Free Dead Water by Barbara Hambly

Swedenborgian tracts that someone—presumably Mr. Quince—had thrust under the stateroom door. “Shall I bring you some supper with that, sir? Pickled pork and cabbage, maybe, with some good fortifying gravy . . . ?”
    The pillow smacked against the doorframe as January ducked outside.
    The coffee seemed to revive Hannibal, however, and he listened with interest to January's account of Queen Régine. “If Her Majesty's on board, she'll be restricted to the main deck,” pointed out the fiddler. “And of that, pretty much, to the stern, if not by the deck-hands themselves, by that squad of Kentucky ruffians that's taking deck-passage on the bow-deck. If she wants to expose you as a fraud—does she even speak English?—she may have a hard time finding anyone to believe her. As for getting in to see the purser's records, that may prove impossible to do unseen. The office door is right on the path of the wood-crews, and the steps down to the hold are right beside it. By all accounts the steward Thucydides is as incorruptible as they come. . . .”
    “I was afraid of that.”
    “But all is not lost, nor even mislaid. I've had a word with Byrne, the genial stone-faced gentleman you saw playing whist with Messrs. Davis, Roberson, and that Massachusetts oyster-fiend Dodd.”
    “Byrne knows you?” asked January, alarmed.
    “He knows me, but he'll keep his mouth shut, the same way I'll keep my mouth shut about him being a professional cardsharp and not a dry-goods importer, as he's told all those respectable and well-heeled gentlemen he is.” Hannibal drained his coffee-cup and leaned back on the bunk, still looking rather greenish around the edges. “He certainly has no idea you are anyone but who I say you are—a slave I managed to buy with some windfall cash. If he had any suspicion, he'd consider it not his business anyway—he's a remarkably single-minded man about anything that doesn't concern cards. But Byrne and I have worked together before. Now that Weems has accepted me as a reliable partner—it went to my heart to let him win at cribbage—I should be able to draw him into a game of whist tonight. Between the two of us, Byrne and I should be able to strip him of whatever cash he has in hand for the journey. If Weems wants more, he'll have to get it from his trunk in the hold.”
    “Will he play?” January recalled Granville's words on the subject, but Hannibal only raised his eyebrows.
    “My dear Benjamin, the man spent two hours this afternoon practically hugging himself for taking thirty dollars off me at cribbage.” He closed his eyes and settled back on his bunk again. “Even splitting the take with Byrne, I think we both deserve more than what Granville's paying us. And as I said last night, there are specific instructions in the Bible about oxen, muzzles, and corn.”
             
    Luncheon on the
Silver Moon
was laid out for the gentlemen as a buffet in the Main Saloon—cold meats, cheeses, bread, and fruit—and served to the ladies in their own small dining-room at the bow. The sexes joined for dinner, however, at trestle tables set up in the Main Saloon and presided over by the owner Mr. Tredgold and his stout, raucous-voiced wife. Afterwards, under Thu's efficient supervision, waiters and porters cleared the tables away, and as the steward had urged, Hannibal played his violin for the company and January a guitar, and there was dancing and parlor-games.
    Needless to say, neither the immigrant families who were dossing down on the bow-deck nor the wild Kentucky rivermen who shared the space with them were invited to join in the revels. Mrs. Tredgold insisted on singing and required her two children, eight-year-old Melissa and six-year-old Neil, also to sing duets (“Now, aren't they the
most
adorable children you've
ever
seen?”) Mrs. Roberson and her younger daughter, sixteen-year-old Dorothea, read a scene from
Much Ado About Nothing,
which the extremely elegant Mrs. Fischer