Dead Water (5 page)

“I'm sure of it,” returned Hannibal, slipping him one of the eleven-penny bits he'd acquired earlier in the night.

“Luncheon is served in the Main Saloon at noon, dinner at six. I see you have a fiddle with you, sir. If it isn't an imposition, if you'd care to favor the company with a little playing after supper, it's often done on board that there's playing and dancing in the evenings. . . .”

“As it happens, my man Ben is also quite accomplished. . . .”

It is only a game,
thought January. Only the masque of despotism, necessary to their disguise. But after the scene on the deck below, he felt disgusted and angry, and walked to the end of the promenade, where the most fashionable of the staterooms overlooked the giant wheel. Narrow stairways ran down to the lower promenades, where the valets and maids of the cabin passengers were already staking out their tiny niches among the heaped baggage and piles of cordwood stacked along the walls of the 'tween-decks: maids on the portside, valets on the starboard, at least those who weren't required to sleep on the floors of their masters' staterooms. The doors to the galley and the engine-room opened into this part of the promenade, screened almost completely from the chained line of slaves by head-high piles of wood. Market-women in bright skirts and tignons swarmed in and out of the galley door, with last-minute offers of tomatoes and melons; two white children on the upper promenade dragged their nurse's hands and screamed, reaching toward a pralinière who hawked her wares to the stevedores. None of the market-women, January observed, would go around the piled wood to where Ned Gleet was checking the chains on his slaves; nor would the deck-hands, as they readied their long poles to shove the
Silver Moon
away from the wharf.

Close by the rear corner of the 'tween-decks, where a narrow walkway crossed behind the wheel, Miss Skippen's maid leaned on the rail, gazing at the Cathedral's towers with a face of stone, tears running in silence down her cheeks.

The huge black wheel at the back of the boat began to turn.

A flash of red among the wood-piles drew January's eye. But when he looked, it wasn't Rose's red jacket, but a red-striped tignon worked into five points, and a red-striped skirt, dirty around the hem with smears of earth, and the flash of cheap glass pearls.

For one moment the woman raised her head, and January looked into the eyes of Queen Régine.

FOUR

“Are you sure?” asked Rose worriedly. “Because I haven't seen her.”

“Positive. I think she was carrying a bundle of some kind, though I can't swear to it.”

Rose said, “Hmmn.”

They sat together on a couple of logs, in a sort of niche among the cordwood. Though the steam engine wasn't noisy, its action vibrated the entire boat, and, beyond the corner of the 'tween-decks, if he stood up, January could catch a glimpse of the black monster of the turning-wheel. The stair to the upper promenade threw barred sun and shadow over them; beyond the rails, the brown-green chop of the river widened between them and the dreary tangle of dessicated snags, withered debris, and mud that stretched below the levees.

Smoke-smell drifted through the galley door, as well as the sound of Eli the cook cursing at the open fire in its huge box of sand. The purser's office was a flimsy cubicle off the galley passageway, and Hannibal's only comment on its lock was “Makes me glad I haven't any valuables stored there.” There was a door to the boiler-room there, too, and deck-hands carried wood in that way from the supplies on the promenades. It would be tricky, January realized, to get at the locked door of the purser's office—and the record of who owned which trunks—within.

If, that is,
he reflected,
by tonight we're not at the center of an uproar brought on by Queen Régine unmasking Hannibal and me as partners rather than master and slave.

In which case she'll be right, with a vengeance, about the gold dissolving from my hand.

Rose asked, “So what do we do?”

“Warn Hannibal,” said January. “I'll stay on the upper deck as much as possible. If she's traveling deck-passage, she has to show up here sometime. . . .”

“In which case she'll recognize me, if she knew you as Cosette's schoolmaster.” Rose tucked her small bedroll like a pillow behind her back where she leaned against the wall. “She may have come on board for some other reason that has nothing to do with you and me, and gotten off again, you know. Up until the boat was shoved away from the wharf, market-women were coming on and off. She has to do
something
for a living other than put hexes on schoolgirls, and it isn't as if there were a lot of boats leaving this morning.”

But January still felt profoundly uneasy as the
Silver Moon
thrashed its way past the river-side plantations that lay north of New Orleans, and the long, low green mound of the levee that hid the dark oceans of cane-field beyond. From the boiler-deck above, white passengers—and their servants as they came and went—could look over the levee at the great houses they passed, white-pillared American mansions in the latest pseudo-Greek style, or the long, brightly-painted French Creole dwellings, wrapped in their galleries that channeled the river breeze. From the main deck, all that could be seen was the levee, the batture below it, and the dark bobbing snags that pierced the shining brown water as it shelved down to the channel.

