Chapter Ten Marie #2
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?”
Marie’s lips quirked. “As a matter of fact, I do. Speaking with you is just not one of them.” Claudette Duvalier was the last person Marie expected to meet in a plantation house. But today was already proving to be full of surprises.
“Two years since that meek excuse for a wedding, and already you tire me with your uninspired jabs. I shudder to think what my cousin ever saw in you,” said Claudette. She’d never approved of Marie as a match for her revolutionary-minded cousin Jacques.
“Then you should return to Haiti,” Marie snapped. “Posthaste.”
“And miss all the fun? I think not. Sanite sent me to make sure you adhered to Corbin’s summons. Come, let us get the matter over with quickly.”
A slave escorted Marie and Claudette to the smoking parlor, where an old four-poster bed had been pushed to the back of the room, draped in tattered netting to keep out buzzing mosquitoes.
The slave presented Marie with a little bow. “Master, I’ve come with the priestess, Madame Laveau.”
Claudette hung back in the doorway, keeping to the shadows while Marie strode toward the bed and stopped just shy of its foot, where she could see yellowed toes peeking out from the sheets. Her gaze flickered to the mayor’s face: plague-ridden and half starved.
“Marie Laveau.” Corbin wheezed a cough. “My family used to own your mother. And your grandmother. Did you know that?”
Yes, she knew that. How could she not, when men like Mayor Corbin could hardly let her forget?
White folks who counted themselves planters and masters always had a way of reminding black folks, free or not, of their enslaved bloodlines and kin—no different, she supposed, than rattling off which horses or chickens they kept in stock on their farms. Marie saw as much in a little oil portrait on the far wall where the mayor’s father, Marc-Louis Corbin, grinned stupidly in a straw hat, arms slung around his white and mixed-race children, with his house slaves, including Marie’s grand-mère, idling in the background, stone-faced.
“What is it that you seek, Monsieur?” Marie asked, her voice cold.
“Isn’t it obvious? A cure. A goddamned antidote. If your reputation precedes you, and it does, then I know that you have one, witch.”
Marie pressed her lips into a thin line. “You can be sure that I do.”
“Give it to me.”
“I am a free woman, Monsieur. I do as I please. From where I stand, you’re not in the position to be making such demands of a woman like me.”
“A woman like you!” He laughed, half mad, his teeth yellowed and stained from his own bile.
“What a sassy nigress! Your reputation does precede you.” His laughter turned into a fit of coughs.
A sudden look of panic filled his waxen face.
“Do you want money? Is that what this is about? Money? I’ve got plenty of money, girl. ”
Marie scoffed. “I don’t want your money.”
“Then what do you want?”
It was a curious question, indeed. She had no intention of disclosing the answer to a man like Felix Corbin.
What she needed was Veil magic. Magic not even Sanite would teach her.
It is expressly forbidden. Off-limits to even the Quarter Queen.
But Sanite had not said it was not possible. Marie just needed the right teacher.
“Felix, what I do for you, I do not do for silver or gold.” She reached into her pocket, drawing forth a corked vial of black liquid. “I do because I am bidden to. Because these are the rules.”
In her work as a plague nurse, sometimes it was better to help patients go gently into the next world, to ease their suffering quickly. So she always carried two vials. One for healing. And one for death.
As she was about to open the vial, a hand seized hers, twisting painfully. Slowly, Claudette shook her head. Of course she had known. Claudette knew Marie’s habits, her ways of doing magic. In another life, they might have been sisters. But not this one.
“Remember yourself, Marie! Do you want to see a war?” Claudette hissed into her ear. And then she added, “Not now. Not like this.”
Jacques had wanted her to use her magic for more, but she hadn’t listened to him.
Not when it mattered. Now, in the long year since he’d vanished, the sorrow made her bitter, and sometimes this city made her want to burn it all down, to see what it might become after.
New Orleans would be better off without men like Corbin, more diseased than any plague.
But then she remembered the smell of the Brotherhood in the house, and she understood.
They weren’t here to heal him; they were here to make sure that she did.
“Take this,” Marie said finally with a sigh, drawing forth a second vial of red liquid. The antidote.
