Dead water bj-8

by Barbara Hambly

  “Well, if you miss the boat,” said Rose, who always had a backup plan, “I'll leave you reports at General Delivery, left till called for, in Vicksburg, Mayersville, and Greenville, and I'll wait for you at the best free colored boardinghouse in Memphis. I'm not sure I'll be able to pursue our friends beyond Memphis alone. . . .”

  “You're not going to have to pursue our friends anywhere,” insisted January, more to reassure himself than her. He pulled her into his arms, kissed her hard. The thought of Rose alone in a strange city—much less a hub of the slave trade like Memphis—made him shudder, even without the added complication of her trying to convince white American police that a respectable white banker was a thief. . . .

  “I won't miss the boat.”

  “Of course not,” agreed Rose far too promptly.

  Why do I dream about rescuing this woman? If she ever dreamed about anything more disturbing than conjugating Latin verbs, she'd dream about rescuing ME.

  “There,” said January softly. “Only one valise. They'll be back.”

  Mrs. Fischer descended the stair, paused to gaze down her nose at Ned Gleet as he thrust and drove his slave-gang ashore, then swept to the landing-stage, where Weems waited by the cab. Sophie followed meekly, carrying a green-striped canvas valise. Across the landing, Hannibal wandered vaguely toward the insalubrious alleyways of Natchez-Under, gazing about him as if he'd never seen such a place before in his life. It was time to go.

  “Take care,” Rose whispered.

  Convinced that the boat would in fact leave, that Rose would in fact be carried off to Memphis alone with Ned Gleet, January fought not to hand her his half of Hubert Granville's traveling expenses. God knew which of them was actually going to need the money more, in the next few hours . . . or the next few days. . . .

  And as he strode across the landing-stage, and through the trampled muck to Hannibal's side, he cursed the desperate necessity of money, that could make the difference between a life that was bearable and one that brought nothing but friction and grief. That could make the difference, for those of the wrong shade of skin, between freedom and a lifetime in bondage.

  Especially in the American lands.

  He glanced back, and saw Jubal Cain standing on the bow end of the boiler-deck, gazing after Weems and Mrs. Fischer as the pair of them climbed into their cab.

  Though the river was low, the usual summer rain of the Mississippi Valley had briefly drenched Natchez the previous night, leaving the landing area, and the ascending mud-wallow of Silver Street, ankle-deep in red-gold ooze. January and Hannibal would have been hard-pressed to remain behind Weems's cab, and the dray with the trunks that followed it, as the horses leaned and slithered in the mud. Fortunately, Silver Street was the only road up the bluff, so they walked up with the air of innocent tourists, passing the vehicles with barely a glance. Above the level of the riverbank willows, the Mississippi unreeled northward, like a skein of silver yarn played with by a particularly mischievous kitten. It was cooler up here, too; the baking heat of the morning was mitigated by the winds breathing over the bluff.

  The mosquitoes seemed to have been left behind in Natchez-Under as well.

  “Fit penalty, a Protestant preacher would say, for those who linger in the dens of vice,” remarked January as they emerged onto the long green space of the Spanish plaza that rimmed the bluff.

  “Hard lines on the poor insects, though.” Hannibal paused to lean against an oak that had probably been old when LaSalle and his explorers camped under it. “Unless they're fond of cocktails that consist of two parts clap and three parts whiskey. But I suppose that, being inventions of the Devil, the mosquitoes deserve it themselves.” He was gasping from the climb, years of consumption having left him, January knew, with lesions and scar-tissue of every kind in his lungs. He fished in his pocket for his opium-bottle and took a drink. “Care to take bets on how many of those poor immigrant deck-passengers make it back on board? I went down last night and tried to warn them—the Germans listened, but the Irish seemed to regard me in the same light that our friend Molloy does, as an Orangeman and a fiend.”

  “How can they tell?” January kept an eye on the top of Silver Street, where a cluster of the immigrant women made their timid appearance, looking around for the town market at the far end of the plaza. “You sound Irish only when you're drunk.”

  “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 opportun
ity 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.

  The padlock clunked against the wood of the door as the bolt was secured again behind him.

  A man got to his feet in the corner, held out his hand. “I'm Bobby,” he said in the just-broken voice of a youth.

  “Ben,” January introduced himself.

  Outside came the heavy crack of a whip, and a man's stifled sob of pain. Bobby flinched, too. In the fragments of daylight that seeped through the brick-holes up under the eaves, his face was downy with the first beard of adolescence. “They charges fifty cents a stroke,” provided Bobby, trying to sound casual about it. “They whipped a woman this mornin' an' all the men over in the jail back of the courthouse crowded up to the window to watch. You a house-nigger?” He was looking with respectful shyness at January's clean linen and well-cut jacket.

  “Manservant,” replied January.

  “You run away?”

  January shook his head, and pressed his eye to the Judas in the door. “That damn deputy Rees arrested both me and my master, on a lie.”

