Dead water

EIGHTEEN

“Get your tools, boy.” A rough hand gripped January's arm. “The man needs a real doctor, not that quack.” The next moment Jubal Cain leaned over the rail and bellowed, “Send the skiff back, damn you!” to the men on shore.

Davis pressed a hand to the chest of the man at whose side he knelt, glanced across at the obviously useless Quince, and said something to Gleet. The slave-dealer grunted a reply but went to the skiff and began to row, while Davis got to his feet and walked over to Hannibal. From the engine-room, January could hear shouting beginning—including a whoop of joy from old Winslow, who was apparently the only man with faith in Hannibal's aim or luck. Mr. Souter came running down the steps in a panic, and January heard Tredgold gabbling, “What are we going to do . . . ?”

“Idiot,” grunted Cain, thrusting January along ahead of him to the bow-deck. His yellow fox-eyes glinted under the white slant of brows and his pockmarked face was grim. “Should have thought of that. . . . Guy! Marcus! Zack! Gonna need hands to carry that paddy bastard's corpse . . . Porter! Clay! And the rest of you trim the boat, god damn you! Nothing more on shore to see.”

The men of his coffle promptly retreated. Nobody else did.

“What the hell they gonna do for a pilot now?” demanded Gleet as he maneuvered the little boat against the rails. “We're losin' money every day, feedin' these damn niggers—”

“What the hell you think?” snarled Cain. “Man doesn't need to have nerves to guide a boat. Just brains enough not to get himself killed over yellow-headed bitches that aren't any better than they should be. Get in the boat, god damn you,” he added, half throwing his remaining men down into the skiff. As he climbed down after them, January saw Mrs. Fischer thrust her way through the little gathering of women at the promenade rail, staring out across the water at Molloy's body lying on the weedy bank.

January was the first ashore when the skiff scraped mud a few feet from the corpse. “Mr. Sefton is unwounded,” said Davis, who had returned to Molloy's side, probably to discourage the attentions of the ravens and buzzards that had already begun to circle overhead. “But deeply shaken, as any man of sensitive nature would be . . .”

Quince was crouched beside Hannibal, still rather greenish himself, proffering a bottle and spoon at which Hannibal was shaking his head with weary nausea. “I assure you,” Quince was saying, “that a decoction of boiled lettuce-root and honey is a sovereign remedy for complaints of the stomach.”

“Pray do not corrupt me with pallid brews and weak elixirs,” whispered Hannibal as January came near. “And the problem is not my stomach but my nerves . . . and probably my heart. Nothing will do for it but laudanum, and lots of it. . . .”

“Are you all right?” The fiddler was still shaking all over, as if with deathly cold despite the humid heat already thick in the air.

Hannibal responded with a cracked laugh. “As all right as any man is who has slain his first man.

Will all green Neptune's ocean

Wash this blood clean from my hand?

No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine,

Making the green one red. . . .”

“He would have killed you!” said Quince in considerable surprise.

“Ah, that makes it all right, then.”

“It does,” said January firmly, pulling Hannibal to his feet. In a lower voice, he added, “God knows what kind of mess it's going to make of Mrs. Fischer's plans to get her treasure back without anyone knowing. . . .” And was rewarded by his friend's sudden wan grin.

“Good God, I'd forgotten it was Molloy who knows where the money is. What do you bet she's searching his cabin even as we speak?” He tried to take a step and caught January's arm; his hand, when January felt it, was like ice, his face still gray and clammy with sweat. “Did you bet on me?”

“No!” said January, anger flaring in the aftermath of shock. “I didn't bet at all.”

“Pity. It might have made your search for your four thousand dollars superrogatory.” Hannibal shivered violently, clearly struggling to stay on his feet. He would have been easier to carry bodily—he weighed barely more than a hundred pounds—but he shook off January's offer to do so.

Cain, in the meantime, had gone with his little gang of slaves to the woods to cut saplings for a litter for the dead man, leaving, again, Davis alone beside the corpse. January bestowed Hannibal in the skiff and went back to kneel beside the Colonel in the mud.

“It was a splendid shot for a pistol.” Davis nodded down at the handkerchief he'd laid over Molloy's head. January lifted the big square of red-blotched white linen, looked down at the gaping crimson hole just beside the left eye. “In a similar situation I don't think I'd have had the resolution to aim for the head. It's far too easy to miss, even at twenty paces. Your master is a remarkable man.”

