Fevre Dream (10 page)

Abner Marsh lingered on the texas porch until the stars began to peer out. Song came drifting over the water from the windows of the brothels, but it did not lighten his mood. At last Joshua York opened his cabin door and stepped out into the night. “You goin’ ashore, Joshua?” Marsh asked him.

York smiled coolly. “Yes, Abner.”

“How long will you be gone this time?”

Joshua York gave an elegant shrug. “I cannot say. I will return as soon as I can. Wait for me.”

“I’d sooner go with you, Joshua,” Marsh said. “That’s Natchez out there. Natchez-under-the-hill. It’s a rough place. We might be waitin’ here a month, while you lay in some gutter with your throat cut. Let me come with you, show you around. I’m a riverman. You ain’t.”

“No,” York said. “I have business ashore, Abner.”

“We’re partners, ain’t we? Your business is my business, where the
Fevre Dream
is concerned.”

“I have concerns beyond our steamboat, friend. Some things you cannot help me with. Some things I must do alone.”

“Simon goes with you, don’t he?”

“At times. That is different, Abner. Simon and I share . . . certain interests that you and I do not.”

“You mentioned enemies once, Joshua. If that’s what you’re about, takin’ care of those who wronged you, then tell me. I’ll help.”

Joshua York shook his head. “No, Abner. My enemies might not be your enemies.”

“Let me decide that, Joshua. You been fair with me so far. Trust me to be fair with you.”

“I cannot,” York replied, sorrowfully. “Abner, we have a bargain. Ask me no questions. Please. Now, if you would, let me pass.”

Abner Marsh nodded and moved aside, and Joshua York swept by him and started down the stairs. “Joshua,” Marsh called out when York was almost to the bottom. The other turned. “Be careful, Joshua,” Marsh said. “Natchez can be . . . bloody.”

York stared up at him for a long time, his eyes as gray and unreadable as smoke. “Yes,” he said finally, “I will take care.” Then he turned and was gone.

Abner Marsh watched him go ashore and vanish into Natchez-under-the-hill, his lean figure throwing long shadows beneath the smoking lamps. When Joshua York was quite gone, Marsh turned and proceeded forward to the captain’s cabin. The door was locked, as he had known it would be. Marsh reached in his ample pocket, and came out with the key.

He hesitated before putting it in the lock. Having duplicate keys made and stored in the steamer’s safe, that was no betrayal, just plain sense. People died in locked cabins, after all, and it was better to have a spare key than to have to break the door in. But using the key, that was something else. He had made a bargain, after all. But partners had to trust each other, and if Joshua York would not trust him, how could he expect trust in return? Resolute, Marsh opened the lock, and entered York’s cabin.

Inside, he lit an oil lamp, and locked the door behind him. He stood there uncertainly for a moment, looking around, wondering what he hoped to find. York’s cabin was just a big stateroom, looking like it had all the other times Marsh had visited it. Still, there must be something here that would tell him something about York, give him some clue as to the nature of his partner’s peculiarities.

Marsh moved to the desk, which seemed the most likely place to begin, carefully eased himself into York’s chair, and began to sift through the newspapers. He touched them gingerly, noting the position of each paper as he slid it out for examination, so that he could leave all as he found it when he left. The newspapers were . . . well, newspapers. There must have been fifty of them on the desk, numbers old and new, the
Herald
and the
Tribune
from New York, several Chicago papers, all the St. Louis and New Orleans journals, papers from Napoleon and Baton Rouge and Memphis and Greenville and Vicksburg and Bayou Sara, weeklies from a dozen little river towns. Most of them were intact. A few had stories cut from them.

Beneath the litter of newspapers, Marsh found two leather-bound ledger books. He eased them out slowly, trying to ignore a nervous clenching in his stomach. Perhaps here he had a journal or a diary, Marsh thought, something to tell him where York had come from and where he aimed to go. He opened the first ledger, and frowned in disappointment. No diary. Only stories, carefully cut from newspapers and mounted with paste, each one labeled as to date and place in Joshua’s flowing hand.

