Dead water

rape stand down.

Mrs. Fischer's maid twisted free of the men's grips and ran to join the little group of women.

“Goddam bitches!” yelled the taller of the boatmen. “I got me a mind to buy the goddam lot of you, fuck the lot of you till you begs me for mercy!”

But the women merely turned away from them and faded into the darkness.

“Bitches!” yelled the tall man. “Hoors!” And his shorter companion, who had a yellow beard like a louse-ranch, took his arm and tugged him toward the piled wood that separated them from the chained slave women. “C'mon, Sam, somebody gonna be down here in a minute. . . .”

As the three men vanished through the gap between wood and rails, January heard one of them snarl, “What you lookin' at, bitch?” The words were followed by the meaty thud of a kick, a woman's stifled gasp, and the jingle of chains.

“Are you all right, honey?” Rose asked the maid in French as January came to join the women near the stern rail. They were little more than shapes in the dense shadows of the 'tween-decks, save for the flash of Rose's spectacles. Beyond them, moonlight flickered terrifyingly on the shapes of snags and towheads, bobbing in the water nearer shore.

“Thank you, yes, I'm fine. Thank you so much, Madame. . . .”

“Vitrac.” Rose used the name under which she'd bought her ticket. “Rose Vitrac.”

“I am Sophie Vannure.” The girl's voice shook with sobs she couldn't control. January wondered whether the little maid had been so well-treated all her life that this was her first experience with molestation, or whether some earlier wound had been opened. In either case, he saw Rose put her arm around the girl, supporting her lest she fall.

“These yours, honey?” The stout Tredgold nursemaid Cissy came over from the wood-piles, carrying a couple of big shawls that had been dropped there. Sophie held out her arms.

“Thank you, yes. My mistress . . .”

“She turn you out to sleep down here?”

“I know why my missus turn me out,” sniffed Miss Skippen's maid in the rough cane-patch French of one who'd probably cost a good deal less than the refined little Sophie. “With no more than ‘Julie, I'll want coffee in the morning.' Don't tell me m'am high-and-mighty Fischer got a gentleman friend comin' to visit her, like my Miss Theodora does?”

Sophie Vannure pulled the shawl tighter around her shoulders, still shaking with fear and humiliation. When she spoke, her voice dripped resentment and betrayal. “What other reason would Madame have, to tell me to go sleep outside on the deck like an animal?”

“Could be worse.” Julie's tone quirked with a bitter knowledge. “She could keep you in there to make up a three.”

Sophie's laugh was a spiteful sob. “Not with Mr. Weems,” she said. “Madame, she's not about to let anyone think she so much as knows what a man is, but she wouldn't share him—or anything else—with any other.”

“You mean Mr. Weems, the little man in the check trousers that looks like a weasel?” Julie hooted with laughter. “He don't look like he got the red blood in him to kiss the parlormaid!”

“He does not,” retorted Sophie, clearly steadied by the sympathy of new-found allies. “At the least he has never kissed me, though he looks, out of the corners of his eyes. He's too scared of Madame. He bought her house in New Orleans, and pays all her bills; yet it's she who says, ‘We will come here, we will go there.' Mr. Weems, he follows, like a little dog.”

“Well, think of that,” murmured Rose as she and January settled into the dark niche among the wood-piles, where they could watch the passway to the engine-room, and the purser's door. “A respectable lady like that, and a thief underneath.”

“What about a respectable schoolmistress like yourself,” replied January softly, his arm sliding around Rose's waist, “who is a wanton underneath?”

“I fear,” said Rose loftily, “that you have me mistaken for someone else—perhaps my wicked twin sister Elena.” And they laughed at the old joke—the twin sister was completely fictitious—and settled themselves to watch the comings and goings of the wood crew, for the chance to slip into either the office or the hold.

But Hannibal had been right in his observation that there was never a time when the passageway was completely empty. While the Silver Moon churned its heavy way upstream through the darkness, and Rose and January watched and slept in turns, they never saw either a sign of Queen Regine or of a moment when it would have been feasible to enter the office or the hold.

FIVE

In the pre-dawn dark of the following morning, talk around the water-barrel beside the galley door was all about how old Fussy-Pants Weems had had seven hundred and seventy-five dollars taken off him last night at whist, and serve him right. “Lord, I thought he's gonna shrivel up into a pile of dust when Byrne brought out that trump card, an' we'd have to sweep him off the floor in the mornin'!”

“They had three hundred dollars extra on the rubber—you think a man that won't tip the porter who brings up his luggage would know better than that!”

Fog lay on the river, but the sky overhead was hot and clear. A thousand birds cried their territories in the green wall of willows that grew along the batture, audible even over the splashing of the paddle. “How the devil can the pilot steer if he can't even see the surface of the water?” January asked Jim, who sat on a coil of rope at the far end of the starboard promenade, shaving by lantern-light and a hand-mirror he'd drawn from his pocket.