Barbara Hambly - Dead water

Rose murmured, “Back here.” The candle's light touched a blanket folded in a little niche between two crates of FINEST CHINA——STAFFORDSHIRE——ENGLAND——FRAGILE. A leather valise lay near it; kneeling, January opened it with a fast-beating heart, as if he expected to find a rattlesnake inside. But within, thickly wrapped in sacking, he found a hunk of cheese the size of his own enormous fist, a sack of cornmeal and another of peanuts, and a half-dozen dried apples.

A smaller bundle yielded a juju-bag: black flannel, ashes, the burnt claw of a wren, pins. With it were packets of herbs—holding the candle close, he identified the brittle, half-crushed leaves and roots in one twist of newspaper as Jack-in-the-Pulpit, and in the other as Christmas rose.

Both deadly poisons.

He looked at the newspaper. The French edition of the New Orleans Bee . Saturday's.

The darkness seemed to be breathing down his back. The thought of coming back here tonight—picking the locks on the passway door if he could manage to get five minutes alone in the busy passway and trying to search what trunks they could open—filled him with queasy dread. Around him in the dark he seemed to feel the water pressing against the frail tarred wood of the hold, the weight of the boat towering over his head. He felt reminded that the steamboats were nothing more than barns on rafts with furnaces in their bellies; he couldn't imagine how anyone could sleep in this darkness, under the water, listening to the current of the mightiest river in the world surging by.

He backed away from the cubby-hole, signed to Rose silently to show him the trunks she hadn't so far had time to see. They moved from one to the next, January noting addresses and names, comparing the handwritting with the letter Granville had given him, and the shopping-list— 15 yd pink lustring, 60 yds blond lace, 4 pr silk stockings, soap —that Sophie had let Rose take to make a note of something to herself on the back. “Sophie's already contrite over her outburst against Madame last night,” whispered Rose. “She begged me this morning not to repeat any of what she said, about Mr. Weems. She was angry, she said, but of course Madame has had so difficult and painful a life, and Mr. Weems treats her so kindly—I take it Madame expressed proper shock and sympathy over Sophie's experience last night. The world is terribly unkind to women who must fend for themselves.”

“I'll put my money on Mrs. Fischer against the world any day of the week,” muttered January, remembering the hard glint in the woman's dark eye, as she'd strolled the deck with Weems, and the masterful set of her red mouth. “Which,” he added bitterly, “I seem to have done. Here, you were a schoolmistress, you must have learned all the ways girls fake handwriting. Does this look like . . . ?”

Daylight spilled briefly across the ceiling of the hold, vanished again with the shutting of the door.

Silence, then the cautious creak of footsteps on the deck.

January blew out the candle in that first instant, drew Rose behind a stack of crates. Threads of gold light outlined a trunk, glinted on the brasswork of a box-corner, then vanished suddenly. But the darkness was full of another living presence, watching and waiting. Listening. January felt that his own breathing, and the thudding of his heart, were audible for the length of the hold. Something scraped behind him, a furtive skittering—rats, probably, but he startled nearly out of his skin.

Anyone with any business in the hold would have called out, Who's there?

But only silence met him, silence that waited for him to make the first sound.

January touched Rose's shoulder, eased gently behind the crates, moving in the direction of the bow-deck door. The light he'd seen had been to the left of the door, and he edged right, feeling the wood of crates, the leather of trunks. Circling around the unseen intruder and hoping she—or he—wasn't doing the same. They'd gone what felt like miles when the door opened again and daylight streamed into the hold, daylight and the yellow glare of a lantern as the steward Thucydides came down the steps. “Who's in there?” he called out, holding the lantern high, and January, not wanting to have questions asked and attention brought to him, crouched behind the canvas bales of osnaberg cloth and waited until the steward had advanced into the darkness.

“Who's there?”

From the back of the hold came a sudden sharp clank. Thu turned in that direction and January caught Rose's wrist to make a dash for the door, only to be forestalled by another dark form breaking from cover, pelting behind Thu and up the steps to the deck. From where he and Rose crouched, January could see nothing besides that it was a woman, a frothy white flash of petticoat under pale, vanishing skirts. Thu cursed and followed, and January drew Rose quickly to the doorway, opening it and slipping out, listening for a moment before scrambling up the steep steps to the deck. He held his breath, waiting for someone to call out, What you doin' down there, nigger? But nobody did. Looking neither to the right nor the left, he led the way around the corner and down the promenade deck again, and back to the stern.

Rose gasped, “Whew!” as they dropped into their niche among the wood-piles. Then she giggled like a schoolgirl who's gotten away with a prank, and January, too, was overcome with the exhilarating urge to laugh.

“It isn't funny,” he told her. “We could have been put off the boat—they'd never think we weren't down there to steal, especially since someone I could mention still has pick-locks in her pocket.”

“Did you get a look at her?”

January shook his head. “I was too busy trying to crawl under the floorboards. She was white, though—I don't think there's a black woman on this boat wears that many petticoats. . . .”

Sabrine, the ladies'-maid to Mrs. Roberson and her daughters, passed across the front of their niche, stepping daintily aside to avoid puddled water and showing half a dozen foamy petticoats handed down from her mistresses. January and Rose had to press their hands over their mouths to keep from laughing out loud, and clung to each other in a paroxsym of near-suffocation with mirth.

“It isn't funny,” January repeated when he could manage to speak again. “Now they'll keep a tight watch on the hold, and we're never going to get down there. . . .”

“ And the gates of Hell shall not prevail against us . . . . I'm sorry,” added Rose. “I'm obviously not taking this seriously enough. But if . . .”

Footsteps creaked on the stair above them, and a quiet voice called out, “Mr. Bredon . . .”

And past the wood-pile, January saw the slave-dealer Jubal Cain flinch and turn, as if he had been shot.

The promenade was quiet, and nearly empty; Cain reached the bottom of the stairs in two long strides, as the speaker came down. From their place of concealment under the stair and behind the wood, January could see the mustard-colored check of Oliver Weems's trouser-leg—all that he could see, now, of either man.

“It is Judas Bredon, isn't it?” asked Weems, his voice very quiet now. “From the . . .”

“I don't know what the hell you're talking about.” Cain's deep voice was like iron. “Or who the hell you are.”

“Probably not.” Weems continued his descent, out of January's sight. “But I know who you are. Or who you were before you started running slaves for a living.” And January thought—though over the throb of the engines, and the voices of the men on the bow-deck, poling the Silver Moon away from the levee, it was difficult to tell—that he heard the rustle of paper, passed perhaps from hand to hand.