04 Sold Down the River

THREE

It was long past dark when they reached Mon Triomphe, and January would have given much-if not quite everything he possessed-to go back to yesterday afternoon and refuse to undertake the journey. Last night's dream returned to him again and again: the staggering shadow that stank of liquor, the sweat of terror at the sound of the whip. Always before he'd waked from this dream to reassure himself, It can't happen to me now. I'm free.

He'd installed Hannibal in his bunk in the men's cabin, drawn the curtain, and gone out in quest of the galley, praying that when the fiddler came to he'd be in possession of enough of his senses to recall the story they'd concocted the night before.

The Belle Dame, like many of the newer boats on the river, was long and narrow. The galley, situated between the men's cabin and the women's, was barely more than a hall. The saloon up front, which doubled as a dining room, was like the lobby of a modest hotel: worn Turkey carpets on the floor, tables of dark oak, men playing short whist or vingt-et-un. By the murmuring voices, January gathered there were few Americans on board. Thank God for small favors, anyway, he thought. The last thing he needed in his current frame of mind was to have his fellow passengers bidding on him all afternoon.

"Will you need help with him?" Fourchet's new butler was already in the galley, fitting out a tray to take around to one of the vessel's two minuscule staterooms. His neatly gloved hands trembled as he arranged the simple china cup and saucer, the small coffeepot and dish of sugar lumps, the napkin and spoon and the plate of buttered pastries; the flesh around his eyes was swollen with tears. Where had she gone, that tall plump woman in her bright dress, after the boat was poled and pushed from the wharf? How would she get through the remainder of her day? "Thank you, sir, no." January remembered to slur his words and drop the endings, like the field hands did, a mode of speech that had been thrashed out of him by his teachers when he was eight. He had a clear mental picture of the man he was supposed to be, a field hand taken from the quarters and put in charge of the feckless scion of a wealthy family, simply because he was big and loyal and not terribly bright. The kind of slave it would be natural to offer to one's host to help with the harvest, and the kind of man who would accept the change of status without fuss. "Least I knows where his medicine is," he added, and accepted the coffeepot, the cup and saucer, the horn spoon that the Belle Dame's cook gave him, and set them on the tray carelessly, any old how, as he'd seen scullery maids do in the big Paris households where he'd played at balls or taught piano to children.

And like the upper cooks in those Parisian kitchens, the butler Baptiste corrected and tidied the layout, though unlike the French cooks he asked politely, "May I?" and then, "This your regular job, sir?"

January threw a note of helplessness into his voice. "No, sir. Abraham-that's Michie Georges's cook-does trays and such mostly." And let's remember, he told himself grimly, that Michie Georges is Hannibal's imaginary wealthy father-in-law and Abraham's the cook, next time you have to produce names of the household you come from.

"Line up the spoon with the side of the tray like this." The round, neat little hands made their adjustments without impatience or condescension. "Bowl goes down, not up, so everyone can see the monogram if there is one. Cup right in the center, pot here. They like things to look nice." "They blessed well better look nice for Michie Fourchet." The doorway darkened with the tall slim form of Fourchet's valet. The man's livery was foppishly neat, dark cravat tied in a severe little bow and thin black curls pomaded smooth. The valet ran a critical eye over both trays and nodded, just a tiny motion, to himself, as if sorry there was nothing to correct. "Any little thing sets him off forks and knives not aligned, one curtain shut an inch more than the other. Anything. He beat your predecessor unconscious once for having dirty sleeves, when he'd told him himself to dust the ledgers in his office. So keep your buttons polished and your linen spotless." He glanced at January, sizing him up with that dark sardonic eye: his size, his clothing, the way he'd spoken, the way he held himself-awkward and a little shy, as if fully conscious of the superiority of the two house-servants and even the steamboat's slovenly cook. Then he turned back to Baptiste. "You'd better get that up to him." "I will do that, M'sieu Cornwallis." The valet walked away. "Thank you, sir," said January, as Baptiste picked up his tray.

The butler took a deep breath, nodded, and went out to do his first service for his master. The cook, looking through the door after Cornwallis's erect figure, said, "Damn Protestant Kaintuck nigger," and went back to the preparation of lunch.

