Dead Water (8 page)

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!”

“My dearest,” murmured Hannibal, “I am hardly the most trustworthy man in the
world. . . .”

“Ah, but you are!” Theodora insisted, like every other woman to whom Hannibal told the honest truth about himself—after three and a half years January was still trying to figure out how he did that. “And who else can I trust? You are so sweet. . . . And he's become so capricious, I scarcely know what to believe anymore! If he turned away a good job to take a poorer one, all at a whim, how do I know that his next whim will not be to forsake me for another, prettier perhaps, or more endowed with the world's goods? For though my family is a fine and an old one, we are, alas, fallen upon poverty!”

Her accent alone was enough to convince January that her family was probably not as fine or old as all that—after one generation of wealth, Americans tended to ship their daughters off to schools where refinement of speech was a part of the curriculum—but Hannibal only passed his palm gently over her cheek.

“For the world's goods I care naught, my Angelflower, and as for beauty, how could any man turn his eyes from what I see before me here?
Eyes as soft as honey / and a face / that Love has lighted / with his own beauty.
. . .”

“Michie Hannibal, sir?” Dalliance was one thing, but January had witnessed two examples already that morning of Kevin Molloy's propensity for casual violence. He had no desire to see his friend beaten up over a blue-eyed tart in pink ruffles. The junior pilot Mr. Souter passed him on the stair, on his way to the pilot-house to change over watches—at a guess, once his watch was up Molloy wouldn't linger. No sane man would, in a ten-by-ten-foot pilot-house with Mark Souter droning on relentlessly about his great-uncle's contribution to the Battle of Blue Lick in 1782 and the precise degree to which the Souters were related to the Wickliffes of Glendower, whose Logan cousins had married into the Todhunter family through a connection who was a first
and
a second cousin, once removed either way. . . .

Hannibal raised a hand to sign January over, and Miss Skippen caught his wrist. “Oh, send him away, do!” There was a slight desperation in her face—January wondered how many others she'd attempted to attach herself to since Colonel Davis had passed by her dropped handkerchief a few hours ago.

“My sweet, I dare not snub Ben, even for the felicity of your violet eyes. It's he who makes my coffee in the mornings.” He bent to kiss her hands. “Until tonight.”

Her parting from him would have done credit to the great tragedienne Sarah Siddons as Juliet. January half expected her to stab herself on her way through the door of the Ladies' Parlor, where Mr. Quince was holding forth on the subject of the need for the immediate re-colonization of all slaves to Africa.

“Tonight?”
January raised his brows as he and Hannibal entered the stateroom.

“We have a tryst on the starboard promenade after dinner, and I rely upon you to be sleeping on the floor here in case she feels faint and demands a place to lie down. Considering the amount of information I've gleaned from her so far, I can hardly cut the poor girl now. God knows she's been cut enough by La Fischer and her co-harpies in the Parlor—not that I'd want
my
sixteen-year-old daughter associating with her, if I had one, mind you. I rescued her while on my quest there for coffee, which I didn't get, by the way. . . .”

“I'll get you some. How long were you with her?” January wasn't certain, but he'd thought Miss Skippen's pink muslin skirts, with their ruffles of blond lace and their silk roses, looked wet and dirty along the hems—they were light-colored, too, as had been those he'd glimpsed in the dark of the hold.

“Twenty minutes or so. Just before we pushed away from the landing. I'm not sure what she'd been up to—mischief, I think. She was breathless and trembling, anyway, and practically fell into my arms. Is all well with you,
amicus meus
? I feared something had happened when you didn't make an appearance. . . .”

“Rose went down into the hold while they were loading and found evidence that Queen Régine is on board, and is hiding down there. I went back down with her to see, with the result,” January added grimly, “that Thucydides may very well be keeping a sharper eye on the hold in future. I'll tell you when I get back.”

Mrs. Tredgold, who presided over the Ladies' Parlor, only smiled benevolently at January's comicly mock-timid request to “thieve some of your coffee, M'am, for Michie Hannibal,” leading him to guess that his friend had exercised his customary charm even over the boat-owner's formidable spouse. Miss Skippen occupied a chair in the corner of the Parlor, nibbling a biscuit and being pointedly ignored by Mrs. Roberson and her elder daughter, Emily—a diminutive widow—and by Mrs. Fischer, whose own comprehensively glass dwelling should have endowed her with a little more charity about casting the first stone. Beside Mrs. Fischer, Mr. Quince continued earnestly on his lecture:

“. . . alternative to pushing them into a society in which, in their savage innocence, they will never be able to make a living . . .”

Not with gentlemen like our Massachusetts friend Dodd running the factories, we won't,
thought January, pouring coffee from the larger pot into a smaller water-carafe and trusting that Hannibal had a spare cup in his room.

“This way, we will obviate the burden of the government and the tax-payer, and at the same time enable the freedmen to improve the lot of their savage brethren in Africa by their own industrious
example. . . .”

January wondered if any of the members of the American Colonization Society had ever actually
asked
any man of African descent—slave or free—if he wanted to go back and live in Africa. At meetings of the Faubourg Tremé Militia and Burial Society—of which January was a member despite his mother's derisive insistence that most of the members were “dark as a pack of field-hands” (
On the subject of glass houses and stone-throwing . . .
he reflected)—not once had a meeting ended with all those
libre
artisans and businessmen leaping to their feet and shouting.
Let's take the Society funds and all re-locate to Africa!

