Dead water - Barbara Hambly [37]
Rose sighed. “Probably not. And I suspect our pupil Cosette's mother, and Germaine's, are right, too, when they say they'd rather their daughters learned something that will be ‘of use' to them, to make them more ‘fascinating' to men.”
“You,” said January, “are fascinating to this man, Greek and mathematics and all. And I can tell you Cosette and Germaine love what you teach them, even if it is difficult. At least I found someone had taken the French copy of the Iliad from the study, and is reading ahead of where you're taking them through the Greek.” He sat beside her again, gathered her into his arm. “I'd like to take that knot-head Quince to your school, and let him preach there about sending ‘savages' who will ‘never be able to make a living' back to Africa because it's all they're mentally fit for.”
In the end, unable to find any place on the bar that had twelve feet of water, Molloy ordered the engineers to build up steam and rammed the bar head-on, the bottom scraping on the soft sand while the deck-hands heaved and shoved with their poles, to literally flounder the Silver Moon to the other side. Then the slow process was all to do again, with the leadsmen rowing ahead in the skiff, and the monotonous calls ringing over the water: “Half one . . . half one . . . quarter less twain . . . mark twain.”
Mark Twain was the magic word, safe water . . . barely . . . enough for the boat to get over the next bar. They stopped at Futch's Wood-Yard, and at Home Plantation to drop off bolts of cheap calico and osnaberg and some New Orleans newspapers, after making a wide detour around Claiborne Island—the chute behind the island, navigable in high water, was nothing but a slot of mud now—and reached Baton Rouge slightly after nine that night.
The entire population of the Grand Saloon, who'd been listening to January and Hannibal play, streamed out en masse in the humid night air to look at the torches and movement on the landing. Though he didn't think Weems would disembark here any more than he'd get off in Donaldsonville, still January kept watch, while Tredgold had another quarrel with Molloy over damping the fires long enough to collect passengers.
“Who the bloody hell will be about at this time of the night fixin' to go up-river?” bellowed the pilot, and Mrs. Tredgold sailed into the argument with: “As long as you're in the pay of this boat, you'll do as my husband orders. . . .”
Most riverboat pilots January had ever met would have walked off at that point, with some choice curse shouted over the shoulder. That Molloy didn't confirmed in January's mind that the pilot was, in fact, a fellow depositor in the Bank of Louisiana and suspected Weems of absconding with some or all of its funds.
“But whether the man intends to return the portion of them that aren't his, if he manages to locate Weems's trunks before we do,” said Hannibal, leaning his bony elbows on the rail and looking down at the landing in the torchlight, “is, as they say, another story.”
After a screaming-match of Olympian proportions between Molloy and Mrs. Tredgold, the Silver Moon remained in Baton Rouge until midnight. Tredgold went ashore—propelled by his wife—as did Ned Gleet, to prowl the barrooms of the waterfront district in quest of human bargains. He came back empty-handed and angry, and tried again to talk Jubal Cain into selling some of his slaves to him. This provoked a scene that was discussed in whispers on the stern deck the following day—since every body-servant on the boat had a wholly understandable loathing for both dealers.
“I never heard one man, black or white, lay out another so flat without raising his voice,” whispered Jim at the water-butts in the morning, as the Silver Moon steamed away from a brief stop at the sordid little settlement of Bayou Sara. “He called him a pusillanimous slime-trail an' I don't know what-all else, and Gleet backed down from it.” The gray-haired Davis valet glanced in the direction of the piled wood that hid the male slaves from the servants' end of the promenade.