  “Somebody paid him.” Bobby flinched again at the next whip-crack, the next gasping scream. “That Rees'd arrest his own mama, somebody pay him. Least that's what Cuth said.” The young man's eyes moved to indicate the man outside at the whipping-post. “He from town here, belong to Marse Simms the blacksmith. Marse Simms say he was stealin', but it's really Young Marse that's takin' iron an' nails an' that an' sellin' 'em, Cuth says. I coulda told him ain't no good to say so.”

  He shivered a little at the sound of a more desperate cry. “I runned away,” he added softly.

  Silence outside, then a man's truculent voice: “All right, then, Cuth. You gonna be a good darky now?”

  Whatever Cuth said, it was too muffled to hear, but a moment later there was the clank of chain against wood, the crunch of boots on gravel. The soft thunk of the closing station-house door.

  Flies, wasps, and bees roared in circles in the blue-brown shadows of the slave-jail's rafters. Far off in the silence January heard a cannon fire, announcing another steamboat coming into the landing.

  A few hours, Rose had guessed. Long enough for Mr. Roberson and his family to have luncheon with some friend in Natchez-Over, for Colonel Davis to pay a social call, for half the crew to get robbed and stripped in Natchez-Under. . . .

  Had Weems's promise to return at two been based on information La Pécheresse had gleaned from Ladies' Parlor gossip? Was two when the Silver Moon would be steaming away upstream, to leave Hannibal and January stranded in the Natchez jail until Sheriff Gridley finally let them out for lack of evidence?

  I'll leave you reports at General Delivery, left till called for, in Vicksburg, Mayersville, and Greenville, and I'll wait for you at the best free colored boardinghouse in Memphis, Rose had said as calmly as if she'd been making arrangements to meet him at his mother's house after Mass. I'm not sure I'll be able to pursue them beyond Memphis alone. . . .

  And if she wasn't in Memphis when he got there? Dear God, how would he ever find her, with the whole length of the river to search? With scoundrels like Gleet and Cain on the boat, eyeing every man and woman of color with cold calculation, resenting the freedom that took seven to fourteen hundred dollars out of his, Gleet's, pocket . . . ?

  Despite the oven-like heat of the brick jail, January felt cold through to his marrow.

  Blessed Virgin, he prayed, sliding his hand into his jacket pocket to touch the blue glass beads of his rosary, take care of her. Watch over her.

  In his mind he pictured the serene face of the Mother of God as he'd seen it on the statues in the cathedrals here and in Paris . . . as he sometimes saw it in his dreams. That star-crowned woman in the sky-blue veil, smiling as she watched over the world.

  Get me the hell out of here. . . .

  The key rattled in the padlock. January and the boy Bobby turned, startled—January noting that whoever had crossed the graveled yard must have done so with conscious silence. A young man who looked like a slave janitor stood in the doorway with a pitcher of water: “I brung this for you,” h
e informed them unnecessarily, and set it down. He closed the door, and January heard his bare feet on the gravel this time, but very soft, and very swift, before silence closed in again.

  January bent to pick up the pitcher, then stopped. “I don't think that man bolted the door.”

  “You shittin' me,” said Bobby.

  January pushed the door.

  It opened.

  The trunks will still be at the hotel.

  I can at least warn Rose.

  This is a trap, isn't it?

  January caught Bobby's arm as the young man started to rush past him into the sunlit yard. People did do stupid things, of course. Careless oversights that would get them a whipping from Deputy Rees and Tom.

  But his every nerve and muscle prickled with watchfulness as he and Bobby slipped through the door, hastened across the yard and out the narrow gate to Commerce Street. . . .

  “This way, boys!” A tall man in a shabby black coat was waiting for them at the corner of the alley. Rusty braids hung Indian-fashion down to his shoulders, and a faded black patch covered one eye; the other was blue and sharp under a curling fringe of brow. As he caught each of them by the sleeve, to draw them through a side-door into the shed behind an apothecary shop, January saw he wore a clerical collar.

  “Thank God you had the sense to run,” whispered the preacher. “There's men so cowed by fear they won't even take the blessing of freedom when the prison door swings wide!”

  “Who are you?” asked Bobby in the same tone the Patriarch Abraham must have addressed the angels who came calling at his tent.

  “Reverend Levi Christmas.” The man shook Bobby's hand, then January's. “Of the Underground Railway.”

  Even in New Orleans, January had heard of what was beginning to be called the Underground Railway. In the copies of the Liberator that Mr. Quince had slid beneath the stateroom door he had read a good deal more. It was a loose organization of Abolitionists, Quakers, and some free blacks who worked together to smuggle runaway slaves to freedom in Canada. They passed the fugitives from one household to another, hiding them in barns and false attics and under the raised bottoms of specially-made boats and wagon-boxes, guiding them by night, sometimes hiding them for weeks at a time until chance offered an opportunity for them to slip across the river to Ohio.