Dead water - Barbara Hambly [90]
A tear fell on the pieced-together crape of the black dress in her lap, and left its stain, like a sad echo, on the slave-woman's gray skirt beneath.
Refraining from taking issue with this unlikely scenario, Rose asked, “Were they together at all on that last night? I know you came down to the deck to sleep, after you helped poor Julie. . . .”
“Oh, poor Julie!” Sophie shook her head, and pressed a delicate hand to her brow. “I feel so guilty for having helped her instead of waiting for Mr. Weems! I might have been able to do something, to say something. . . .”
“But Mrs. Fischer sent you away,” pointed out Rose, “didn't she?”
“Yes.” Sophie sighed tragically and removed her hand, the stains from the crape on her fingers leaving a long, sooty smudge beneath the edge of her pink tignon. “Yes, she did. There was nothing, really, that I could have done. But I should have been able to. I brushed out her hair for her, and folded up her clothes and locked up her jewelry. She settled down in her wrapper to wait for . . . for Mr. Weems. . . .” A blush suffused the girl's ivory cheeks. “I'd made up a bundle, you see, for Julie, while I was waiting for Mrs. Fischer to come back from dinner. Some food, and a dress Mrs. Fischer had given me, which didn't fit me, and shoes. I took it out of the stateroom with me just as Julie came out of Miss Skippen's stateroom crying. I put my arms around her and tried to comfort her, and it was then that the boat ran on the bar. We clung to each other—I was afraid the boat would sink . . . !”
January blinked for a moment at this concept—by running onto the bar the boat had in effect touched the bottom of the river, and couldn't sink—but Sophie went on breathlessly.
“Then Julie said, ‘I'm going now! We must be near shore, and the water shallow, to run on a bar. I can get to shore, I know it!' Oh, poor Julie! I only hope she made it to shore!”
Eleven o'clock, then, thought January, unless something delayed her . . . But what would have delayed Julie for the hour that it took to walk the boat over the bar?
Which left, unfortunately, only one other black culprit with reason to wish Weems harm, and without an alibi.
Benjamin January.
“Do you know if Mr. Weems came to see your mistress at all?” asked Rose sympathetically.
Sophie shook her head tragically. “I know he didn't. She lay awake far into the night, waiting for him—when I came up in the morning to tell her of that . . . that horrible sight, that horrible thing Jim saw . . . all the lamp-oil was burned away. When I opened the door the first thing she said was, Run to Mr. Weems's stateroom, and learn why he did not come last night.”
“She did not go look herself, earlier in the night, then?”
Sophie recoiled in shock at the suggestion. “She was not dressed! She was so much the lady, she would not have ventured about the boat only in her wrapper and her nightgown! Oh, if only I had been there, I could have gone and searched in the night myself! Perhaps, if I had found him, I could have prevented his terrible death!”
“And when you told her . . . ?” prompted Rose gently.
“My poor Madame,” whispered Sophie. “The shock of it . . . all she could do was sit up in bed and say, What? Just like that . . . as if she could not believe. Then she said, Good Christ, and got out of bed without another word, and dressed. No tears,” she whispered, “though she has been weeping all the afternoon in the Parlor, with the other ladies about her. . . .”
I'll bet she has, thought January. After breaking into Weems's stateroom and searching . . . for what?
“It is a most tragic story. And I am the more grieved for hurting her, after all she has suffered already,