Dead water - Barbara Hambly [39]
“Was she grading Latin papers that week?”
And January laughed. The iron reality of the fear retreated a little. But it watched him like a rat from the shadows.
“I suppose I should be grateful it's Rose I'm trying to save,” he said. “I can wake up, and there she is, sleeping beside me and dreaming about planting sweet-peas. Sometimes I used to dream about running through the streets of Paris, knowing Ayasha was dying of the cholera, back in our rooms. . . .” He flinched at the memory of those dreams. Of the way the streets of the river-side district lengthened and tangled into bizarre labyrinths, turned back on themselves, while he could hear his first wife's desperate breathing, her sobs as she lay on the bed. Could hear her calling his name.
“And I'd wake up,” he said softly, “and know that she actually did die.” He didn't add that sometimes it was Rose dying while he ran through the streets of Paris in that sweltering cholera summer, trying to find the way to her. To save her.
So that he would not have to face the rest of his life alone.
“I suppose that is what it is,” said Hannibal, “to be a knight-errant at heart. God knows what Sir Galahad dreamed about. It couldn't have been terribly interesting, fighting to rescue a cup. And an empty cup, at that. I think the worst part of trying to give up opium was the dreams—although mind you, I wasn't terribly keen on the throwing-up part either.”
Or the ghastly blackness of depression that had followed hard upon the physical symptoms, January reflected, considering his friend's gaunt face in the tiny seed of orange light. That Hannibal had, with an improvement in his health last winter, actually attempted to break his opium habit had astonished January; that he had ultimately been unable to do so surprised him not at all. To the girls among whom Hannibal lived, in the attics and back-sheds of the whorehouses and saloons of the Swamp, his resolve to give up laudanum and liquor had appeared merely quixotic in the face of the devastating symptoms of withdrawal: “Just have a bit until you're feeling better” had quickly collapsed the whole effort, leaving him, January thought, more fragile than before.
“Does Rose want to be rescued?” asked Hannibal now. “In your dreams, I mean?”
“I don't know,” said January. “God knows I've never had any luck with rescuing her in real life. And it may not be Rose I'm seeking to rescue at all, or not Rose only, but my sisters, my mother . . . my father. . . .”
When he slept again he dreamed of the slaves chained along the promenade, sleeping in their chains, while Rose lay curled on her blanket with her head on her satchel, beside Julia, as the huge paddle thrashed and glittered in the darkness. And in his dream he saw the faces of the men and women in the coffle, and knew them: his sister Olympe and her husband, Paul, his sister Dominique with her tiny daughter Charmian in her arms. For some reason his mother wasn't there—probably because she would never permit herself to be perceived as a slave, even in her son's dreams. But his father was, the father he had not seen since he was eight, since his mother was sold to a white man and went to New Orleans to live as his free mistress with her children.
And his father's face was his own.
All in chains. All being taken to someplace they did not know, to be separated forever. All trapped on the wet planks of the steamboat, churning up-river through the night.
Then he woke with the pale light trickling through the shut curtains of the stateroom, to the sounds of horns blowing, of cannon firing in the distance. And coming out on deck minutes later, he saw the town of Natchez-On-The-Hill lying before them in the hot light of morning.
SEVEN
Natchez-On-The-Hill was a handsome town of some four thousand souls,