George Martin - Fevre Dream

Encanteur and girl both looked up in surprise. Montreuil and several of his friends gave Billy dark, threatening looks. “Thirty-eight hundred,” Montreuil said.

“Four thousand,” said Sour Billy.

It was a high price, even for such a beauty. Montreuil said something to two men standing near him, and the three of them suddenly spun on their heels and strode from the rotunda without another word, their footsteps ringing angrily on the marble.

“It seems like I won the auction,” Sour Billy said. “Get her dressed and ready to go.” The others were all staring at him.

“But of course!” the encanteur said. Another auctioneer rose at his desk, and with his mallet summoned yet another fancy girl to the attention of the crowd, and the French Exchange began to buzz again.

Sour Billy Tipton led Emily down the long arcade from the rotunda to St. Louis Street, past all the fashionable shops where idlers and wealthy travelers gave them curious looks. As he stepped out into daylight, blinking at the glare, Montreuil came up beside him. “Monsieur,” he began.

“Talk English if you want to talk to me,” Sour Billy said sharply. “It’s Mister Tipton out here, Montreuil.” His long fingers twitched, and he fixed the other with his cold ice eyes.

“Mister Tipton,” Montreuil said in a flat, unaccented English. His face was vaguely flushed. Behind him, his two companions stood stiffly. “I have lost girls before,” the Creole said. “She is striking, but it is nothing, losing her. But I take offense at the way you bid, Mister Tipton. You made a mockery of me in there, taunting me with victory and playing me for a fool.”

“Well, well,” Sour Billy said. “Well, well.”

“You play a dangerous game,” Montreuil warned. “Do you know who I am? If you were a gentleman, I would call you out, sir.”

“Dueling’s illegal, Montreuil,” Sour Billy said. “Hadn’t you heard? And I’m no gentleman.” He turned back to the quadroon girl, who was standing up near the wall of the hotel, watching them. “Come,” he said. He walked off down the sidewalk, and she followed.

“You shall be paid in kind for this, monsieur, ”Montreuil called after him.

Sour Billy paid him no mind and turned a corner. He walked briskly, a swagger in his step that had been absent inside the French Exchange. The streets were where Sour Billy felt at home; there he had grown up, there he had learned to survive. The slave girl Emily scurried after him as best she could, her bare feet pounding on the brick sidewalks. The streets of the Vieux Carre were lined with brick and plaster houses, each with its graceful wrought-iron balcony overhanging the narrow walk, fancy as you please. But the roads themselves were unpaved, and the recent rains had turned them into a sea of mud. Along the walks were open gutters, deep ditches of cypress full of standing water, fragrant with filth and raw sewage.

They passed neat little shops and slave pens with heavily barred windows, passed elegant hotels and smoky grog shops full of surly free niggers, passed close, humid alleys and airy courtyards each with its well or fountain, passed haughty Creole ladies with their escorts and chaperones and a gang of runaway slaves in iron collars and chains cleaning the gutters under the careful watch of a hard-eyed white man with a whip. Shortly they passed out of the French Quarter entirely, into the rawer, newer American section of New Orleans. Sour Billy had left his horse tied up outside a grog shop. He mounted it, and told the girl to walk along beside him. They struck out south from the city, and soon left the main roads, stopping only once, briefly, so Sour Billy could rest his horse and eat some of the dry, hard bread and cheese in his saddlebag. He let Emily suck up some water from a stream.

“Are you my new massa, sir?” she asked him then, in remarkably good English.

“Overseer,” said Sour Billy. “You’ll meet Julian tonight, girl. After dark.” He smiled. “He’ll like you.” Then he told her to shut up.

Since the girl was afoot their pace was laggardly, and it was near dusk when they reached the Julian plantation. The road ran along the bayou and wound through a thick stand of trees, limbs heavy with Spanish moss. They rounded a large, barren oak and came out into the fields, red-tinged in the somber light of the setting sun. They lay fallow and overgrown from the water’s edge to the house. There was an old, rotting wharf and a woodyard along the bayou for passing steamers, and behind the great house a row of slave shanties. But there were no slaves, and the fields had not been worked in some years. The house was not large as plantation houses go, nor particularly grand; it was a stolid, square structure of graying wood, paint flaking from its sides, its only striking aspect a high tower with a widow’s walk around it.

“Home,” said Sour Billy.

The girl asked if the plantation had a name.

“Used to,” Sour Billy said, “years ago, when Garoux owned it. But he took sick and died, him and all his fine sons, and it don’t got no name now. Now shut your mouth and hurry.”

He led her around back, to his own entrance, and opened the padlock with a key he wore on a chain around his neck. He had three rooms of his own, in the servants’ portion of the house. He pulled Emily into the bedroom. “Get out of them clothes,” Sour Billy snapped.

The girl fumbled to obey, but looked at him with fear in her eyes.

“Don’t look like that,” he said. “You’re Julian’s, I ain’t going to mess with you. I’ll be heatin’ some water. There’s a tub in the kitchen. You’ll wash the filth off you, and dress.” He threw open a wardrobe of intricately carved wood, pulled out a dark brocade gown. “Here, this’ll fit.”

She gasped. “I can’t wear nothin’ like that. That’s a white lady’s dress.”

“You shut your mouth and do like I tell you,” Sour Billy said. “Julian wants you pretty, girl.” Then he left her and went through into the main part of the house.

He found Julian in the library, sitting quietly in darkness in a great leather chair, a brandy snifter in his hand. All around him, covered with dust, were the books that had belonged to old Rene Garoux and his sons. None of them had been touched in years. Damon Julian was not a reader.

Sour Billy entered and stood a respectful distance away, silent until Julian spoke.

“Well?” the voice from the darkness asked at last.

“Four thousand,” Sour Billy said, “but you’ll like her. A young one, nice and tender, beautiful, real beautiful.”

“The others will be here soon. Alain and Jean are here already, the fools. The thirst is on them. Bring her to the ballroom when she is ready.”

“Yes,” Sour Billy said quickly. “There was trouble at the auction, Mister Julian.”

“Trouble?”

“A Creole sharper, name of Montreuil. He wanted her too, didn’t like being outbid. Think he might get curious. He’s a gambler, seen a lot around the gaming rooms. Want me to take care of him some night?”

“Tell me about him,” Julian commanded. His voice was liquid, soft and deep and sensuous, rich as a fine cognac.

“Young, dark. Black eyes, black hair. Tall. A duelist, they say. Hard man. Strong and lean, but he’s got a pretty face, like so many of them do.”

“I will see to him,” Damon Julian said.

“Yes, sir,” said Sour Billy Tipton. He turned and went back to his rooms.

Emily was transformed when she slipped into the brocade gown. Slave and child alike vanished; washed and dressed properly, she was a woman of dark, almost ethereal beauty. Sour Billy inspected her carefully. “You’ll do,” he said. “Come, you’re goin’ to a ball.”

The ballroom was the largest and grandest chamber in the house, lit by three huge cut-glass chandeliers burning with a hundred tiny candles. Bayou landscapes done in rich oils hung on the walls, and the floors were beautifully polished wood. At one end of the room wide double doors opened out onto a foyer; at the other, a great staircase rose and branched off to either side, its banisters gleaming.