Barbara Hambly - Dead water

And given the absolute darkness that reigned once you got three steps away from the light of the passway, January supposed that even a statuesque matron could have managed it, particularly one in the inky black of full mourning.

As he climbed the steps to the boiler-deck and Hannibal's stateroom once again, January heard, along the misty blackness of the banks, the first birdsong of the early-breaking summer dawn, and his heart flinched in his chest like a beached trout dying in air.

Due to Molloy's objection to a “nigger doctor” “poking” him, January was at the last minute dropped from the shore party in favor of Mr. Quince, who claimed expertise in both the mystical healing of the long-vanished Egyptians, and the “vegetarian mathematics” of the Thompsonian system of medicine. “If you see me go down, come over to the shore if you have to swim,” said Hannibal as he put on his frayed coat and the darkest and plainest of his rather tattered collection of waistcoats.

“Is there anyone we should notify if you're badly hurt?” asked Rose tactfully, and handed the fiddler a black velvet ribbon to tie his hair.

Hannibal cocked an ironic eye back at her, knowing that she really meant “killed.” Since he'd appeared in New Orleans four and a half years ago, he had never spoken to January—or to anyone January knew—of his former life, though he was clearly a man of breeding and education. He would speak sometimes of being up at Oxford, or of the family estates in County Mayo or their town-house in London. But why he had left them, and how he had fetched up in New Orleans a penniless consumptive opium-eater with a hundred-guinea Italian violin, January could only guess. Somewhere in London, or in the English-held estates of western Ireland, there was undoubtedly a family Bible with a name that probably wasn't Hannibal Sefton, with a date of birth and also a date of death. January wondered how long ago that second date had been filled in.

“I think everyone who cares anything about me is here.” Hannibal kissed Rose's hand, then clasped January's. “And I must say you're displaying a woeful lack of confidence in my abilities at both shooting and dodging,” he added, pulling on his shabby gloves. “At least that idiot Davis didn't demand bowie-knives, though I'd have been able to hold my own with a sword, or I did back in the days when I had any wind to speak of. I shall be all right.” He looked as white as a sheet—and stone-cold sober—in the grimy glow.

January followed him down to the skiff, then made his way back to the servants' end of the promenade to watch. Even the deck-hands, and the male slaves, had paused in their work, and clustered the rail like ravens on a fence, watching the skiff pull to shore. On the hurricane deck, Roberson and Lockhart set down their rifles and turned their attention from vigilance to observation: “You'd think it was a public hanging,” muttered January as he and Rose edged their way to the rail among the other servants. The engineer's curses to trim the boat might just as well have been the whistling of the birds.

Over the past twenty-four hours the river had fallen still farther. It was going to take some tricky maneuvering to come away from the vicinity of Hitchins' Chute: the glassy brown surface was broken by a hundred splinters and daggers of black snags barely showing above the water, and by a hundred more deadly arrowheads of ripple that marked others still hidden. Davis and Gleet, rowing the skiff, had to back or push a number of times to keep the little craft from tangling itself in the floating branches, and Mr. Quince, sitting stiffly amidships with a satchel full of bandages and medicines, winced visibly every time the boat so much as rocked.

As Davis had said, there was a clear space of thirty or forty feet on the bank, perhaps twenty feet above the muddy water and ooze of the river's brim. Behind it the trees formed a misty wall, which curved inward on both ends toward the river. At the downstream end the land rose into a higher bank above the chute, where the trees grew thicker near the now-invisible water. At the upstream end a tangle of willows and cottonwoods hovered over the jumble of leafy trash that the retreating water had left. The final shadows of night seemed to linger beneath the trees.

Behind January a slave dropped an armload of wood, and Cain shouted, “You black bastard, I've seen trained donkeys at the circus less clumsy than you!”

Nervous? January wondered as Mr. Tredgold—at the bellowed command of his wife—hurried to admonish the slave-dealer for cursing in the presence of the ladies crowding the rail above. It wasn't like the imperturbable dealer to shout at his slaves.

The skiff scraped the mud bank just west of the chute, and Molloy leaped ashore, as if impatient to kill his man and be done with it and on his way. Hannibal fished a flask from his pocket, then put it back unsipped. He looked very small and thin stepping ashore among the tangle of deadfalls, jetsam, and matted leaves.

The seconds conferred for a few minutes, then loaded both Mr. Byrne's pistols and held them out to their principals to choose.

Twenty yards, when paced off, looked appallingly short.

