“You are the Widow Paris.”
Marie froze.Jacques.The tears grew hot against her lashes. Still, Marie held them back. She would not cry in front of this woman.
Her smile deepened. “Yes, yes. You are, aren’t you?The Widow Paris.” Her voice took on a singsong lilt. “Where did your husband go? Gone he was, like smoke, they say.”
They say.People said many things about her. They always had, since she was a girl. Father Antoine had taught her it was her own cross to bear. But then she’d grown up and come to see such talk as the mark of power. After all, people did not waste time speaking of the unremarkable. No, they spoke of those whom they feared.
“Voodoo,” she mocked, that same dreamlike smile plastered on her face. “The woman who for all her magic couldn’t keep her husband from leaving her.”
Marie said nothing. Jacques had questioned her magic too. She could still hear him now, those last fateful words he’d said before he left and disappeared a year ago.What’s the use of having all that power, mon amour,if you don’t dare use it for more?
The woman laughed, scattering spittle. Marie imagined backhanding the woman. Hexing her. Killing her, even. Certainly, she’d killed for less at Sanite Dede’s command. But no spell came to her, and all the magic and blood seemed to drain from her veins, leaving her breathless and cold.
The woman’s laughter followed Marie through the infirmary, along the rows and rows of white linen cots filled with the writhing and the sick, and out into the murky sunlight of the Quarter. Like astone pitched over a river’s edge, Marie hurled herself out from the chapel, sucking in mouthfuls of late-winter air. The morning brought down a veil of gray mist over the city, and it drifted out upon the Quarter’s cobbled streets, a slow-crawling miasma.
All she could think of was Jacques. Sometimes she thought herself a fool for loving him so. They’d scarcely been married a year before he’d gone from her. And before that, she’d known him for only a few months. He was a sailor, a revolutionary whom Sanite had introduced her to during one of her moonlit rituals at Lake Pontchartrain.
The funny thing was, she hardly remembered the sweet days of their marriage. Not when her mind craved only the pain of the nightmare, to relive it each night in the agony of grief and loneliness. That last day. That last goodbye. He’d gone on up to Baton Rouge for business as he always had. Wasn’t supposed to be gone for more than three days’ time. But three days had come and gone. And Jacques never returned. She didn’t know what happened to him. No one did. But one day after he left New Orleans, there had been talk of an attack on Governor Jean-Francis. An insurrection,The Quintessencehad printed across their front page in large, accusing red lettering the next morning. Someone had tried to stage a rebellion. Although she had never received an official report, and there was no body to bury, no amount of human closure could tell her what she already knew in her soul to be true. Jacques had died that day. She’d felt it, the moment of his death lodging in her chest like a knife, and later, in the long nights after, the sinking weight of his absence when the grief had bled her dry.
If you don’t dare use it for more.It was those words that haunted her. The words that kept her faithfully attending confession with Father Antoine, that played endlessly in her head as she silently served Sanite day and night. Because they were true. What good was she doing with her magic? What if she was meant to do more?
“Are you Marie Laveau?” asked a boy in a straw hat.
He was a young white boy, bayou-fed and apple-cheeked. Cajun, no doubt, looking to find work in the city as a runner.
“That depends upon who’s asking.”
The courier looked her over, nonplussed by her brazenness. “Well, if you are, in fact, Marie Laveau, then you’ve been summoned.”
“By whom?”
He handed the letter over to her, and Marie caught the unmistakable violet wax seal in the shape of the city’s official brand, the fleur-de-lis. “By a man I highly suggest you heed.”
“Quite politely, you can send my response by mouth. Fuck no.”
“You misunderstand, Madame Laveau. This was not a question.” He backed away, rightfully sensing Marie’s mood darken. “This was an order.”
“I do not take orders from men. Even white men.”
“I don’t imagine you do. But this is no ordinary man.” He tipped his hat. “This is the fucking mayor.”
Marie’s carriage trundled up the long path that led to Chateau Corbin, the road unwinding from its coil like a garden snake readying to strike from the weeds.
Mayor Felix Corbin. The very same mayor that put her people up on platforms to be bartered and sold, like they were not humans but pretty trinkets in a window. The mayor whose father had owned her mother, and her mother before her. The mayor who, until this very moment, it seemed, was quite happy to pretend the likes of Marie Laveau did not exist. Marie bristled. Apparently, he pretended no more. Her eyes moved beyond the house, across the grounds, into the shadowed edges of the fields, where Corbin’s stock of slaves toiled in the sopping wet gloom of the sugarcane stalks.
A few were gathered along the garden path, peering at her curiously. When Marie held a slave child’s eyes, she ran off—they all did, schools of fish darting through dangerous water. Marie’s lips thinned. Her own kind ran from her. She imagined that she was a marvel to them—a freedwoman, in fine enough dress, with hair that didn’t need to be hidden under a cap from the sun’s lash. Or perhaps she was a specter on two feet, an oddity sorely out of placeand time, something that should not exist according to plantation rules but did nonetheless.
Marie stepped from the carriage and was met by a house slave who fell into a deep bow. “Right this way, Madame Laveau.”
The moment Marie entered the chateau, she could sense another magic that was not hers. When she turned into the parlor, she knew why. The Brotherhood of the White Hand. Brotherhood spells and curses made her skin prickle and her hair stand on end. As she turned into the hallway that led toward the foyer, she saw only a few house slaves peeking from the back kitchens, eager to catch a glimpse of a Voodoo priestess on the grounds.
Besides the stink of Brotherhood magic, and the buttery aroma of a chicken being boiled in tarragon, thyme, and lemon juices, there was death in this house. She could smell it strongly in the foyer, where it ran like a dark river beneath the floorboards and seeped into the walls. Of course, in any plantation house there was death; one careless mistake, a single glass of sweet tea spilled, a word of frustration uttered under the breath after a long day in the fields—all of that could bring down the deadly wrath of an overseer or master.
The slave led Marie down the hall, stopping in the kitchens to retrieve a bowl of fresh water as Marie had bid. Marie stopped suddenly, having scented another, familiar magic—sage and the sweet smoke of coffee. Out stepped a tall, deeply brown-skinned woman in white skirts, her bosom draped in a lush red that denoted her allegiance to Haiti, her knee-length dark braids held back by two gold flower combs. On her neck she wore the red-and-black beaded pendant of Simbi Makaya, her patron loa.
“Claudette,” Marie said with a brisk nod. Staring at Claudette always made her uncomfortable.She has his eyes.They were Jacques’s eyes, to be sure, emerald green and glittering.
Claudette shuffled a stack of silver-trimmed tarot cards from hand to hand. “You took long enough, Laveau. Have you more important things to do?”
