Barbara Hambly - Dead water

He could only take his ticket, get on board, and see what the situation was.

“As I suspected,” sighed Rose, “they don't have cabins for colored. I expect I'll have some company on the deck.” She nodded as a Junoesque matron in severe dark bombazine ascended the gangplank, a diminutive maid in tow, and behind them a train of trunks that would have embarrassed Marie Antoinette. “Unless of course she's the sort who likes to have her maid sleep on the floor beside her bed.”

January gritted his teeth at the thought of Rose sleeping on the deck with the servants. “I'll come down and join you whenever I can.”

“Bring food,” said Rose unsentimentally, and raised her face to kiss him. “Oh, good Heavens,” she added, cutting in over Granville's embarrassed apologies and effusive thanks, “Hannibal's found a girl-friend already. . . .”

January rolled his eyes, snatched up his and Hannibal's luggage, and strode to intercept his friend, who had indeed entered into what appeared to be a flirtation with a dainty blonde in a fantasia of silk rosebuds and lace. The young lady flung up her hands and trilled with silvery laughter: “Oh, Mr. Sefton, you will turn my poor little head!”

“My dearest Miss Skippen, how could Paris hold himself back from complimenting Helen?” Hannibal offered his hand to help her around the two massive crates that were just being off-loaded from a dray. She leaned on his arm, blond curls brushing the shoulder of his coat. “How could Petrarch remain silent when Laura passed him by? Nymph of the downward smile and sidelong glance/ in what diviner moments of the day / art thou most lovely? A man would have to be more, or less, than man, to—”

“You get your hands away from her, pig of an Orangeman!” bellowed a voice just as January reached them. A man came storming down the gangplank of the Silver Moon, nearly January's height and, like January, massive through the shoulders beneath the blue pea-jacket of the vessel's pilot. “I know your like!” The red ruff of his side-whiskers bristled almost straight out from the flushed red moon of his face. “Sneerin' bastards—and you!” he added, whirling on the blond lady, who had both lace-gloved hands pressed to her rosebud mouth in guilty shock. “Onto the boat with ye, and don't you go believin' the likes of a cozening Orangeman who'd rob old women of their bread, an' turn orphan children out into the road! You keep away from her.” He thrust a savage finger almost into Hannibal's face. “You keep away from her or, Kevin Molloy's tellin' you now, it'll be the worse for you!”

The bespectacled owner of the boat had already leaped down from the deck and was hurrying to break up what looked like a serious affray, but the pilot turned on his heel, seized the blond girl by the arm, and shoved her away in the direction of the boat, followed by three porters hauling trunks, hatboxes, and valises, with a sullen slave-girl bringing up the rear.

“Well,” said January, coming up beside the still-shaken Hannibal, “getting the pilot of the boat set against you: that'll help things.”

“And as sterling an example of bog-Irish manhood as ever graced my homeland by his departure.” Hannibal picked up his violin-case, which had been dropped when Molloy had shoved him. “I understand pilots are the true rulers of the steamboats—I hope this isn't going to get me dropped overboard some night.” He waited until Molloy had hustled Miss Skippen up the stairway that led from the wide bow-deck up to the boiler-deck above before venturing up the gangway himself, January at his heels.

Because the deck-hands were lowering the last of the cargo—including Miss Skippen's trunks—into the hold, a small crowd had gathered on the apron of the boat at the bow, waiting to pass and go up the stairs. The slave-dealer Ned Gleet was just chaining his four female slaves to rings set in the wall of what was called the promenade, the narrow outside corridor that ran down both sides of the 'tween-decks housing from bow to stern. The men were chained starboard, the women along the port, and one of the young planters who was traveling up-river had stopped to watch. Gleet caught his eye and winked: “She's a beauty, ain't she?” And he tweaked the chin of the girl he was chaining, the beautiful girl January had noticed before, who had stared at Gleet with such loathing. “She's yours for a thousand dollars.”

The young man flushed in the paling torchlight and looked hastily aside. But he didn't move off. Gleet's sly smile widened.

“Worth every dime of it,” he coaxed. “Sixteen years old . . .” His big hand tugged off her tignon, releasing a soft cloud of dark-brown hair over her shoulders. “Come up closer and have a look. She's a prime one.” And he dragged her head back around when she would have turned her face away, her expression wooden but for the tears of shame in her eyes. “Now, you tell me if you've ever seen one half so sweet, for a thousand or fifteen hundred.”

The young planter stammered, “I— She's very lovely, of course, sir, but . . .”

“But you got your daddy's money, and can't spend it?” Gleet nodded understandingly, his sharp blue glance taking in the sweat that stood out on the youth's forehead. “But that's the great thing about a gal like this, you see. You don't like her, you can sell her again, and not a penny the worse. Here—feel of her if you don't believe me.” With a quick move he tore open the front of the girl's dress and pulled it back over her shoulders, leaving her breasts bare in the torchlight. “Go ahead, feel of her. Tell me if you ain't felt titties as hard as those in all your born days.”

Hannibal slipped through the crowd like a ferret and climbed the stair. January followed. The two men were silent as they walked down the long upper promenade on the starboard side of the boiler-deck, past the shut doors of the staterooms to the one Hannibal had been given, three from the stern. The young steward in his white coat was there, setting out a carafe of water and a glass: “Let me know if there's anything you need, sir. My name's Thu; I been with Mr. Tredgold on the Silver Moon three-four years now. You're on a good boat.”

“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.