George Martin - Fevre Dream

They were waiting when Sour Billy led her in.

Nine of them were on hand, including Julian himself; six men, three women, the men in dark suits of European cut, the women in pale silken gowns. Except for Julian, they waited on the staircase, still and silent, respectful. Sour Billy knew them all: the pale women who called themselves Adrienne and Cynthia and Valerie, dark handsome Raymond with the boy’s face, Kurt whose eyes burned like hot coals, all the others. One of them, Jean, trembled slightly as he waited, his lips pulled back from long white teeth, his hand moving in small spasms. The thirst was on him badly, but he did not act. He waited for Damon Julian. All of them waited for Damon Julian.

Julian walked across the ballroom to the slave girl Emily. He moved with the stately grace of a cat. He moved like a lord, like a king. He moved like darkness flowing, liquid and inevitable. He was a dark man, somehow, though his skin was very pale; his hair was black and curling, his clothing somber, his eyes glittering flint.

He stopped before her and smiled. Julian had a charming, sophisticated smile. “Exquisite,” he said simply.

Emily blushed and stammered. “Shut up,” Sour Billy told her sharply. “Don’t you talk unless Mister Julian tells you to.”

Julian ran his finger along one soft, dark cheek, and the girl trembled and tried to stand still. He stroked her hair languidly, then raised her face toward his and let his eyes drink from her own. At that Emily shied and cried out with alarm, but Julian placed his hands on either side of her face, and would not let her look away. “Lovely,” he said. “You are beautiful, child. We appreciate beauty here, all of us.” He released her face, took one of her small hands in his own, raised it, and turned it over and bowed to plant a soft kiss on the inside of her wrist.

The slave girl was still shaking, but she did not resist. Julian turned her slightly, and gave her arm to Sour Billy Tipton. “Will you do the honors, Billy?”

Sour Billy reached behind him, and pulled the knife from the sheath in the small of his back. Emily’s dark eyes bulged wide and frightened and she tried to pull away, but he had a firm grip on her and he was fast, very fast. The blade had scarcely come into view and suddenly it was wet; a single swift slash across the inside of her wrist, where Julian had planted his lips. Blood welled from the wound and began to drip onto the floor, the patters loud in the stillness of the ballroom.

Briefly the girl whimpered, but before she quite knew what was happening Sour Billy had sheathed his knife and stepped away and Julian had taken her hand again. He raised her slim arm up once more, and bent his lips to her wrist, and began to suck.

Sour Billy retreated to the door. The others left the stair and came closer, the women’s gowns whispering softly. They stood in a hungry circle about Julian and his prey, their eyes dark and hot. When Emily lost consciousness, Sour Billy sprang forward and caught her beneath the arms, supporting her. She weighed almost nothing at all.

“Such beauty,” Julian muttered when he broke free of her, lips moist, eyes heavy and sated. He smiled.

“ Please, Damon,” implored the one called Jean, shaking like a man with the fever.

Blood ran slowly, darkly down Emily’s arm as Julian gave Jean a cold, malignant stare. “Valerie,” he said, “you are next.” The pale young woman with the violet eyes and yellow gown came forward, knelt daintily, and began to lick at the terrible flow. Not until she had licked the arm clean did she press her mouth to the open wound.

Raymond went next, by Julian’s leave, then Adrienne, then Jorge. Finally, when the others were done, Julian turned to Jean with a smile and a gesture. He fell on her with a stifled sob, wrenching her from Sour Billy’s embrace, and began to tear at the soft flesh of her throat. Damon Julian grimaced with distaste. “When he is done,” he told Sour Billy, “clean it up.”

New Albany, Indiana, June 1857

The mists were thick on the river and the air damp and chilly. It was just after midnight when Joshua York, finally arrived from St. Louis, met Abner Marsh in the deserted boatyards of New Albany. Marsh had been waiting for almost half an hour when York appeared, striding out of the fog like some pale apparition. Behind him, silent as shadows, came four others.

