Barbara Hambly - Dead water

By the glare of armloads of wood burning aloft in iron cressets, January watched stevedores heave the last of the luggage on board, and stack cords of logs for the ever-hungry furnaces. Soot from the tall chimney stacks gushed into the sullen sky above the levee. Now and then showers of sparks would whirl upward, only the height of the stacks preventing them from igniting the boats themselves. On the deck of the Silver Moon a nervous little gentleman with a pot belly and octagonal spectacles fussily marshalled the deck-hands—the owner, January guessed. Beside him, a tall, slim young man in a steward's white coat read from a notebook and called out to the porters: “Leave that trunk on the deck, Mr. Purlie gettin' off at Donaldsonville. Those go in the hold, Colonel Davis goin' on with us to Memphis this time. . . .”

January shifted Hannibal's valise, and his own small satchel, in his hand.

“All the way through to Memphis,” requested Hannibal of the clerk at the steamboat office window. The man took the Bank of Louisiana notes without question. January had to admit he'd been holding his breath.

“Hell, don't you piss around sellin' your niggers here and there along the river,” boomed a voice near-by. “Niggers are sky-high in St. Louis, fourteen hundred, fifteen hundred for prime bucks. . . .”

January turned and saw the speaker, bow-legged and broad-shouldered, his shortness making him look like an animate barrel, with tobacco-stains in his yellow mustache and a mouth like the hack of an ax. He jabbed a finger at another man, then gestured back to the line behind him: five men, four women, linked together by hanks of chain.

Scared, some of them, looking around in the sickly yellow of the smoke-fouled dawn. In Virginia and Kentucky, January knew, sluggards and troublemakers were threatened by their masters with being “sold down the river” to the cane plantations—and, he reflected, remembering his own childhood, they were right to fear. Three of the men clutched little bundles of clothing done up in bandannas, all they'd been able to carry from Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah, still seasick from the voyage and aching with grief for friends and family they'd never see again. One woman clutched a small child to her side. Another, a girl with the fair-skinned quadroon beauty prized by so many white men, stared at the slave-dealer with naked hatred in her eyes.

“They got more and more land goin' for cotton up there, and they'll pay damn near anythin' for hands to work it. You can't go wrong with St. Louis, or my name ain't Ned Gleet!”

January turned away, sick with the sickness of helplessness, rage, and disgust, and looked around for Rose. He glimpsed her between the brick arches of the market buildings that stretched along the levee downstream of the Place des Armes, nearly out of sight in the shadows. She was dressed like the market-women who were just beginning to make their appearance, with their baskets of roses and oranges: a short red skirt and a petticoat of blue-and-orange calico, a white blouse and a short red corduroy jacket, a gay bandanna hiding her hair. With her spectacles she looked like an intellectual gypsy. With a glance back at Hannibal, who was still chatting with the clerk, January crossed to her, and as he drew close he saw Hubert Granville half-concealed behind the pillar, looking out into the square.

“That's Weems.” Granville pointed, and January turned to see a small, dapper gentleman in a full-skirted coat of rust-colored wool and a very unfortunate silk waistcoat of purple and mustard. The bank manager was arguing about something with the pot-bellied owner. The slender steward intervened, consulting his notebook, pointing up at the staterooms that ranged both sides of the upper, or boiler, deck. “Here's the sample of his handwriting you asked for,” Granville told January.

January pocketed the folded note the banker offered him, to compare against the labels of every trunk and box in the hold, if and when he could manage to sneak down there. That this would be difficult, he guessed—that sleek, efficient young steward might prove to be either venal or careless or both, but somehow January doubted it. Nor would he know until he was on board how many ways there were into the cargo-hold, and whose work-stations overlooked them. Through hard experience he had learned that trying to plan ahead without information led only to madness, especially in a situation with so many tiny variables.

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.