Dead water - Barbara Hambly [53]
Remembered, too, more softly: She's a beauty, ain't she?
From here on up the river was cotton country. The plantations starting up on newly-ceded Indian lands needed field-hands far more than they needed half-trained ladies-maids.
“My granny that's a free woman was savin' to buy me free,” Julie continued in a whisper. “But Michie Binoche, he needed money right then, 'cause of his girl gettin' sick. He wouldn't a' sold me, he said, 'cept that I'd be a ladies'-maid, an' he made Mamzelle Theodora swear she wouldn't sell me off, the dirty bitch.”
“Do you know for sure she's done it?” asked Sophie, grasping at straws. Trying to push aside her own fears of what would become of her on the voyage—as well she should, January reflected. Had Mrs. Fischer put her foot down about selling off her maid rather than letting Weems lead his watchers to the trunks in the hold? “Surely she wouldn't rob herself of a maid while she's traveling?”
“She say, ‘Don't be stupid,' when I ask her.” Julie wiped under her nose with the back of her wrist. “An' she slap me when I ask her again. But when she leave the room I look in her bag, an' she got four hundred dollars there she didn't have before.”
“I don't suppose she could have made that in Natchez,” mused Rose. “Not all in one afternoon, anyway.”
And the women laughed—even Sophie, who looked shocked, too—the wry, bitter laughter of those who lace corsets and wash dirty underwear and tidy away stained sheets. Then they tightened their arms around Julie again, and held the girl close among them as the hard-held tears began to flow. “What'm I gonna do?” whispered the girl, her face pressed to Rose's shoulder. “What'm I gonna do?”
Preparing to climb the steps to assist his “master” in getting ready for supper, January paused, his eyes drawn down the passway to the locked door of the hold. The thought rose in his mind: Queen Régine might help.
Help how? Poison Gleet? That would result only in Julie and the other seven men and women of Gleet's coffle spending several months in a slave-jail in Vicksburg, waiting for letters to make their patient way up and down the river in quest of his next-of-kin.
Help Julie escape? Even this close to shore, among the snags and eddies of low water, the current was strong. Julie could stay afloat on a couple of pieces of furnace-wood, but once ashore, she'd have county patrols to contend with, and almost certainly the Reverend Levi Christmas, dogging the boat like a carrion wolf.
Along the starboard promenade, the men were singing, their voices rolling out across the water:
Ai, tingwaiye, ai tingwaiye. . . .
And from the women's side of the boat, two or three voices at first, then on the next round more, replied, “Ah waiya, ah waiya.”
African words, learned by rote from mothers who'd sung them long ago. Even those who hadn't known them before took them up, drawing comfort from the sound, from the memory of the quarters of their childhood, and the villages on the other side of the ocean, beneath the hot African moon.
Day-zab, day-zab, day koo-noo wi wi,
Day-zab, day-zab, day koo-noo wi wi. . . .
Could Queen Régine hear them, he wondered, down in the terrible dark of the hold? Was she able—he couldn't imagine how—to come out on deck, to move about silent in the night, seeking him like a vengeful ghost? I curse you to the ruin of all you touch, and the destruction of all you hope.
All he hoped stood a pace from ruin now, that was for certain.
January shivered, and fished in his pocket for the comforting touch of his rosary. He'd lived in Paris, and read the works of Locke and Hume, Kant and Hegel, and had listened to the talk of students in the cafés. He would no more have admitted to belief in a half-crazed old freedwoman's curse than he'd have worshipped God by cutting a lamb's