Quince didn't even look at him as he collected the coffee-tray and left the room.

Hannibal duly produced a second china cup from his luggage, and listened while January poured out coffee for them both and related the events of the morning. “Queen Régine obviously has a confederate on the boat—if that
is
her food down there and not someone else's. . . .”

“Someone else's food and someone else's poison?”

“
A hit, a palpable hit.
Hers, then. And just as obviously it isn't Thucydides, if he called out,
Who's there?
As for who was
actually
there . . . What time did all this take place?”

“Shortly before the boat left the landing, which makes me fairly certain that was the lovely Miss Skippen investigating the hold. Eight-thirty? Nine o'clock?”

“According to the lovely Miss Skippen, Mr. Molloy—apparently on a whim and at a few hours' notice—abandoned the pilot's berth on the
Emperor Napoleon
to Memphis, to take considerably less pay piloting the
Silver Moon
.”

“A few hours before departure, the
Silver Moon
didn't already
have
a pilot?” January paused in the act of buttering a roll, with a slight twinge of guilt that he hadn't taken a few more from the Parlor to save for Rose.

“Molloy undercut the original pilot's fee, evidently, and sought out Mr. Tredgold at the steamboat offices to convince him that his original head pilot was incompetent.” Hannibal gestured with his open hand, as if inviting January to take this explanation from his palm if he wanted it. “Miss Skippen is most annoyed, because this lesser pay means Mr. Molloy has reneged on several promised gifts—including a purple silk bonnet with pink plumes at La Violette on Rue Chartres that Miss Skippen had her poor little heart set on.”

January said, “Hmmn.”

“I'd say it sounds like your Mr. Granville's lady-friend at the cocoa-shop wasn't the only person who saw Mr. Weems at the steamboat office and put two and two together. It isn't unreasonable. Even riverboat pilots have to bank their money somewhere, though after a few weeks of providing lodging and apparel for Miss Skippen in New Orleans, I wonder that Molloy had any money left to bank, let alone lose. As for Jubal Cain . . .”

“Clearly Weems took the first chance he could to recoup some of his money without opening one of the trunks in the hold,” said January. “Mrs. Fischer at least suspects the hold's being watched. She seems to be the brains of the outfit. And if that was Miss Skippen I saw down there, Fischer has reason to be watchful. . . . How much was your share of the whist takings, by the way?”

“Two hundred and fifty. It grieved me, to mis-lead Weems with our bids so that we lost, instead of cleaning out Dodd, who's a shockingly bad player.” Hannibal set his cup aside and drew a roll of bills from his breast-pocket, and counted out a hundred and sixty-six onto the counterpane between them as he spoke—the tiny cabin boasted only a single chair, at present doing service as a table for the coffee-tray.

“But Byrne was as close to singing and dancing as I've ever seen him,” added Hannibal thoughtfully, “since Dodd now trusts him and is ripe for a good plucking. Bank of Louisiana notes, you'll observe.” He held the last one up, then handed it to January. “With luck this will buy you and owl-eyed Athene a little more maneuvering-room in an emergency. I wonder if La Pécheresse”—he twisted the French word for “fisher-woman” into its sound-alike, “sinner”—“is aware of her partner's efforts to raise extra cash?”

“I wouldn't think so.” January recalled the calculating intelligence in Mrs. Fischer's chill, dark eyes, the hardness of her voice. As a black man, he was forbidden by convention to look a white woman in the face, but even a quick glance had shown hers to be a study in wary strength.

An adventuress, like her sister-in-greed Theodora Skippen, but with education and sophistication that put her as far beyond the blond girl as a tigress is beyond a kitten. “Mrs. Fischer's not a woman I'd care to cross, no matter who's paying the bills.”

“As you say,” said Hannibal thoughtfully. “It would take someone very desperate—or very stupid—to blackmail a man with eyes like Jubal Cain's.”

Watching Cain throughout the day, as the
Silver Moon
steamed north—or in fact mostly west and then east again around the Mississippi's huge bends—January was inclined to agree with his friend. Though taller than Gleet, and built heavy, like an overweight bull-mastiff, Cain wasn't a blusterer like Gleet. His eyes—yellow as a wolf's, in a pock-marked, bearded face—were the eyes of an infinitely dangerous man.

The men of Gleet's coffle were cowed by the slave-dealer, but when he was up in the Saloon—as he was during most of the day—they relaxed, and talked and told stories among themselves and with the deck-hands, as men with nothing left to lose will come to do under nearly any circumstances. The men in Cain's coffle were afraid, even in their owner's absence. They talked when they had to, but they kept quiet for the most part, the uneasy quiet of fear. The only one of them who would actually stand up and speak to Cain when he came down was the tall, slim young man—'Rodus, the others called him—chained next to the engine-room door.

January had many chances to observe them that day, for he spent a good part of it down on the stern end of the starboard promenade, while Hannibal amused himself by gossiping with the ladies or playing cribbage with the shaky-handed Mr. Lundy in a corner of the Saloon. The open passway between the engine-room and the galley, which connected the rear ends of the promenades on either side of the lower deck, was a sort of village square for such of the colored population of the boat as were able to walk around, and a clearing-house for gossip. January heard, on one occasion, Sophie Vannure's warmly sympathetic account of Mrs. Fischer's tribulations with a cruel and domineering husband in Cincinnati—an account he believed in no more than he did in Miss Skippen's “fine old family”—and somewhat later in the day, Julie's bitter animadversions against Miss Skippen herself.