Carrying his own tray back to the men's cabin-a journey that involved sidestepping crated dry goods, barrels of blankets and calico, boxes of spermaceti candles, decanters packed in straw, a small pile of pigs of lead, and a dozen trunks stacked on the deck January reflected on the fact that the cook, whom the valet obviously scorned for being of almost certainly pure African descent and menial employment, should look down on the valet for his Virginia accent and the religious preferences that accent implied.

During January's childhood, Fourchet had never bothered to convert his slaves. Even the house-servants had only the thinnest veneer of Christianity. St.-Denis Janvier had seen to his religious instruction as well as his education, and January remembered clearly being cautioned about the evils and ignorance of Protestants, a rarity in those days. Since his return he'd been conscious of how many American slaves were coming into New Orleans now from Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas, and of how the French-speaking Catholic slaves-even the ones who followed up Mass by attendance at the voodoo dances in Congo Square-tended to shun them. And vice versa, of course.

Even before he knocked on the door of the men's cabin he heard Hannibal's voice inside. "Of course I'm drunk," the fiddler was saying. "But I'm not stupid, and I assure you I've imbibed enough opium in the course of a misspent life that I've learned to manage quite nicely. Benjamin, amicus meus..." He propped himself a little on the pillows as January entered, and Fourchet stood back a half pace from the bunk. "Tell this gentleman about the time I drove Monsieur Marigny's carriage down Rue Bourbon after having quaffed a good four fingers of the finest Kendal Black Drop."

"Drink your coffee." January set the tray on Hannibal's knees, which were so thin they barely lifted above the level of the bunk's meager mattress. "Sir."

He glanced around the men's cabin, confirming his original observation that they were alone. To Fourchet he said, "As someone who's known Monsieur Sefton for two years, I can assure you he's usually less inebriated than he seems. I don't think we need fear his giving away any secrets." Unless, he thought, he gets really neck-shot-something Hannibal did seldom, but did with fiendish timing for those few occasions on which it was most important that he be sober. Fourchet regarded him with an arctic eye. "I don't imagine you would have been stupid enough to propose an alliance with someone you believed to be as untrustworthy as most drunkards are," he said. "But considering the pains we've taken to arrange a story, as you termed it last night, I'm at a loss to think of a convincing reason for me to offer the shelter of my roof to a sodden reprobate. No matter how desperately he counterfeits sickness."

Hannibal coughed, with a violence and a gluey, glottal note to it that, January thought uneasily, were no counterfeit. The wasting effects of his consumption seemed to have abated with the cooler weather, but with his shirt open and his long hair trailing loose from its ribbon over his shoulders, he still looked like a ghost just back from a night on the tiles. When he regained his breath he said, "Easy. I will have done you a great service, which you feel obliged to repay by taking me in when I'm stricken ill."

"What service? You can't even do up your bootlaces," Fourchet said.

"Then it's fortunate you don't need bootlaces done up. However, I will do you the service of telling you that the gentleman who arranged a half-hour or so ago to go halves with you in the purchase of Chickasaw lands has no more option to title on those lands than I have option to title on the Parthenon of Athens."

Fourchet's eyes widened in alarm. "How do you know what Monsieur LaBarre and I discussed?

You haven't been out of this room! "

"I saw you pass the door deep in conversation with him a few minutes ago, and I know there's only one thing Slinky LaBarre holds deep conversations about with strangers, and that's a tract of territory along the Arkansas River that the government is about to negotiate from the tribes. I hope you didn't give him a draft."

The planter said nothing for a time, only tightened his jaw as if chewing something tough and rancid tasting. January was familiar with the tic. "And what do you know about it?" Fourchet demanded at length.

"Only what I've heard about Slinky from other gamblers, cheats, river pirates, and opium-sodden reprobates in the saloons." Hannibal's voice weakened and he leaned his back against the pillows;

January could see the flecks of blood that tipped his mustache hairs. "I'll think of some other service for me to do you if that doesn't suit: the location of one of Lafitte's caches of treasure, perhaps? Or it could be I have title to Chickasaw land myself."

"My family knows how I feel about drunkards and opium-eaters." The savage loathing in Fourchet's voice was deeper than any disgust or contempt. "When we go ashore at Triomphe I'll thank you to restrict your habits to something that can be accounted for by illness, not dissipation."

"I'll commence practicing my coughing immediately." Hannibal gave him the ghost of a military salute. Mouth almost square-cornered with distaste, the planter resumed his hat and made to go.

