of second mourning, calling cards left by Monsieur le Choléra and his local cousin Bronze John, as the yellow fever was called. Technically, Suzanne Marcillac Pritchard’s birthday ball was a private party, not a public occasion, suitable
even for widows in first mourning to attend—not that there weren’t boxes at the Théâtre d’Orléans closed in with latticework so that the recently bereaved could respectably enjoy the opera.

  And in any case, it would take more than the death of their immediate relatives to keep the ladies of New Orleans’s prominent French and Spanish families from a party. Manon Desdunes—that very young widow gazing wistfully at the dancers—had lost a brother to the cholera last summer and a husband the summer before. Delicate, white-haired Madame Jumon, talking beside the buffet to Mrs. Pritchard, had only last summer lost her middle-aged son.

  Always entertained by the vagaries of human conduct, January distracted himself from the pain in his arms and back by picking out exactly where in the ballroom the frontier between American and French ran, an invisible Rubicon curving from the second of the Corinthian pilasters on the north wall, to a point just south of the enormous, carven double doors opening to the upstairs hall. French territory centered around Mrs. Pritchard, plump and plain and sweet faced, and the brilliantly animated Madame Jumon, though now and then a Creole gentleman would pass that invisible line to discuss business with the Colonel’s friends: bankers, sugar brokers, importers, and landlords, the planters having long since departed New Orleans for their acres. Every so often one of the younger Americans would solicit the favor of a dance with one of Mrs. Pritchard’s younger Marcillac or Jumon cousins—and to do them justice, January had to admit that for Americans they were as well behaved as they probably knew how to be. For the most part, the damsel would be rescued by a brother or a cousin or a younger uncle twice-removed who would reply politely that Mademoiselle was desolate, but the dance was already promised to him. When Madame Jumon’s surviving son, a craggily saturnine gentleman of forty-five, showed signs of leading Pritchard’s middle-aged maiden sister out onto the floor, Madame quickly excused herself from conversation and intercepted the erring gallant; January was hard put to hide a smile.