Dead water

January said softly, “Thank you, Your Majesty.”

And the little old woman winked at him, and he stepped aside to let her totter down the stair.

To himself he reflected, as she hobbled away into the half-lights and whispers of the warm, still dawn, that if he was going to start working with the Underground Railway, he was certainly going to need all the blessings he could get.

He turned, and went back into the dim sanctuary of his home.

STEAMBOATS

The steam-driven packet-boats that plied the waterways of America in the 1830s were hardly the “floating palaces” of the post–Civil War era; they, and the craft of steamboating, differed even from those of the late 1850s immortalized in Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi. At the time of my story, the era of fancy wooden gingerbread trimmings, gilded antlers on the smokestacks, plush cabin furnishings, and calliopes lay a decade or two in the future. Even the steam whistle had yet to be invented.

Before the post-War era of the railroads, steamboats were the workaday backbone of commerce and transportation. They were plain, generally only two decks high (only later was the “hurricane” deck surmounted by the topmost “texas” deck), and resembled barns set on rafts. If they were primarily white, like later steamboats, it was only because whitewash was cheap. Staterooms were minuscule, and in the high-water periods of the cotton and sugar harvests, every square foot of deck-space was likely to be taken up with cargo: freight was given priority, and passengers came in a poor second. During the high-water months most commerce was done by the side- wheelers—larger, more powerful, and more maneuverable. Only in low water—or in shallower waters of lesser rivers and bayous—did the smaller stern-wheelers like the Silver Moon come into their own.

I have tried to describe what steamboat travel must have been like in the 1830s, when the Mississippi River was innocent of locks, flood control, uniform levees, or any variety of snag-clearance (or safety regulations for steamboat passengers). Even before the Civil War, railroads had begun to undercut the steamboats' monopoly on freight and to disrupt uninhibited navigation with bridges.

COLONEL DAVIS

In the summer of 1836, when Dead Water takes place, Jefferson Davis was twenty- eight years old and just embarking on a career as a planter at Brierfield on Davis's Bend of the Mississippi. He had been widowed less than a year before by the death of his young bride of three months, Sarah Knox Taylor (called Knox), the daughter of his former commanding officer—and future President—Zachary Taylor. Davis had already commanded troops in the Black Hawk War, though as far as anyone has ever been able to prove, he never encountered militia Captain Abraham Lincoln during that conflict.

In the mid-1840s Davis entered politics and re-married, to a young lady named Varina Howell. When the Mexican War broke out in 1846, he accepted a commission as Colonel and went on to become a war hero, a Senator, and Secretary of War to President Franklin Pierce, a career that culminated in his five-year term as the only President of the Confederate States of America.

James Pemberton became the overseer at Brierfield in Davis's absence, a position he held until his death in 1850.

Davis is universally described as a fair and kind master to his slaves.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BARBARA HAMBLY lives in Los Angeles, where she is at work on a novel about Mary Todd Lincoln, The Emancipator's Wife, which Bantam will publish in 2005.

Also by Barbara Hambly

A Free Man of Color

Fever Season

Graveyard Dust

Sold Down the River

Die Upon a Kiss

Wet Grave

Days of the Dead

DEAD WATER

A Bantam Book / August 2004

Published by Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2004 by Barbara Hambly

Map and illustration copyright © 2004 by Jeffrey L. Ward

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Hambly, Barbara.

Dead water / Barbara Hambly.

p.         cm.

1. January, Benjamin (Fictitious character)—Fiction.         2. Private investigators—Louisiana—New Orleans—Fiction.         3. Natchez-under-the-Hill (Natchez, Miss.)—Fiction.         4.