Sold Down the River

by Barbara Hambly

  Which almost certainly saved his life. That and the fact that he’d left the rifle behind. It stopped them pulling the triggers at once, and as two more men ran up, with dark-lanterns and guns leveled, January added, “I’ll go back! I wasn’t runnin’ away! I swear it!”

  Ney glanced toward the lightless house. The mate said, “The door was still locked.”

  “I didn’t go near that house!” January protested, as his hands were seized and bound behind him. Oh, please, God, don’t let them look in the kitchen woodshed.… “I was just lookin’ around for somethin’ to eat.” With his soot-stained clothing, blistered face, and the dirt and grime that covered him, he hoped he looked sufficiently like a runaway, but he had to fight to maintain the look of wide-eyed innocence when, in the course of searching him for weapons, they found the packet of passes, and Ney pulled Robert’s letter from it and held it up to the lantern’s narrow beam.

  “What’s this?”

  January shook his head. “It’s a pass, sir. Michie Hannibal, he gave me a bunch of passes ’fore he left.”

  Ney and the Spaniard exchanged a glance. Behind them, three or four of the steamboat’s crew were hurrying back and forth to the levee with wood from the mill’s sheds. The boat itself must have been stripped to a skeleton crew, January thought through a sickened haze of dread—stevedores and stewards and handlers of cargo left elsewhere. The only men he saw now were ruffians, grim-eyed men whose interest quite clearly lay in making a dollar wherever and however they could.

  “Get him on board,” commanded Ney. “Get them both on board.”

  January was chained in the cargo hold, a good-sized area immediately in front of the engine room. His hands were still bound behind him, his feet joined by a short shackle whose central chain was run through a ring in the wall about three and a half feet above the floor. This was a position favored among dealers and owners of rebellious or uncooperative slaves, for in addition to rendering the captive completely helpless, it was a position of total, almost childlike, humiliation. Only the thought that Shaw would be looking for him—that Shaw would in all probability be able to figure out from tracks and signs at Refuge what had happened—kept him from attempting to break away from them in despair.

  Don’t be stupid, he told himself, as the men gagged him and left him. Panic had nearly betrayed him once—Don’t let it do so again.

  They’re in a hurry. Ney hates to dump steam. With the engine stopped they’re risking a boiler explosion if they stay here a moment longer than absolutely necessary. They have wood from the mill sheds and there’s no reason for them to open that kitchen porch.

  And don’t let Senecan aphorisms seduce you into thinking that the only alternative to slavery is death. You’re worth a thousand dollars to these people. And unless they find Leander’s grave, the VERY worst that can happen is they’ll sell you somewhere along the river. You’ll smile and bow and look “likely,” as the Americans say, and at the first opportunity you’ll head for New Orleans, where there are people who’ll testify you’re a free man.

  And then you’ll come after Ney and his crew with everything you have.

  The thought allowed him to lie still, though the hammering of his heart left him short of breath. To listen and to watch.

  On the voyage upriver from town he’d put his head through the cargo-hold door out of simple curiosity, in the same spirit in which he’d investigated the rest of the boat: One had to do something for eight hours besides maintain a running mental competition for the most ostentatious American dwelling on the lower river. The hold had been filled with crates, bales, and passenger luggage then, piled around the two long walls in such a fashion as to completely conceal the heavy wooden beams that ran, like chair-rails, along the middle of the wall. Exposed now, it could be seen that these beams supported iron rings every three feet or so, through one of which his own ankle chains were fastened. More chains hung from each of the other rings, long chains bearing many manacles: large ones to fasten around the neck, smaller ones for the wrists.

  Other than that, and a couple of latrine buckets in the corners, the hold was bare.

  January counted the chains. There were enough for a hundred and fifty, maybe a hundred and seventy-five souls.

  “Stow those in the stateroom.” Captain Ney’s voice spoke very close to the open cargo-hold door and lantern light splashed through. “Make sure every man gets a pistol and a rifle. We don’t want to take chances. And tell the men to step lively. We need to make Triomphe before daylight.”

