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Running would draw attention. She did not want attention, did she?
Well, why not? She was doing nothing wrong. It mattered little if anyone stopped her.
A seagull squawked loudly and flapped far too close to her head, startling her into flinging her hands defensively upward. The bird chattered its displeasure and dropped with a soft slapping of its splayed, webbed feet onto the planks immediately in her path. It stretched its wings, opening and closing them as if in warning, or summons, or some other gesture the woman couldn’t decipher.
“What?” she asked it, feeling ridiculous. “What do you want? Get out of the way,” she said, and prepared to aim a kick in it
s general direction. She knew from long experience that she’d never hit the thing; it’d be out of her way well in time, which was just as well. She didn’t care to hurt it, but she would not be bullied by a creature the size of a cat.
It cawed once more and stared at something behind her, so she looked over her shoulder and spied—at a brief, outrageous glance—a storefront window that made her gasp. A large white skull filled the entire pane, but only for a split second … before it was replaced with a dress stitched for a bride, advertising the stock at Miss Delia’s Dresses and Wares.
Josephine’s throat went dry, and a warm flush began creeping up her chest. Her hands tingled and went numb. “What’s going on?” she asked no one in particular. “What’s happening?”
The gull answered with a scrap of stationery in its mouth. It hadn’t been there at first, but it was present when she turned around. The bird dropped the shred of paper printed-side up, declaring in someone’s overelaborate handwriting, Join us for something garbled and runny, dampened into meaninglessness. Then, at Jackson Square, the north corner gardens!
Jackson Square. The Cathedral.
A message, but from whom? From what? And who would communicate in such a fashion?
It would be better to go find out than to always wonder—or that’s the conclusion she came to as the bird flew off, taking the paper with it. She adjusted her trajectory and increased her pace. At first she merely hustled, walking too fast for decorum, but soon she was all but skipping, then dashing outright.
She wasn’t sure why she was running, or what she was running from, though she could take a guess.
“Not yet, not yet, not yet,” she said under her breath as she tore along, ducking down alleys and cutting across intersections.
The whole Quarter ushered her along, clearing the way.
The doors moved and the sweepers stepped aside. Horses drew carriages out of her path, and rolling-crawlers lurched off as she darted toward them. Wisps of fog frayed and split at her approach, and Jackson Square was closer, closer, and closer.
Her chest ached against the bones of her corset, straining against the stays as she panted her way closer to the river. Her skirts tangled around her ankles, twisting around her knees and trying to slow her, but failing. She kicked herself free and pushed onward.
The texture of the streets beneath her changed. They shifted from the wood slats of lifted walkways as those side paths ended, then became the slick cobbles of humidity-damp stones that slipped beneath her feet despite her rubber-bottomed boots. She stumbled and recovered, ran out of steam, and leaned against a large, cool, stone square that turned out to be the foundation of the equestrian statue directly in front of the church.
Gazing up at it, she wondered if it, too, might have some arcane message to pass along. But the rider and horse both kept their silence.
Back behind the church, or somewhere past it, she heard a dull mumble punctuated with gasps and small cries. Catching her breath, she pulled herself together and continued onward, toward the ornate, dark church doors illuminated by fizzing electric torches on either side. She turned to pass them, still tracking the sounds and pushing toward their source.
A tall black fence cordoned off the church’s back yards.
It walled off the gardens.
A crowd was gathering. Josephine joined it at full speed, stopping herself hands-first against the rails, leaving bruises on her palms that she wouldn’t notice for days. She thrust her face between the bars and gazed openmouthed at the scene framed in the vivid green grass of the shadowed yard behind the city’s holy Christian center.
There on the ground, faceup in a state of peaceful repose with arms at her sides, Marie Laveau lay unbreathing, unmoving.
On the lawn around her, items were accumulating. As Josephine watched, three gold coins were pitched through the gate with a prayer, shortly to be joined by hastily improvised bags as small as her thumb. One gris-gris after another went sailing over the fence or through it, to land in a gentle plunk near the serene, still body.
Josephine wrapped her fingers around the chilly bars and struggled to breathe. She watched the small things fly—the ribbons, the coins, the buttons. The bags and beads, the twine-twisted bracelets and bootlaces, the flowers, pebbles, and nails. They accumulated around the queen’s corpse, yet none landed upon her. They gathered like a full-body halo, drifts of clutter, a fog of tiny gifts dredged from pockets and purses.
“No,” she said in half a breath, and with the other half she said, “Not yet. It’s too soon,” she added. “There’s too much I don’t know!”
More mourners gathered, brought to the spot by whatever means had brought Josephine, or by word of mouth filtering from churchyard gardens throughout the Quarter. They joined her at the fence, gawkers who stood with eyes wet and heads bowed, whispering prayers or moaning.
No one heeded the curfew, and as the sun set more fully, the Texians came out to see the fuss. The first who came started with commands to disperse, then saw the uncanny tableau spread out within the fence. They recognized the body lying there and stopped yelling their orders. They, too, joined the lookers at the fence, drawn up close and made quiet by awe, or shock, or some other odd familiarity that told them this was not the time to insist upon anything.
Someone at the back cried, “What’s going on? What’s the meaning of this?” Josephine knew that whoever this was, he’d find his silence, too. But she recognized the voice and turned to spot the speaker. At the nearest corner where the gas lamps were sputtering to light under a colored child’s expert spark, she saw Horatio Korman.
She watched understanding dawn on him and, closely following that, a nervous kind of horror. Their eyes met across the now-crowded side street.