The boat hugged the bank as close as it dared, so that the probing black branches stabbed up through the water only six or seven feet from the rail. Now and then January could hear Kevin Molloy's booming Irish voice hurling instructions to the deck-hands, or the clanging of the bells that communicated from the pilot's cupola up on the hurricane deck down to the engine-room. A good pilot, January knew, kept his boat as close to the shore as possible, to avoid burning up excessive wood fighting the current mid-channel. It was a narrow margin to walk, between the force of the river and the perils close to the banks.

Some of them he could see—the snags that could tear the bucket-boards out of a paddle or the bottom out of a boat, or the long fringes of ripples that ran over sand-bars that stretched out from every point of land on the bank. Others, he knew, were visible only to the man in that high pilot-house, and some only to a man who knew this stretch of river in high water and low, who knew what to look for and what to expect.

“Are they taking soundings?” he asked a moment later as two of the deck-hands dropped the
Silver Moon
's skiff into the water from the bow-deck and began to row over to the nearer shore. Rose shook her head uncertainly, and one of the planters' valets, pausing for air in the galley passageway, said helpfully, “Looks like they're picking up word about the river.”

January had heard the skinny, sharp-voiced young Colonel Davis call this man Jim. “See there where he's gone up to that tree on the levee? There'll be a box nailed to it. Pilots comin' down the river sometimes leave word for each other if there's somethin' like a caved-in bank or somethin' big that others need to know about. In high water they'll just yell to each other, but you see there ain't much traffic now the river's so low.”

“Couldn't the pilot get the same information from one of the flatboats?” asked Rose as she and January followed Jim to the rail for a better look.

The older man, gray-haired and with a manner of friendly gentleness, grinned. “A steamboat pilot ask the time of day from one of them bumpkins on a flatboat? You'll see pigs flyin' on angel wings before you'll see that.” He nodded toward the main channel, where from time to time that day they'd passed those hundred-foot rafts with their pens of hogs and mountains of corn and pumpkins. “Wouldn't be no use anyway, 'cause they didn't know the river. And Mr. Molloy wouldn't ask a keelboat crew, 'less'n he knew 'em, 'cause river-pirates often use keelboats. Pirates'd have you runnin' your boat up onto a bar, where they'd be waitin' for you, like as not.”

“Even a small boat like this?” asked January.

Jim raised his grizzled eyebrows and glanced at the stacked wood that hid Ned Gleet's chained slaves from view. “There's enough cargo on this boat that'd be worth some outlaw's time. There's not near as much piratin' as there was, even a few years ago, and not many gangs on the river that'd take on a steamboat. But you look in the purser's office, an' you'll see we're carryin' a dozen guns, just in case.”

“Ben?”

The three looked up as Thu the steward came down the stair.

“Excuse me interrupting,” said the young man, “but they're asking for you in the Saloon.” He said it without expression, but as he stepped aside to let January precede him up the stair, January guessed, with sinking heart, what that phrase meant.

With half a dozen planters on board—not to mention Ned Gleet—what was coming was probably inevitable.

At least, he reflected as he passed along the promenade to the door that led to the Main Saloon, he hoped that what awaited him was some white slave-owner offering Hannibal money for him, and not a spiteful Queen Régine demanding what he was doing on the
Silver Moon
disguised as someone's valet.

The Main Saloon was a tremendously long, narrow room that ran most of the length of the so-called boiler-deck. Hemmed in on all sides by passenger staterooms and, at the bow end, by the daytime accommodations for the ladies, it was lighted by clerestory windows, above the level of the lower stateroom roofs, and as a result was always rather gloomy, the diffuse light being helped along by two oil chandeliers. These factors combined to give the room the air of a cathedral nave, one furnished with a suite of worn walnut furniture in red velvet, and two or three card-tables. Though the high windows were open, the stench of tobacco—both smoked and spit—pervaded the room, along with the male smells of boot-leather and pomade.

January paused in the doorway, blinking to adjust his eyes to the dimness, as Colonel Davis's high, sharp laugh barked out. “So what I get instead of proper soldiers to hunt down Chief Black Hawk and his braves are the so-called State Militia—farm-boys who can't tell their right foot from their left. I remember once when one of the companies was approaching a fence with a narrow gate in it, this beanpole captain—who obviously couldn't remember the command to form a column—shouting out, ‘Company to fall out for two minutes and re-assemble on the other side of that fence!' I nearly fell off my horse laughing, but it's no wonder poor General Taylor was never able to accomplish much.”