Marsh grinned toothily. “Joshua,” he said. He nodded curtly to the others. He had met them briefly back in April, in St. Louis, before he had taken passage to New Albany to supervise the building of his dream. They were York’s friends and traveling companions, but an odder bunch Marsh had never met. Two of them were men of indeterminate age with foreign names that he could neither remember nor pronounce; he called ’em Smith and Brown, to York’s amusement. They were always yapping at each other in some outlandish gibble-gabble. The third man, a hollow-cheeked Easterner who dressed like a mortician, was called Simon and never spoke at all. The woman, Katherine, was said to be a Britisher. She was tall and kind of stooped, with a sickly, decaying look to her. She reminded Marsh of a great white vulture. But she was York’s friend, all of them were, and York had warned him that he might have peculiar friends, so Abner Marsh held his tongue.

“Good evening, Abner,” York said. He stopped and glanced around the yards, where the half-built steamers lay like so many skeletons amid the gray flowing mists. “Cold night, isn’t it? For June?”

“That it is. You come far?”

“I’ve taken a suite at the Galt House over in Louisville. We hired a boat to take us across the river.” His cool gray eyes studied the nearest steamboat with interest. “Is this one ours?”

Marsh snorted. “This little thing? Hell no, that’s just some cheap stern-wheeler they’re building for the Cincinnati trade. You don’t think I’d put no damned stern-wheel on our boat, do you?”

York smiled. “Forgive my ignorance. Where is our boat, then?”

“Come this way,” Marsh said, gesturing broadly with his walking stick. He led them half across the boatyard. “There,” he said, pointing.

The mists gave way for them, and there she stood, high and proud, dwarfing all the other boats around her. Her cabins and rails gleamed with fresh paint pale as snow, bright even in the gray shroud of fog. Way up on her texas roof, halfway to the stars, her pilot house seemed to glitter; a glass temple, its ornate cupola decorated all around with fancy woodwork as intricate as Irish lace. Her chimneys, twin pillars that stood just forward of the texas deck, rose up a hundred feet, black and straight and haughty. Their feathered tops bloomed like two dark metal flowers. Her hull was slender and seemed to go on forever, with her stern obscured by the fog. Like all the first-class boats, she was a side-wheeler. Set amidship, the huge curved wheelhouses loomed gigantic, hinting at the vast power of the paddle wheels concealed within them. They seemed all the larger for want of the name that would soon be emblazoned across them.

In the night and the fog, amid all those smaller, plainer boats, she seemed a vision, a white phantom from some riverman’s dream. She took the breath away, Marsh thought as they stood there.

Smith was gibbling and Brown was gabbling back at him, but Joshua York just looked. For the longest time he looked, and then he nodded. “We have created something beautiful, Abner,” he said.

Marsh smiled.

“I had not expected to find her so close to finished,” York said.

“This is New Albany,” said Marsh. “That’s why I came here, instead of one of the boatyards in St. Louis. They been buildin’ steamboats here since I was a boy, built twenty-two of ’em just last year, probably have almost that many this year. I knew they could do the job for us. You should have been here. I came in with one of those little chests of gold, and I dumped it all over the superintendent’s desk, and I says to him, I says, ‘I want a steamer built, and I want it built quick, and I want it to be the fastest and prettiest and best damn heller of a boat that you ever damn built, you hear? Now you get me some engineers, your best, I don’t care if you got to drag ’em out of some cathouse over to Louisville, you get ’em to me tonight, so we can begin. And you get me the best damn carpenters and painters and boilermakers and all the damn rest, cause if I get anything but the best, you’re goin’ to be a mighty sorry man.’ ” Marsh laughed. “You should of seen him, didn’t know whether to look at that gold or lissen to me, both scared him half to death. But he did us right, that he did.” He nodded toward the boat. “Course, she’s not finished. Trim needs to be painted, goin’ do it up mostly in blue and silver, to go with all that silver you wanted in the saloon. And we’re still waitin’ on some of the fancy furniture and mirrors you ordered from Philadelphia, and such things. But mostly she’s done, Joshua, mostly she’s ready. Come, I’ll show you.”