Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard by Barbara Hambly Read Free Book Online

misconstruction. “That was arsenic in one of them tins as we took off yore shelf, M'am Corbier, and monkshood in another, and the doctor I took them jars to says that was antimony in the third.”
    “Then why don't you arrest my brother as well?” asked Olympe in a reasonable voice. “He carries arsenic in his bag, when he works in the Hospital during the fever season. Salts of mercury, too, and foxglove, that can stop the heart. Arrest the doctor that told you the contents of those jars. I'll bet he has all that and more in his office.”
    “My friend is a healer, Lieutenant Shaw.” Mamzelle Marie, who had entered quietly through the open doors of the arcade, made her way with leisurely grace to them and regarded the gawky Kentuckian with a mixture of amusement and insolence. “As a healer, Olympe, like her brother, has obligations to secrecy. Should a young girl give birth out of wedlock, she must trust that her midwife will not spread word of it. Must a slave who has slipped out of his master's thrall for an evening, and met with some injury, risk his life by letting the wound go untended for fear of a beating into the bargain?” She added, with the barest touch of mocking malice, “That might lose the owner money, were the slave to die. You wouldn't want that, sir.”
    “No, M'am.” Shaw met the voodooienne's gaze calmly, arms folded over his chest. “And I do understand M'am Corbier's not wantin' to say where she was nor why she tried to run away the minute officers of the law showed up in her house. It's just that it looks bad, and it's gonna look worse when the state prosecutor asks her about it in open court.” He scratched under the breast of his coat with fingers like stalks of cane. “That's all. M'am.”
    January glanced across at Olympe, wondering if indeed she had been outside Colonel Pritchard's house last night. She would not do that which she saw to be evil. But what was evil in her eyes?
    “I am a voodoo.” Olympe looked gravely up at Shaw. “Believe what you will, Lieutenant. I-and indeed almost any voodoo you speak to in this town-work more in herbs of healing than in poisonings. The whites who come creeping veiled to our doors to ask for love potions or tricken bags-or partners for their lusts sometimes-they have no idea who we are or what we are. In any case the girl Célie told me, Not a death spell. She's a good girl, confirmed and goes to church.” In the past, January thought, Olympe would have given those last five words a derisive twist; now she simply stated them as a fact. Perhaps, he thought, because now she, too, had a daughter.
    “I gave her a ball of saffron, salt, gunpowder, and dog filth, tied in black paper, to leave in Geneviève Jumon's house and another in her shop. Saturday night when the moon was full I took and split a beef tongue and witched it with silver and pins and guinea peppers, and buried it in the cemetery with a piece of paper bearing Geneviève's name. That was all that I did. And in truth I didn't need even to do that. The woman's evil and greed themselves will call down grief on her, with no doing of mine. About Isaak I know nothing. Are you so certain that he is dead?”
    Shaw's pale brows raised, the gray eyes beneath them suddenly sharp and wary. “Why do you ask that, M'am?”
    “Have you seen his body?”
    “Where is she?” shouted a voice behind them. “What have you done with her? Pigs! Bastards! Murderers!” January turned in time to see a heavyset little man stumble through the Cabildo's outer doors, his well-cut gray coat awry and his eyes burning with rage and grief. “Have you no pity? No shame?” He flung himself at the nearest Guard, who happened to be Shaw, seizing him by the lapels and shaking him to and fro. Shaw, who January knew could have broken his assailant's neck with very little trouble, raised no hand to thrust him back, and a well-dressed tall gentleman dashed through the door in the next moment, followed by a small,