“He is indeed,” said January, thinking of what it had cost Hannibal, to stand out there and let an experienced marksman aim at him with a loaded gun.

“To be honest—if you will forgive my saying so—I did not think he had it in him.” Davis edged aside as January examined the wound. “I have commanded men, and am something of a judge of them. Mr. Sefton is not one I would have chosen for a mission requiring desperation or resolution.”

“He fools many people,” agreed January, sitting back a little on his heels. Then he leaned forward again, and with as matter-of-fact an air as he could muster, went on to press his hands to Molloy's chest and sides beneath his blue pea-jacket, to listen to Molloy's chest, and to extract the contents of Molloy's pockets. “Had Mr. Molloy near kin?” he asked, spreading out the temperance tract and rumpled copy of the Liberator that Molloy had clearly been tearing up for cigar-spills, and laying upon them the cigar-case, match-box, stateroom key, and thirty dollars in assorted coin and Bank of Louisiana banknotes that the pockets had yielded.

“Mr. Tredgold would know,” replied Davis, wrapping the items in the tracts and folding them together carefully. “He certainly never spoke of family, though of course I was not intimate with a person such as that.”

January felt around Molloy's waist and drew out a money-belt containing another five hundred dollars, a hundred of which was in the form of gold Spanish or Portuguese dollars. These were common currency on the river, of course . . . as were banknotes from the Bank of Louisiana, which was one of the largest establishments in New Orleans and was, of course, Molloy's own Bank. There was nothing else in the belt, nor in Molloy's pockets: no nails, no unexplained keys, no letters.

“There will be an inquiry, of course, in Mayersville.” Davis unfolded his lean form as Cain and his gang returned from the woods and began to lash together a makeshift bier. Interestingly—to January at any rate—violence and death seemed to have calmed the young Colonel's tic rather than exacerbated it. “I think there is ample evidence that it was Molloy who provoked the quarrel; perhaps sufficient reason to believe that had your master not accepted the challenge, Molloy might have resorted to less formal violence. You will not lose many days on your journey, and I assure you, I will debark also to testify to all that I have seen.”

“Sir,” said January, glancing across the water at the Silver Moon, “I appreciate that, and I thank you for all the help you have been. But I am almost certain now that the quarrel was engineered by others—by someone who sent messages to both Hannibal—my master,” he corrected himself quickly, “—to Miss Skippen, and to Mr. Molloy, with the intention of forcing a duel in order to get us, and Molloy, off the boat.”

“Surely you're not still claiming that Weems's ill-gotten goods are hidden somewhere aboard? Every trunk and crate was searched. . . .”

“Every trunk and crate was on that boat for days—long enough for Molloy, I am almost certain, to transfer the bulk of the gold and stock certificates to another hiding-place on board,” said January. “I think that's what Weems was looking for when he was killed. If this boat continues on without us, we lose all chance of finding the loot—and incidentally any chance of identifying once and for all Weems's murderer.”

Davis was silent, one finger curling around the ends of his wispy beard, studying January's face with thoughtful eyes. Beside them, Guy and 'Rodus gently lifted Molloy's body onto the bier, and the other slaves clustered around to load it into the skiff. January glanced back toward the Silver Moon, and saw Mrs. Fischer on the bow end of the boiler-deck, engaged in what looked like a furious three-way argument with Theodora Skippen and Thucydides.

The Colonel said slowly, “Well, I admit that there is something very strange going on aboard the Silver Moon—something that has so far cost two men their lives. I believe that a great number of people are lying about what happened the night before last, and about why you and your master came aboard the vessel in the first place. But as for delaying the entire boat so that it can be taken apart piece by piece . . .”

“I suspect there's something in Mr. Molloy's stateroom that may help us,” said January desperately. “When we get back to the boat, with your permission, and in your presence, I'd like to have a look through the room. . . .”

“I think that's a good idea. I am most curious myself as to what we might find there.”

“And if I might be so bold as to make the suggestion, it might be a good idea to lock and seal the door until the room can be examined.”

Davis looked a little surprised. “Aren't you coming back to the boat with us now?”

“I'll return in a few minutes. Half an hour at the latest. There's something I want to look at here on shore—or look for. Could you speak to Mr. Tredgold about holding the boat until I come back, sir?”

The Colonel nodded, evidently perfectly comfortable with the thought of a trusted slave being permitted to poke about on shore unsupervised. With Hannibal huddled in the bow, and Quince clinging queasily to the stern gunwale and trying not to touch the corpse, the skiff set out over the water, leaving January alone on the bank under the watchful rifles of two deck-hands and Mr. Lockhart on the hurricane deck.

