Dead water - Barbara Hambly [87]
January thought, She's there.
Queen Régine.
And what did SHE see last night? What does she know?
As January had guessed, Mrs. Fischer's numerous trunks contained nothing but clothes and jewelry—extremely opulent, vividly colorful, and completely at odds with her ladylike and withdrawn exterior—and a number of books printed in Paris or Amsterdam, with titles like The Flogging-Block, Confessions of a Lady of Leisure, and The Lustful Turk. None of the trunks bearing her name seemed disordered or incompletely packed. Sophie turned her shoulder away from Hannibal when he spoke to her, and as she returned up the stair hesitated to greet Rose. . . .
“God knows what La Pécheresse has been telling her about the three of us,” remarked Hannibal under his breath. “Or told her cronies in the Parlor, for that matter. Look how La Tredgold has been watching every move I make.”
Sophie and Rose stepped aside as Molloy swaggered down the stair and over to Davis. “When the hell you going to be done playing about here and let me get my deck-hands back to their work? We can't stay here keepin' the fires drawn for all the night!”
“We shall remain,” retorted Davis, glaring coldly down his nose at the pilot, “as long as it takes to ascertain once and for all who is lying and who is speaking the truth.”
“What is truth, asked Pilate, and washed his hands.” Hannibal went forward to start hauling the trunks back to be lowered into the hold again, and replaced by others. “I have my pick-locks on hand for those items addressed to people not on the boat, though I'm sure that will clinch what remains of my reputation. All I can say is, we'd better find something in one of these trunks, or I suspect we're both going to hear about it from the sheriff at Mayersville.”
Mr. Quince's single trunk contained numerous identical sets of shirts and underclothing, innumerable Swedenborgian tracts, fifty back issues of the Liberator, a dozen bottles of “Vegetarian Tonic,” and a dozen more of Kendal Black Drop, a quadruple-strength opium tincture.
Theodora Skippen's held enormous quantities of frilled night-dresses, silk stockings, fifteen gold watches, twenty-seven men's gold signet-rings, four gold and seven silver cigar cases (two with cigars), no two of anything engraved with the same initials.
Kelsey Lundy's yielded, among a few shirts and a spare pair of boots, two Bibles, several Abolitionist pamphlets, four copies of the Liberator, three bottles of laudanum, and a packet of sulfate of zinc, which January recognized as a powerful emetic.
No trunk, crate, or box examined held either banknotes, the packets of securities Granville had spoken of, or gold.
FIFTEEN
“La Pécheresse couldn't possibly have managed to spend four million dollars all in one afternoon before she left New Orleans, could she?”
Hannibal trailed January down the starboard promenade as Thucydides locked up the hold door and the hatch under Davis's watchful eye. The two coffles of slaves, having spent the forenoon poling the Silver Moon out of the chute and the mid-afternoon dragging luggage around, were now being ordered to assist in the task of helping the exhausted deck-hands lug wood to the furnaces to get steam up again, a process that would take until nearly dawn.
Climbing overboard in sightless night and fog and swimming for an unknown shore in the dark was beginning to make more and more sense.
“Even if she'd bought all those clothes and Weems had paid cash for three plantations and the slaves to run them,” January replied wearily, “it wouldn't have gone unnoticed. No, the money was on board and Molloy did something with it—or with some important portion of it. For that matter, Fischer and Weems had several days to remove the loot from their trunks themselves. We've been able to keep an eye on the stern doorway down into the hold, but they—or