Barbara Hambly - Dead water

In this enterprise January, Jim, and the other valets were pressed into service, while the deck-passengers stood around and gaped at the possessions of their betters, the white men grumbled and snarled, and Mrs. Tredgold protested vociferously that no one was going to violate the sanctity of her baggage. Hannibal—the only white man to actually assist with moving the luggage—explained to them that it was believed that Weems might have abstracted something from one of the pieces of luggage on board, and Davis—who seemed to have taken over the investigation by sheer force of will—ended the discussion by announcing, “Justice must be served.”

A man definitely destined for politics, thought January.

Molloy, clearly baffled at how his attempt to rid the boat of both Hannibal and January had failed, kept to the pilot-house during the proceedings.

Mrs. Fischer did not even emerge from her stateroom.

January was one of the men working the crane at the bow hatch, so he was able to watch the little clumps of passengers along the upper-deck railing, as well as the lantern-lit square of the dark hold below. Thucydides coordinated the shifting of the trunks in the hold, as deck-hands brought them to the crane, lifted them out to be checked, then lowered them to be replaced; he was assisted by 'Rodus and two other slaves of Cain's coffle, Marcus and Guy. On the deck itself, Mr. Tredgold was in charge. Davis chalked a line and appointed Nick the barkeep to make sure nobody crossed it except the owner of the trunk—it was Sophie who brought Mrs. Fischer's luggage keys.

“The specie was taken out of the trunks, all right,” murmured January as he, Hannibal, and Jim paused to lean on the still-netted load of the Roberson trunks. “All of it, apparently.”

“It must have been scattered among dozens, you know,” panted the fiddler. “We haven't seen an empty trunk yet. Yes, Molloy had time to get at the luggage while it was being off-loaded at Horsehead Bar—when all the men were out of the way—but he'd have to have known exactly which trunks to open, and even at that would have to have worked very fast.”

“If he had an accomplice—or more than one—it would have gone quicker,” responded January thoughtfully. “But that theory brings its own problems.” He nodded back up toward the pilot-house, visible above the arcade that shaded the wide upper-deck apron at the top of the stairs. “However Molloy managed it, he isn't worried about the trunks. He's worried about us —about trying to get us off the boat. But not the trunks. And as you notice, Mrs. Fischer isn't, either.”

“And that worries me .” Hannibal yanked the netting back, helped January and Jim skid two green canvas trunks with brass corners, an old wooden trunk with iron strapping, and a crate that proved to contain dishes onto the deck, where Mr. Roberson waited with the keys. “Do we need to concern ourselves with a second gang under Molloy's command as well as Christmas's boys, or is there something here we're not seeing?”

January only shook his head. Down in the hold, he saw Thu and 'Rodus pause in their work and trade a low-voiced joke, and laugh; then Thu went back to his notebook and his list. From the upper deck, Mrs. Roberson called down, “Mr. Roberson, you need not trouble yourself with that and with mounting guard, too. I can deal with the keys.”

Roberson shaded his eyes against the afternoon sun and called back up, “It's quite all right, Mrs. Roberson,” and handed his rifle to Davis—Lockhart, Byrne, Dodd (who was likelier to accidentally shoot one of the deck-hands than an attacking river-pirate), and Cain stood with rifles, surveying the green, silent bank. Considering the startling cache of pornographic prints that Davis unearthed from Roberson's trunk a moment later, the Kentucky planter's attitude was understandable.

Davis's mouth thinned to a needle-scratch of disapproval, and his tic twitched the side of his face a number of times, but he said nothing. Tucked among the shirts, coats, and stockings were also a number of packets of cheap glass jewelry so garish that it could not possibly be intended for the subdued and elegant Mrs. Roberson: some of the housemaids on Mimosa Plantation, January reflected cynically, were going to get new earbobs when Marse got home.

Turning to say as much to Jim, January thought he glimpsed—but wasn't sure—the movement of a skirt down in the shadows of the hold. It was only on the edge of the darkness, and gone like the flicker one sometimes sees at the corner of one's eye. . . .

January thought, She's there.

Queen Régine.

And what did SHE see last night? What does she know?

As January had guessed, Mrs. Fischer's numerous trunks contained nothing but clothes and jewelry—extremely opulent, vividly colorful, and completely at odds with her ladylike and withdrawn exterior—and a number of books printed in Paris or Amsterdam, with titles like The Flogging-Block, Confessions of a Lady of Leisure, and The Lustful Turk. None of the trunks bearing her name seemed disordered or incompletely packed. Sophie turned her shoulder away from Hannibal when he spoke to her, and as she returned up the stair hesitated to greet Rose. . . .

“God knows what La Pécheresse has been telling her about the three of us,” remarked Hannibal under his breath. “Or told her cronies in the Parlor, for that matter. Look how La Tredgold has been watching every move I make.”

Sophie and Rose stepped aside as Molloy swaggered down the stair and over to Davis. “When the hell you going to be done playing about here and let me get my deck-hands back to their work? We can't stay here keepin' the fires drawn for all the night!”

“We shall remain,” retorted Davis, glaring coldly down his nose at the pilot, “as long as it takes to ascertain once and for all who is lying and who is speaking the truth.”

“ What is truth, asked Pilate, and washed his hands.” Hannibal went forward to start hauling the trunks back to be lowered into the hold again, and replaced by others. “I have my pick-locks on hand for those items addressed to people not on the boat, though I'm sure that will clinch what remains of my reputation. All I can say is, we'd better find some thing in one of these trunks, or I suspect we're both going to hear about it from the sheriff at Mayersville.”

Mr. Quince's single trunk contained numerous identical sets of shirts and underclothing, innumerable Swedenborgian tracts, fifty back issues of the Liberator, a dozen bottles of “Vegetarian Tonic,” and a dozen more of Kendal Black Drop, a quadruple-strength opium tincture.

Theodora Skippen's held enormous quantities of frilled night-dresses, silk stockings, fifteen gold watches, twenty-seven men's gold signet-rings, four gold and seven silver cigar cases (two with cigars), no two of anything engraved with the same initials.

Kelsey Lundy's yielded, among a few shirts and a spare pair of boots, two Bibles, several Abolitionist pamphlets, four copies of the Liberator, three bottles of laudanum, and a packet of sulfate of zinc, which January recognized as a powerful emetic.

No trunk, crate, or box examined held either banknotes, the packets of securities Granville had spoken of, or gold.

FIFTEEN

“La Pécheresse couldn't possibly have managed to spend four million dollars all in one afternoon before she left New Orleans, could she?”

Hannibal trailed January down the starboard promenade as Thucydides locked up the hold door and the hatch under Davis's watchful eye. The two coffles of slaves, having spent the forenoon poling the Silver Moon out of the chute and the mid-afternoon dragging luggage around, were now being ordered to assist in the task of helping the exhausted deck-hands lug wood to the furnaces to get steam up again, a process that would take until nearly dawn.