January said, "If you could spare us a few more minutes of your time, sir?"

Fourchet glanced pointedly at the door, as if to remind him that anyone could enter at any time.

This wasn't, January knew, actually likely. No one in their right mind would linger in the passenger cabins of a small steamboat if they didn't have to.

Like most stern-wheelers, the Belle Dame was a smallish boat of shallow draft, and what it lost in the smallness of its hold space was made up out of the cabins, galley, staterooms, and saloon. The men's cabin was narrow and cramped, odorous from the proximity of the galley, and Spartan at best. Despite its distance from the boiler room, the walls shuddered with the regular thudding pulse of the engine. Trunks, valises, and portmanteaux that either wouldn't fit in the hold or would be required before many hours had passed heaped the floor in front of and beside the bunks. Most passengers sought the distractions of cards in the saloon, or braved the chill on the hurricane deck above.

Fourchet turned back, nostrils flared with impatience as Hannibal set down his untasted coffee and went into a paroxysm of coughing. "For what?"

"A little information." January knelt, and dug through the valise for the first laudanum bottle he could lay hands on. He had to hold it steady while his friend drank. "Who the members of your household are. Where they were on the night of the fire in the sugar-mill, and when the mule barn caught fire. Who besides Gilles had the keys to the cellaret the cognac was in, and the keys to the mill."

The planter looked about to snap some stricture about the medicine, but drew a breath instead, as if forcibly reminding himself to keep his own affairs in focus. "You've seen Cornwallis," he said at last. "He's my valet, he's been with me about six years. He came warranted honest and sober but I suspect they wanted to get rid of him for some reason, for in the end they let him go for seven-fifty. My son Esteban's valet is Agamemnon-a creeping, sneaking, prissy catamite if you ask me-and Kiki's the cook. The maids are Ariadne and Henna. My son Robert's man and his wife's maid they took with them to Paris, and they weren't even present when the trouble started.

Doucette does the sewing. There's Ti-Jeanne the washerwoman, but she wouldn't have had access to the keys of the cellaret, let alone the-"

"I didn't mean the servants," said January quietly. "I mean your family. The people who stand to profit from your death."

The planter's face flamed. "By God, if I have to stand here and take this from a-"

"You don't, sir," said January steadily. "But if your wife was with child, and an accoucheur asked after her health, would you keep it from him if she'd had three miscarriages in the past three years?"

Fourchet, who had opened his mouth to shout him down, checked, and closed it again, listening in simmering silence.

"Would you keep silent about her passing blood, or fainting? I'm a doctor, M'sieu." Well, a surgeon, anyway, he thought, but Fourchet didn't have to know that. "I've seen men who do all this and more, and in so doing endanger the lives of those they love by their unwillingness to tell the complete truth."

Footfalls clumped outside the door. January knelt at once and pretended to be rearranging something in Hannibal's valise. Since the cabin did not go all the way through the width of the boat, but backed its inner end onto the wall of one of the staterooms, Fourchet left it entirely, passing in the doorway the man who entered, a stout fair gentleman who nodded a friendly greeting to him and was roundly snubbed.

Nothing discomposed, the newcomer nodded to Hannibal. He asked, "Is all well with the Herr?"

Hannibal lifted a hand in assent and replied in the German in which he'd been addressed. "I'm better now, thank you."

The German gentleman went to his own bunk and fetched a greatcoat. "Might I ask where you are bound, sir? You seem in no fit case to travel."

"St. Louis," said Hannibal faintly. "If I make it so far."

"T'cha, that is not good." The stranger divided his worried glance between Hannibal and January.

"Please let me know if I may be of any assistance."

"Fool," muttered Fourchet after the German left. "That's the kind of man who ends up with parasites on his hands and in his house for months, sucking him dry." He had kindled a cigar while on deck, chewing it now angrily as he stared down at the fiddler lying on his bunk. "And serve him right. "

Resentment in every craggy line of his face, he dragged up the room's solitary chair and settled in it. "These are they who'd have access to the keys to the cellaret," he said abruptly. "My son Esteban; and through him that sneaking valet of his, Agamemnon. My wife..." He could barely bring out the words. "And I presume either of the maids, who could have lifted them from her room if they'd had the wits to do it. My son Robert and his wife weren't back yet from Paris when the mill burned, and they had, as I said, their servants with them: Leander and that good-for-nothing slut Vanille." "What about your overseer?"