  He strode past the door, pistol in hand. Two men followed, bearing a crate whose open lid leaked straw. As they passed the door one of the other men came by and took a rifle from it, and hurried on his way. “What about him?” asked a voice, and Ney replied something indistinct. The stateroom, it sounded like, so there was little chance, reflected January wryly, that they referred to him. “I mean, what the hell do we do with him? Why’d Fourchet keep him around? Why not just dump him overside?”

  “Because, you imbecile cunt, his family knows he was staying at Triomphe.” Anger made the young boatmaster’s voice clearer. “So that’s where he’ll have to be found.”

  For a moment January didn’t understand whom they meant. Then the Spanish mate passed the door with another man, carrying Hannibal slung between them like a parcel. January heard the door of the stateroom next to the cargo hold open, the muffled creaking as Hannibal was dropped roughly onto the bed there. A man asked, “He be all right?” and the Spaniard replied, “With that much opium in him he’d better be.” At the same time Captain Ney passed the door again, this time with a man dressed as a fireman or engineer, whose face bore the same long jaw, the same wide-lipped heavy mouth and pale eyes as his: a cousin or brother, part of the clan. Boots creaked, and above the jarring racket of the engines, which had all the while shuddered the ship’s bones, January heard the roaring hiss of a release-valve venting steam.

  “Idiots,” said Ney, so close to the opposite wall it sounded as if he stood at January’s side. “Is it so difficult to put in a pump that will take on water without the engine running? Make sure she fills properly on the way, and when we get running fast, you come in every five minutes. That’s the pitch-pine wood over there. When we use it—if we have to use it—keep a weather eye on her.”

  “Think we’ll have to, Jac?”

  “I doubt it. But it’s as well to be prepared to make a run for it. And as hot as pitch-wood burns, I don’t want to end up scattered all over the territories in little shreds.”

  And from behind the opposite wall, Hannibal abruptly began to declaim Shelley’s “The Cloud” in his hoarse, fragile voice.

  “That’s it!” shouted a voice from the deck. Juddering lantern light, and Ney passed the door again, striding toward the stair that led to the pilothouse on the hurricane deck above. January resumed breathing. Hannibal was alive. And they hadn’t found either the rifle or the open grave.

  More men passed, bearing the long poles with which the sternwheeler would be thrust from the landing and turned out sufficiently that the paddle could be engaged. The trees of the batture, mere sable cutouts, vanished at once. Mon Triomphe, thought January, wriggling tentatively in his bonds. To rendezvous with Robert—and possibly Marie-Noël.…

  The chains on the wall jingled with the stomp and jerk of the engine. “River’s rising, piss on it,” said the Spanish mate, pausing by the rail outside the door.” Just what we need in the fog.”

  And turning, he banged shut the hold door, leaving January in darkness.

  Robert, thought January, as he had last night.

  Camille’s son.

  You’re in it together, Simon had cried, dying, though it was clear to January that whether or not Robert had seduced his stepmother into complicity after his arrival, his original partner had not even been aware of him when she’d started her revenge.

  But Robert had been aware of her.

  And that was all that he’d needed. Even the dates f
itted, the deeds that had seemed so senseless—the mule barn fire, the second and third time the harness had been damaged, the marking of the house with those childishly identical vévés, the knives damaged—all had taken place after Robert and his family had returned on the seventh. And they were senseless, if you actually were a slave.

  But not if you only wanted people to think you were.

  Not if your motive wasn’t property, but vengeance.

  The sign of the Heavenly Twins. Double vengeance. A double crime.

  You sow the wind in your hatred, but somewhere a whirlwind is listening. Robert had stepped off the ship from France to be met on the dock by his older brother, with the news that the father he already intended to murder had remarried, to a young girl capable of bearing many more sons and daughters with whom the inheritance of Mon Triomphe must be divided.…

  And that there was slave unrest afoot, to take the blame if one, or some, or all of the other heirs were to die.

  It had, after all, happened before.

