Dead water - Barbara Hambly [79]
“Is that what happened?”
“It's what Souter says. He was near in tears about it when I talked to him on the bow that afternoon and asked him what the hell he meant by shaving the bank that close. Molloy came down the stairs and slapped him on the shoulder and says, ‘You shouldn't go believin' everythin' you're told, boy. . . .'” Despite the crippled soft monotone of his voice, Lundy captured the Irishman's speech with blistering scorn. “It's my opinion Molloy did it just to break the boy's spirit a little and keep him under his thumb.”
The white triangular sail of the skiff winked from among the trees, tacking before the brisk gusts back toward the Silver Moon. Molloy's oilskin coat and wide-brimmed hat were running with rain, but he looked cheerful and stood up in the skiff to shout, “Plenty of water in the chute, laddies!”
“Oh, the hell there is!” Lundy limped over to the pilot as the deck-hands crowded forward to draw the skiff close to the bow and help Molloy spring aboard. January saw the older man gesture furiously, pointing toward the gap in the trees as the Silver Moon came slowly around and pointed her nose to the chute.
Because of the palsy, Lundy's buzzing, timbreless voice was inaudible over the rain and the paddle's splashing, but Molloy's reply boomed out arrogantly.
“What's the matter, man? You can't run a boat in ten feet of water? I thought you were the one with the hard-on to get to Lexington—in a manner of speaking,” he added, and strode on up the stair with a jeering laugh.
Lundy clung for a moment to the stanchion as if all strength had deserted him. But as January came forward to help him, the former pilot pushed himself away and moved, with surprising agility, up the stair as well.
“What causes it?” asked Rose's voice softly behind him. January turned to see her looking after the old pilot with compassionate eyes. “Palsy, I mean.”
“They don't know.” January went to take her in his arms, to press her to the thin boards of the wall through which the throb of the engines beat like a heart. To press his lips over hers, as the touch of her, the scent of her—even after a week unwashed in the heat on a steamboat's deck—aroused in him the desire to pull her behind the wood-piles and crates and have her on the bare deck like a savage, a Kaintuck, a rapist.
I feared I would never see you again.
He realized how often this was his fear when something separated them, when something went wrong.
“We wouldn't have left you, you know,” Rose said after that long, wordless time of silent rocking in one another's arms. Of silent thanks to God and the Virgin that in spite of Queen Régine's curse and every effort by the world in general to the contrary, the ultimate thing was still all right. She was still with him.
“I don't think I've ever felt so relieved in my life as when I saw you coming down the bank,” she went on. “Hannibal and I were watching for you, of course—Mr. Lundy told us Steele's Bayou was the likeliest place you'd make for.”
His lips brushed the feather-soft curls that emerged from beneath the edge of her tignon. “Don't tell me you were the one who actually got poor Souter to run the boat up on the bar.”
“Nonsense.” Her smile was a quick sunflash, quickly tucked away. “If we hadn't run aground on that bar, Hannibal was going to light a small fire in the cordwood near the engine-door just as we came within sight of Steele's Bayou so that I could slip in and dump the boilers in the confusion.”
January sighed. “It's good to know I have ingenious friends. Where was Lundy last night, by the way? I'll have to ask Hannibal what time he left the Saloon after dinner.”
“You don't suspect poor Mr. Lundy of heaving Weems overboard, do you? Why would he? I'd say it would be Mr. Molloy, if anybody. Or that cold savage, Cain.”
“Except that Molloy was in the pilot-house when it happened,” said January. “And Cain appears to have been continuously