Dead Water by Barbara Hambly

have her maid sleep on the floor beside her bed.”
    January gritted his teeth at the thought of Rose sleeping on the deck with the servants. “I'll come down and join you whenever I can.”
    “Bring food,” said Rose unsentimentally, and raised her face to kiss him. “Oh, good Heavens,” she added, cutting in over Granville's embarrassed apologies and effusive thanks, “Hannibal's found a girl-friend already. . . .”
    January rolled his eyes, snatched up his and Hannibal's luggage, and strode to intercept his friend, who had indeed entered into what appeared to be a flirtation with a dainty blonde in a fantasia of silk rosebuds and lace. The young lady flung up her hands and trilled with silvery laughter: “Oh, Mr. Sefton, you will turn my poor little head!”
    “My dearest Miss Skippen, how could Paris hold himself back from complimenting Helen?” Hannibal offered his hand to help her around the two massive crates that were just being off-loaded from a dray. She leaned on his arm, blond curls brushing the shoulder of his coat. “How could Petrarch remain silent when Laura passed him by?
Nymph of the downward smile and sidelong glance/ in what diviner moments of the day / art thou most lovely?
A man would have to be more, or less, than man, to—”
    “You get your hands away from her, pig of an Orangeman!” bellowed a voice just as January reached them. A man came storming down the gangplank of the
Silver Moon,
nearly January's height and, like January, massive through the shoulders beneath the blue pea-jacket of the vessel's pilot. “I know your like!” The red ruff of his side-whiskers bristled almost straight out from the flushed red moon of his face. “Sneerin' bastards—and you!” he added, whirling on the blond lady, who had both lace-gloved hands pressed to her rosebud mouth in guilty shock. “Onto the boat with ye, and don't you go believin' the likes of a cozening Orangeman who'd rob old women of their bread, an' turn orphan children out into the road! You keep away from her.” He thrust a savage finger almost into Hannibal's face. “You keep away from her or, Kevin Molloy's tellin' you now, it'll be the worse for you!”
    The bespectacled owner of the boat had already leaped down from the deck and was hurrying to break up what looked like a serious affray, but the pilot turned on his heel, seized the blond girl by the arm, and shoved her away in the direction of the boat, followed by three porters hauling trunks, hatboxes, and valises, with a sullen slave-girl bringing up the rear.
    “Well,” said January, coming up beside the still-shaken Hannibal, “getting the pilot of the boat set against you: that'll help things.”
    “And as sterling an example of bog-Irish manhood as ever graced my homeland by his departure.” Hannibal picked up his violin-case, which had been dropped when Molloy had shoved him. “I understand pilots are the true rulers of the steamboats—I hope this isn't going to get me dropped overboard some night.” He waited until Molloy had hustled Miss Skippen up the stairway that led from the wide bow-deck up to the boiler-deck above before venturing up the gangway himself, January at his heels.
    Because the deck-hands were lowering the last of the cargo—including Miss Skippen's trunks—into the hold, a small crowd had gathered on the apron of the boat at the bow, waiting to pass and go up the stairs. The slave-dealer Ned Gleet was just chaining his four female slaves to rings set in the wall of what was called the promenade, the narrow outside corridor that ran down both sides of the 'tween-decks housing from bow to stern. The men were chained starboard, the women along the port, and one of the young planters who was traveling up-river had stopped to watch. Gleet caught his eye and winked: “She's a beauty, ain't she?” And he tweaked the chin of the girl he was chaining, the beautiful girl January had noticed before, who had stared at Gleet with such loathing.