Barbara Hambly - Dead water

They put in at Donaldsonville as the sky was turning bright, and stayed at the landing there until mid-morning while Mr. Tredgold inquired about the town for a passenger who was supposed to be waiting and wasn't. Molloy cursed mightily at the delay, because it meant drawing the fires out of his engines so that the boilers wouldn't run dry—the water-pumps operated only when the wheel was turning—but Ned Gleet took advantage of the occasion to ensconce himself on the gallery of the biggest of the waterfront taverns, alert for anyone who possessed a slave and who might be talked into selling.

At five in the morning there wasn't much hope of this, and from the upper deck promenade—where he kept a discreet eye on passengers and luggage leaving the boat—January could see the dealer getting himself into a fouler and fouler mood. When Molloy went into the selfsame tavern (“Even I don't start drinking at five in the morning!” exclaimed Hannibal self-righteously when January told him about this several hours later) Gleet shouted something at him about staying longer: Molloy didn't even break stride, just turned and back-handed the slave-dealer off the porch, threw the chair after him, and was stopped from following him down into the street and continuing the fight only by Mr. Tredgold and the young junior pilot Mr. Souter.

“There's no man tells Kevin Molloy what he's to do and not to do!”

Gleet's discouragement and chagrin were completed by the arrival of another slave-dealer with a coffle of some fifteen men and women, and by the fact that this dealer, a man named Cain with the coldest yellow eyes January had ever seen, refused to sell any of his stock. “I can get a better price for 'em in Louisville,” Cain said in his quiet voice, and crossed the gangplank to see to chaining them along the lower promenade beside Gleet's.

All this January saw from the bow end of the boiler-deck, where he idled most of the morning, trying not to look like he was keeping watch. He didn't actually think Weems would try to desert the boat here—it was far too close to New Orleans—but it was just possible he would off-load one or more of his (or Mrs. Fischer's) trunks of money there, to be left in storage and picked up later. From this position January was able to observe the comings and goings of most of the passengers that morning: to witness the departure of the young planter Mr. Purlie with the slave-girl in tow he'd bought from Ned Gleet; to note how artfully Molloy's fair Miss Skippen, a vision in lavender ruffles, dropped her handkerchief just as Colonel Davis turned the corner of the upper promenade deck—and to hear the word she muttered to herself when Davis simply walked past and let it lie; to overhear a fragment of what appeared to be a vicious argument between Mrs. Fischer and Mr. Weems.

“—but what do you want me to do, Diana?”

“I want you to get yourself out of a situation you were too stupid to avoid, is what I want you to do.” As they passed, January pretended to be absorbed in the spectacle of Molloy, down on the bow-deck, striking a porter with the back of his hand and sending the poor man sprawling into the coils of rope; January slipped his eye sidelong to glimpse the pair as they passed him, and saw that they were still pretending to be strangers, walking well apart and speaking in tones of quiet conversation, until you heard the words.

“But I tell you one thing, you're not touching a dime of . . .”

They passed out of hearing, and Melissa and Neil Tredgold came racing around the corner of the 'tween-decks, shrieking like banshees, followed by their nursemaid Cissy's shouts: “You children get back here!” On the deck below, Mr. Purlie's trunks were unloaded, and a merchant came down to take consignment for several bales of the rough osnaberg “nigger-cloth” and a crated plow. Deck passengers milled about, mostly rough waterfront types or the crews of flatboats making their way north again, with occasional families of Irish or Germans too poor to pay for cabins. Andy, the planter Lockhart's valet, passed January with a tray of coffee in his hands and asked, “Mr. Sefton not an early riser, I take it?”

“Not as of ten minutes ago,” replied January good-humoredly. “I expect he'll be stirrin' soon.”

“I thought he'd have more wits than to play cards with that Byrne feller in the Saloon.” The valet shook his head. “When Mr. Lockhart come down the river last week, that Mr. Byrne was on the same boat, all friendly as can be—stayed at the same hotel as Mr. Lockhart, too. 'Course, Mr. Lockhart don't see a thing funny in Mr. Byrne seekin' him out, but if a man's that friendly for no reason, I always wonder if there's somethin' behind it.”

He passed on, and January glanced down at the bow-deck again, wondering if he could relax his guard long enough to make sure Hannibal didn't arouse comment by making his own way down to the galley for coffee. The big bow hatch was open down to the hold, but the deck-hands were stowing the pulley-ropes of the crane on the jackstaff; no other trunks lay on the deck.

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.