There was boisterous laughter although personally January would have bet his money, in single combat, on his quiet-voiced Kentucky farm-boy friend Abishag Shaw against the cocky young planter, Colonel or no. Looking around the room, he spotted Hannibal at one of the tables with Oliver Weems, a cribbage-board laid out between them. At the other table Davis and one of the several planters on board—Roberson, January recalled his name was—had a game of whist in progress with a stout gray-haired Northerner whose French valet was sleeping on deck, the fourth player being a smooth, dark-haired man of undistinguished appearance whom January guessed was a professional cardsharp.

Ned Gleet—sitting next to Hannibal—boomed genially as January entered, “Now,
there's
a boy does any man's heart good to see!” Despite the cheer in his voice, his eyes were as expressionless as a china doll's. “Look at those shoulders on him, gentlemen, and tell me it isn't a crime to waste a boy like that folding cravats when he could be working in the fields with the best of them!”

The young planter—Purlie, January recalled his name was—to whom Gleet had shown the slave-girl that morning was absent; January had not seen him all morning. As he'd come up he'd seen that the girl, too, was gone from the promenade, where she had been chained.

Hannibal replied very mildly, “At least it isn't a crime in the State of Louisiana, and I happen to like the way Ben folds my cravats.”

Weems said nothing, but looked at Gleet as if a cat had deposited a long-dead gopher on the chair where the slave-dealer sat.

“Hell!” Gleet spit a long streak of brown juice at the cuspidor. “If it's a valet you want, my friend, they're a dime a dozen in Louisville!” He draped a friendly arm around Hannibal's thin shoulders, and with the other hand poured three generous fingers of whiskey from his flask into the fiddler's empty glass with the clear intention of loosening up his mark's sales resistance, not having the slightest notion of how much liquor Hannibal could put away. “Kentucky's creeping with 'em! You can pick one up for six hundred dollars, and you'll have made a clear three hundred profit with that boy of yours.”

“Sir, I find your manner of speech completely offensive!” A young gentleman rose from the armchair, where he'd been reading, dark-haired, blue-eyed, and strikingly handsome, with skin as flawless as a girl's. “Have you no shame? You are a kidnapper, sir, a vile trafficker in human souls and human bodies, and you, sir”—he rounded on Hannibal—“are as morally degenerate as he, for participating in the putrid institution of human slavery!”

Whipping a sheaf of folded broadsides from his coat pocket, he thrust one into Hannibal's hands, and another into Gleet's. “How can you face your wife and your dear little children with the moral slime of bondage dripping from your hands?”

“Now, Mr. Quince . . .” A cadaverously thin gentleman in a faded-blue pilot's jacket detached himself from the bar and moved to intercept the indignant speaker even as the handsome young Mr. Quince was digging in his pockets for more tracts.

Gleet bellowed with laughter, and plucked the cigar from Weems's fingers to light the tract he'd been given. January hardly needed to see the masthead,
The Liberator,
to know what it was. “You know what I have to say to you, Quince, and to all Abolitionists like you?”

Quince, with an indignant gasp, tried to snatch the burning tract from Gleet's hands. The slave-dealer whooped harder and held it away from him, like a man teasing a child, which, despite his square-chinned handsomeness, the abolitionist Quince somehow resembled. “Let it be,” said the thin gentleman in the oddly rangeless voice that January identified at once as one symptom of chronic palsy.

“What's the matter?” Kevin Molloy appeared in the doorway, crossed the room to the bar. “You're never an Abolitionist, too, Lundy? A bit of the water of life, Nick,” he added to the barkeep. And to the emaciated, faintly-trembling Lundy, “I guess you've got to have
something
to keep your mind occupied, now that you're not up to runnin' a boat anymore.”

“When I was piloting, Mr. Molloy,” responded Lundy, “it wasn't my custom to spend my time in the Saloon.”

“What, on this stretch of the river?” Molloy hooted. “'Tis twenty feet of bottom we've got and not a bar in sight till we get to Red Church. I could take a wee nap and nothing would come of it! You're an old woman, Lundy,” he added. “'Tis a damn shame. You used to be good.”

And he swaggered from the room, even as Mr. Quince took the glass from Hannibal's hand and replaced it with another tract, entitled “The Devil's Brew.”

“I'm afraid my manservant is not for sale, Mr. Gleet,” said Hannibal as Quince poured the contents of the glass into the spittoon near the table. “Although I do appreciate your offer.”

“A thousand, then.” Gleet waved to January, signaling him over. “A thousand, and that leaves me with barely any profit. What the hell you need a big buck like that for a valet for, anyway? He's got field-hand written all over him.”