"Thierry? He keeps his own liquor in his own house." Disgust tinged Fourchet's voice, as if he'd sniffed wormwood. "He has no call to have a key. But you know as well as I do the thievery that goes on among blacks. Any one of them could have taken the key."

Well, it would be harder for a field hand to get it, January thought, unless of course he worked out trade or blackmail with one of the house-servants, who generally held the field hands in complete contempt. At that point a copy could be made, if the plantation blacksmith was clever enough. But he said nothing. These were the secrets of the quarters, not to be shared with les blankittes, for you never knew against whom information might be used. Instead he said, "Tell me about the day the mill burned."

"Evening." Fourchet bit savagely on the cigar with one side of his mouth and leaked smoke from the other. "Just at sunset. The men were still in the cipriere. Reuben, my sugar-boss, saw the mill door open and fire inside. He ran in and started beating at the flames, and only fortune saved him, for the mill door blew shut behind him and jammed. We had to open it with an ax, and by that time smoke had overcome him, and the fire spread. We found trash-cane leaves and hay, and last year's dried bagasse-jammed up under the rafter joints, and in the timbers that supported the grinders."

"Who is 'we'?" asked January. "If Reuben was alone and ran in and the door blew shut behind him, how was he saved?"

"One of the pickaninnies. Boy claimed he was gathering kindling-playing in the mule barn more likely, where he'd no business to be-and saw the smoke, and heard Reuben shouting. He and his brother ran to the ciprierrie and got the men."

January sat silent, gazing at the narrow glaring rectangle of the half-open door and the brown river beyond. It was low water, and gray snags reached up like demon hands, clutching for the hulls and the wheels of the boats. More dangerous still would be those just beneath the surface, mere scratches or ruffles on the glassy flow. Sandbars made slanting riffles, or accrued enough flotsam to build up into islands the larger side-wheelers veered into the heavy current of the main channel to avoid them, but the Belle Dame skimmed "inside" these obstructions, between them and the tree-grown bank. Above the engine's jarring heartbeat, January heard the leadsmen calling the depth: "Quarter twain. Quarter twain. Mark twain." "There were no men nearer?"

"We were behind the harvest, I tell you," snapped Fourchet. "We'd had rain for three days. I had both gangs out cutting wood, Sunday or no Sunday, and most of the yard-men as well. Even the gardener. There was no one about the place except the houseservants." "And Reuben, evidently."

"He'd been working in the mill on and off all day, making it ready for the grinding." During the roulaison, the near-universal rule of Sunday as a day of "rest"-which for a slave meant labor on one's own provision grounds instead of for the master's cash crop-was suspended in the interests of the cane. January remembered how the field dust gummed in the cut-cane-juice on his hands, his clothes, his face; how everything was sticky with it.

Suddenly and clearly he had a vision of his father rising in freezing darkness and going outside to wash before joining the men for work, a tall shadow in the banked sulfurous dimness of the hearth.

Where had that memory come from? he wondered. As a rule he had few memories of his father. "And how long was the grinding delayed?"

"Over a week. Too long-cane'll rot within two days. The sugar goes sour." He blew a vile-smelling cloud. "Reuben spent the day after the fire going over every inch of that mill. That's when he found the hoodoo-marks. The axle-beams of the grinders were charred black, but he said they hadn't been damaged, so he got the grinders running by the Tuesday. Two days later the main gang was down sick, puking and purging. More hoodoo work. I put as many as I could spare from the second gang in the fields with the women, and the women were more use than they at the work. The cane came in full of trash and stones, jamming up the grinders every five minutes. Reuben tried to pull a knot or something free and the mules spooked. The whole business broke and the grinding rollers came down on him, and what with Esteban having to go to town and get new, and the delay of having a man set them up, we lost another week." January was silent, trying to piece the images together in his mind. Sick at the thought of those huge toothed iron cylinders, monster jaws drooling the green sticky sap of the cane... Came down on him... Dear Jesus!

And all Fourchet saw was the delay. The planter pulled on his chewed cigar and brooded about the injustice of it all. On his bunk Hannibal lay with shut eyes, thin hands folded around the empty coffee cup. Above the thwack jerk of the engine, the voices of the slaves on the deck outside could be heard: 'Suzette my beautiful friend, Suzette my beautiful friend, Pray to God for me. I will wait for her, I will work for her, I'll carry cane for her upon my shoulder."