Even with such guardians, January had qualms about remaining on shore alone, though on balance he judged that Davis's authority—self-assumed though it might be—would be better used in making sure Mrs. Fischer didn't ransack Molloy's stateroom, than in witnessing whatever he himself might find here. He first paced off the dueling-ground, finding in the damp mud of the bank the marks of Hannibal's battered old boots, and, twenty paces away, the rucked-up, bloodied earth where Molloy had stood.

Putting his feet in the heel-gouges left by the pilot's first rocked-back shock, he sighted along his own outstretched arm to where Hannibal had stood . . . then turned his head just slightly to the left.

He was looking straight at the little rise of ground covered with oak trees, from which the raven had flown, shrieking, a moment before Davis had given the signal to fire.

But when he reached the grove itself, January gave a groan of frustration, for it was here that Cain's slaves had cut the saplings for Molloy's litter. Bare feet, ragged knees, had left their marks everywhere. Saplings had been pulled up, branches broken . . . any of those forked sticks lying snapped on the ground could have been used to rest the barrel of a rifle on. If the still, damp air here had ever held the smell of powder smoke, it was gone now, shaken away by the stir of activity.

January could only kneel in the soft earth behind a bank of hackberry brambles, where a break in the foliage gave a clear view of the dueling-ground, and of the place where a few minutes before he—and earlier Molloy—had stood. But whatever tracks might have been left there, by whoever it was who frightened the raven from its perch, had been obliterated.

He returned to the upstream edge of the dueling-ground, and for nearly half an hour searched the straggling willows and cottonwoods without finding a lodged pistol-ball that would have borne out his theory of what had actually taken place on the shore. By the time Thu called out to him that Mr. Souter wanted to get under way—that Simon in the engine-room had threatened to cut his own throat before he drew out the fires one more time—January had still found nothing.

One of the deck-hands rowed across in the skiff, and brought him back.

“What were you looking for?” asked Rose, waiting for him on the promenade.

“Hannibal's pistol-ball,” said January. “Did you see Molloy when they brought him aboard?”

She shook her head.

“He was shot through the left temple, just in back of the zygomatic bone—the outer rim of the eye socket.”

“How could Hannibal have shot him there?” asked Rose immediately. “If he was looking straight at Hannibal to fire . . .”

“Exactly. The hole is huge, and the path of the bullet—as far as I could see, and I'll probe it when I see the body again to make sure—seems to go diagonally through the head, cracking the right occipital bone in the back. When Davis dropped the handkerchief as a signal to fire, did you see anything strange? Anything out of the ordinary?”

“Other than two grown men shooting at one another because one of them didn't like the fact that the other had spoken to a woman he claimed was ‘his own'? I was watching Hannibal,” she added in a gentler voice. “Hoping against hope he'd be all right.”

“Is he all right?”

Rose sighed. “He's probably unconscious with laudanum by this time, and who can blame him? He looked deathly sick when he came aboard, and went straight to his stateroom. That Skippen hussy came tearing down the stair and tried to throw herself into his arms and he thrust her aside, but he couldn't speak. She's knocked at the door of his stateroom three times since, and tried to open it—I was keeping watch at the end of the promenade—but it's locked from the inside. What did you see?”

“Two grown men shooting at one another,” replied January with a wry grin. Then he sobered. “I was watching Hannibal, too. But when I saw the wound in Molloy's head I remembered how that raven flew up, just before the signal to fire, and it came to me that the whole thing might have been set up. That the intended victim wasn't Hannibal and myself, but Molloy. I think Molloy was shot with a rifle from that little oak grove at the head of the chute.”

“By whom?” asked Rose, startled. “Mrs. Fischer was on the promenade with Mrs. Tredgold and Mrs. Roberson—I saw her. And Mr. Cain was on the deck below.”

“Levi Christmas, maybe? Or one of his men?”

“But that would imply communication between him and someone on board—either Theodora or one of those awful deck-passengers. Since we've been stopped, there hasn't been a moment when there wasn't a guard of some kind on the hurricane deck. I don't think they could even have signaled without being seen.”

“I know,” said January. “I didn't say this was something I could prove, or even explain. But one thing I can and will do is have a look at the bullet lodged in Molloy's skull. And if it's a ball from a Manton dueling pistol, I'll eat it.”

