Barbara Hambly - Dead water

Deserting his post seemed safe enough. January passed down the starboard promenade side and rapped gently on Hannibal's door, receiving no answer, not much to his surprise. From there he descended the stair to the lower promenade, looking around him for Rose. A moment later he saw her come through the narrow space between a wood-pile and the starboard rails, encountering, as she did so, Cain the slave-dealer. They stopped, facing one another, for only an instant. Then Cain stepped back and aside to let her pass, and proceeded around her into the promenade where the female slaves were chained. Rose looked back over her shoulder at him, as if something in the meeting troubled her, then turned her head and saw January.

Relief swept her face and she quickened her step toward him, dodging two deck-hands piling still more wood near the galley door and stepping past the two maidservants Sophie and Julie, who were snatching a hasty cup of coffee between fixing their mistresses' hair and tidying up their mistresses' cabins and wardrobes. “My God, I'm glad I caught you,” breathed Rose. “Queen Régine is on the boat. I've found where she's hiding.”

“Sophie got me a sample of Mrs. Fischer's handwriting,” whispered Rose as she and January walked, as swiftly and unobtrusively as possible, past the chained coffles of slaves along the starboard promenade. “The doorway from the galley passway to the hold is padlocked, but there's a door at the bow as well. . . .”

“I've seen it,” said January. “The white deck-passengers sleep all around it.”

“Reason enough to keep it locked.” Rose grimaced at the recollection of Kyle and Sam. “There's no one near it now, though, and they've piled luggage in front of it, waiting to be lowered down the hatch.”

The slaves in Cain's coffle moved aside to let them pass, chained already to rings along the wall and some of them settling down, to sit where they would sit for the coming days of the voyage, their little bandannas of possessions tucked at their sides. A tall, slim young man chained closest to the engine-room door was saying reassuringly to the man chained beside him, “. . . mostly the ones that blow up are 'cause somebody does somethin' stupid in the engine-room. These things go up an' down the river all the time, with no more danger than ridin' a horse.”

“You know how many folks get killed ridin' horses, 'Rodus?”

Rose went on as they reached the corner of the 'tween-decks, “I marked with chalk the trunks and crates whose labels I checked—and there were several of the dozen I checked addressed to people who aren't on the boat, leaving aside entirely the crates and bales that are obviously commercial. I didn't see any of Mrs. Fischer's or Mr. Weems's, but I only had time to . . .” She paused, putting her head around the corner, watching the men on the deck.

Most of these were gathered around the door of the engine-room that opened onto the bow-deck, from which could be heard Molloy's bellowing voice. “Well, damn it, how long are we to kick our heels in this cursed place? It'll take us an hour to get up steam yet, and if you're still pussyfootin' about the town lookin' for passengers, then the back of both me hands to you! You can get that worthless old man Lundy to pilot you . . . !”

Rose and January slipped quickly around the corner, behind the heap of trunks, and down the ladder-like steps to the unlocked door of the hold.

January slipped the padlock out of its hasp and dropped it into his jacket pocket as they ducked through the door, which he closed behind them. In the remaining slit of light he fished a candle-stub and match-box from his pocket, scraped the match in the striking-paper, and looked around.

Rose whispered, in the softest audible breath, “Even if she does see us down here, what can Régine say that won't have her thrown off the boat as a stowaway?”

“She may not care,” January replied. The thought of being dumped ashore seventy-five miles from New Orleans, in territory largely American and heavily committed to finding as many field-slaves as possible, was enough to daunt anyone—it frankly terrified him—but he wasn't entirely certain Queen Régine was sane. Most voodoos, including his own sister, didn't think like other people anyway.

Before them, the hold stretched away, a hundred feet into wet darkness. Trunks, crates, and boxes loomed, waking in January uncomfortable echoes of Sunday evening's excursion to the cemetery: the same sense of being hemmed in, of his field of vision being ruthlessly cut. He realized almost at once the difficulty of inspecting any of the luggage stowed aboard—Rose and Hannibal might be adept at the use of pick-locks, but the trunks and crates were piled two and three deep, and many of the crates, even those addressed to individuals, were nailed shut. Some could be discounted—Robert Lockhart, Greenville, Miss.; Col. Jefferson Davis, Brierfield Plantation, Miss.; Mr. Joseph Davis, Aurora Plantation, Miss., addressed in Colonel Davis's spiky hand.

