Barbara Hambly - Dead water

But he said nothing about that. Only watched Granville's eyes, counting the seconds of silence before the banker replied. An immediate Of course, that goes without saying! would have been his signal to renege at once and to get Hubert Granville the hell out of his parlor as quickly as he could. A reply that unthinking meant that Granville had no intention of laying out so much as ten cents to purchase his freedom, much less the fourteen hundred dollars a prime cotton-hand, six feet three inches tall and massively built, would fetch on the open market.

But Granville thought about it, asking himself—January could see the infinitesimal movement of his kid-gloved fingers as he toted up estimates—if it was something he could actually afford. “How much danger is there of that?” he asked finally.

“Some,” said January. “We'll be safer on the boat than ashore. But if Weems off-loads those trunks somewhere along the way, we'll have to follow. I won't know how much danger there'll be until we see what we're faced with on board. Some of it depends on how desperate Weems is, or will become if he realizes he's being dogged. We need to know that you'll stand by us.”

Granville rose, massive and only inches shorter than January himself, and held out his hand. “I'll stand by you,” he pledged. “And in addition to the thanks of the bank officers—most of whom don't know and won't know that there's a problem—you have my personal thanks. I won't let you down.”

“And if you believe that,” remarked Rose, standing on the front gallery minutes later as they watched the banker disappear down the darkness of Rue Esplanade, “as your sister Olympe would say, you and I both deserve to spend the rest of our lives picking cotton in Tennessee.”

Her voice was light, but he could tell she was still furiously angry, and he knew he could not say to her, I won't let you come.

Behind those words, if only in their hearts, lurked the reply: It's your fault we're in this mess.

Besides, he knew he'd need all the help he could get.

Far off, thunder rumbled in the tar-black darkness and flashes of heat-lightning flickered over the lake. Here beyond the range of the French town's iron street-lanterns, the blackness was absolute. Across Rue Esplanade, where the small houses of Faubourg Marigny lay hidden among the trees, the roar of cicadas beat like a metallic sea.

January took a deep breath. “Rose, I'm sorry.”

“You're sorry that you disregarded me when I pointed a pistol at your head and said, Put it in the Commerce Bank or I'll shoot ? We both made the decision, Ben.” She sighed, and put her arm around his waist. “It will, however, be some time before I can bring myself to be polite to your mother again.”

Soft laughter shook him, and he cupped her face in his hands, kissed her gratefully, then again with slow, deep enjoyment of her lips. In the darkness she had an animal sensuality completely at odds with her daylight persona of a schoolmistress and scholar.

A mosquito whined in his ear, and they parted while he slapped at it. “Will you do me a favor, Rose?” he asked as they retreated into their bedroom from the gallery and so through to the parlor. One of the candles had gone out, and the other was guttering again. Rose fetched the candle-scissors and January cracked his shins against Cosette's small trunk, waiting by the door.

“Write to Dominique.” He named his sweet-natured younger sister who was so often in and out of the house. “Ask her if she'll take Cosette for a few days. You know they get along well, and that maid of Dominique's has her hands full with the new baby. Then write to Cosette's grandmother, Serafine Poucet, in Spanish Fort.”

Taking the candle, he walked through to the dining-room and into the pantry, where a supper of cold chicken and bread waited for him in covered dishes. He ate a few hasty bites standing, knowing that it was nearly midnight already, and the later it got, the less safe he'd be in accomplishing his next mission that night.

Safe being, of course, a completely relative term when applied to a black man venturing into the rough dives and grubby gin-palaces that straggled out into the swamp at the back of town.

“Tell her Cosette hasn't been well, and hint—without saying anything so vulgar—that you don't think she'll get particularly good care spending the summer at her mother's house.”

“What, that awful old lady Poucet is Cosette's grandmother?” Rose leaned her shoulder in the pantry doorway. The daughter of a plaçée herself, she knew just about everyone in the free colored demimonde, by reputation if not by actual acquaintance.

“Yes, and according to Dominique, Poucet hates Cosette's mother.”

Rose began to chuckle, and followed January back out to the parlor again, where he collected his jacket, the disreputable old cap he'd worn to Congo Square, and a tin lantern. “God help the voodoo who tries to trespass on old lady Serafine's yard. She'll take Cosette in just to show up her daughter, won't she?”

“It's what I'm hoping.” He bent again to kiss her lips, standing in the dark of the bedroom, whose French door was the only one in the house unshuttered, and entertained a momentary question about how much time it would take to fling Rose down on the bed before he proceeded with his next task. . . . “I should be back in two hours.”

Rose nodded, not needing him to explain where he was going, or whom he was seeking, or why. That was one of the things he most loved about Rose. She knew already that they'd need a third member of the party if they were going on board the Silver Moon, and knew exactly who that had to be.

“Go carefully,” she told him, although she was perfectly well aware that the City Guards who enforced the ten o'clock curfew on blacks never went anywhere near the Swamp.

I've already had the roof torn away from my head, reflected January as he descended the steps, and the gold dissolve from my hand, and the curse hasn't been on me two hours yet. What further could go wrong tonight?

He looked around him, right and left in the darkness. But the lantern he held gave no more than the dimmest flicker, barely enough to keep him from falling into the gutter as he set off along Rue des Ramparts. If anyone followed him, they were cloaked utterly in the night.

THREE

If a stranger to New Orleans were to follow the street called Perdidio back from the handsome American mansions of St. Charles Avenue, he would be struck, almost certainly, by the rapidity with which those imposing houses gave way to the humbler dwellings of shopkeepers and artisans, to red-brick boardinghouses and then to brickyards, cotton-presses, livery stables. The gaps between buildings grew wider, yielding to undeveloped lots of rank weeds or stands of trees that had seen the Houmas and the Natchez Indians camp beneath them. The pavement failed, the roadbed narrowed to a path which in turn became a slot of gumbo-thick mud. Among the trees, the buildings dwindled to shacks and sheds, nailed together from the planks of the flatboats that came down-river filled with Ohio corn, Indiana hogs, lowa pumpkins, and illiterate Kentucky ruffians in Conestoga boots, spitting tobacco in all directions. At night, cicada-roaring darkness lay between the trees like God's curse upon Egypt, broken only by the feeblest splodges of lantern-light from makeshift taverns that bore names like The Rough and Ready and The Nantucket Virgin. From those dim doorways hoarse shouts and curses resounded, the crash of breaking benches punctuating the tinny laughter of whores.