While they'd been speaking, the great stern paddle had begun to turn, slowly driving the Silver Moon out into the channel of the river from the dead water behind the point. The river had fallen to its former low level, and the boat was surrounded by a veritable forest of snags that scraped at the hull and caught in the paddle, forcing the vessel to stop repeatedly while the deck-hands clambered here and there with poles to thrust off. January could hear Mr. Souter's voice yelling down from the hurricane deck, and unbidden to his mind rose the thought of what it must be like to be hidden in the damp, smelly darkness of the hold, listening to the grate of dead wood on the thin walls and knowing how much water lay immediately outside.

The thought made him shudder. He might fear Queen Régine, waiting like a spider down there in the darkness—holding whatever secret it was that she held about Weems's death—but he pitied her, too. She was a woman half-crazy and without fear, but there were limits even to craziness and courage.

January wasn't certain he could have stayed down there and listened to that horrible scraping sound.

When he and Rose reached the upper deck, almost the first thing they encountered was a knot of people grouped at the corner of the 'tween-decks near the door of Molloy's stateroom. Colonel Davis stood by the door, looking as if he wished he could simply call a sergeant and order everyone back to their quarters. Mrs. Fischer, her handsome face flushed behind the black veils she'd assumed, was shouting at him, “The man was a thief and a scoundrel, and I know that it was he who stole poor Mr. Weems's money! Mr. Weems told me himself, that on Saturday, when the boat ran aground on the bar above Vicksburg, and all the men were pressed into service in that disgraceful manner, he came back to find his stateroom door open and his money gone. . . .”

“And you just know it was poor Kevin, do you?” Miss Skippen lashed at her shrilly. “You just saw in his face that he was evil, because he didn't play up to you and tell you you were beautiful, is that it?” She turned to Davis, clutching at his sleeve. “Oh, what am I to do? Mr. Davis, I must get into that cabin! I left some things—my money—with Kevin—with Mr. Molloy—for safekeeping, and I must get them back! Oh, to be left this way without my fiancé's protection . . .”

“Fiancé?” Mrs. Tredgold sniffed. “A fine way to treat your fiancé, to make up to other men and send him to his grave, not that I believe for a moment that he offered to marry such a piece of work as yourself. . . .”

“Ladies,” pleaded Mr. Tredgold faintly.

“You see here.” Mrs. Tredgold stabbed a thick finger at Davis. “I've heard the rumor that you plan to tell the sheriff at Mayersville to hold the entire boat for investigation of these absurd stories about Weems having a fortune in stolen gold aboard. . . . What I have to say is, I'd like to see that fortune! You order us about, ransack every piece of luggage on board, delay us needlessly, run up a fortune in wood-charges that we'll have to pay and soon, if we're to make it to Mayersville at all. . . .”

“And where do you think you're going?” Mrs. Fischer rounded on January as he tried to speak quietly to Davis. Without waiting for a reply she went on. “You forbid me to enter the stateroom of a man who robbed my fiancé, yet you're going to let a thieving black Negro in—”

“As a surgeon, Madame,” interposed January, “I need to make an examination of the body—”

“For what purpose? We all know he's dead.”

Theodora cried, “Oh!” and sagged against the rail of the stair up to the hurricane deck. Nobody paid any attention.

“All you want to do is search the room for anything you can get that you think will help your master prove my poor Oliver was a thief! Well, if he can enter, then so can I!”

“Madame, you will do nothing of the sort,” retorted Davis, blotches of color staining his pale cheekbones. “I will accompany this boy and no one else—”

“Who are you to treat us like you were a policeman and we were all criminals?” interrupted Mrs. Fischer, shoving her face inches from the planter's. “You paid your passage on this boat like everyone else!”

“Tredgold,” said Mrs. Tredgold sharply, “it's for you to take charge here. Now, you go into that stateroom and look for Mr. Weems's money for poor Mrs. Fischer!”

Davis stared at her, speechless with indignation, and from above Souter shouted, “Mr. Lundy says, if you're all gonna argue, argue someplace else! He can't hear the leadsman and he can't hardly hear himself think, he says!”

“You be quiet!” yelled Mrs. Tredgold back. “This is my husband's boat and we'll say what we want, where we want to!”

“Dearest . . .”

Mr. Souter came hesitantly halfway down the steps from the deck above. The Silver Moon had begun to move, the breeze flowing down the river as they rounded Hitchins' Point riffling his thinning black hair. “Er—then Mr. Lundy says your husband can pilot the boat wherever he wants it to go.”