Rose's hand closed around January's.

A raven burst, squawking, from the stand of oaks that marked the entrance to Hitchins' Chute, like a vengeful ghost in the gray dawnlight.

Davis held up his handkerchief, and let it drop. The roar of the shots ringing out together was like a cannon.

Molloy spun like a kicked rag-doll, arms flung out, blood spraying from his head. His knees buckled and he dropped.

Hannibal stood for what seemed like nearly a minute as Gleet and Davis strode to the body; Mr. Quince sat down very suddenly on the nearest deadfall tree and put his head between his knees. In the gray morning mists, the pistol still in his hand, Hannibal looked absolutely alone as he lowered the weapon, then let it slip from his fingers. He turned, and walked as shakily as a drunken man to the edge of the river, where he fell to his knees and was violently sick.

EIGHTEEN

“Get your tools, boy.” A rough hand gripped January's arm. “The man needs a real doctor, not that quack.” The next moment Jubal Cain leaned over the rail and bellowed, “Send the skiff back, damn you!” to the men on shore.

Davis pressed a hand to the chest of the man at whose side he knelt, glanced across at the obviously useless Quince, and said something to Gleet. The slave-dealer grunted a reply but went to the skiff and began to row, while Davis got to his feet and walked over to Hannibal. From the engine-room, January could hear shouting beginning—including a whoop of joy from old Winslow, who was apparently the only man with faith in Hannibal's aim or luck. Mr. Souter came running down the steps in a panic, and January heard Tredgold gabbling, “What are we going to do . . . ?”

“Idiot,” grunted Cain, thrusting January along ahead of him to the bow-deck. His yellow fox-eyes glinted under the white slant of brows and his pockmarked face was grim. “Should have thought of that. . . . Guy! Marcus! Zack! Gonna need hands to carry that paddy bastard's corpse . . . Porter! Clay! And the rest of you trim the boat, god damn you! Nothing more on shore to see.”

The men of his coffle promptly retreated. Nobody else did.

“What the hell they gonna do for a pilot now?” demanded Gleet as he maneuvered the little boat against the rails. “We're losin' money every day, feedin' these damn niggers—”

“What the hell you think?” snarled Cain. “Man doesn't need to have nerves to guide a boat. Just brains enough not to get himself killed over yellow-headed bitches that aren't any better than they should be. Get in the boat, god damn you,” he added, half throwing his remaining men down into the skiff. As he climbed down after them, January saw Mrs. Fischer thrust her way through the little gathering of women at the promenade rail, staring out across the water at Molloy's body lying on the weedy bank.

January was the first ashore when the skiff scraped mud a few feet from the corpse. “Mr. Sefton is unwounded,” said Davis, who had returned to Molloy's side, probably to discourage the attentions of the ravens and buzzards that had already begun to circle overhead. “But deeply shaken, as any man of sensitive nature would be . . .”

Quince was crouched beside Hannibal, still rather greenish himself, proffering a bottle and spoon at which Hannibal was shaking his head with weary nausea. “I assure you,” Quince was saying, “that a decoction of boiled lettuce-root and honey is a sovereign remedy for complaints of the stomach.”

“Pray do not corrupt me with pallid brews and weak elixirs,” whispered Hannibal as January came near. “And the problem is not my stomach but my nerves . . . and probably my heart. Nothing will do for it but laudanum, and lots of it. . . .”

“Are you all right?” The fiddler was still shaking all over, as if with deathly cold despite the humid heat already thick in the air.

Hannibal responded with a cracked laugh. “As all right as any man is who has slain his first man.

Will all green Neptune's ocean

Wash this blood clean from my hand?

No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine,

Making the green one red. . . .”

“He would have killed you!” said Quince in considerable surprise.

“Ah, that makes it all right, then.”

“It does,” said January firmly, pulling Hannibal to his feet. In a lower voice, he added, “God knows what kind of mess it's going to make of Mrs. Fischer's plans to get her treasure back without anyone knowing. . . .” And was rewarded by his friend's sudden wan grin.

“Good God, I'd forgotten it was Molloy who knows where the money is. What do you bet she's searching his cabin even as we speak?” He tried to take a step and caught January's arm; his hand, when January felt it, was like ice, his face still gray and clammy with sweat. “Did you bet on me?”

“No!” said January, anger flaring in the aftermath of shock. “I didn't bet at all.”

