Dead water - Barbara Hambly [42]
“How can they tell?” January kept an eye on the top of Silver Street, where a cluster of the immigrant women made their timid appearance, looking around for the town market at the far end of the plaza. “You sound Irish only when you're drunk.”
“Good God, the average Paddy can smell an Orangeman even when he's addressing them—as I was—in purest poacher's Gaelic. It's an instinct. Like you being able to look at Jim Pemberton and say, Oh, his grandmother was Senegalese, or at Thucydides and say, Oh, yes, mostly Fulani. I can't imagine how you do that.”
“And for me it's like telling an Italian from a Swede.” January shrugged. “The dealers do that, too, you know. Gleet could probably tell you how much European blood each of his slaves has, and what tribe the African ancestors came from.”
“Remind me never to ask him.” Hannibal shivered. “There are men who strike one as throwbacks straight to Sodom and Gomorrah; they make one understand God's use of fire and brimstone. There they go,” he added, touching January's sleeve. Horses blowing and sweating, the cab and the dray emerged from the top of Silver Street and swung around the edge of the plaza toward Main Street. January and Hannibal loafed purposefully behind.
Unlike New Orleans, Natchez was a town where a wealthy man could live quite comfortably all year round. The Spanish had done so, as had the English Tories who had fled there rather than remain with the rebellious Atlantic seaboard colonies forty-five years before. Across the river, the rich black delta soil grew the finest cotton in the New World, with the cotton-lands in back of the bluffs on the Mississippi side almost as fertile. The houses here were big, lush, and surrounded by gardens and orchards; the hotels gracious, welcoming the merchants who came to partake of the wealth. The handsome white edifice into whose driveway the cab turned would not have been out of place in London, except for its wider yard and more opulent greenery. The dray entered a side-street, January and Hannibal crossing to follow.
“You think they saw us?” Hannibal glanced back at the mustard-colored figure helping the tall, brown-clothed lady down from the cab.
“They might have. But everyone from the boat, almost, is ashore. We're hardly the only ones.”
“Yes, but we're probably the only ones who followed them to this hotel.”
“Since I never set eyes on Weems in New Orleans before Monday morning—and since you have no connection with the Bank of Louisiana at all—there's no reason he should take any notice of us.”
Through the yard gates January could see the draymen unloading the two trunks, handling them as if they were, indeed, heavy with gold. By the kitchen door—which was in the rear of the hotel building itself, American fashion, and not in separate quarters at the far end of the yard, a practice that always struck January as both unsanitary and dangerous—a laundress and a cook sat in the shade, smoking pipes and talking in a leisurely manner that made him want to send the manager out to thrash them both back to work.
“They look settled for the day,” whispered Hannibal as he and January ducked back out of sight around the fence.
“Let's give them fifteen minutes,” replied January—a remark he later heartily regretted. For fifteen minutes by January's silver French watch they listened to the account of the family argument that had surrounded the deathbed of the cook's grandmother, which rivaled any stage melodrama January had ever witnessed in violence, greed, and sheer bad taste. When at the end of that time the tale hadn't even reached Grandma's death (“. . . so she said, What's more, you wasn't even my son, let alone his; I borrowed you from this friend of mine when you was a baby to get your grandpa to marry me . . .”) Hannibal fished through his pockets for his card-case, from which he extracted a neat slip of pasteboard:
Mr.