George Martin - Fevre Dream

“I just wanted to tell you, tonight, when dinner’s done, I want you off the boat,” Marsh said. “You serve us up good and proper, and then you get. And take your kitchen boys and them waiters with you. You understand, do you? You hear what I’m sayin’?”

“I surely do, Cap’n,” Toby said with a grin. “I surely do. Goin’ to have a lil’ party, is you?”

“Never you mind about that,” Marsh said. “Just see that you get ashore when you’re done workin’.” He turned to go, stern-faced. But something made him turn back. “Toby,” he said.

“Yessuh?”

“You know I never held much with slavery, even if I never done much against it neither. I would of, but those damned abolitionists were such Bible-thumpers. Only I been thinkin’, and it seems to me maybe they was right after all. You can’t just go… usin’ another kind of people, like they wasn’t people at all. Know what I mean? Got to end, sooner or later. Better if it ends peaceful, but it’s got to end even if it has to be with fire and blood, you see? Maybe that’s what them abolitionists been sayin’ all along. You try to be reasonable, that’s only right, but if it don’t work, you got to be ready. Some things is just wrong. They got to be ended.”

Toby was looking at him queerly, still absent-mindedly wiping his hands across the front of his apron, back and forth, back and forth. “Cap’n,” he said softly, “you is talkin’ abolition. This here is slave country, Cap’n. You could git kilt fo’ sech talk.”

“Maybe I could, Toby, but right is right, that’s what I say.”

“You done good by ol’ Toby, Cap’n Marsh, givin’ me my freedom and all so’s I could cook fo’ you. That you did.”

Abner Marsh nodded. “Toby,” he said, “why don’t you go fetch me a knife from the kitchen. Don’t say nothing about it, you hear? Just go fetch me a good sharp knife. It ought to be able to slide down into my boot, I think. Can you get me a knife?”

“Yessuh, Cap’n Marsh,” said Toby. His eyes narrowed just a little in his worn black face. “Yessuh.” Then he ran to obey.

Abner Marsh walked a little strangely for the next couple hours, with the long kitchen knife snugly tucked into his high leather boot. By the time dark had fallen, however, the blade had begun to feel damned comfortable, and he almost forgot that it was there.

The storm came just before sunset. Most of the steamers headed upriver were long gone by then, although others had come to take their places along the New Orleans levee. The storm broke, with a terrible roaring sound like a steamer’s boilers going up, and the lightning flashed overhead, and the rain came a-screaming down, torrential as a spring flood. Marsh stood beneath the cover of the boiler deck promenade, listening to the water pound against his steamer and watching folks on the landing scramble for cover. He had been standing there for the longest time, leaning on the rail and thinking, when suddenly Joshua York was there beside him. “It’s rainin’, Joshua,” Marsh said, pointing his stick out into the storm. “Maybe this Julian won’t be coming tonight. Maybe he don’t want to get wet.”

Joshua York wore a strange solemn look. “He will come,” he said. That was all. Just, “He will come.”

And-finally-he did.

The storm had subsided by then. The rain still came down and down, but it was gentler, softer, hardly more than a mist. Abner Marsh was still on the boiler deck, and he saw them coming, striding across the deserted, rain-slick levee. Even at a distance, he knew it was them. There was something about the way they walked, something graceful and predatory, full of a terrible beauty. One of them walked different, swaggering and sliding like he was trying to be one of them but couldn’t and when they came closer Marsh saw that it was Sour Billy Tipton. He was carrying something awkwardly.

Abner Marsh went on into the grand saloon. The others were all at table: Simon and Katherine, Smith and Brown, Raymond and Jean and Valerie and all the others that Joshua had gathered along the river. They were talking softly, but they fell silent when Marsh entered. “They’re coming,” Marsh said. Joshua York rose from his seat at the head of the table and went to meet them. Abner Marsh went to the bar and poured himself a whiskey. He drained it in a gulp, had another quickly, then went to the table. Joshua had insisted Marsh sit right up by the head, on his left-hand side. The chair to his right was saved for this Damon Julian. Marsh plopped down heavily and scowled at the empty place across from him.

And then they entered.

Only the four night folks came into the saloon, Marsh noted. Sour Billy had been left behind somewhere, which suited him just fine. There were two women, and a huge white-faced man who frowned darkly and shook the moisture from his coat. And the other, him, Marsh knew him instantly. He had a smooth ageless face framed by black curls, and he looked like some kind of lord in his dark burgundy suit, with a loose-collared silk shirt all ruffled down the front. On one finger he wore a gold ring with a sapphire the size of a sugar cube, and fastened to his black vest was a headlight, a polished chunk of black diamond in a soft web of yellow gold. He moved across the room and then-rounding the table-he paused, and stood by Joshua’s place, behind the chair at the head of the table. He put his smooth white hands up on the chair back, and he looked at them, one by one, all along the table.

And they rose.

The three who had come with him first, and then Raymond Ortega, and then Cara, and then the rest, in ones and twos, Valerie last of all. Everyone in the room was standing, everyone but Abner Marsh. Damon Julian smiled a charming, warm smile. “It is good to be together with all of you once again,” he said. He looked especially at Katherine. “My dear, how many years has it been? How very many years?”

The grin that lit her vulture-face was terrible to behold, Marsh thought. He decided to take matters into his own hands. “Sit down,” he barked up at Damon Julian. He tugged him by the sleeve. “I’m hungry, and we’ve waited supper just about long enough.”

“Yes,” said Joshua, and that broke the spell, and everyone took seats again. But Julian took Joshua’s seat, the seat at the head of the table.

Joshua came and stood over Julian. “You are in my seat,” he said. His voice seemed flat and tense. “This one is yours, sir. If you will be so kind.” York gestured. His eyes were fixed on Damon Julian, and Marsh glanced up at Joshua’s face and saw the power there, the cold intensity, the determination.

Damon Julian smiled. “Ah,” he said softly. He shrugged slightly. “Pardon.” Then, never looking up at Joshua York for even an instant, he rose and moved to the other seat.

Joshua seated himself stiffly, and made an impatient motion with his fingers. A waiter came hurrying from the shadows and deposited a bottle on the table in front of York. “Kindly leave the room,” Joshua told the youth.

The bottle was unlabeled. Beneath the chandeliers, surrounded by gleaming crystal and silver, it seemed dark and threatening. It had been opened. “You know what this is,” Joshua York said flatly to Damon Julian.

“Yes.”

York reached out, took up Julian’s wine glass, and poured. He filled the glass to the brim, and put it down again squarely in front of the other. “Drink,” he ordered.

York’s eyes were on Julian. Julian stared at the glass, a faint smile playing around the corners of his mouth, as if he were involved in some secret amusement. The grand saloon was utterly silent. Far off in the distance, Marsh heard the faint wail of a steamer struggling through the rain. The moment seemed to last forever.