“Pity. It might have made your search for your four thousand dollars superrogatory.” Hannibal shivered violently, clearly struggling to stay on his feet. He would have been easier to carry bodily—he weighed barely more than a hundred pounds—but he shook off January's offer to do so.

Cain, in the meantime, had gone with his little gang of slaves to the woods to cut saplings for a litter for the dead man, leaving, again, Davis alone beside the corpse. January bestowed Hannibal in the skiff and went back to kneel beside the Colonel in the mud.

“It was a splendid shot for a pistol.” Davis nodded down at the handkerchief he'd laid over Molloy's head. January lifted the big square of red-blotched white linen, looked down at the gaping crimson hole just beside the left eye. “In a similar situation I don't think I'd have had the resolution to aim for the head. It's far too easy to miss, even at twenty paces. Your master is a remarkable man.”

“He is indeed,” said January, thinking of what it had cost Hannibal, to stand out there and let an experienced marksman aim at him with a loaded gun.

“To be honest—if you will forgive my saying so—I did not think he had it in him.” Davis edged aside as January examined the wound. “I have commanded men, and am something of a judge of them. Mr. Sefton is not one I would have chosen for a mission requiring desperation or resolution.”

“He fools many people,” agreed January, sitting back a little on his heels. Then he leaned forward again, and with as matter-of-fact an air as he could muster, went on to press his hands to Molloy's chest and sides beneath his blue pea-jacket, to listen to Molloy's chest, and to extract the contents of Molloy's pockets. “Had Mr. Molloy near kin?” he asked, spreading out the temperance tract and rumpled copy of the Liberator that Molloy had clearly been tearing up for cigar-spills, and laying upon them the cigar-case, match-box, stateroom key, and thirty dollars in assorted coin and Bank of Louisiana banknotes that the pockets had yielded.

“Mr. Tredgold would know,” replied Davis, wrapping the items in the tracts and folding them together carefully. “He certainly never spoke of family, though of course I was not intimate with a person such as that.”

January felt around Molloy's waist and drew out a money-belt containing another five hundred dollars, a hundred of which was in the form of gold Spanish or Portuguese dollars. These were common currency on the river, of course . . . as were banknotes from the Bank of Louisiana, which was one of the largest establishments in New Orleans and was, of course, Molloy's own Bank. There was nothing else in the belt, nor in Molloy's pockets: no nails, no unexplained keys, no letters.

“There will be an inquiry, of course, in Mayersville.” Davis unfolded his lean form as Cain and his gang returned from the woods and began to lash together a makeshift bier. Interestingly—to January at any rate—violence and death seemed to have calmed the young Colonel's tic rather than exacerbated it. “I think there is ample evidence that it was Molloy who provoked the quarrel; perhaps sufficient reason to believe that had your master not accepted the challenge, Molloy might have resorted to less formal violence. You will not lose many days on your journey, and I assure you, I will debark also to testify to all that I have seen.”

“Sir,” said January, glancing across the water at the Silver Moon, “I appreciate that, and I thank you for all the help you have been. But I am almost certain now that the quarrel was engineered by others—by someone who sent messages to both Hannibal—my master,” he corrected himself quickly, “—to Miss Skippen, and to Mr. Molloy, with the intention of forcing a duel in order to get us, and Molloy, off the boat.”

“Surely you're not still claiming that Weems's ill-gotten goods are hidden somewhere aboard? Every trunk and crate was searched. . . .”

“Every trunk and crate was on that boat for days—long enough for Molloy, I am almost certain, to transfer the bulk of the gold and stock certificates to another hiding-place on board,” said January. “I think that's what Weems was looking for when he was killed. If this boat continues on without us, we lose all chance of finding the loot—and incidentally any chance of identifying once and for all Weems's murderer.”

Davis was silent, one finger curling around the ends of his wispy beard, studying January's face with thoughtful eyes. Beside them, Guy and 'Rodus gently lifted Molloy's body onto the bier, and the other slaves clustered around to load it into the skiff. January glanced back toward the Silver Moon, and saw Mrs. Fischer on the bow end of the boiler-deck, engaged in what looked like a furious three-way argument with Theodora Skippen and Thucydides.

The Colonel said slowly, “Well, I admit that there is something very strange going on aboard the Silver Moon—something that has so far cost two men their lives. I believe that a great number of people are lying about what happened the night before last, and about why you and your master came aboard the vessel in the first place. But as for delaying the entire boat so that it can be taken apart piece by piece . . .”