Read Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave for Free Online Page B

on the slow turning of the roaster crank, and paused to push up her spectacles and wipe the bridge of her nose with a corner of the apron she usually wore to teach. Most of the dinner was done, and the coals that had been heaped around the iron dutch-ovens on the hearth cleared away to simmer sauces in the line of stew-holes on the other wall. Rose had begged a shovel-full of the still-radiating coals to pile around the coffee-roaster. Martine herself was in the house, helping St. Chinian's valet-the only other servant the reclusive old gentleman possessed-to set the table. The courtyard between house and kitchen was a jungle of banana-plants and resurrection fern, of oleanders decades untrimmed and pavement-bricks so heaved and buckled with water-damage as to be worse than bare earth would have been. The carriageway out to Rue Bourbon rivaled most attics January had seen in both quantity and variety of clutter.
    The old man's family, one and all, considered Veryl St. Chinian mad.
    “Is that M'sieu Janvier?” called a youth's voice from the flagstoned room next door that had once been a laundry. “Shall I put in more water for him?” Without waiting for yea or nay, Artois St. Chinian came into the kitchen with a yellow pottery jar, and ran a couple of cups of water into it from the big glazed-clay water-purifier on the shelf.
    Artois was sixteen. Since April, Rose had been the boy's tutor, hired by Artois' uncle in the face of the absolute incredulity of the family that a woman could either hold such a position, or teach a youth anything of value. By the tangle of wires, pots, cranks, and bottles spread over the big worktable in the former laundry, January guessed the subject was still electricity, as it had been for weeks. Nothing that would be of any use to a student preparing for the University in Lyons, of course, but it was a treat that both Rose and Artois indulged each other in after they'd finished the day's ration of Latin, mathematics, and Greek.
    “I really will have to talk Uncle Veryl into getting gas laid on, at least in part of the house,” sighed Artois, drawing the gallows-iron of the kitchen fireplace to him with a poker to add the water to the pot. “This is just impossible.”
    “Making coffee over a spermaceti lamp in the workshop?” January grinned in spite of his day-long, weary anger at the injustice of the world.
    “Heating anything over a spermaceti lamp.
    
     I'll bet Michael Faraday didn't do his experiments by heating his wires and solutions over... over bonfires in the middle of the laboratory floor.” In spite of a white linen shirt, the silk waistcoat, and the sky-blue cravat of a young dandy, Artois St. Chinian still had a schoolboy air. His curly hair, halfway in color between molasses and honey, tumbled loosely over his forehead; his eyes were the hue of pale tourmaline. His mother had been fair, too, January had been told, with nearly European features, and the planter Raymond St. Chinian had lavished as much care and attention on his plaqee's child as he had on the daughter of his legitimate, white wife.
    Only at Raymond St. Chinian's death had the care stopped. Had Raymond's uncle Veryl not stepped in, January wasn't sure what would have become of the boy Artois. Apprenticed out as a clerk, he supposed-to waste that shining intelligence copying bills of lading or columns of figures in a bank for the rest of his days.
    “Between Creole family politics and low water in the river, I'd be surprised if Shaw returned any time before tomorrow night,” January went on as Artois fetched down the coffee-grinder and perched on the table to adjust the rather delicate, fiddly rollers to his favorite consistency. “There aren't many boats coming upstream from Plaquemines Parish this time of year. From curiosity I might see what my mother knows about the Avocet family when I go out to Milneburgh tomorrow afternoon to see Dominique.”
    “You think she'll know?” Rose's eyebrows quirked