Marsh read the story before him, from a Vicksburg paper, about a body that had been found washed up on the riverfront. The date placed it six months back. On the opposite page were two items, both from Vicksburg as well; a family found dead in a shanty twenty miles from the city, a Negro wench—probably a runaway—discovered stiff in the woods, dead of unknown causes.

Marsh turned the pages, read, turned again. After a time he closed the book and opened the other. It was the same. Page after page of bodies, mysterious deaths, corpses discovered here and there, all arranged by city. Marsh closed the books and returned them to their place, and tried to consider. The newspapers had lots of accounts of deaths and killings that York hadn’t bothered to cut out. Why? He searched through a few newspapers and read over them until he was sure. Then Marsh frowned. It appeared that Joshua had no interest in shootings or knifings, in rivermen drowned or blown up by boiler explosions or burned, in gamblers and thieves hanged by the law. The stories he collected were different. Deaths no one could account for. Folks with throats tore out. Bodies all mutilated and ripped up, or else too far rotted for anyone to know just how they’d died. Bodies unmarked as well, found dead for no reason anyone could find, found with wounds too small to notice at first, found whole but bloodless. Between the two ledgers, there must have been fifty or sixty stories, nine months’ worth of death drawn from the whole length of the lower Mississippi.

Briefly Abner Marsh was afraid, sick at heart at the thought that perhaps Joshua was saving accounts of his own vile deeds. But a moment’s thought proved that could not be. Some, perhaps, but in other cases the dates were wrong; Joshua had been with him in St. Louis or New Albany or aboard the
Fevre Dream
when these people met their ghastly ends. He could not be responsible.

Still, Marsh saw, there was a pattern to the stops York had ordered, to his secretive trips ashore. He was visiting the sites of these stories, one by one. What was York looking for? What . . . or who? An enemy? An enemy who had done all this, somehow, moving up and down the river? If so, then Joshua was on the side of right. But why the silence, if his purpose was just?

It had to be more than one enemy, Marsh realized. No single person could be responsible for all the killing in those ledgers, and Joshua had said “enemies,” after all. Besides, he had come back from New Madrid with blood on his hands, but that did not end his quest.

He could not make sense of it.

Marsh began to go through the drawers and storage nooks in York’s desk. Paper, fancy stationery impressed with a picture of the
Fevre Dream
and the name of the line, envelopes, ink, a half-dozen pens, a blotter, a map of the river system with marks on it, boot polish, sealing wax: in short, nothing useful. In one drawer he found letters, and turned to them hopefully. But they told him nothing. Two were letters of credit, the rest simple business correspondence with agents in London, New York, St. Louis, and other cities. Marsh did come on one letter from a banker in St. Louis bringing Fevre River Packets to York’s attention. “I think it best suited to your purposes as you describe them,” the man had written. “Its owner is an experienced riverman with a reputation for honesty, said to be exceedingly ugly but fair, and he has recently had reverses which should make him receptive to your offer.” The letter went on, but told Marsh nothing he had not already known.

Replacing the letters as he had found them, Abner Marsh rose and moved about the cabin, looking for something else, something to enlighten him. He found nothing; clothing in the drawers, York’s vile-tasting drink in the wine rack, suits hung in the closet, books everywhere. Marsh checked the titles of the volumes by York’s bedside; one was a book of poetry by Shelley, the other some sort of medical book he could scarcely understand a line of. The tall bookcase offered more of the same; much fiction and poetry, a fair amount of history, books on medicine and philosophy and natural science, a dusty old tome on alchemy, an entire shelf of books in foreign languages. A few untitled books, hand-bound in finely tooled leather with gold-leaf pages, presented themselves, and Marsh pulled one out, hoping this might be the diary or log to answer his questions. But if it was, he could not read it; the words were in some grotesque, spindly code, and the hand was clearly not Joshua’s airy script but rather crabbed and tiny.

Marsh went through the cabin one final time, to make sure he had overlooked nothing, and finally determined to leave, not much wiser than he had come. He inserted the key in the lock, turned it carefully, snuffed the lamp, stepped outside, and relocked the door behind him. It had gotten a trifle cooler outside. Marsh realized that he was drenched in sweat. He slipped the key back into his coat pocket and turned to go.

