Barbara Hambly - Dead water

“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.

“She call herself a lady, an' go on about how great her family is,” muttered the girl, settling herself by the rail beside Rose and January so that January could look at her bruised and bleeding ear. “Maybe Michie Binoche, that owns my mama, ain't no more than a contractor, but I seen decent white folks in my time, an' Miss Skippen ain't one of 'em, no matter what she say. When Michie Molloy buy me for her, an' bring me home to that house he got for her, I could see she didn't have a thing but what he buy her. Every one of them dresses she got is spang new, some of 'em just delivered by the dressmaker that week. . . .”

“That doesn't mean she isn't respectable,” objected Sophie, who'd come down to fetch water from the galley to rinse a coffee-stain from her mistress's cuff. “When poor Madame fled from her husband in Cincinnati, she tells me she had to escape with only the clothing she stood up in, lest he pursue her and force her to live with him and endure his abuse again. I am myself a good Catholic,” she added, crossing herself, “and of course I believe that divorce is wrong, but in cases like that . . . But what I mean is, Madame is a most respectable woman, even if she is . . . even if she has found a man who loves and cherishes her.”

“Oh, Mr. Molloy love an' cherish Miss Skippen, all right, with her hangin' on his arm, an' feelin' faint, an' goin' on about her finishin'-school, an' how she ain't never been with a big, strong gentleman like him before.” Julie's lips tightened, and she gazed out over the rail at the brown water, prickled and studded with the groping black fingers of snags, and the tangled gray wilderness of the banks. “He should see her when he ain't there, an' she got a couple glasses of plum brandy in her, singin' about the three old whores from Winnipeg. He'd wonder what finishin'-school she went to, to learn that .”

“And I suppose that if she did go to a finishing-school,” sighed Rose later, after January had ascertained that no more damage had been done to Julie's ear by her mistress's blow than nail-scratches, “she still would not be able to support herself in anything but poverty or prostitution. For Miss Skippen was right, you know, when she said that the world is unkind to girls who find themselves alone in it.”

She settled herself against the heaped cordwood in the shade, watching the deck-hands as they walked along the rail, long poles in their hands. As the river shallowed with summer, the bars that the current laid down before every point, on every bend, went from annoyances to be edged around to outright perils. Though noon was far past, Kevin Molloy remained in the pilot-house, and January could hear his voice bellowing curse-riddled instructions to the little crew of leadsmen who had rowed ahead of the Silver Moon in the skiff.