Dead water - Barbara Hambly [105]
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 Silver Moon, namely, find where the Bank of Louisiana funds were and pin the crime on Fischer and Weems. Somewhere out there in the deepening blackness of the Mississippi woods, he thought, Baron Cemetery and the Grand Zombi and Guédé-Five-Days-Unhappy were all laughing—and down in the hold, Queen Régine was laughing, too.
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