And stopped.

A few yards away, the ghastly old woman Katherine was standing and staring at him, cold malevolence in her eyes. Marsh decided to brazen it out. He tipped his cap. “Good evening, ma’am,” he said to her.

Katherine smiled slowly, a creeping rictus of a smile that twisted her vulpine face into a mask of terrible glee. “Good evening, Captain,” she said. Her teeth, Marsh noted, were yellow, and very long.

CHAPTER TEN

New Orleans,
August 1857

After Adrienne and Alain had departed on the steamer
Cotton Queen,
bound for Baton Rouge and Bayou Sara, Damon Julian decided to take a stroll along the levee to a French coffee stall he knew. Sour Billy Tipton walked uneasily beside him, casting suspicious glances at everyone they passed. The rest of Julian’s party followed; Kurt and Cynthia walked together, while Armand brought up the rear, furtive and ill-at-ease, already touched by the thirst. Michelle was back at the house.

The rest were gone, dispersed, sent up or down the river on one steamer or another by Julian’s command, searching for money, safety, a new place to gather. Damon Julian had finally stirred.

The moonlight was soft and bright as butter upon the river. The stars were out. Along the levee, dozens of steamers crowded in next to the sailing ships with their high, proud masts and furled canvas sails. Niggers moved cotton and sugar and flour from one sort of boat to the other. The air was humid and fragrant, the streets crowded.

They found a table that gave them a good view of the bustle, and ordered café au lait and the fried sugar pastries the stall was famous for. Sour Billy bit into one and got sugar powder all over his vest and sleeves. He cussed loudly.

Damon Julian laughed, his laughter as sweet as the moonlight. “Ah, Billy. How amusing you are.”

Sour Billy hated being laughed at worse than he hated anything, but he looked up at Julian’s dark eyes and forced a grin. “Yes, sir,” he said with a rueful shake of his head.

Julian ate his own pastry neatly, so no sugar whitened the rich dark gray of his suit, or the sheen of his scarlet tie. When he was done, he sipped at his café au lait while his gaze swept over the levee and wandered among the passersby on the street. “There,” he said shortly, “the woman beneath the cypress.” The others looked. “Is she not striking?”

She was a Creole lady, escorted by two dangerous-looking gentlemen. Damon Julian stared at her like a love-struck youth, his pale face unlined and serene, his hair a mass of fine dark curls, his eyes large and melancholy. But even across the table, Sour Billy could feel the heat in those eyes, and he was afraid.

“She is exquisite,” Cynthia said.

“She has Valerie’s hair,” Armand added.

Kurt smiled. “Will you take her, Damon?”

The woman and her companions were going away from them, walking in front of an ornate wrought-iron fence. Damon Julian watched them thoughtfully. “No,” he said at last, turning back to the table and sipping his café au lait. “The night is too young, the streets are too crowded, and I am weary. Let us sit.”

Armand looked downcast and anxious. Julian smiled at him briefly, then leaned forward and laid a hand on Armand’s sleeve. “We will drink before the dawn comes,” he said. “You have my word.”

“I know a place,” Sour Billy added conspiratorially, “a real fancy house, with a bar, red velvet chairs, good drinks. The girls are all beautiful, you’ll see. You can get one all night for a twenty-dollar gold piece. In the morning, well, well.” He chuckled. “But we’ll be gone when they find what they find, and it’s cheaper than buyin’ fancy girls. Yes, sir.”

Damon Julian’s black eyes were amused. “Billy makes me niggardly,” he said to the others, “but whatever would we do without him?” He looked about again, bored. “I should come into the city more often. When one is sated, one loses sight of all the other pleasures.” He sighed. “Can you feel it? The air is rank with it, Billy!”

“What?” said Sour Billy.

“Life, Billy.” Julian’s smile mocked him, but Billy made himself smile back. “Life and love and lust, rich food and rich wine, rich dreams and hope, Billy. All of it here around us. Possibilities.” His eyes glittered. “Why should I pursue that beauty who went by us, when there are so many others, so many possibilities? Can you answer?”