And they'll sell you down the river all the same, thought January. He knew the song in another form from town, but among the unfiree, music was a thing to be transmuted, quickened or slowed to fit the changing seasons of the heart. He thought of Rose, sitting in the market arcades late last night after everything had been settled, looking out over the levee and drinking coffee. Of the moon near full, above the rising river mists. Of Baptiste's plump woman, running to the gangplank that morning with her bright skirts bunched up in her hands, to see her man one last time.

"You were with the men in the cipriere on the night of the fire?"

"Of course! Where else would I be? Damn blacks won't do a thing unless you're standing over them with a whip."

January opened his mouth to reply and then closed it. At the time-in the days of his childhood, his slavery-the endless, intricate dance of slave and master, of work and avoidance of work, had seemed to him the only manner in which life could be conducted. Looking back on it, he was still amazed that grown men and women should be astonished by their slaves' efforts to evade tasks that they themselves found too hard or too nasty, tasks demanded with no recompense but the simplest of food and the cheapest of shelter and clothing, with the constant threat of losing their friends and families thrown in.

He should, he reflected, never have gone to Paris. Or else he should have stayed there, no matter how desperate the agony of his grief at his wife's death. He was no longer capable of accepting the custom of the country that at one time had been second nature to him.

A Frenchman would have burst out laughing at Fourchet's indignation.

And would probably have been shot.

"We were all there," continued the planter truculently. "Thierry'd been back at the mill with Reuben earlier in the day, but came out to the cipriere around noon. Esteban was working with another part of the gang, deeper in the trees."

Of course, thought January. Cutting trees wasn't like cutting cane. The main gang would have been split into a dozen little groups, scattered throughout the marshy tangle of cypress, black oak, hackberry thickets, and bramble.

"And the people who remained at the house?"

"Just those I've told you of." The planter hurled the mangled end of the cigar into the spittoon.

"Cornwallis, Agamemnon, Gilles the butler, the two maids, the sewing women, the washerwoman. The yard hands like Scipio the potter, who's too old to be out in the woods, the cook, and the woman who makes the soap and candles-"

"And your wife," said January.

Fourchet bolted to his feet, veins bulging in his forehead. "My wife is the gentlest and most honorable soul who walks the face of the earth," he said, in a voice of iron quiet. "You will not speak of her in connection with anything-anything!-concerning this... this hoodoo, this vandal, this enemy of mine. She would no more have anything to do with such activities than she wouldwould-would forswear her faith or betray her country! If you speak again of her as you have, to me or to anyone else, believe me, I will have you whipped."

His hand lashed out and January flinched, but Fourchet in his anger only caught the back of the chair on which he'd been sitting, sending it crashing into the wall. "And that goes for you." He jabbed a finger down at Hannibal. Then with the vast savage violence January had remembered with terror in over thirty years of dreaming, he slammed from the cabin.

His footfalls crashed along the deck, then up the stairs to lose themselves in the promenade above. The engine clanked in the silence like the labored panting of a wind-touched horse.

"I look forward to making the acquaintance of the gentlest and most honorable soul who walks the face of the earth." Hannibal spoke without opening his eyes. "Any reason for suspecting her of doctoring her husband's tipple? Beyond the obvious one, I mean."

"A woman married to a man who is habituated to violence doesn't need a reason beyond the obvious," said January quietly. "But no. And at the moment I don't suspect her particularly. It's just that she had as much opportunity as anyone else, and more than some, and she's among the group that stands to profit rather than to lose by her husband's death. And then again, if someone cries, Don't look over there, don't look over there, I generally can't resist a peek, to find out what it is I'm not supposed to be seeing. On the whole I'd like to know where all the snags and bars lie, if I'm going to navigate these waters."

No man of color-unless in the service of a passenger-being permitted on the rooftop promenade, January spent the remainder of the day watching the river from the cluttered lower deck. Beyond the saw grass and cypress of the batture, and above the low brow of the levee on the landward side, plantation houses seemed to drift by-square, white, ostentatious with pillars and summerhouses if the owner was an American; smaller, plainer, and brightly painted if Creole.