Corbin reached for the vial and drained every last drop. “Such magic my father was a plum fool to discard.” He watched her, wet blue eyes latching on to her in wonder. “You got that real magic in you, girl. To think, my family could have owned it.”
Marie knew men of Corbin’s ilk. A speck of magic in his blood.
A miserable smidgeon. But not enough that the Brotherhood of the White Hand might want him.
They’d closed their doors in his face, turned their backs on him.
He was nothing but a Brotherhood reject looking to take magic he couldn’t hope to produce himself from others. Now he wanted hers.
Marie offered him a cold smile over her shoulder. “And it never will again.”
On the other side of the door, Marie was met with clapping. She swiveled to find two white men leaning against the wall, clearly waiting for her. A small auburn-haired boy lingered behind them, suckling sullenly on his finger.
The older of the two stepped forward. He was well over six feet, and despite looking in the early days of his forties, he had snow-white hair that trailed over his shoulder to his waist. Gailon LeBlanc, Grand Wizard of the Brotherhood of the White Hand.
“My dear Marie, why do you bother with the likes of Voodoo when you’re clearly destined for the stage?” He held her gaze, and it was then that she realized his eyes were unnaturally dark—cold and impenetrable as swamp water.
“Bonjour, Grand Wizard.”
“Marie Laveau,” Gailon said, testing the name on his lips as if tasting a fine wine. “Oh, I’ve heard much about you.”
Marie nodded toward the door, motioning for Claudette to wait for her outside.
It would be better for her to handle this little tiff on her own.
A woman like Claudette, who’d grown up under Haiti’s hard-won sovereignty, had little patience for the likes of the Brotherhood and did not play nice by their rules.
Claudette passed her a final cautious look, then swept out to the carriages.
“I wasn’t aware that you discuss the business of blacks and coloreds in your halls,” said Marie, feigning hurt, once Claudette had gone. “On account of how we aren’t allowed entry.”
“Is that your way of asking for an invitation, witch?” the younger of the two said. “Perhaps that could be arranged.”
Marie turned to look at him. He was smirking at her, but not cruelly, not like his master.
He was closer to her age, with a clean-shaven face, and had the air of a university boy, pompous and self-assured—sadly typical for the Brotherhood of the White Hand’s chosen crop.
But his hair was reddish-gold, not the snowy white of his master.
Which meant he was not ascended, not quite yet.
The higher an alchemist rose among the Brotherhood’s ranks and the deeper they delved into their mysterious rites, the whiter their hair became—leaving only the most magically formidable with strands of ash.
Marie wondered if it was a point of pride for men of the Brotherhood—was their only mission to bleed the color from everything they had the misfortune of touching?
“Let us not be hasty, Silas. The Brotherhood’s rules exist for good reason.” Gailon’s eyes twinkled, as if the three of them were old friends reunited and not enemies sworn to never cross color and magical lines alike.
The child, who could be no more than three, waddled forward, clasping his stubby fingers around Gailon’s leg.
Gailon tapped his staff once on the ground, and the child fell, hitting the wall behind them.
The boy climbed to his feet, wetness in his gray eyes, but he knew better than to say a word.
The alchemist had flicked him back as if he were a gnat buzzing in his ear.
So the child is his, Marie discerned. How terrible to have such a monster for a parent. But for all the magic in the world, the gods had never allowed folks to choose their mothers or their fathers. This Marie knew, unfortunately.
“As you wish, Grand Wizard,” Silas said, although his blue eyes were trained directly on Marie.
“Supposedly, you are a talented healer, Marie Laveau,” said Gailon.
“But they say that your queen grows ill, weaker still by the day. Why are you here, on a plantation, healing men like us, when you could be with Sanite, healing her? Perhaps”—a strange light touched his eyes, black coal burning in a twinkling flame—“your presence here is merely a sham. I know Voodoo when I see it. Perhaps this is the work of your Quarter Queen?”
He dared call Voodoo dangerous when she’d heard the stories whispered about the Brotherhood of the White Hand—capturing runaway slaves for study and sacrifice all in the name of magical advancement.
It was commonly believed among black folks that they transmuted more than lead and gold in those secret halls.
“Perhaps you’d better mind the business that pays you, Grand Wizard,” Marie said with a sneer. “And last I checked, that wasn’t exactly the business of negroes.”