“I—Mister Julian, I don’t—”

“No, Billy, you don’t, do you?” Julian laughed. “My whims are life and death to these cattle, Billy. If you are ever to be one of us, you must understand that. I am pleasure, Billy. I am power. And the essence of what I am, of pleasure and power, lies in possibility. My own possibilities are vast, and have no limit, as our years have no limit. But I am the limit to these cattle, I am the end of all their hopes, of all their possibilities. Do you begin to understand? To slake the red thirst, that is nothing, any old darkie on his deathbed will do for that. Yet how much finer to drink of the young, the rich, the beautiful, those whose lives stretch out ahead of them, whose days and nights glitter and shine with promise! Blood is but blood, any animal can sip at it, any of
them
.” He gestured languidly, at the steamboatmen on the levee, the niggers toting their hogsheads, and all the richly dressed folk of the Vieux Carré. “It is not the blood that ennobles, that makes one a master. It is the
life,
Billy. Drink of their lives and yours becomes longer. Eat of their flesh and yours grows stronger. Feast on beauty and wax more beautiful.”

Sour Billy Tipton listened eagerly; he had seldom seen Julian in so expansive a mood. Sitting in the darkness of the library, Julian tended to be brusque and frightening. Beyond it, out in the world again, he glittered, reminding Sour Billy of the way he had been when he first arrived with Charles Garoux at the plantation where Billy was overseer. He said as much.

Julian nodded. “Yes,” he said, “the plantation is safe, but in safety and satiety is danger.” His teeth were white when he smiled. “Charles Garoux,” he mused. “Ah, the possibilities of that youth! He was beautiful in his way, strong, healthy. A firebrand, beloved by all the ladies, admired by other men. Even the darkies loved Master Charles. He would have had a grand life! His nature was so open as well, it was easy to befriend him, to win his undying trust by saving him from poor Kurt here.” Julian interrupted himself with a laugh. “Then, once I had been welcomed into his house, easier still to come to him every night, and drain him, little by little, so he seemed to sicken and die. Once he woke when I was in his room, and thought I had come to comfort him. I leaned over his bed, and he reached up and clasped me to him, and I drank. Ah, the sweetness of Charles, all the strength and beauty of him!”

“The old man was damn upset when he up and died,” Sour Billy put in. Personally, he’d been delighted. Charles Garoux had always been telling his father that Billy was too hard on the niggers, and trying to get him dismissed. As if you could get any work from a nigger by being soft.

“Yes, Garoux was distraught,” said Julian. “How fortunate that I was there to comfort him in his grief. His son’s best friend. How often he told me, afterward, that I had become like a fourth son to him as we mourned.”

Sour Billy remembered it well. Julian had handled it real good. The younger sons had let down the old man; Jean-Pierre was a drunken lout, and Philip a weakling who wept like a woman at his brother’s funeral, but Damon Julian had been a tower of manly strength. They had buried Charles out back of the plantation, in the family cemetery. The ground being so damp in these parts, he’d been laid to rest in a big marble mausoleum with a winged victory on top of it. It stayed nice and cool in there, even in the heat of August. Sour Billy had gone into the tomb many a time in the years since, to drink and piss on Charles’s coffin. Once he’d dragged a nigger wench in there with him, slapped her around a little and had her three-four times, just so old Charles’s ghost could see the proper way to handle niggers.

Charles had only been the beginning, Sour Billy recalled. Six months later Jean-Pierre rode off to do some whoring and gambling in the city, and he never did ride back, and it wasn’t long after that when poor timid Philip got himself all ripped up by some kind of animal in the woods. Old Garoux was real sick at heart by then, but Damon Julian was by his side through all of it, helping. Finally Garoux adopted him, and wrote a new will leaving him just about everything.