Geranium-red with fury, Mrs. Tredgold stormed up the steps, nearly shoving Mr. Souter over the rail. Davis and January darted at once to the stateroom door, to which Davis bent with a key, probably obtained from Thu. Mrs Fischer strode in their wake like a black-sailed ship fully rigged for a race and Theodora Skippen brought up the rear, not a tear on her face and the only redness visible being her rouge. From the hurricane deck voices drifted down, mostly Mrs. Tredgold's.

“That's just what we need,” muttered January as Davis unlocked Molloy's cabin door. “Lundy quitting on us . . . because there isn't a pilot under the sun who'll put up with being told what to do. . . . Ladies,” he added, turning in the doorway as the two bereaved caught up with them. “It is my intention simply to make a medical examination of Mr. Molloy's body—”

“And cut him up,” demanded Theodora shrilly, “as you did poor Mr. Weems? How dare you? How can you permit . . . ?”

To Mrs. Fischer—ignoring the younger woman's tirade—he continued. “Mr. Davis here will vouch for it that I do nothing else while in the room. Perhaps, Madame, if you could give Mr. Davis a description of what you are looking for, he could locate it without the unseemliness of ransacking the room, as Mr. Weems's was ransacked?”

The woman stood for a moment, staring up into January's face. Her dark eyes were like an animal's, that calculates its opponent's strength, a crimson flush of anger rising under the sallow skin of her cheeks. Though no black man was supposed to meet a white woman's eyes January did so, quietly challenging her, and he was interested to see that she didn't react like a woman born to command slaves. She met his eyes as an equal, an opponent.

Then she turned to Davis and snapped, “I never thought I would live to see the day when a Southern gentleman would stand by and let a lady be insulted by an impertinent Negro!”

And without waiting for Davis to reply, she turned, and strode toward her own stateroom. Miss Skippen wavered, clearly not up to challenging both January and Davis. January wondered whether she would faint. Instead she burst into somewhat artificial-sounding sobs, and hastened away in the same direction with her handkerchief pressed to her face.

“And I,” panted Davis as he locked the stateroom door despite the suffocating heat, “never thought I would live to see the day when a woman—not a Southerner, I perceive—would so unsex herself . . .”

“There's a great deal of money at stake, sir,” said January. “Men speak a great deal about women being worse than men, if they decide to take to crime, but I suspect that's because crime is one of the few ways a woman can get her own money, and need not rely on a man. But it's curious, isn't it, that both ladies are acting as if what they're looking for is small enough to be easily palmed, or concealed in a pocket—either mine or hers. So Miss Skippen doesn't seem to think there's six hundred pounds of gold, or several trunks full of securities, hidden in here.”

He knelt beside Molloy's body on the narrow bunk, turned the head gently, and withdrew a bullet-probe from his small medical kit. The pilot's closed eyes had begun to settle back into his head; blood and brain matter leaking from the wound had soaked the pillow, and in spite of the closed door the room was droning with flies. January inserted first the probe, then a pair of long-nosed bullet forceps into the channel cut by the bullet, which had cracked the skull on the other side.

Davis, after a rapid search of Molloy's portmanteau and the few drawers in the tiny dresser, came over to January's side, looking down over his shoulder as he withdrew the bullet from the wound. “That's no pistol-ball,” he said at once. “I loaded those pistols. That ball wouldn't have gone down the barrel.”

“I'm glad to hear you say it, sir.” January dropped the bullet into the nearest vessel, in this case the saucer under an empty coffee-cup that had been on the cabin's single chair. “In fact, I didn't expect it to be. You can tell from the angle of the wound that it wasn't made from the front, but from about twenty degrees to Molloy's left—that is, from the little rise at the head of the chute. The only thing Hannibal had to do with Molloy's death was to unknowingly lure him out on the riverbank, where someone could take a clear shot at him . . . and blame the death on Hannibal.”

“Well . . . I'll be dipped,” murmured Colonel Davis. “Who would have done such a thing?”

“I can think of four, right off-hand.” January covered the dead man's face with the sheet, then went to the washstand and poured water to wash his hands and the probe and forceps. “Unfortunately, three of them were within sight of half a dozen people at the moment of the shooting . . . and the fourth, as far as I can figure out, had no way of knowing that Molloy would be on the bank, involved in a duel, at dawn today.” He fetched the bullet and washed it in the basin as well, then held it up.