  That Robert had returned from France with the intention of killing his father, January was almost certain. He’d have to ask Shaw—and he would see Shaw again, he reminded himself firmly—to get in touch with authorities in Paris to confirm the identity of the aged, opium-soaked prostitute whose apartment Robert had visited, not once but many times.… Scarcely the sort of girlfriend the young dandy would choose. Scarcely the neighborhood he’d select to visit, if it weren’t to see his mother.

  A good thing too that she did turn out to have died, the cook Arnaud had said. He went nearly crazy tryin’ to find out.…

  And of course, thought January, in the end he couldn’t. And he hadn’t let that stop him.

  Saw her on the bed, and Michie Robert holding her in his arms.…

  Had she died then? he wondered. Of drink and opium and the sheer ill-usage a woman endures, when she’s forced to whore for her living? Or was Camille Fourchet still alive in that filthy Paris room, waiting for her son’s revenge?

  All she wanted was to go back to France.

  Hericourt’s Concentrated Calomel Solution was a proprietary brand, bottled by one of the large apothecaries on the Right Bank. Robert must have bought it shortly before embarking for New Orleans again. Had his father not been ill, there were a dozen other places where it could have been put, once Robert had arranged to be officially out of the area, with little notes from Baton Rouge and points upriver to prove it.

  A young man who, when staying at Mon Triomphe as a child, had shared his studies with the brightest scion of the disreputable Ney clan would have no lack of accomplices.

  In the darkness of the hold, with the lurch and jerk of the engine rattling his bones and the stealthy scurrying of the inevitable rats along the walls, January thought about Marie-Noël, clutching Robert’s clandestine note to her chest. Bidding her come to Refuge, of course. Baiting the hook with words of love.

  Did she really think he’d let her unborn child live? Or was she so eager to extricate herself from that violent and abusive old man that she didn’t consider what risks involvement with so calculating a murderer might entail?

  Kiki had said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if those children of hers that died didn’t die of something else.…” Little knowing how truly she spoke.

  Even then Robert had hated his father and his family, for his mother’s sake. Even then he had wanted her love—and his father’s money—all to himself.

  The bone-jarring rhythm of the engine shifted and eased. With a howling hiss of steam the boiler was dumped—January had heard many times that engineers could tell the state of the boiler merely by the sound, scorning those fearful souls who argued for the installation of gauges. The jolt of the pistons and the heavy splash of the wheel ceased; the wheelhouse bell clanged distantly. They’d come opposite the Mon Triomphe wharf, and were being towed in.

  He twisted against his bonds. The leather thongs around his wrists were cuttingly tight and double-wrapped between them in a figure-of-eight—feats like “wriggling free of his bonds” and “finding a convenient fragment of broken glass,” performed with such aplomb by the likes of Leatherstocking and Ivanhoe, were clearly the province of mighty-thewed, younger, and gray-eyed men. In any case neither the Deerslayer nor the Knight of the Oak had ever been chained with his feet above his head, a position in which it was difficult to do anything except hope that the beautiful Indian maiden (or Saracen girl) whose eyes he’d met for an unforgettable moment during capture would hurry up and steal down those dungeon stairs.…

  “And make it quick,” snapped Ney, from the stateroom door nearby. “We can’t afford to let the engine go off its steam.”

  Within a very few minutes January heard the scuffling tread of feet on the deck. Bumper’s voice asked, “Mama, what’s goin’ on? Michie Esteban wouldn’t really sell off everybody on the place.…”

  The door was opened.

  “Ben!” cried Hope, the first one through, with her boys at her sides and her youngest baby tucked in the fold of her shawl. Washed-out dawnlight flooded in around her. “Ben, what …?”

  “Don’t mind him,” said Jules Ney’s nephew who’d guarded Jeanette. “Get over there. You—next to her. You …”

  They were pushed into line. Chained, neck and wrists. Even Marquis, gasping with the pain of his burns, and Boaz, carried by his wife and his friend Philippe. The other sick men, Java and Dumaka, staggering. January counted, tallied in his mind, as each slave was herded through the door by men with rifles and pistols in hand, men who locked them into their manacles, shoved and thrust them as if they had been sheep.

