George Martin - Fevre Dream

“It can be,” she said. “All you need do is promise.”

“Promise?” Marsh repeated hoarsely.

The violet eyes beckoned, blazed. “Take us away, away from New Orleans. Promise me that and you can have me. You want it so much. I can feel it.”

Abner Marsh brought his hands up, took her by the shoulders. He shook. His lips were dry. He wanted to crush her to him in a bearlike embrace, tumble her into his bed. But instead, somehow, he called up all the strength that was in him, and shoved her away roughly. She cried out, stumbled, went down to one knee. And Marsh, freed of those eyes, was roaring. “Get out of here!” he bellowed. “Get the hell off my texas, what the hell kind of woman are you, get the hell out of here, you’re nothing but… get out of here!”

Valerie’s face turned up again toward his, and her lips were drawn back. “I can make you…” she started angrily.

“No,” Joshua York said, firmly, quietly, from behind her.

Joshua had appeared from the shadows as suddenly as if the darkness itself had taken on human form. Valerie stared at him, made a small noise deep in her throat, and fled down the stairs.

Marsh felt so drained he could hardly stand up. “Goddamn,” he muttered. He pulled a handkerchief from a pocket and wiped the sweat off his brow. When he finished, Joshua was looking at him patiently. “I don’t know what you saw, Joshua, but it wasn’t what you might think.”

“I know exactly what it was, Abner,” Joshua replied. He did not sound especially angry. “I have been here nearly the whole time. When I noticed that Valerie had left the saloon, I went in search of her, and I heard your voices as I came up the stairs.”

“I never heard you,” Marsh said.

Joshua smiled. “I can be very quiet when it suits my purposes, Abner.”

“That woman,” Marsh said. “She’s… she offered to… hell, she’s just a goddamned…” The words would not come. “She ain’t no lady,” he finished weakly. “Put her off, Joshua, her and Ortega both.”

“No.”

“Why the hell not?” Marsh roared. “You heard her!”

“It makes no difference,” Joshua said calmly. “If anything, what I heard makes me cherish her all the more. It was for me, Abner. She cares for me more than I had hoped, more than I dared expect.”

Abner Marsh cussed furiously. “You ain’t makin’ one goddamned bit of sense.”

Joshua smiled softly. “Perhaps not. This is not your concern, Abner. Leave Valerie to me. She will not cause trouble again. She was only afraid.”

“Afraid of New Orleans,” Marsh said. “Of vampires. She knows.”

“Yes.”

“You sure you can handle whatever we’re steamin’ into?” Marsh said. “If you want to skip New Orleans, say so, damn it! Valerie thinks…”

“What do you think, Abner?” York asked.

Marsh looked at him for a long, long time. Then he said, “I think we’re going to New Orleans,” and both of them smiled.

And so it was that the Fevre Dream steamed into New Orleans the next morning, with dapper Dan Albright at her wheel and Abner Marsh standing proudly out on her bridge in his captain’s coat and his new cap. The sun burned hot in a blue, blue sky and every little snag and bluff reef was marked by golden ripples on the water, so the piloting came easy and the steamer made crack time. The New Orleans levee was jammed with steamers and all manner of sailing ships; the river was alive to the music of their whistles and bells. Marsh leaned on his walking stick and watched the city loom large ahead, listening to the Fevre Dream call out to the other boats with her landing bell and her loud, wild whistle. He had been to New Orleans many a time in his days on the river, but never like this, standing on the bridge of his own steamer, the biggest and fanciest and fleetest boat in sight. He felt like the lord of creation.

Once they had tied up on the levee, though, there was work to do; freight to unload, consignments to hunt up for the return trip to St. Louis, advertisements to take in the local papers. Marsh decided that the company ought to see about opening a regular office down here, so he busied himself looking at likely sites and making arrangements for starting a bank account and hiring an agent. That night he dined at the St. Charles Hotel with Jonathon Jeffers and Karl Framm, but his mind kept wandering away from the food to the dangers that Valerie had seemed so afraid of, and he wondered what Joshua York was up to. When Marsh returned to the steamer, Joshua was talking with his companions in the texas parlor, and nothing seemed amiss, though Valerie-seated by his side-looked somewhat sullen and abashed. Marsh went to sleep and put the whole thing from his mind, and in the days that followed he hardly thought on it at all. The Fevre Dream kept him too busy by day, and by night he dined well in the city, bragged up his boat over drinks in taverns near the levee, strolled through the Vieux Carre admiring the lovely Creole ladies and all the courtyards and fountains and balconies. New Orleans was as fine as he remembered, Marsh thought at first.

But then, gradually, a disquiet began to grow in him, a vague sense of wrongness that made him look at familiar things from new eyes. The weather was beastly; by day the heat was oppressive, the air thick and wet once you shut yourself off from the cool river breezes. Day and night, fumes rose up stinking from the open sewers, rich rotten odors that wafted off the standing water like some vile perfume. No wonder New Orleans was so often taken by yellow fever, Marsh thought. The city was full of free men of color and lovely young quadroons and octaroons and griffes who dressed as fine as white women. But it was full of slaves as well. You saw them everywhere, running errands for their masters, sitting or milling forlornly in the slave pens on Moreau and Common streets, going in long chained lines to and from the great exchanges, cleaning out the gutters. Even down by the steamer landing, you couldn’t escape the signs of slavery; the grand side-wheelers that plied the New Orleans trade were always taking black folks up and down the river, and Abner Marsh saw them come and go whenever he went down to the Fevre Dream. The slaves rode in chains as often as not, sitting together miserably amidst the cargo, sweating in the heat of the furnaces.

“I don’t like it none,” Marsh complained to Jonathon Jeffers. “It ain’t clean. And I tell you, I won’t have none of it on the Fevre Dream. Nobody is goin’ to stink up my boat with that kind of stuff, you hear?”

Jeffers gave him a wry look of appraisal. “Why, Cap’n, if we don’t traffic in slaves, we stand to lose a pile of money. You’re sounding like an abolitionist.”

“I ain’t no damned abolitionist,” Marsh said hotly, “but I mean what I said. If a gentleman wants to bring a slave or two along, servants and such, that’s fine. I’ll take ’em cabin passage or deck passage, don’t matter none to me. But we ain’t goin’ to take ’em as freight, all chained up by some goddamned trader.”

By their seventh night in New Orleans, Abner Marsh felt strangely sick of the city, and anxious to be off. That night Joshua York came down to supper with some river charts in his hand. Marsh had seen very little of his partner since their arrival. “How do you fancy New Orleans?” Marsh asked York as the other seated himself.

“The city is lovely,” York replied in an oddly troubled voice that made Marsh look up from the roll he was buttering. “I have nothing but admiration for the Vieux Carre. It is utterly unlike the other river towns we’ve seen, almost European, and some of the houses in the American section are grand as well. Nonetheless, I do not like it here.”

Marsh frowned. “Why’s that?”