Dead water

Sophie shook her head tragically. “I know he didn't. She lay awake far into the night, waiting for him—when I came up in the morning to tell her of that . . . that horrible sight, that horrible thing Jim saw . . . all the lamp-oil was burned away. When I opened the door the first thing she said was, Run to Mr. Weems's stateroom, and learn why he did not come last night.”

“She did not go look herself, earlier in the night, then?”

Sophie recoiled in shock at the suggestion. “She was not dressed! She was so much the lady, she would not have ventured about the boat only in her wrapper and her nightgown! Oh, if only I had been there, I could have gone and searched in the night myself! Perhaps, if I had found him, I could have prevented his terrible death!”

“And when you told her . . . ?” prompted Rose gently.

“My poor Madame,” whispered Sophie. “The shock of it . . . all she could do was sit up in bed and say, What? Just like that . . . as if she could not believe. Then she said, Good Christ, and got out of bed without another word, and dressed. No tears,” she whispered, “though she has been weeping all the afternoon in the Parlor, with the other ladies about her. . . .”

I'll bet she has, thought January. After breaking into Weems's stateroom and searching . . . for what?

“It is a most tragic story. And I am the more grieved for hurting her, after all she has suffered already,” he said gently. “It might indeed have been my master who killed Mr. Weems.” He spoke reluctantly, like one convinced against his will. “But there are other evil people on this boat who might also have done this terrible thing. Not all of them,” he added, lowering his voice to a whisper, “men.”

Sophie's beautiful eyes widened and her lips parted with understanding and shock, and she glanced automatically to her left, the direction in which Miss Skippen's stateroom lay. Rose, taking her cue, produced a perfectly-judged little gasp and breathed, “Miss Skippen?”

January raised his eyebrows: like Hamlet's friends, We could an if we would, and, If we list to speak . . .

Rose prompted, “But surely Julie was with her?”

“Not after we ran onto the bar,” answered Sophie. “And Miss Skippen didn't undress as Mrs. Fischer did—Julie told me. In fact, she said Miss Skippen . . .”

At the forward end of the promenade Thucydides appeared, carrying a tray of lemonade. As he passed January and Rose in Mrs. Fischer's stateroom doorway, he said quietly, “Mrs. Fischer's coming,” then walked on by without breaking stride. January and Rose followed him immediately, without even a word to Sophie, who for her part instantly bowed her head over her sewing so that she would be stitching away industriously when her mistress rounded the corner.

It wasn't until dinnertime that January heard what Miss Skippen had done on the night of Weems's death. He spent the twilight hour with Rose, huddled next to the galley passway beside a makeshift smudge of lemongrass and gun-powder that Eli had rigged to give some relief from the mosquitoes that swarmed in the dead water under Hitchins' Point. Around them, deck-hands beat a steady trail into the engine-room with wood, to Eli's loudly-voiced annoyance. In the cobalt gloom the passway, and the engine-room door, looked like the furnace-gate of Hell.

“You want maybe to sit here all day tomorrow, with all those passengers eating their heads off?” roared Molloy's voice. “Settle in, maybe, set up camp on the shore? This is a steamboat, by God, and what we need is steam!”

The pilot came stamping out of the engine-room and swung himself around the newel-post and up the stair. January glanced across at Rose and raised his brows: “Any ideas on how we might be able to get into his stateroom for a look at the floorboards?”

“Thucydides has spare keys to every stateroom on the boat,” she replied quietly. “If he was good enough to warn us about Mrs. Fischer . . .”

January shook his head. “Any slave would do that for any other slave.” And when Rose—a freewoman born and bred—looked inquiring, he explained, “You ever heard field-hands singing, and they'll change their song when the overseer rides by, or when a party of whites rides along the road? They'll sing something like, “Chink, pink, honey o lula, 'way down in the bayou . . . go wade in the bayou.” His deep, velvety baritone shaped one of the earliest field-songs he knew. “I was five or six, before I understood what it meant when they'd sing it. . . . That they'd heard rumor someone had run, and they were singing warning, if the runaway was resting near, to get into the bayou so the dogs couldn't sniff him out.”

“My mama used to sing that song when she'd cook,” added Roberson's valet, old Winslow, coming over at the sound of January's singing. “She was from bayou country, but we didn't have bayous in Virginia where I was born. They'd sing in the tobacco-fields,

Oh hide me in the rock,

Oh Lord, oh Lord,

Oh hide me in the rock. . . .

His voice lifted in the rolling rhythm, echoing out over the dark water. “Then they'd go on, ‘Oh hide me in the tree, Oh hide me in the earth, Oh hide me in the sea. . . .' We children would all know it was somebody who'd run, though I don't recall anyone ever tellin' us so.” He smiled reminiscently, looking back from a lifetime of clean, comfortable house-service, then shook his head. “One fella—from the plantation next to ours—he ran off, and hid out in our mule-barn for three weeks. Everybody on the place knew he was there, while the patrollers hunted clear up to Fairfax County. He finally got out in a wagon of hay.”

Molloy came down the steps again, strode past Rose and January to where Cain was just coming from checking the spancels on his slaves. As he swaggered past the dealer, the pilot said something quietly—impossible to hear, but the angle of his head, the crowding jostle of his shoulder, were like a shove.

Torchlight shone on Cain's pockmarked, impassive face as the bigger man jostled by. Winslow murmured, “Molloy better watch how he mess with that man. That's a hard man, an' no mistake.”

“They both strike me as hard men,” remarked Rose.

The gray-haired valet shook his head. “Molloy, he a loud man, an' he no gentleman, but he's not hard. Not hard like that Cain. A bully'll crowd a weaker man, or a nigger, someone who can't fight back, but he like a barkin' cur- dog. He think Cain ain't gonna push back, 'cause of that letter he's got—”

“Who's got?” asked January. “Molloy?”

Winslow nodded. “This mornin', when it start to rain so bad, I went to the stateroom to fetch Mr. Roberson's umbrella for Mrs. Roberson. Our stateroom's next to Mr. Weems's, and I heard someone movin' around in there. An' I stay still, wonderin' if it's Thu makin' Mr. Weems decent, or Mr. Weems himself . . . Mr. Roberson gives lectures