Dead water

With a quick move he tore open the front of the girl's dress and pulled it back over her shoulders, leaving her breasts bare in the torchlight. “Go ahead, feel of her. Tell me if you ain't felt titties as hard as those in all your born days.”

Hannibal slipped through the crowd like a ferret and climbed the stair. January followed. The two men were silent as they walked down the long upper promenade on the starboard side of the boiler-deck, past the shut doors of the staterooms to the one Hannibal had been given, three from the stern. The young steward in his white coat was there, setting out a carafe of water and a glass: “Let me know if there's anything you need, sir. My name's Thu; I been with Mr. Tredgold on the Silver Moon three-four years now. You're on a good boat.”

“I'm sure of it,” returned Hannibal, slipping him one of the eleven-penny bits he'd acquired earlier in the night.

“Luncheon is served in the Main Saloon at noon, dinner at six. I see you have a fiddle with you, sir. If it isn't an imposition, if you'd care to favor the company with a little playing after supper, it's often done on board that there's playing and dancing in the evenings. . . .”

“As it happens, my man Ben is also quite accomplished. . . .”

It is only a game, thought January. Only the masque of despotism, necessary to their disguise. But after the scene on the deck below, he felt disgusted and angry, and walked to the end of the promenade, where the most fashionable of the staterooms overlooked the giant wheel. Narrow stairways ran down to the lower promenades, where the valets and maids of the cabin passengers were already staking out their tiny niches among the heaped baggage and piles of cordwood stacked along the walls of the 'tween-decks: maids on the portside, valets on the starboard, at least those who weren't required to sleep on the floors of their masters' staterooms. The doors to the galley and the engine-room opened into this part of the promenade, screened almost completely from the chained line of slaves by head-high piles of wood. Market-women in bright skirts and tignons swarmed in and out of the galley door, with last-minute offers of tomatoes and melons; two white children on the upper promenade dragged their nurse's hands and screamed, reaching toward a praliniere who hawked her wares to the stevedores. None of the market-women, January observed, would go around the piled wood to where Ned Gleet was checking the chains on his slaves; nor would the deck-hands, as they readied their long poles to shove the Silver Moon away from the wharf.

Close by the rear corner of the 'tween-decks, where a narrow walkway crossed behind the wheel, Miss Skippen's maid leaned on the rail, gazing at the Cathedral's towers with a face of stone, tears running in silence down her cheeks.

The huge black wheel at the back of the boat began to turn.

A flash of red among the wood-piles drew January's eye. But when he looked, it wasn't Rose's red jacket, but a red-striped tignon worked into five points, and a red-striped skirt, dirty around the hem with smears of earth, and the flash of cheap glass pearls.

For one moment the woman raised her head, and January looked into the eyes of Queen Regine.

FOUR

“Are you sure?” asked Rose worriedly. “Because I haven't seen her.”

“Positive. I think she was carrying a bundle of some kind, though I can't swear to it.”

Rose said, “Hmmn.”

They sat together on a couple of logs, in a sort of niche among the cordwood. Though the steam engine wasn't noisy, its action vibrated the entire boat, and, beyond the corner of the 'tween-decks, if he stood up, January could catch a glimpse of the black monster of the turning-wheel. The stair to the upper promenade threw barred sun and shadow over them; beyond the rails, the brown-green chop of the river widened between them and the dreary tangle of dessicated snags, withered debris, and mud that stretched below the levees.

Smoke-smell drifted through the galley door, as well as the sound of Eli the cook cursing at the open fire in its huge box of sand. The purser's office was a flimsy cubicle off the galley passageway, and Hannibal's only comment on its lock was “Makes me glad I haven't any valuables stored there.” There was a door to the boiler-room there, too, and deck-hands carried wood in that way from the supplies on the promenades. It would be tricky, January realized, to get at the locked door of the purser's office—and the record of who owned which trunks—within.

If, that is, he reflected, by tonight we're not at the center of an uproar brought on by Queen Regine unmasking Hannibal and me as partners rather than master and slave.

In which case she'll be right, with a vengeance, about the gold dissolving from my hand.

Rose asked, “So what do we do?”

“Warn Hannibal,” said January. “I'll stay on the upper deck as much as possible. If she's traveling deck- passage, she has to show up here sometime. . . .”

“In which case she'll recognize me, if she knew you as Cosette's schoolmaster.” Rose tucked her small bedroll like a pillow behind her back where she leaned against the wall. “She may have come on board for some other reason that has nothing to do with you and me, and gotten off again, you know. Up until the boat was shoved away from the wharf, market-women were coming on and off. She has to do something for a living other than put hexes on schoolgirls, and it isn't as if there were a lot of boats leaving this morning.”

But January still felt profoundly uneasy as the Silver Moon thrashed its way past the river-side plantations that lay north of New Orleans, and the long, low green mound of the levee that hid the dark oceans of cane-field beyond. From the boiler-deck above, white passengers—and their servants as they came and went—could look over the levee at the great houses they passed, white-pillared American mansions in the latest pseudo-Greek style, or the long, brightly-painted French Creole dwellings, wrapped in their galleries that channeled the river breeze. From the main deck, all that could be seen was the levee, the batture below it, and the dark bobbing snags that pierced the shining brown water as it shelved down to the channel.

The boat hugged the bank as close as it dared, so that the probing black branches stabbed up through the water only six or seven feet from the rail. Now and then January could hear Kevin Molloy's booming Irish voice