Dead water - Barbara Hambly [114]
Or he'd be grateful when he woke out of the opiated stupor into which he'd almost certainly drunk himself in reaction to the thought that he was a murderer.
Will all great Neptune's ocean
Wash this blood clean from my hand . . . ?
And anger burned up in him at the thought that someone would have used an innocent and morbidly sensitive soul like Hannibal as their cat's-paw.
The stateroom door stood open. Coming closer, even above the faint, terrible reek from Weems's closed room, he could smell vomit.
He sighed, not much surprised. Hannibal no longer got blazing drunk several times a week, and had nearly killed himself trying to get opium out of his system. January had encountered men who were able to cut down their drinking in the face of necessity, but had never found one who could break free of opium.
And even those who turned away from alcohol often turned back.
He'd been waiting to see if Hannibal was one of them.
Rose was kneeling beside the bed where Hannibal lay—Thucydides was just mopping up the floor with a towel. The fiddler looked ghastly, worse than any drunk January had ever seen, shut eyes sunken and lips gray as he gasped for breath. Horrified, January dropped down beside Rose and felt for the racing, thready pulse.
“Good God, how much did he drink?” How much could he have drunk, in the . . . what? An hour, at most, since he'd returned to the boat?
Rose glanced at him, her eyes warning—she reached into her pocket and took out her red bandanna, with which she wiped their friend's face.
January fell silent. Like the songs about wading in the bayou, a red bandanna had long been a signal of danger between them.
Only when Thucydides had left did she whisper, “About half an ounce, as far as I could tell . . .” She nodded to the flask of opium and sherry on the floor beside the bed, the only bottle in the room. “The door was locked—I had to get Thu to force it. He isn't drunk, Ben. And he doesn't have a fever, he's like ice. I think he was poisoned.”
NINETEEN
January dabbed some of the liquor from the flask onto his finger and tasted it, but the bitterness of the opium and the heavy sweet of Malaga sherry drowned any hint of whatever had been added to the brew. Still, he had no doubt that the poison, whatever it was, had been put into the flask. Taking a drink from it would have been the first thing Hannibal did upon entering the room.
And the second thing would have been to lock the door against Theodora Skippen, who was apparently determined—not to say desperate—to find a new protector for herself. No wonder Rose had had to get Thucydides to open it.
Since Hannibal seemed to have vomited everything in him, there seemed little point in a further purge. “See if you can get some water and a little salt beef from the galley,” January said, and dug in his medical kit for a paper twist of dried foxglove. Hannibal's hands and face were icy, but sweat stood out on his forehead and cheeks. When January lifted back his eyelids, he found the pupils dilated rather than constricted, as opium would have left them. His breathing was sunken to a thread—January watched closely the rise and fall of his chest, but though he seemed deep in a stupor he was having no obvious trouble or spasms.
“Why on earth would anyone have wanted to poison Hannibal?” demanded Rose, returning with a pitcher.
January mixed the tiniest pinch of foxglove with the water, and gently raised his friend and spooned some of it into his mouth. Hannibal swallowed, but didn't open his eyes.
“For exactly the reason we thought he—or she—had provoked the duel,” replied January grimly. “To get us off the boat. To get me off the boat . . . since, if I'm supposed to be Hannibal's slave, I must remain in Mayersville with him even if I didn't do so out of sheer humanity. If he died—”
Rose's eyes widened and filled with tears, and January shook his head reassuringly.
“His heartbeat seems to be steadying. And his breathing