Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard by Barbara Hambly

of professionals, leading after them other men, or sometimes a woman or two, shabbily dressed in castoffs, usually barefoot, the women with their heads modestly covered in tignons. Twenty-five cents a stroke, January remembered-trying to force deafness and ignorance upon a rage that would otherwise have overwhelmed him-for a master to have his property whipped by the City Guards, if he didn't want to do it himself. The sergeant at the desk paused in talk with the Police Chief, to write out a receipt. In the courtyard beyond them two men in the blue uniforms of Guards emerged from a cell on the second gallery, bearing between them a shutter on which a body lay, covered with a blanket. The Guards hustled furtively along the gallery and down the stairs. As they turned a corner the shutter knocked against the newel post and an arm dropped out, limp, yellow as cheese.
    Shaw was still explaining something to Monsieur Gerard-probably why a young man's word for a crime had to be accepted over the assertions of a respectable coffee merchant-as January made his way back to the courtyard doors. He intercepted the Guards and their burden as they reached the foot of the stair. “I beg your pardon, Messieurs, but would you mind telling me what this man died of?”
    Knowing he'd be coming to the Cabildo that morning he had been careful to don his most respectable clothing: linen shirt, black wool coat, white gloves, gray trousers, and high-crowned beaver hat, the costume of a professional that he wore on those occasions when he volunteered his services to the Hospital and when he played at a ball. The men looked at him and then at one another. “Stabbed,” said one in English at the same moment the other said, “Hung himself, poor bastard,” in French. January looked down at the blanket, which was ancient and ragged and moving with lice. There was no sign of blood. The man who spoke English added, “We got to be gettin' on.”
    He watched them move around under the gallery to the little storeroom at the back of the court; watched them close and latch the door. His heart seemed to have turned to ice inside him. He knew, having seen the color of that arm, why they lied.
    Glancing behind him, he saw that the Corbiers, Jumons, and officers of the law had left the watch room. Someone took back the chairs in which Olympe and Célie Jumon had sat; a lamplighter came in from the arcade with a couple of bottles, beer or ale, which he handed to the sergeant at the desk. In the courtyard, a man who was being triced to the pillory suddenly began to thrash and heave like a landed fish, screaming curses at his master, at the men who bound him, at whatever god had ordered the world to be so constituted that this could be done to him. While everyone in the yard--except the man's master-ran to help, January made his way under the galleries to the storeroom, unlatched the door, and stepped noiselessly inside.
    Most of the time, January knew from past dealings with Lieutenant Shaw, the room was used as a storage place for records and for the shovels and buckets in use by those who cleaned up the gutters of the Place d'Armes. There was a cot in one corner where Guardsmen who sustained injuries in the line of duty could lie down-a situation not uncommon when a steamboat crew or a gang of keelboat ruffians were in town on a spree.
    The form on the cot now was not a Guardsman. From beneath the tattered blanket the hand still projected, dangling to the floor, fingers purpling. Another body lay on the floor. Flies roared in every corner of the low ceiling, gathering already in the fluids that trickled slowly into the cracks of the brick floor.
    The judas hole in the door let through just enough light to see. January pulled the blankets first from one man, then the other, and looked down into the bloated faces. An ugly orange flush mottled their skin and black vomit crusted their teeth and beards. One had clearly been a British sailor, with bare feet and a