  All of them were there. Cornwallis speechless with outrage, Agamemnon trembling with silent fury at this second betrayal. Eve shrinking fearfully from the men who pawed and fingered her. Ancilla holding close to her surviving son Ti-Rod and trying to catch her husband’s eye. Ajax and Rodney and Herc doing their best to keep everyone in order, knowing that to do so was often the only way of averting wholesale, unpredictable retaliation.

  Mohammed and Parson, half-carrying old Pennydip. Jeanette stumbling in chains, her face and half-bared breasts marked with burns. Mohammed and Baptiste went immediately to move January out of the way of the crowding feet, the shuffling bodies that filled the hold more and more tightly. “Get away from him!” snarled the mate. “You leave him gagged, you hear?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Mohammed, stepping back. His face was swollen and caked with blood and his nose had been broken. “Yes, sir.”

  “Can we take a couple, sir?” one of the deckhands asked discreetly, running a hand over the back of Eve’s neck. “Just for an hour or so?”

  “I’ll ask.” He might have been speaking of books in a lending library. “Let’s get under way first.”

  “You trust that Napoleoniste’s brat?” Old Jules Ney paused outside the door with his son, watching someone outside the range of January’s sight.

  “Shouldn’t I?” retorted the younger man. “All Fourchet wants is to be out of this country. A man may live comfortably enough in Paris on fifty thousand dollars, if he invests it wisely. And if he doesn’t …” Captain Ney shrugged. “They’re all healthy and strong, except for a few old crocks. Those we can just drop off the back of the boat. Where else would we get prime blacks for three hundred dollars apiece? Revenge is a wonderful thing, mon père.”

  And old Ney sniffed, as Robert’s voice said, “Jac,” and both the captain and the old man stepped away. January strained his ears to listen, but the noise in the hold was too great, children crying, men muttering and whispering.

  “This is ridiculous!” Agamemnon sobbed, “Absurd! I don’t care how much damage has been done by this—this hoodoo! Michie Esteban wouldn’t sell all of us! I tell you that woman is forcing him to do it!”

  “How would she do that?” demanded Ajax, exasperated. “I suppose she’s forcing Michie Robert to do it, too.…”

  “He wouldn’t sell his own children’s mammy!” raged the valet.
“His wife’s maid!”

  “You shut up in there!”

  There was quiet, through which January heard Robert say, “… found her in Paris. In a garret in a street in the Saint-Antoine district, near the Halles, the worst of the worst. She was so sodden with gin she barely knew me! I was with her when she died. I swore then …”

  “I’d have heard something of it, if they were planning this!” hissed Agamemnon.

  “Like they tell you everything?” demanded Cornwallis scornfully.

  “What’s gonna happen?” pleaded Yellow Austin’s daughter Tanisha, clinging to Baptiste’s hand. “We all gonna get sold?” Boaz coughed desperately, and those around him propped him gently so he could breathe.

  Boots clunked on the deck; the stateroom door creaked again. Two deckhands carried Hannibal past the cargo-hold door, and those standing nearest the door looked back fast at where January lay in his corner, eyes asking, scared. Ney, Old Jules, and the engineer walked over and gave some low-voiced instructions, then followed them out of sight, and a voice called, “Get ready to cast off. Let’s get out of here.” From the engine room came a sharp clanging, the hiss of steam immediately cut off, and through the wall January heard the engine room door open and a deckhand say, “We’re ready to cast off, M’sieu Fourchet.”

  “I’ll be along,” yelled Robert, over the dense rattle that shook the engine, and another hiss of steam.

  The deckhand’s boots retreated. More steam, thinning away to a frail piercing whisper.

  What’s Robert doing in the engine room?

  “ ’Sieu Robert, the Captain’s gone ashore,” said the engineer’s voice, and January saw him outside the cargo-hold door, looking back toward the stern as Robert, evidently, emerged from the engine room. “You want to help him finish at the house?”