Dead water

promenade, the first sight that met his eyes was Hannibal, standing with Miss Skippen by the stern railing, his arm protectively around her and his head bowed in an attitude of sympathetic attention. When her rosebud lips trembled, the fiddler immediately proffered a handkerchief, and dried the tears on the long lashes—a shift of wind brought January the reek of very expensive French perfume.

“I saw my lady weep,

And Sorrow proud to be exalted so

In those fair eyes where all perfections keep.”

“You say such beautiful things,” whispered Theodora, resting her lace-mitted fingers lightly on Hannibal's lapel and gazing up into his eyes. “Not like . . . Well, not like some others I have encountered. Oh, Mr. Sefton”—her small hands turned, and gripped the cloth in a convulsion of feeling—“I declare I am sometimes so afraid of him! He is so rough, so uncouth! Thank God I have you to turn to, in my misery . . . you are the only one I can trust!”

“My dearest,” murmured Hannibal, “I am hardly the most trustworthy man in the world. . . .”

“Ah, but you are!” Theodora insisted, like every other woman to whom Hannibal told the honest truth about himself—after three and a half years January was still trying to figure out how he did that. “And who else can I trust? You are so sweet. . . . And he's become so capricious, I scarcely know what to believe anymore! If he turned away a good job to take a poorer one, all at a whim, how do I know that his next whim will not be to forsake me for another, prettier perhaps, or more endowed with the world's goods? For though my family is a fine and an old one, we are, alas, fallen upon poverty!”

Her accent alone was enough to convince January that her family was probably not as fine or old as all that— after one generation of wealth, Americans tended to ship their daughters off to schools where refinement of speech was a part of the curriculum—but Hannibal only passed his palm gently over her cheek.

“For the world's goods I care naught, my Angelflower, and as for beauty, how could any man turn his eyes from what I see before me here? Eyes as soft as honey / and a face / that Love has lighted / with his own beauty. . . .”

“Michie Hannibal, sir?” Dalliance was one thing, but January had witnessed two examples already that morning of Kevin Molloy's propensity for casual violence. He had no desire to see his friend beaten up over a blue-eyed tart in pink ruffles. The junior pilot Mr. Souter passed him on the stair, on his way to the pilot-house to change over watches—at a guess, once his watch was up Molloy wouldn't linger. No sane man would, in a ten-by-ten-foot pilot- house with Mark Souter droning on relentlessly about his great-uncle's contribution to the Battle of Blue Lick in 1782 and the precise degree to which the Souters were related to the Wickliffes of Glendower, whose Logan cousins had married into the Todhunter family through a connection who was a first and a second cousin, once removed either way. . . .

Hannibal raised a hand to sign January over, and Miss Skippen caught his wrist. “Oh, send him away, do!” There was a slight desperation in her face—January wondered how many others she'd attempted to attach herself to since Colonel Davis had passed by her dropped handkerchief a few hours ago.

“My sweet, I dare not snub Ben, even for the felicity of your violet eyes. It's he who makes my coffee in the mornings.” He bent to kiss her hands. “Until tonight.”

Her parting from him would have done credit to the great tragedienne Sarah Siddons as Juliet. January half expected her to stab herself on her way through the door of the Ladies' Parlor, where Mr. Quince was holding forth on the subject of the need for the immediate re-colonization of all slaves to Africa.

“Tonight?” January raised his brows as he and Hannibal entered the stateroom.

“We have a tryst on the starboard promenade after dinner, and I rely upon you to be sleeping on the floor here in case she feels faint and demands a place to lie down. Considering the amount of information I've gleaned from her so far, I can hardly cut the poor girl now. God knows she's been cut enough by La Fischer and her co-harpies in the Parlor—not that I'd want my sixteen-year-old daughter associating with her, if I had one, mind you. I rescued her while on my quest there for coffee, which I didn't get, by the way. . . .”

“I'll get you some. How long were you with her?” January wasn't certain, but he'd thought Miss Skippen's pink muslin skirts, with their ruffles of blond lace and their silk roses, looked wet and dirty along the hems—they were light-colored, too, as had been those he'd glimpsed in the dark of the hold.

“Twenty minutes or so. Just before we pushed away from the landing. I'm not sure what she'd been up to— mischief, I think. She was breathless and trembling, anyway, and practically fell into my arms. Is all well with you, amicus meus? I feared something had happened when you didn't make an appearance. . . .”

“Rose went down into the hold while they were loading and found evidence that Queen Regine is on board, and is hiding down there. I went back down with her to see, with the result,” January added grimly, “that Thucydides may very well be keeping a sharper eye on the hold in future. I'll tell you when I get back.”

Mrs. Tredgold, who presided over the Ladies' Parlor, only smiled benevolently at January's comicly mock-timid request to “thieve some of your coffee, M'am, for Michie Hannibal,” leading him to guess that his friend had exercised his customary charm even over the boat-owner's formidable spouse. Miss Skippen occupied a chair in the corner of the Parlor, nibbling a biscuit and being pointedly ignored by Mrs. Roberson and her elder daughter, Emily —a diminutive widow—and by Mrs. Fischer, whose own comprehensively glass dwelling should have endowed her with a little more charity about casting the first stone. Beside Mrs. Fischer, Mr. Quince continued earnestly on his lecture:

“. . . alternative to pushing them into a society in which, in their savage innocence, they will never be able to make a living . . .”

Not with gentlemen like our Massachusetts friend Dodd running the factories, we won't, thought January, pouring coffee from the larger pot into a smaller water-carafe and trusting that Hannibal had a spare cup in his room.

“This way, we will obviate the burden of the government and the tax-payer, and at the same time enable the freedmen to improve the lot of their savage brethren in Africa by their own industrious example. . . .”

January wondered if any of the members of the American Colonization Society had ever actually asked any man of African descent—slave or free—if he wanted to go back and live in Africa. At meetings of the Faubourg Treme Militia and Burial Society—of which January was a member despite his mother's derisive insistence that most of the members were “dark as a pack of field-hands” (On the subject of glass houses and stone-throwing . . . he reflected)—not once had a meeting ended with all those libre artisans and businessmen leaping to their feet and shouting. Let's take the Society funds and all re-locate to Africa!

Quince didn't even look at him as he collected the coffee-tray and left the room.