Barbara Hambly - 04 Sold Down the River

"Drink your coffee." January set the tray on Hannibal's knees, which were so thin they barely lifted above the level of the bunk's meager mattress. "Sir."

He glanced around the men's cabin, confirming his original observation that they were alone. To Fourchet he said, "As someone who's known Monsieur Sefton for two years, I can assure you he's usually less inebriated than he seems. I don't think we need fear his giving away any secrets." Unless, he thought, he gets really neck-shot-something Hannibal did seldom, but did with fiendish timing for those few occasions on which it was most important that he be sober. Fourchet regarded him with an arctic eye. "I don't imagine you would have been stupid enough to propose an alliance with someone you believed to be as untrustworthy as most drunkards are," he said. "But considering the pains we've taken to arrange a story, as you termed it last night, I'm at a loss to think of a convincing reason for me to offer the shelter of my roof to a sodden reprobate. No matter how desperately he counterfeits sickness."

Hannibal coughed, with a violence and a gluey, glottal note to it that, January thought uneasily, were no counterfeit. The wasting effects of his consumption seemed to have abated with the cooler weather, but with his shirt open and his long hair trailing loose from its ribbon over his shoulders, he still looked like a ghost just back from a night on the tiles. When he regained his breath he said, "Easy. I will have done you a great service, which you feel obliged to repay by taking me in when I'm stricken ill."

"What service? You can't even do up your bootlaces," Fourchet said.

"Then it's fortunate you don't need bootlaces done up. However, I will do you the service of telling you that the gentleman who arranged a half-hour or so ago to go halves with you in the purchase of Chickasaw lands has no more option to title on those lands than I have option to title on the Parthenon of Athens."

Fourchet's eyes widened in alarm. "How do you know what Monsieur LaBarre and I discussed?

You haven't been out of this room! "

"I saw you pass the door deep in conversation with him a few minutes ago, and I know there's only one thing Slinky LaBarre holds deep conversations about with strangers, and that's a tract of territory along the Arkansas River that the government is about to negotiate from the tribes. I hope you didn't give him a draft."

The planter said nothing for a time, only tightened his jaw as if chewing something tough and rancid tasting. January was familiar with the tic. "And what do you know about it?" Fourchet demanded at length.

"Only what I've heard about Slinky from other gamblers, cheats, river pirates, and opium-sodden reprobates in the saloons." Hannibal's voice weakened and he leaned his back against the pillows;

January could see the flecks of blood that tipped his mustache hairs. "I'll think of some other service for me to do you if that doesn't suit: the location of one of Lafitte's caches of treasure, perhaps? Or it could be I have title to Chickasaw land myself."

"My family knows how I feel about drunkards and opium-eaters." The savage loathing in Fourchet's voice was deeper than any disgust or contempt. "When we go ashore at Triomphe I'll thank you to restrict your habits to something that can be accounted for by illness, not dissipation."

"I'll commence practicing my coughing immediately." Hannibal gave him the ghost of a military salute. Mouth almost square-cornered with distaste, the planter resumed his hat and made to go.

January said, "If you could spare us a few more minutes of your time, sir?"

Fourchet glanced pointedly at the door, as if to remind him that anyone could enter at any time.

This wasn't, January knew, actually likely. No one in their right mind would linger in the passenger cabins of a small steamboat if they didn't have to.

Like most stern-wheelers, the Belle Dame was a smallish boat of shallow draft, and what it lost in the smallness of its hold space was made up out of the cabins, galley, staterooms, and saloon. The men's cabin was narrow and cramped, odorous from the proximity of the galley, and Spartan at best. Despite its distance from the boiler room, the walls shuddered with the regular thudding pulse of the engine. Trunks, valises, and portmanteaux that either wouldn't fit in the hold or would be required before many hours had passed heaped the floor in front of and beside the bunks. Most passengers sought the distractions of cards in the saloon, or braved the chill on the hurricane deck above.

Fourchet turned back, nostrils flared with impatience as Hannibal set down his untasted coffee and went into a paroxysm of coughing. "For what?"

"A little information." January knelt, and dug through the valise for the first laudanum bottle he could lay hands on. He had to hold it steady while his friend drank. "Who the members of your household are. Where they were on the night of the fire in the sugar-mill, and when the mule barn caught fire. Who besides Gilles had the keys to the cellaret the cognac was in, and the keys to the mill."

The planter looked about to snap some stricture about the medicine, but drew a breath instead, as if forcibly reminding himself to keep his own affairs in focus. "You've seen Cornwallis," he said at last. "He's my valet, he's been with me about six years. He came warranted honest and sober but I suspect they wanted to get rid of him for some reason, for in the end they let him go for seven-fifty. My son Esteban's valet is Agamemnon-a creeping, sneaking, prissy catamite if you ask me-and Kiki's the cook. The maids are Ariadne and Henna. My son Robert's man and his wife's maid they took with them to Paris, and they weren't even present when the trouble started.

Doucette does the sewing. There's Ti-Jeanne the washerwoman, but she wouldn't have had access to the keys of the cellaret, let alone the-"

"I didn't mean the servants," said January quietly. "I mean your family. The people who stand to profit from your death."

The planter's face flamed. "By God, if I have to stand here and take this from a-"

"You don't, sir," said January steadily. "But if your wife was with child, and an accoucheur asked after her health, would you keep it from him if she'd had three miscarriages in the past three years?"

Fourchet, who had opened his mouth to shout him down, checked, and closed it again, listening in simmering silence.

"Would you keep silent about her passing blood, or fainting? I'm a doctor, M'sieu." Well, a surgeon, anyway, he thought, but Fourchet didn't have to know that. "I've seen men who do all this and more, and in so doing endanger the lives of those they love by their unwillingness to tell the complete truth."

Footfalls clumped outside the door. January knelt at once and pretended to be rearranging something in Hannibal's valise. Since the cabin did not go all the way through the width of the boat, but backed its inner end onto the wall of one of the staterooms, Fourchet left it entirely, passing in the doorway the man who entered, a stout fair gentleman who nodded a friendly greeting to him and was roundly snubbed.

Nothing discomposed, the newcomer nodded to Hannibal. He asked, "Is all well with the Herr?"

Hannibal lifted a hand in assent and replied in the German in which he'd been addressed. "I'm better now, thank you."

The German gentleman went to his own bunk and fetched a greatcoat. "Might I ask where you are bound, sir? You seem in no fit case to travel."

"St. Louis," said Hannibal faintly. "If I make it so far."

"T'cha, that is not good." The stranger divided his worried glance between Hannibal and January.

"Please let me know if I may be of any assistance."

"Fool," muttered Fourchet after the German left. "That's the kind of man who ends up with parasites on his hands and in his house for months, sucking him dry." He had kindled a cigar while on deck, chewing it now angrily as he stared down at the fiddler lying on his bunk. "And serve him right. "