Free Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard by Barbara Hambly Page A

is, where was Isaak Jumon between Thursday, when Geneviève swore out a warrant distraining him as her slave-”
    “Oh, shame!” cried Dominique.
    “Sounds like her,” remarked Livia Levesque.
     “-and his death on Monday night. Not to mention such things as why Jumon didn't leave a sou to Geneviève, which he didn't.”
    “She'd have poisoned the boy herself, I wager, out of spite.”
    “Mama, surely not!”
    “Could she have? Isaak would be staying as far away from Geneviève as he could. He didn't take refuge with Célie's parents. . . .”
    “He wouldn't have anyway,” said Minou, gathering a length of mist-fine point d'esprit over the head of the other sleeve. “Monsieur Gérard never liked Madame Jumon, even before the shop rental incident, because of her `former way of life.' He was mortified nearly to death when his precious daughter Célie married her son. AIthough after thirteen years you'd think Monsieur Gérard would forget about Geneviève being a plaçée. I mean, everyone else has, and he's always polite to Iphègénie and Phlosine and me when we come into his shop. Although just the other day he said to Phlosine-”
    “Thirteen years?” January set down his cup. “Thirteen years? I thought . . . I mean, I know Jumon never married, so there was no reason for him to put his plaçée aside...”
    “No reason? That hypocritical moneybox, no reason? And it wasn't he that left her,” Livia added, returning her attention to the sleeve. “She left him, or rather bade him leave, for she kept the house and the furniture and all he'd given her. And Jumon did marry, two years after that, to get control of his mother's plantation I daresay, which she wasn't going to turn loose to any man who hadn't done his duty by the family and given her a grandson. Not that it did him the slightest bit of good, or her, either. She went to Paris. The wife, I mean.”
    “Wait a minute-What?” It was unheard of for a plaçée to leave her protector. “Geneviève left Jumon? Why?”
    “Jealous,” snapped his mother. “She heard there was marriage in the wind.”
    “Oh, don't be silly, Mama, you don't know that!” protested Minou. “And no one-I mean, we all know . . .” She hesitated, looking suddenly down at her sewing, and a dark flush rose under the matte fawn of her skin.
    “We all know men marry?” finished her mother. Dominique drew a steadying breath, and when she raised her head again, wore a cheerful smile. As if, thought January, it mattered little to her that the fat bespectacled young planter who had bought her house for her, and fathered the child who had died last year, would not one day marry, too. “Well, if she's as grasping as you say, she wouldn't have let him go for a little thing like that.” She made her voice languid and light.
    “Hmph,” said Livia, unable to have it both ways. “At any rate, that whining nigaude Noëmie-his wife-went back to Paris, and Laurence's maman sold up the plantations, and the brother's never had a regular mistress at all, so far as anyone knows.” She shrugged. “Laurence Jumon never breathed a peep. When he was sick back in twenty-four he gave Geneviève money to buy both their sons from him, in case he died, and they'd still be part of his estate. That mother of his would have sold off her white grandchildren, if she'd ever had any, never mind her colored ones. Jumon and Geneviève had parted company by that time, but he paid every penny to educate those boys, not that anything ever came of that. For all the airs Antoine and his mother give themselves Antoine's just a clerk at the Bank of Louisiana. And Isaak . . .”
    Her gesture amply demonstrated what she thought of a boy of education becoming a marble sculptor. “He's as bad as you, Ben, wasting the gifts M'sieu Janvier gave you...”
    “Not wasting them at all, Mama.” January smiled at her. He'd long ago realized that being annoyed at his mother would be the occupation of a lifetime. “M'sieu