Dead water

“Everyone avoids Gleet,” agreed Davis. “The man is an excrescence, and I won't permit him on my place, for all he comes around two or three times a year trying to buy slaves or sell them—pah! A human mollusk.” His sharp voice was shrill with distaste. “The worst of a bad class, of whom even the so-called best suffer by comparison to the average hound dog.”

“Do you know why Cain detests Gleet the way he seems to?”

“I can't imagine any gentleman of taste who wouldn't.” Davis frowned, as if realizing that Cain by definition did not fall into that category. “As for Cain, I don't know him or anything about him—he's new on the river. But it's curious that he would have paid Weems money at the threat of exposure, being already, as it were, the most despicable form of life known to man. Unless . . .” A look of momentary enlightenment flickered across the sharp features, then passed into a look of calculation, and the idea he'd scouted—almost certainly, January guessed, the possibility that Cain might himself be part African—was dropped.

It was a concern—and a cause for blackmail—everywhere in the South, where a man ran the risk of ostracism and possible enslavement if proven to bear even the smallest proportion of African blood in his veins: more than one murder had been committed in New Orleans to conceal just such information.

But a more Saxon product than the hawk-nosed Jubal Cain was hard to picture. The supposition was simply absurd.

Which left them where?

Bredon, Weems had called Cain.

Printed in the Mayersville Gazette.

What possible social consequences would threaten a man who was already a slave-dealer?

Striding footfalls shook the stairs that led down from the pilot-house. January whipped around as Molloy shoved past him, a pistol in his hand. He nearly ran down the promenade, January pelting at his heels, cursing himself for not finding a way to watch Hannibal's door during his talk with Davis—January and Davis had not quite caught up with the infuriated pilot when he reached Hannibal's door, yanked it open . . .

The lamplight within showed them all Theodora Skippen leaning against Hannibal and grasping his lapels, while Hannibal, backed to the wall, attempted to disengage her grip.

As the door was ripped open, Theodora whirled, mouth and eyes widening to a series of perfectly round O's; Hannibal began, “Sir, it isn't—”

“God damn you, if it isn't what it looks like, what is it, then?” bellowed Molloy, grabbed Hannibal by the front of his coat, hauled him from the room, and showed every sign of heaving him over the rail and into the river had not January and Davis both intervened.

Molloy thrashed against their grip, shouting curses—when Hannibal, with a sad lack of gallantry, dragged Theodora's note from his coat pocket and held it out, the pilot simply crushed it in his fist and hurled it overboard: “You don't think I don't know the bitch can't write? Nor read—she had to get someone to read her this. . . .”

He slashed Hannibal across the face with a sheet of notepaper and, when Hannibal took it, followed up the blow with the back of his hand. “And don't you be pretending you don't know what's there,” snarled Molloy. “Now, sir, it's insulted me you have and done murder on my boat, and this time I will have satisfaction! You name your friends if you've got any!”

Hannibal probably could have gotten out of it with another abject apology—January had seen him wriggle out of worse—but Colonel Davis, face jerking with his tic, stepped forward and snapped, “You, sir, are a boor and a commoner, and I take it as an honor to stand as Mr. Sefton's friend.”

“Non tali auxilio nec defensoribus istis tempus eget,” said Hannibal sadly, and Davis, ignoring him, went on.

“I take it that it shall be pistols at dawn?”

“It shall, and here the boat shall stand until we've had this out once and for all,” shouted Molloy. “And you, surgeon—or surgeon's nigger”—he jabbed a finger at January—“you'd better be ready to take a bullet out of your master's thieving Ulsterman heart.”

Curious, January bent down as Molloy seized Theodora by the wrist and went storming off toward the bow, Theodora gasping, “Oh, how I am undone! He deceived me, drew me into the room with lies. . . .”

The note said:

Beloved,

I have tried to put you from my heart, but I have failed. I can no longer live without your kisses. Please, please, come to my stateroom at ten.

Your own,

Hannibal

January could tell the difference, but the handwriting was an excellent facsimile of Hannibal's own.

SEVENTEEN

So eager was Colonel Davis that someone should stand up and take a shot at Kevin Molloy that he was very little use as a second. “The man is a boor and a swine,” he announced decisively at the War Council that took place in Hannibal's stateroom minutes after Molloy's departure with Theodora in tow. “You're a gentleman, Sefton. You should be able to out-shoot him with ease.”

“Ah.” Hannibal took a long, shaky swig of opium-laced sherry. “A fact which entirely slipped my mind in the excitement of the moment . . .”

“Brace up, man! Surely you aren't thinking of backing out?”

“I have the feeling that I backed in. . . . As challenged, mine is the choice of weapons, I believe? And conditions?”

The door opened without the smallest vestige of a knock. It was Gleet.