Fevre Dream (13 page)

“No!”
Valerie said quickly, alarmed.

“I got a good mind to tell him anyway,” Marsh said. “He ought to know that you’re plottin’ when his back is turned.”

Valerie reached out and took him by the arm. “Please, no,” she implored. Her grip was strong. “Look at me, Captain Marsh.”

Abner Marsh had been about to stomp away, but something in her voice compelled him to do as she bid. He looked into those purple eyes, and kept looking.

“I’m not so hard to look at,” she said, smiling. “I’ve seen you look before, Captain. You can’t keep your eyes away from me, can you?”

Marsh’s throat was very dry. “I . . .”

Valerie tossed her hair back again in a wild, flamboyant gesture. “Steamboats can’t be the only thing you dream of, Captain Marsh. This boat is a cold lady, a poor lover. Warm flesh is better than wood and iron.” Marsh had never heard a woman talk like that before. He stood there thunderstruck. “Come closer,” Valerie said, and she pulled him to her, until he stood only inches from her upturned face. “Look at me,” she said. He could sense the trembling warmth of her, so near at hand, and her eyes were vast purple pools, cool and silky and inviting. “You want me, Captain,” she whispered.

“No,” Marsh said.

“Oh, you want me. I can see the desire in your eyes.”

“No,” Marsh protested. “You’re . . . Joshua . . .”

Valerie laughed; light, airy laughter, sensuous, musical. “Don’t concern yourself with Joshua. Take what you want. You’re afraid, that’s why you fight it so. Don’t be afraid.”

Abner Marsh shook violently, and in the back of his mind he realized with a start that he was trembling with lust. He had never wanted a woman so badly in his life. Yet somehow he was resisting, fighting it, though Valerie’s eyes were drawing him closer, and the world was full of the scent of her.

“Take me to your cabin now,” she whispered. “I’m yours tonight.”

“You are?” Marsh said, weakly. He felt sweat dripping off his brow, clouding his eyes. “No,” he muttered. “No, this ain’t . . .”

“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 Carré 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 Carré. 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?”

“I have a bad feeling, Abner. This city—the heat, the bright colors, the smells, the slaves—it is very alive, this New Orleans, but inside I think it is rotten with sickness. Everything is so rich and beautiful here, the cuisine, the manners, the architecture, but beneath that . . .” He shook his head. “You see all those lovely courtyards, each boasting an exquisite well. And then you see the teamsters selling river water from barrels, and you realize that the well water is unfit to drink. You savor the rich sauces and the spices of the food, and then you learn that the spices are intended to disguise the fact that the meat is going bad. You wander through the St. Louis and cast your eyes upon all that marble and that delightful dome with the light pouring through it down onto the rotunda, and then you learn it is a famous slave mart where humans are sold like cattle. Even the graveyards are places of beauty here. No simple tombstones or wooden crosses, but great marble mausoleums, each prouder than the last, with statuary atop them and fine poetic sentiments inscribed in stone. But inside every one is a rotting corpse, full of maggots and worms. They must be imprisoned in stone because the ground is no good even for burying, and graves fill up with water. And pestilence hangs over this beautiful city like a pall.

“No, Abner,” Joshua said with an odd, distant look in his gray eyes, “I love beauty, but sometimes a thing lovely to behold conceals vileness and evil within. The sooner we are quit of this city, the better I shall like it.”

“Hell,” said Abner Marsh. “Damned if I can say why, but I feel just the same way. Don’t fret, we can get out of here real quick.”

Joshua York grimaced. “Good,” he said. “But first, I have one final task.” He moved aside his plate and opened the chart he had brought to the table with him. “Tomorrow at dusk, I want to take the
Fevre Dream
downriver.”

“Downriver?”
Marsh said in astonishment. “Hell, ain’t nothin’ downstream of here for us. Some plantations, lots of Cajuns, swamps and bayous and then the Gulf.”

“Look,” said York. His finger traced a path down the Mississippi. “We follow the river down around through here, turn off onto this bayou and proceed about a half-dozen miles to here. It won’t take us long, and we can return the next night to pick up our passengers for St. Louis. I want to make a brief landing
here
.” He jabbed.

Abner Marsh’s ham steak was set in front of him, but he ignored it, leaning over to see where Joshua was pointing.

“Cypress Landing,” he read from the chart. “Well, I don’t know.” He looked around the main cabin, three-quarters empty now with no passengers aboard. Karl Framm, Whitey Blake, and Jack Ely were eating down to the far end of the table. “Mister Framm,” Marsh called out, “come on down here a minute.” When Framm arrived, Marsh pointed out the route York had traced. “Can you pilot us downriver, and up this here bayou? Or do we draw too much?”

Framm shrugged. “Some of them bayoux is pretty wide and deep, others you’d have trouble gettin’ up with a yawl, let alone a steamer. But probably I can do it. There’s landings and plantations down there, and other steamers get to ’em. Most of ’em ain’t so big as this lady, though. It’ll be slow goin’, I know that. We’ll have to sound all the way, and be real careful of snags and sandbars, and likely as not we’ll have to saw off a mess of tree limbs if we don’t want ’em knockin’ off our chimneys.” He leaned over to look at the chart. “Where we goin’? I been down that way once or twice.”

“Place called Cypress Landing,” said Marsh.

Framm pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Shouldn’t be too bad. That’s the old Garoux plantation. Steamers used to put in there regular, takin’ sweet potaters and sugar cane to N’Orleans. Garoux died, though, him and his whole family, and Cypress Landing ain’t been heard of much since. Although, now that I recollect, there’s some funny stories about them parts. Why we goin’ there?”

“A personal matter,” said Joshua York. “Just see that we get there, Mister Framm. We’ll leave tomorrow at dusk.”

“You’re the cap’n,” Framm said. He went on back to his meal.

“Where the hell is my milk?” Abner Marsh complained. He looked around. The waiter, a slender Negro youth, lingered at the kitchen door. “Come on with my supper,” Marsh bellowed at him, and the boy started visibly. Marsh turned back to York. “This trip,” he said. “Is it—part of that thing you told me about?”

“Yes,” York said curtly.

“Dangerous?” Marsh asked.