But who was Althea Fitzsimmonds of Memphis, Tennessee? Or Mr. Robert S. Todd of Lexington? The handwriting on both of those labels was nothing like Weems's or Fischer's, but who was to say that the two thieves didn't have other confederates? Or that one or the other of them wasn't as skilled at alternative forms of handwriting as Hannibal?

And as Rose led him deep into the blackness of the hold, January was filled with the sense of being watched from out of that blackness by angry eyes that he could not see.

Rose murmured, “Back here.” The candle's light touched a blanket folded in a little niche between two crates of FINEST CHINA——STAFFORDSHIRE——ENGLAND——FRAGILE. A leather valise lay near it; kneeling, January opened it with a fast-beating heart, as if he expected to find a rattlesnake inside. But within, thickly wrapped in sacking, he found a hunk of cheese the size of his own enormous fist, a sack of cornmeal and another of peanuts, and a half-dozen dried apples.

A smaller bundle yielded a juju-bag: black flannel, ashes, the burnt claw of a wren, pins. With it were packets of herbs—holding the candle close, he identified the brittle, half-crushed leaves and roots in one twist of newspaper as Jack-in-the-Pulpit, and in the other as Christmas rose.

Both deadly poisons.

He looked at the newspaper. The French edition of the New Orleans Bee. Saturday's.

The darkness seemed to be breathing down his back. The thought of coming back here tonight—picking the locks on the passway door if he could manage to get five minutes alone in the busy passway and trying to search what trunks they could open—filled him with queasy dread. Around him in the dark he seemed to feel the water pressing against the frail tarred wood of the hold, the weight of the boat towering over his head. He felt reminded that the steamboats were nothing more than barns on rafts with furnaces in their bellies; he couldn't imagine how anyone could sleep in this darkness, under the water, listening to the current of the mightiest river in the world surging by.

He backed away from the cubby-hole, signed to Rose silently to show him the trunks she hadn't so far had time to see. They moved from one to the next, January noting addresses and names, comparing the handwritting with the letter Granville had given him, and the shopping-list—15 yd pink lustring, 60 yds blond lace, 4 pr silk stockings, soap—that Sophie had let Rose take to make a note of something to herself on the back. “Sophie's already contrite over her outburst against Madame last night,” whispered Rose. “She begged me this morning not to repeat any of what she said, about Mr. Weems. She was angry, she said, but of course Madame has had so difficult and painful a life, and Mr. Weems treats her so kindly—I take it Madame expressed proper shock and sympathy over Sophie's experience last night. The world is terribly unkind to women who must fend for themselves.”

“I'll put my money on Mrs. Fischer against the world any day of the week,” muttered January, remembering the hard glint in the woman's dark eye, as she'd strolled the deck with Weems, and the masterful set of her red mouth. “Which,” he added bitterly, “I seem to have done. Here, you were a schoolmistress, you must have learned all the ways girls fake handwriting. Does this look like . . . ?”

Daylight spilled briefly across the ceiling of the hold, vanished again with the shutting of the door.

Silence, then the cautious creak of footsteps on the deck.

January blew out the candle in that first instant, drew Rose behind a stack of crates. Threads of gold light outlined a trunk, glinted on the brasswork of a box-corner, then vanished suddenly. But the darkness was full of another living presence, watching and waiting. Listening. January felt that his own breathing, and the thudding of his heart, were audible for the length of the hold. Something scraped behind him, a furtive skittering—rats, probably, but he startled nearly out of his skin.

Anyone with any business in the hold would have called out, Who's there?

But only silence met him, silence that waited for him to make the first sound.

January touched Rose's shoulder, eased gently behind the crates, moving in the direction of the bow-deck door. The light he'd seen had been to the left of the door, and he edged right, feeling the wood of crates, the leather of trunks. Circling around the unseen intruder and hoping she—or he—wasn't doing the same. They'd gone what felt like miles when the door opened again and daylight streamed into the hold, daylight and the yellow glare of a lantern as the steward Thucydides came down the steps. “Who's in there?” he called out, holding the lantern high, and January, not wanting to have questions asked and attention brought to him, crouched behind the canvas bales of osnaberg cloth and waited until the steward had advanced into the darkness.

“Who's there?”

