Dead water

The Colonel nodded, evidently perfectly comfortable with the thought of a trusted slave being permitted to poke about on shore unsupervised. With Hannibal huddled in the bow, and Quince clinging queasily to the stern gunwale and trying not to touch the corpse, the skiff set out over the water, leaving January alone on the bank under the watchful rifles of two deck-hands and Mr. Lockhart on the hurricane deck.

Even with such guardians, January had qualms about remaining on shore alone, though on balance he judged that Davis's authority—self-assumed though it might be—would be better used in making sure Mrs. Fischer didn't ransack Molloy's stateroom, than in witnessing whatever he himself might find here. He first paced off the dueling- ground, finding in the damp mud of the bank the marks of Hannibal's battered old boots, and, twenty paces away, the rucked-up, bloodied earth where Molloy had stood.

Putting his feet in the heel-gouges left by the pilot's first rocked-back shock, he sighted along his own outstretched arm to where Hannibal had stood . . . then turned his head just slightly to the left.

He was looking straight at the little rise of ground covered with oak trees, from which the raven had flown, shrieking, a moment before Davis had given the signal to fire.

But when he reached the grove itself, January gave a groan of frustration, for it was here that Cain's slaves had cut the saplings for Molloy's litter. Bare feet, ragged knees, had left their marks everywhere. Saplings had been pulled up, branches broken . . . any of those forked sticks lying snapped on the ground could have been used to rest the barrel of a rifle on. If the still, damp air here had ever held the smell of powder smoke, it was gone now, shaken away by the stir of activity.

January could only kneel in the soft earth behind a bank of hackberry brambles, where a break in the foliage gave a clear view of the dueling-ground, and of the place where a few minutes before he—and earlier Molloy—had stood. But whatever tracks might have been left there, by whoever it was who frightened the raven from its perch, had been obliterated.

He returned to the upstream edge of the dueling-ground, and for nearly half an hour searched the straggling willows and cottonwoods without finding a lodged pistol-ball that would have borne out his theory of what had actually taken place on the shore. By the time Thu called out to him that Mr. Souter wanted to get under way—that Simon in the engine-room had threatened to cut his own throat before he drew out the fires one more time— January had still found nothing.

One of the deck-hands rowed across in the skiff, and brought him back.

“What were you looking for?” asked Rose, waiting for him on the promenade.

“Hannibal's pistol-ball,” said January. “Did you see Molloy when they brought him aboard?”

She shook her head.

“He was shot through the left temple, just in back of the zygomatic bone—the outer rim of the eye socket.”

“How could Hannibal have shot him there?” asked Rose immediately. “If he was looking straight at Hannibal to fire . . .”

“Exactly. The hole is huge, and the path of the bullet—as far as I could see, and I'll probe it when I see the body again to make sure—seems to go diagonally through the head, cracking the right occipital bone in the back. When Davis dropped the handkerchief as a signal to fire, did you see anything strange? Anything out of the ordinary?”

“Other than two grown men shooting at one another because one of them didn't like the fact that the other had spoken to a woman he claimed was ‘his own'? I was watching Hannibal,” she added in a gentler voice. “Hoping against hope he'd be all right.”

“Is he all right?”

Rose sighed. “He's probably unconscious with laudanum by this time, and who can blame him? He looked deathly sick when he came aboard, and went straight to his stateroom. That Skippen hussy came tearing down the stair and tried to throw herself into his arms and he thrust her aside, but he couldn't speak. She's knocked at the door of his stateroom three times since, and tried to open it—I was keeping watch at the end of the promenade— but it's locked from the inside. What did you see?”

“Two grown men shooting at one another,” replied January with a wry grin. Then he sobered. “I was watching Hannibal, too. But when I saw the wound in Molloy's head I remembered how that raven flew up, just before the signal to fire, and it came to me that the whole thing might have been set up. That the intended victim wasn't Hannibal and myself, but Molloy. I think Molloy was shot with a rifle from that little oak grove at the head of the chute.”

“By whom?” asked Rose, startled. “Mrs. Fischer was on the promenade with Mrs. Tredgold and Mrs. Roberson—I saw her. And Mr. Cain was on the deck below.”

“Levi Christmas, maybe? Or one of his men?”

“But that would imply communication between him and someone on board—either Theodora or one of those awful deck-passengers. Since we've been stopped, there hasn't been a moment when there wasn't a guard of some kind on the hurricane deck. I don't think they could even have signaled without being seen.”

“I know,” said January. “I didn't say this was something I could prove, or even explain. But one thing I can and will do is have a look at the bullet lodged in Molloy's skull. And if it's a ball from a Manton dueling pistol, I'll eat it.”

While they'd been speaking, the great stern paddle had begun to turn, slowly driving the Silver Moon out into the channel of the river from the dead water behind the point. The river had fallen to its former low level, and the boat was surrounded by a veritable forest of snags that scraped at the hull and caught in the paddle, forcing the vessel to stop repeatedly while the deck-hands clambered here and there with poles to thrust off. January could hear Mr. Souter's voice yelling down from the hurricane deck, and unbidden to his mind rose the thought of what it must be like to be hidden in the damp, smelly darkness of the hold, listening to the grate of dead wood on the thin walls and knowing how much water lay immediately outside.

The thought made him shudder. He might fear Queen Regine, waiting like a spider down there in the darkness—holding whatever secret it was that she held about Weems's death—but he pitied her, too. She was a woman half-crazy and without fear, but there were limits even to craziness and courage.

January wasn't certain he could have stayed down there and listened to that horrible scraping sound.

When he and Rose reached the upper deck, almost the first thing they encountered was a knot of people