“If we get there.” January took her hand gratefully, then scrubbed a weary palm over his unshaven face. “It feels like we've been stalled on this particular bend of the river for days.” And it felt like weeks, he thought, since he'd swum out along the shallow waters over Horsehead Bar, to be hauled up onto the
Strange, he thought, that so little time had passed since the most complicated matter in his life had been to simply stay with the boat and watch Oliver Weems. Since the solution to the problem had been merely one of finding which trunks the stolen gold and securities were in, and proving the crime on Weems.
And now even the retrieval of the money, if it could be accomplished, began to seem like a tawdry and trivial goal compared to all the greater things he could not do. Compared to the image of the woman Mary walking back to the isolated prison of her slavery, to the thought of Julie weeping on Rose's shoulder, terrified of a fate to which she'd been betrayed . . .
Compared to the voices of the chained men along the starboard promenade, singing to keep up their spirits in the night, and the ropy cross-hatch of scars on 'Rodus's back.
And those things filled him with a helpless aching, like those dreams of trying to rescue Rose from some terrible fate. But this was the world into which he woke from dreams.
There was nothing that he could do, he knew. Not even vote for men who might change what the Founding Fathers of the United States had decreed should be.
The thought of simply taking his money—if he could find it—and using it to make himself, and Rose, and their future children as safe as he could make them, now felt to him as dirty and mean as if he were leaping into a rowboat from a sinking ship, leaving 'Rodus and Jim, Julie and Sophie, and all the rest chained on board to die.
The sense of helplessness was worse than his earlier anger, his earlier fear.
Another shot cracked out, and he cursed, thinking of Hannibal back in his cabin, patiently writing out instructions to be opened in the event of his death. Rose slid her arms around him, comforting or seeking comfort; he pressed his cheek to the soft white folds of her tignon, the scent of her, as always, dissolving the pain inside.
He couldn't do a thing to save Mary back in Mississippi, or Julie hiding in the woods along the river, or the men and women chained along the sides of the 'tween-decks fifteen feet away from him. . . . He couldn't do a thing to save Hannibal, short of murdering Molloy himself, and even that might not work. . . .
He couldn't even accomplish what he'd set out to do on the
And waiting.
Had the Bank of Louisiana collapsed during the course of this past week? Would Hubert Granville even be in New Orleans still, to back up January's assertions when the sheriff at Mayersville would, inevitably, write for clarification?
And what would happen if Granville had absconded as well?
To distract his mind from this question, he followed Rose over to the lantern that hung in the galley passway, where Winslow, Andy, and most of the deck-hands were clustered around Jim, gaping at the Fatal Note. A comparison under his magnifying lens showed January that the two notes, though the handwriting was disguised, had been written with the same pen, or at least with two pens cut at precisely the same angle, almost certainly by the same hand, though whether that hand had been a man's or a woman's he couldn't tell. Thucydides still could not be located to tell how the Fatal Note had come to be under the Fatal Coffee-Cup, but Eli, when asked, said he put up the tray for the pilot on the counter near the door, for either Thu or one of the lesser stewards to carry up at ten. Anyone could have gotten to it.
And given the absolute darkness that reigned once you got three steps away from the light of the passway, January supposed that even a statuesque matron could have managed it, particularly one in the inky black of full mourning.
As he climbed the steps to the boiler-deck and Hannibal's stateroom once again, January heard, along the misty blackness of the banks, the first birdsong of the early-breaking summer dawn, and his heart flinched in his chest like a beached trout dying in air.
Due to Molloy's objection to a “nigger doctor” “poking” him, January was at the last minute dropped from the shore party in favor of Mr. Quince, who claimed expertise in both the mystical healing of the long-vanished Egyptians, and the “vegetarian mathematics” of the Thompsonian system of medicine. “If you see me go down, come over to the shore if you have to swim,” said Hannibal as he put on his frayed coat and the darkest and plainest of his rather tattered collection of waistcoats.
“Is there anyone we should notify if you're badly hurt?” asked Rose tactfully, and handed the fiddler a black velvet ribbon to tie his hair.
Hannibal cocked an ironic eye back at her, knowing that she really meant “killed.” Since he'd appeared in New Orleans four and a half years ago, he had never spoken to January—or to anyone January knew—of his former life, though he was clearly a man of breeding and education. He would speak sometimes of being up at Oxford, or of the family estates in County Mayo or their town-house in London. But why he had left them, and how he had fetched up in New Orleans a penniless consumptive opium-eater with a hundred-guinea Italian violin, January could only guess. Somewhere in London, or in the English-held estates of western Ireland, there was undoubtedly a family Bible with a name that probably wasn't Hannibal Sefton, with a date of birth and also a date of death. January wondered how long ago that second date had been filled in.
“I think everyone who cares anything about me is here.” Hannibal kissed Rose's hand, then clasped January's. “And I must say you're displaying a woeful lack of confidence in my abilities at both shooting and dodging,” he added, pulling on his shabby gloves. “At least that idiot Davis didn't demand bowie-knives, though I'd have been able to hold my own with a sword, or I did back in the days when I had any wind to speak of. I shall be all right.” He looked as white as a sheet—and stone-cold sober—in the grimy glow.
January followed him down to the skiff, then made his way back to the servants' end of the promenade to watch. Even the deck-hands, and the male slaves, had paused in their work, and clustered the rail like ravens on a fence, watching the skiff pull to shore. On the hurricane deck, Roberson and Lockhart set down their rifles and turned their attention from vigilance to observation: “You'd think it was a public hanging,” muttered January as he and Rose edged their way to the rail among the other servants. The engineer's curses to trim the boat might just as well have been the whistling of the birds.
