Free Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard by Barbara Hambly Page B

Janvier paid for my piano lessons as well as for Dr. Gomez to teach me medicine. I think as long as I'm making money at one or the other . . ”
    “Not much money.”
    But January refused to fight, though the wound hurt. “So Geneviève turned M'sieu Laurence out, because of this engagement-it would have given him control of more property, surely? A plantation?”
    Livia looked as if she'd have liked to enlarge on her son's folly and ingratitude, but in the end she could no more resist slandering a rival than a child could resist a sweet. Besides, reasoned January, the conversation could always be brought back around to his shortcomings. “Trianon,” said Livia, with spiteful satisfaction. “And another one across the lake. Geneviève must have hoped to make free with some of the proceeds. But Madame Cordelia sold them up, and put the money in town lots. If she'd held on-”
    “But you see,” said Dominique, “Geneviève and Isaak have been estranged for just years. Isaak was the only one of the boys who was still friends with their father-and I always thought poor M'sieu Laurence seemed terribly lonely. He'd come to the Blue Ribbon Balls and chat with us girls, and be so gallant and sweet, not like a lot of the gentlemen who look at you so when they don't think you can see, even if the whole town knows you already have a friend. All he wanted to do was dance. . . .”
    Livia's sniff was more expressive than many books January had read.
    “No, truly, Mama, we can tell.” Dominique gently discouraged Madame la Comtesse de Marzipan, the less obese of Livia's two butter-colored cats, from playing with the ribbons she was sewing on the sleeve. “At any rate, when he was taken sick last fall, both Isaak and Célie visited him every day. At least that's what Thèrése tells me, and her cousin was one of M'sieu Laurence's maids. When M'sieu Laurence died he left Isaak-oh, I don't know how much money, and some property as well, I think.”
    “He left him a warehouse at the foot of Rue Bienville, half-interest in his cotton press, a lot on Rue Marais and Rue des Ursulines, which if you ask me isn't worth seven hundred dollars, fifteen hundred dollars' worth of railway shares in the Atlantic and Northeastern, and three thousand dollars cash.”
    January didn't even bother to inquire where his mother had obtained these figures. He merely whistled appreciatively. “Not bad for a marble carver living in the back of his employer's house. I presume they've only been waiting for the probate.”
    “Which would have gone through a lot more quickly had not four-fifths of the judges in this city turned tail and fled at the first rumor of fever.”
    “Well, yes,” said Dominique: “But also, M'sieu Laurence's mother contested the will. You are going to do something about it, aren't you, Ben? Not about the will, I mean, but about Olympe being arrested? You can't let them-I mean, they won't really . . .” She let the words hang her trail off unsaid.
    January was silent. Madame la Duchesse de Gateaubeurre prowled idly into the room, levitated effortlessly up onto his knee, and settled her bulk, making bread with her broad soft paws.
    “Olympe wouldn't have done such an awful thing!” insisted Dominique. “And as for Célie Gérard having had anything to do with it-stuff! Why would she have wanted to kill her husband?”
    January remembered that sweet-faced child turning away from Shaw, her hand pressed to her mouth with the shock of having confirmed the doubts that had tormented her through the horror of the night. Mamzelle Marie's words rose to his mind: a thousand reasons men will think a woman poisoned a man.
    Célie, Isaak Jumon had said. And died.
    “I don't know,” he said thoughtfully. “Maybe I ought to find that out.”
     
    “I knew about the will, yes.” Basile Nogent rested his forehead for a moment on his knuckles, against the shoulder of an infant angel carved to look like a white boy. The sculptor was small