Barbara Hambly - Dead water

“Good God, the average Paddy can smell an Orangeman even when he's addressing them—as I was—in purest poacher's Gaelic. It's an instinct. Like you being able to look at Jim Pemberton and say, Oh, his grandmother was Senegalese, or at Thucydides and say, Oh, yes, mostly Fulani . I can't imagine how you do that.”

“And for me it's like telling an Italian from a Swede.” January shrugged. “The dealers do that, too, you know. Gleet could probably tell you how much European blood each of his slaves has, and what tribe the African ancestors came from.”

“Remind me never to ask him.” Hannibal shivered. “There are men who strike one as throwbacks straight to Sodom and Gomorrah; they make one understand God's use of fire and brimstone. There they go,” he added, touching January's sleeve. Horses blowing and sweating, the cab and the dray emerged from the top of Silver Street and swung around the edge of the plaza toward Main Street. January and Hannibal loafed purposefully behind.

Unlike New Orleans, Natchez was a town where a wealthy man could live quite comfortably all year round. The Spanish had done so, as had the English Tories who had fled there rather than remain with the rebellious Atlantic seaboard colonies forty-five years before. Across the river, the rich black delta soil grew the finest cotton in the New World, with the cotton-lands in back of the bluffs on the Mississippi side almost as fertile. The houses here were big, lush, and surrounded by gardens and orchards; the hotels gracious, welcoming the merchants who came to partake of the wealth. The handsome white edifice into whose driveway the cab turned would not have been out of place in London, except for its wider yard and more opulent greenery. The dray entered a side-street, January and Hannibal crossing to follow.

“You think they saw us?” Hannibal glanced back at the mustard-colored figure helping the tall, brown-clothed lady down from the cab.

“They might have. But everyone from the boat, almost, is ashore. We're hardly the only ones.”

“Yes, but we're probably the only ones who followed them to this hotel.”

“Since I never set eyes on Weems in New Orleans before Monday morning—and since you have no connection with the Bank of Louisiana at all—there's no reason he should take any notice of us.”

Through the yard gates January could see the draymen unloading the two trunks, handling them as if they were, indeed, heavy with gold. By the kitchen door—which was in the rear of the hotel building itself, American fashion, and not in separate quarters at the far end of the yard, a practice that always struck January as both unsanitary and dangerous—a laundress and a cook sat in the shade, smoking pipes and talking in a leisurely manner that made him want to send the manager out to thrash them both back to work.

“They look settled for the day,” whispered Hannibal as he and January ducked back out of sight around the fence.

“Let's give them fifteen minutes,” replied January—a remark he later heartily regretted. For fifteen minutes by January's silver French watch they listened to the account of the family argument that had surrounded the deathbed of the cook's grandmother, which rivaled any stage melodrama January had ever witnessed in violence, greed, and sheer bad taste. When at the end of that time the tale hadn't even reached Grandma's death ( “. . . so she said, What's more, you wasn't even my son, let alone his; I borrowed you from this friend of mine when you was a baby to get your grandpa to marry me . . .” ) Hannibal fished through his pockets for his card-case, from which he extracted a neat slip of pasteboard:

Mr. Oliver Weems

Brinton House——New Orleans

Hannibal had a fine collection of other people's cards, and never wasted the opportunity to add to it.

“They're probably gone by this time,” he said. He briefly jingled the pick-locks in his coat pocket, then led the way around to the front of the Imperial Hotel again, January falling respectfully into step behind. The cab that had brought Weems and Mrs. Fischer certainly no longer stood in the drive; January ventured to hope that they could simply cross through the lobby and into the yard, where the porters, seeing the card, would allow Hannibal to open the trunks on pretext of needing something inside.

And then, with luck, thought January, we can find an officer of the law, present Granville's documents, and head back to New Orleans by the next boat. . . .

Only one of his three wishes was granted.

“Are you Mr. Hannibal Sefton of New Orleans?”

Hannibal stopped in surprise at the question, asked by a youngish, squint-eyed man in a rough woolen coat who stepped from the hotel doors as he and January mounted the steps.

“I am.” The information was readily checkable on the boat, though January later realized that at this point either Hannibal should have lied or the two of them should have immediately turned tail and dashed in opposite directions to divide pursuit. . . .

“And is this your man Ben?”

“Yes.”

“Then I place you under arrest,” said the newcomer, opening his lapel to reveal the badge of a deputy sheriff of Adams County. “For slave-stealing.”

“This is absurd.” Hannibal tugged his arm protestingly from Deputy Rees's grip as the deputy escorted him down Commerce Street toward the jail. “I demand to be confronted by my accuser!”

“You will be.” The deputy's grip on his arm didn't slack, though the man didn't spare more than a glance back at January to see that he was following. A reasonable assumption of docility, January reflected bitterly, given a fugitive black man's chances if an alarm was raised, in the upper town at least. “That feller Granville said he'd be back here at two, to meet with Sheriff Gridley and give evidence.”

Weems, January reflected dourly, seemed to have made as free about lifting Hubert Granville's cards as Hannibal had about helping himself to one of Weems's. The deputy thrust Hannibal through the gate of a dusty yard behind a brick building. In the middle of the yard a hard-jawed young man was chaining a slave to the six-foot timber in the center of the yard that served as a whipping-post. “Tom, lock up Sambo here,” Rees ordered with a jerk of his head, and Tom fastened the final manacle to the chained slave's wrist and came to grab January's arm.

“This way, Chimney-Chops.” Tom thrust January toward the slave jail at the back of the yard, a brick building whose only windows were a frieze of gaps in the brickwork up under the eaves.

“And I demand to see the warrant issued for my arrest,” added Hannibal as Rees pushed him toward the rear door of the police station. He didn't trade so much as a nod with January, but January knew his friend had the wits to realize that the deputy was not the person to be shown Granville's letter demanding cooperation—not until they knew beyond the shadow of a doubt what was in those trunks.

Even in that event, January would have been unwilling to risk it: no judge could have been found to issue a warrant in the fifteen minutes between Weems's arrival at the Imperial Hotel and Hannibal's arrest. Therefore, Deputy Rees had almost certainly been bribed.

Undoubtedly with Jubal Cain's four hundred blackmailed dollars—with enough left over for lunch.

“You'll see it when the sheriff gets here,” said Rees as they vanished inside, confirming January's guess. January himself, he was well aware, was only an adjunct to the whole process—merely stolen property to be secured until those who were legally human determined guilt or innocence.

So he had to force himself silent as he was walked across the yard, past the man chained at the whipping-post, to the door of the slave-jail. Tom keyed open the padlock. Trapped heat, a cloud of flies, and the stench of a latrine-bucket rolled out like the breath of Hell.