It was a .45-caliber, the same as the Leman rifles handed out to the guards.

“Anything in the drawers, sir?” He remembered to modify his tone into one of humble inquiry.

Behind them the door rattled peremptorily. Mrs. Fischer demanded, “Open this immediately!” and Mrs. Tredgold and Miss Skippen chimed in as a sort of operatic chorus, mezzo, contralto, and soprano.

Davis shook his head.

“In the portmanteau? A letter? Or tools of some kind—hammer, nails, pry-bar?”

“Nothing. Only a couple of empty tins.”

“Tins, sir?”

“Such as they sell candy in.” Davis held one up—English, gaudy reds and golds, flat and square and slightly larger than January's enormous palm.

“Open this door immediately!” shouted Mrs. Tredgold. If her tone of voice was any indication of her attitude in dealing with Mr. Lundy, January despaired of ever getting to Memphis.

“I will go to the purser's office,” Davis said, “and ascertain if any of the rifles is missing, or if one has been fired recently.”

“Missing is more likely,” said January as Davis unlocked the door and the two men stepped out, letting the three women push past them into the small cabin. “It could simply have been thrown in the chute afterward—it's what I'd do.” Behind them in the cabin three shrill voices rose, quarreling already over who had the right to be there.

“But if the man who pulled the trigger came off this boat,” said Davis worriedly, “how did he come back on? While you were ashore, Mr. Tredgold and Thucydides counted most assiduously to make sure that no one was inadvertently left behind. Every deck-hand and passenger is accounted for, even to the slaves who went ashore with Mr. Cain. And if the man who pulled the trigger didn't come off this boat, why would his accomplice on the vessel need to smuggle him a rifle? Surely such a man as that would have his own weapons? And why in any case would they wish to kill Mr. Molloy, who is, as far as we know, the only one who knew where Weems had hidden his loot . . . if indeed the loot exists at all?”

January shook his head, and glanced up to see Souter coming down the steps from the hurricane deck. Tredgold followed him: January caught a snatch of their speculation about where the nearest wood-yard was and whether the Silver Moon could make it there or would have to stop yet again for the deck-hands—and the hard-worked slaves—to cut enough trees to keep the fires going.

Down below, the half-submerged forest of snags and towheads closer to the bank was finally being left behind. So Lundy had apparently agreed to stay, when any other pilot would have stomped down to the Saloon and left poor old Tredgold at the wheel himself.

Any other pilot who didn't have such an overwhelming desire to be on the Silver Moon . . . To pilot the Silver Moon.

There's a pattern here somewhere, thought January as he walked along the promenade to Hannibal's room, the rifle-ball in his hand. At least, he thought, his friend would be grateful to learn that he hadn't killed a man, even a man he despised and who was trying to take his life.

Or he'd be grateful when he woke out of the opiated stupor into which he'd almost certainly drunk himself in reaction to the thought that he was a murderer.

Will all great Neptune's ocean

Wash this blood clean from my hand . . . ?

And anger burned up in him at the thought that someone would have used an innocent and morbidly sensitive soul like Hannibal as their cat's-paw.

The stateroom door stood open. Coming closer, even above the faint, terrible reek from Weems's closed room, he could smell vomit.

He sighed, not much surprised. Hannibal no longer got blazing drunk several times a week, and had nearly killed himself trying to get opium out of his system. January had encountered men who were able to cut down their drinking in the face of necessity, but had never found one who could break free of opium.

And even those who turned away from alcohol often turned back.

He'd been waiting to see if Hannibal was one of them.

Rose was kneeling beside the bed where Hannibal lay—Thucydides was just mopping up the floor with a towel. The fiddler looked ghastly, worse than any drunk January had ever seen, shut eyes sunken and lips gray as he gasped for breath. Horrified, January dropped down beside Rose and felt for the racing, thready pulse.

“Good God, how much did he drink?” How much could he have drunk, in the . . . what? An hour, at most, since he'd returned to the boat?

Rose glanced at him, her eyes warning—she reached into her pocket and took out her red bandanna, with which she wiped their friend's face.

January fell silent. Like the songs about wading in the bayou, a red bandanna had long been a signal of danger between them.

Only when Thucydides had left did she whisper, “About half an ounce, as far as I could tell . . .” She nodded to the flask of opium and sherry on the floor beside the bed, the only bottle in the room. “The door was locked—I had to get Thu to force it. He isn't drunk, Ben. And he doesn't have a fever, he's like ice. I think he was poisoned.”