Free Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard by Barbara Hambly

Janvier, who had died while January was a student at the Hotel Dieu in Paris; later had worn it not a day longer for her husband Christophe Levesque, a cabinetmaker of color whom January recalled only as one of her many male acquaintances during her days of plaçage. Black, she had declared on several occasions, did not suit her complexion.
    Her father had been white, though she had to January's recollection never even speculated as to who he might have been. Her daughter by St.-Denis Janvier had added to her mother's exotic beauty the lightness of skin and silky hair so admired by white men and by many of the free colored as well. Dominique glanced worriedly sidelong at her mother, apprehensive of a scene, and then said “Poor Paul! And the children-are they all right? Shall I send over Thèrése to help?”
    “You'll do nothing of the kind,” snapped her mother. “That girl of yours doesn't do her own work for you, let alone looking after some laborer's children, not that she'd have the faintest idea how to go about it. As for Geneviève Jumon, I'm not surprised her daughter-in-law wanted to do her ill-I'm astonished the girl didn't poison her instead of her son. A more grasping, mealy-mouthed harpy you'd never have the misfortune to meet. She's been above herself for years, for all that she started out as one of Antoine Allard's cane hands.”
    She shrugged, exactly as if she herself hadn't worked in the fields before St.-Denis Janvier bought her. “She's had nothing but ill to say about Fortune Gérard since he rented the shop floor of Jeanne-Françoise Langostine's house for his business-he sells coffee and tea, and charges two pennies the pound more than Belasco over on Rue Chartres-that she wanted, not that she's ever made a hat that didn't look as if a squadron of dragoons had been sacking a florist's.”
    She opened the top of a heavy-pleated sleeve and produced a white paper sack of what turned out to be goose down, which she carefully shook into the space between the outer sleeve and its thin gauze lining, so that the sleeve rapidly assumed the appearance of a gigantic pillow. After ten years of marriage to a dressmaker, January was familiar with the style, and he still marveled at the sheer ugliness of it.
    “I daresay she was good-looking enough that Laurence Jumon bought her of Allard, back during the war, for four hundred and seventy-five dollars,” his mother went on, “but that's nothing to give herself airs about. Allard's asking price was six hundred and fifty and Jumon bargained him down. Jumon always did drive a warm bargain.” No thought seemed to enter her head that St.-Denis Janvier must have bargained with her former master in just such a manner.
    All January could do was shake his head over the detail and comprehensiveness of her knowledge of everybody's business in town. He wondered if Marie Laveau bought information from her. If not, she should.
    “Wasn't it Laurence Jumon who bought those matched white horses last fall?” Dominique fit a gold thimble onto the end of her middle finger. “With the black-and-yellow carriage?”
    “They looked like fried eggs on a plate,” replied her mother. “And they'd been bishopped. In any case grays are a stupid thing to get in a town that's hip deep in mud ten months of the year. That's all the good they did him; forty days after he laid out the money they were pulling his hearse.” She began to set the sleeve into place with neat, tiny stitches, and January marveled again at the linguistic convention that termed white horses “grays.” Typical, too, that his mother had adopted it: most slaves just called them white.
    “So why did Célie Jumon buy a gris-gris from Olympe?” asked Dominique, eager as a child. “And why do they think the gris-gris ended up poisoning Isaak instead of Geneviève?”
    “Olympe says the gris-gris had nothing to do with Isaak's death, that it wasn't poison at all,” said January. “What I'm trying to learn now