From the back of the hold came a sudden sharp clank. Thu turned in that direction and January caught Rose's wrist to make a dash for the door, only to be forestalled by another dark form breaking from cover, pelting behind Thu and up the steps to the deck. From where he and Rose crouched, January could see nothing besides that it was a woman, a frothy white flash of petticoat under pale, vanishing skirts. Thu cursed and followed, and January drew Rose quickly to the doorway, opening it and slipping out, listening for a moment before scrambling up the steep steps to the deck. He held his breath, waiting for someone to call out, What you doin' down there, nigger? But nobody did. Looking neither to the right nor the left, he led the way around the corner and down the promenade deck again, and back to the stern.

Rose gasped, “Whew!” as they dropped into their niche among the wood-piles. Then she giggled like a schoolgirl who's gotten away with a prank, and January, too, was overcome with the exhilarating urge to laugh.

“It isn't funny,” he told her. “We could have been put off the boat—they'd never think we weren't down there to steal, especially since someone I could mention still has pick-locks in her pocket.”

“Did you get a look at her?”

January shook his head. “I was too busy trying to crawl under the floorboards. She was white, though—I don't think there's a black woman on this boat wears that many petticoats. . . .”

Sabrine, the ladies'-maid to Mrs. Roberson and her daughters, passed across the front of their niche, stepping daintily aside to avoid puddled water and showing half a dozen foamy petticoats handed down from her mistresses. January and Rose had to press their hands over their mouths to keep from laughing out loud, and clung to each other in a paroxsym of near-suffocation with mirth.

“It isn't funny,” January repeated when he could manage to speak again. “Now they'll keep a tight watch on the hold, and we're never going to get down there. . . .”

“And the gates of Hell shall not prevail against us. . . . I'm sorry,” added Rose. “I'm obviously not taking this seriously enough. But if . . .”

Footsteps creaked on the stair above them, and a quiet voice called out, “Mr. Bredon . . .”

And past the wood-pile, January saw the slave-dealer Jubal Cain flinch and turn, as if he had been shot.

The promenade was quiet, and nearly empty; Cain reached the bottom of the stairs in two long strides, as the speaker came down. From their place of concealment under the stair and behind the wood, January could see the mustard-colored check of Oliver Weems's trouser-leg—all that he could see, now, of either man.

“It is Judas Bredon, isn't it?” asked Weems, his voice very quiet now. “From the . . .”

“I don't know what the hell you're talking about.” Cain's deep voice was like iron. “Or who the hell you are.”

“Probably not.” Weems continued his descent, out of January's sight. “But I know who you are. Or who you were before you started running slaves for a living.” And January thought—though over the throb of the engines, and the voices of the men on the bow-deck, poling the Silver Moon away from the levee, it was difficult to tell—that he heard the rustle of paper, passed perhaps from hand to hand.

Cain said in a low, tight whisper, “How much do you want?”

“Four hundred. Tonight.”

“Where the hell am I supposed to get . . . ?”

“You might try selling one of your slaves. I'm sure Ned Gleet would pay you that much for a good field-hand.”

The stairs above them creaked sharply again as Weems sprang up them. A moment later Cain came into view, his back to Rose and January as he walked to the stern rail. The great paddlewheel had begun to turn at last, silver rivers of water pouring down off it flashing in the morning light. Molloy's voice could be heard from the bow-deck, bellowing profanity at the deck-hands. But Cain stood motionless, holding what looked like a crumpled ball of paper in his hand.

Then, as the boat began to move forward up the river, the slave-dealer clenched the paper in his fist and hurled it out into the churning wake of the boat.

SIX

“Oh, Mr. Sefton, you have no idea how unkind people can be to girls of quite good family who find themselves all alone in the world.” The low, sweet voice met January's ears as he mounted the steps. Emerging onto the upper promenade, the first sight that met his eyes was Hannibal, standing with Miss Skippen by the stern railing, his arm protectively around her and his head bowed in an attitude of sympathetic attention. When her rosebud lips trembled, the fiddler immediately proffered a handkerchief, and dried the tears on the long lashes—a shift of wind brought January the reek of very expensive French perfume.

“I saw my lady weep,

And Sorrow proud to be exalted so

In those fair eyes where all perfections keep.”

“You say such beautiful things,” whispered Theodora, resting her lace-mitted fingers lightly on Hannibal's lapel and gazing up into his eyes. “Not like . . . Well, not like some others I have encountered. Oh, Mr. Sefton”—her small hands turned, and gripped the cloth in a convulsion of feeling—“I declare I am sometimes so afraid of him! He is so rough, so uncouth! Thank God I have you to turn to, in my misery . . . you are the only one I can trust!”