When the Belle Dame slowed to maneuver among snags, or labored to buck a sandbar, January could pick out clearly the men and women on the galleries: planters' wives in dark neat wooh and poplins, servants in plain calico dresses or simple dark livery. Children now and then raced in and out the long French doors, muslin-clad girls and boys in tight-buttoned skeleton suits, whose older sisters would be in the convent in town, whose brothers would be away at school.

And between the houses lay the endless dark green of the cane-fields, buzzards circling lazily overhead. Smoke poured skyward from mill after mill, and from the fields the still air shimmered with voices singing:

"The English guns they go bim-bim,

The Kaintuck guns, they go zim-zim,

I say to myself,

Run save your skin,

Run to the water's edge,

O, Run to the water's edge..."

The main gangs, the big men, January remembered, leaning on the rail, would be chopping the cane, while the women gathered and carted, and the second gang worked the mill. Fed the cut cane into the grinders and kept the fire going beneath the cauldrons with wood that had been cut and stored up all year against this grueling and terrible season. Once the mill was started, it never stopped. The grinders would halt only for a few moments, to change the mule teams, or to clear knots or rocks picked up with the cane. But the fires were never suffered to go out. His father was a main-gang man. That much he recalled. Leaning on the rail, he tried to remember that tall quiet man with the tribal scars-country marks, they were called-on his face. But it hurt, like probing an unhealed wound.

Night after hot summer night in his childhood, January had sat on the gallery of the gar?onni?re, watching the lights across the yard where his mother entertained St.-Denis Janvier. January would watch until the lights went out and sometimes for hours afterwards, waiting for his father to come. He'd never spoken to his mother about the man, nor she to him. But those nights were printed so clearly on his mind, the dim glow of candles in the garrets and town houses visible beyond the roof, and the patterns of the stars in the dark velvet sky. Cicadas thrumming above the whine of mosquitoes, and the shrill cheep of crickets. In those days the cipri?re had lain close to Rue Burgundy, a few streets away only.

He didn't remember when he'd quit waiting like that. Didn't remember anything about the last night that he'd done so, or the first night that he had not. Only eventually, it became something that he no longer did. "Ben?"

He turned his head to see the butler Baptiste. "Michie Fourchet sent me to find you, to let you know that your master Michie Sefton's going to be going ashore at Mon Triomphe, to stay til he's feeling better."

January raised his brows and widened his eyes in what he hoped was a convincing expression of relieved joy, and gusted a sigh. "Thank God," he said. "All day I been wonderin' just what we'd do, with him sick and gettin' sicker by the look of it, and us bound all the way to St. Louis. Thank you. And bless your master, for such a kindness."

Baptiste managed a trace of a smile. "I must admit I'm astonished. Michie Fourchet seems to me to be a-a hard man." He stammered a little over the words. His French was good, if a little Creole in its treatment of articles-he used je instead of mo to refer to himself, a refinement January was careful, in his new persona, to avoid. "I hope your master will feel better soon." "Thank you." January shook his head. "It's the consumption, the doctors say. Seems like he get a little worse every year, no matter what they do."

"I know." Baptiste leaned his elbows beside January's on the railing and watched the miniature drama enacted in dumb show on the gallery of a white-pillared house: mistress chiding a sewing-maid, leaping to her feet, rustling into the house; the master emerging, catching the girl by the arm, speaking intently. Kissing her. Trees intervened.

"My mistress my old mistress, M'am Grasse-was consumptive also, and there wasn't a thing Michie Pierre didn't try to get her well. In the end he took her to Paris, where the doctors are better, they say." He stared out at the glittering riffle along the water's surface, while from the bow a leadsman called out "Deep four... deep four... quarter less four..."

"It help?" asked January, after several minutes of silence.

The little man glanced sidelong at him. "That I don't know. I hoped they'd take us with themwhich was what Michie Pierre said they'd do." He opened his mouth to say something more, then closed it.

But they found they needed another fifteen hundred dollars instead.

January could see it, in the tears that slowly filled the elderly man's eyes. But there was nothingliterally nothing-that he could say.

Traveling without interruption, a fast boat could have covered the distance between New Orleans and two rusted smokestacks poking up from the black waters. Here a boat had either been gutted on a sawyer or blown up her boilers. Above him the ship's bell clanged and a voice called, "Give us a little more steam."

