Barbara Hambly - Dead water

“Ourselves included.” The incomparable smell of coffee filled the quiet gloom as Rose returned with a tray. The coffee would have been warming in the pantry, awaiting his return from Congo Square—it seemed like another lifetime. Rose made excellent coffee, though she was an otherwise execrable cook. It crossed January's mind that without the assistance of the hired freedwoman Abigail and Abigail's daughter, Rose would be quickly swallowed up by the drudgery of cleaning, cooking, and endless sewing that occupied the time of most women who kept house.

Until, of course, the house itself was foreclosed.

His hand shook a little as he took the coffee cup she offered. One bite told him that the sweet biscuits that accompanied it had been made by Abigail, not Rose.

“How much money are we talking about?” Rose seated herself again. “And in what form? How many trunks are we looking for?”

“Three or four at least,” said Granville, turning a little to speak to her. “Maybe as many as ten.” Having set up four of his former free colored mistresses in business, reflected January, at least Granville didn't suffer from the common white man's delusion that women of color—or women in general—were slightly incompetent. “He stole nearly four million dollars, of which about a hundred thousand was in gold.”

Rose's eyebrows shot up. “That's a lot of gold.”

“About six hundred pounds of it,” Granville replied. “The rest is in notes and drafts on other banks—including the Bank of Pennsylvania, which as you know received a great deal of the Federal gold—and the Bank of England. There are also sight-drafts on a number of the plantations hereabouts against next winter's crop. Any single trunk containing the gold would be too heavy to lift, so it has to be spread out among several, padded up with the paper.”

“You say Weems came to you with the highest recommendations,” said January. “From whom? What do you know about the man? Where is he from?”

“Philadelphia,” said Granville like a New Yorker: Philadelphier, a trick of speech that made January wonder whether there was a still-more-brotherly town of Philadelphiest somewhere even farther north. “He was a clerk when I was vice-president of the Broadway Bank and Trust, and worked his way up after I was sent down here. Everyone spoke highly of his abilities.”

Granville scowled, as if everyone had conspired to lie and would, if he had anything to say in the matter, suffer the consequences.

“It probably paid him to have abilities when the whole country's economic system wasn't being run by wildcat private banks,” remarked January dryly. Granville opened his mouth to protest—the Bank of Louisiana, though private, had been chartered by the State—and January asked, “Drink?”

Granville's square face darkened, and he looked as if he were about to demand what the hell business it was of January's. Then he subsided a little, like porridge coming off the boil, and sipped his coffee. “I've seen Weems look down his nose at drunkards on the street,” he answered. “I've never seen him go into a public house. But I don't keep company with the man, so in fact I don't know whether he drinks or not.”

“Women?”

Again Granville's beady eyes flashed at the suggestion that an employee of his bank would chase trollops up and down Gallatin Street, but since that employee had almost certainly walked off with large sums of the bank's money, there wasn't a great deal he could be self-righteous about. “He was engaged to the daughter of the President of the Jersey Trust Bank,” he said slowly. “She married someone else. That's when he came here. He looks down upon women as he looks down upon drunkards. Looks down on a great many things, for a man who's only five feet five inches tall himself.” Granville gave out a bearlike rumbling guffaw. “Nor does he gamble, beyond a hand or two of whist. He often said how he despised waste and wastrels.”

“Which must have made it easier,” remarked Rose, “for him to walk off with the money—if he gave the matter a second thought at all. I'm sure he considers he has better uses for the money than its legal owners.” She folded her long-fingered hands on her knee, a tall, angular woman who moved as if she were perpetually about to trip. She had the light medium-brown hair of her white father and grandfather, worn in a neat chignon as long as she was out of sight of the laws that required her to cover it in a slave's headcloth. Behind the gold reflections of candle-light on her spectacles, her eyes were gray-green. “What does he look like? How will we know him?”

Granville raised his eyebrows a bit at the “we,” but January—though he experienced his usual sense of protesting shock at the thought of Rose sharing his danger—felt no surprise. A spinster into her late twenties and a woman who had operated her own school for several years, Rose was not one to watch knight-errantry from the dull safety of a bower window.

He knew, too, that there were things a woman could learn in conversation with other women, that would be hidden from a man.

But he felt sick inside at the thought of her taking the steamboat north into territory where she'd fetch seven or eight hundred dollars on the auction-block, if she happened to lose her freedom papers or have them taken from her.

“I'll take you to the wharf when you get your tickets, and point him out as he gets on board,” promised the banker.

“The Silver Moon 's an American boat, isn't it?” asked January. “Will they even hire a stateroom to a man and woman of color? Or are we going to have to take deck-passage? In which case,” he added, “we're not going to be in much of a position to observe whatever Weems is doing.”

“You'll do it, then?” The hope gleaming in Granville's eyes, and the lightening of his voice, made him seem younger, like a child suddenly relieved of terrible fear. January realized then that the man must have been as sick with dread as he was himself.

“I'll do it for five hundred,” replied January. “In advance, whether we succeed or fail—plus the expenses of the journey. And I want your word as a gentleman”—he tried to keep the irony out of his voice—“that if either of us gets into trouble, you'll get us out of it.”

The banker's sandy-red brows pulled together in momentary puzzlement. Of course a white man wouldn't understand, thought January. Certainly not a New Yorker, coming from a town that had a thriving free black population that didn't live looking over their shoulders, worrying about whether they'd be kidnapped into slavery.

“We'll be traveling through cotton territory,” January illuminated for him grimly. “We'll be in country where nobody's even heard that there are free colored people or that there can be black people who aren't somebody's property. Where nobody's going to look too closely at a black man's ownership papers if he turns up on some auction-block for cheap, and where no local sheriff is going to go against one of his constituents if that constituent has a newly-bought slave who claims he's a kidnapped freeman.

“If we get in trouble,” January concluded, “I'm trusting you to buy us free. Just as you're trusting me not to breathe a word about your bank having eight million banknotes in circulation backed up by the change in your pockets. Sir.”

He didn't even mention the problems he would face, in the event of “trouble,” in getting word back to Granville that he or Rose needed help. In the low water of summer, it could take nearly a week for a letter to get to New Orleans from Vicksburg, two weeks from Memphis—longer, if the boat got tangled up on a bar or tore out its paddle on a snag. A week in the hands of slave-dealers or professional kidnappers could be an eternity, and once in the deep heartland of Missouri or Tennessee, it was almost unbelievably difficult for a black who didn't know the area to travel.