At about eight the engine's thud-thud-thud altered yet again to a steady shuddering, and the whistles howled as the engine let off steam. From the darkness a voice called, "Mon Triomphe! " and yellow smears of torchlight spotted the batture's indistinct bulk.

Men put out in a boat with towlines. The Belle Dame could not maneuver into a dock the way a sidewheeler could. After a few minutes the boat began to move again, with the silent sideways steadiness of dead weight being hauled by main force. The mate, a short bearded man with a Spanish lilt to his voice, yelled, "Let's do this, then! Captain don't want to have to damp the fires."

Voices on the wharf, and the jangle of harness. A lookout would have warned the coachman of the steamboat's approach. January remembered angling for the job of lookout, a task more interesting than pulling weeds or gathering kindling, and being trumped out of it every time by a boy named Gideon, who was older and quick and silver-tongued. He wondered what had become of him.

The batture took shape through the mist. Above the landing loomed the dark baroque shape of a twisted oak tree, gesturing like Demosthenes warming to a Philippic peroration-an ideal place, January thought, to hang his bright-hued bandannas.

Today had been Friday. Tomorrow, Saturday, the kerchief would be black: purple for Christ's blood shed on a Friday, black for the day Our Lord spent in Hell. White for His resurrection-and then red for the red beans everyone in New Orleans cooked on Mondays when they did the wash.

After a day of observing what Mon Triomphe in five hours. But all the way upriver, the Belle Dame stopped at plantation landings, to take on cargo or passengers, to drop off letters and small consignments of goods.

January checked on Hannibal twice, and found him as well as could be expected-though bored senseless with nothing to do but pretend to be on his deathbed-and tried to get up a conversation with Cornwallis, only to meet with a cold sarcasm and the kind of mocking double-entendres that couldn't be answered without revealing himself to be a good deal more intelligent than he was supposed to be. Once, in his idle rounds of the decks, January heard the valet describing in detail to the new butler their master's habit of nailing up malefactors in a flour barrel in the barn, and Cornwallis's eyes glinted with spiteful satisfaction at the tale.

January wanted to say, Don't pay any attention to that, but couldn't. He knew Cornwallis spoke the truth. Darkness fell. Mists rose from the river and rendered the moon away to a ravel of shining wool. Smoke from the mills hung thick in the raw air, and through night and fog smudges of gold burned like the maws of ovens, where the mills of every plantation blazed on through the night. January shivered, for it seemed to him they ran awfully close to the shore for low water, fog, and night, but Captain Ney, standing in the open pilothouse in his long coat of scarlet wool, seemed to know what he was doing.

"Hell, he was born hereabouts, him," said the cook, when January went to fetch another pot of coffee for Hannibal. "I seen him take her so close to shore you could kiss a girl that was standin' on the batture. One day he may blow her up, for he do like to lay on the speed, but he never snag her."

Following the receipt of this Dutch comfort January reemerged from the galley to the unpromising sight of every woman on the river was wearing, he had no doubt that the stokers and stewards would report the colors accurately to Shaw.

His hand sought the rosary in his pocket, the rosary that never left him, and the touch of the blue beads like the grasp of God's reassuring fingers around his own.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee... Pray for us sinners. Pray for us sinners. Me, and those I'm seeking to help in the house of chains.

Men pelted by him, manhandling the gangplank into position. A rope was tossed across the narrowing space of black water. Captain Ney descended the steps from the hurricane deck and spoke to Fourchet as the planter came around the corner of the boat's barnlike superstructure. The younger man was distant and wary, January saw, as if the captain had indeed grown up watchful of this unpredictably violent man.

In the torchlight on shore, January identified Esteban Fourchet at once-was it possible a man nearing fifty could look that much like the shuffle-footed boy he'd been?-and guessed the narrow-headed leathery gent in dark corduroy to be the overseer Thierry. The neat little fop in a beryl-green tailcoat would be the surviving son of Camille Bassancourt. It was time to get Hannibal and the luggage, and go ashore.

And let's hope, January thought, as Fourchet's voice slashed the fog like an oyster shell tearing flesh, Shaw keeps the colors straight in his mind as well, and comes hotfoot if the bandanna says the same color two days running.

Because if something prevents me from changing the signals, I'll be either dead, or a slave somewhere for life.