There was a night not too long after that Sour Billy would never forget, when Damon Julian had demonstrated how thoroughly old René Garoux was in his power. It was up in the old man’s bedroom. Valerie was there, and Adrienne and Alain as well, they’d all been living in the big house, since any friend of Julian’s was welcome in the Garoux home. They watched with Sour Billy while Damon Julian stood at the side of the great canopied bed and pierced the old man through with his black eyes and his easy smile and told him the truth, all the truth about what had happened to Charles and Jean-Pierre and Philip. Julian was wearing Charles’s signet ring, and Valerie had its twin on a chain about her neck. Hers had once belonged to the missing Jean-Pierre. She had not wanted to wear it. The thirst was on her, but she wanted to finish old Garoux quickly, without talk. But Damon Julian stilled her protests with soft words and cold eyes, so she wore the ring and stood meekly and listened.

When Julian had finished his story, Garoux had been shaking, his rheumy eyes full of tears and pain and hate. And then, astoundingly, Damon Julian had told Sour Billy to hand the old man his knife. “He ain’t dead yet, Mister Julian,” Billy had protested. “He’ll cut your guts out.”

But Julian only glanced at him and smiled, so Sour Billy reached back and produced the knife and put it into Garoux’s wrinkled, liver-spotted grasp. The old man’s hands shook so bad that Billy had been afraid he was going to drop the damn thing, but somehow he hung on to it. Damon Julian sat on the edge of the bed. “René,” he said, “my friends are thirsty.” His voice was so quiet, so liquid.

That was all he had to say. Alain produced a glass, a fine crystal etched with the family crest, and old René Garoux carefully cut open the vein in his wrist and filled the glass with his own steaming red blood, crying and trembling all the while. Valerie and Alain and Adrienne passed the glass from hand to hand, but it was left to Damon Julian to finish it off, while Garoux bled to death in his bed.

“Garoux gave us some good years,” Kurt was saying. His words drew Sour Billy out of his memories. “Rich and safe, off by ourselves, the city here whenever we wanted it. Food and drink and niggers to wait on us, a fancy girl every month.”

“Yet it ended,” Julian said, a trifle wistfully. “All things must end, Kurt. Do you mourn it?”

“Things aren’t the same,” Kurt admitted. “Dust everywhere, the house rotting, rats. I’m not anxious to move again, Damon. Out in the world, we are never secure. After a hunt, there is always the fear, the hiding, the running. I do not want that again.”

Julian smiled sardonically. “Inconvenient, true, but not without spice. You are young, Kurt. Remember, however they may hound you, you are the master. You will see them dead, and their children, and their children’s children. The Garoux home falls into ruin. It is nothing. All these things the cattle make fall into ruin. I have seen Rome itself turn to dust. Only we go on.” He shrugged. “And we may yet find another like René Garoux.”

“So long as we are with you,” Cynthia said anxiously. She was a slight, pretty woman with brown eyes, and she had become Julian’s favorite since he had dismissed Valerie, but even Sour Billy could tell that she was insecure about her position. “It is worse when we are alone.”

“So you do not wish to leave me?” Damon Julian asked her, smiling.

“No,” she said. “Please.” Kurt and Armand were looking at him as well. Julian had begun sending away his companions a month ago, very suddenly. Valerie was exiled first, as she had begged, though he sent her upriver not with the troublesome Jean, but with dark handsome Raymond, who was cruel and strong and—some said—Julian’s own son. Raymond would be sure to keep her safe, Julian said mockingly as Valerie knelt before him that night. Jean was given his leave the next night, and went off alone, and Sour Billy thought that would be the end of it. He was wrong. Damon Julian had some new thought in his head, and so Jorge was sent away a week later, and then Cara and Vincent, and then the others, alone or in pairs. Now those who remained knew that none of them were safe.

“Ah,” Julian said to Cynthia, amused. “Well, there are only five of us now. If we are careful, and we make each fancy girl last for, oh, a month or two, sipping slowly as it were—why then, I believe we can last until winter. By then one of the others will have sent word, perhaps. We shall see. Until then, you may stay, darling. And Michelle as well, and you, Kurt.”

Armand looked stricken. “And me?” he blurted. “Damon, please.”

“Is it the thirst, Armand? Is that why you tremble? Control yourself. Will you rip and tear when we reach these friends of Billy’s? You know how I frown on that.” His eyes narrowed. “I am still thinking about you, Armand.”

Armand looked down at his empty cup.

“I’ll stay,” Sour Billy announced.

“Ah,” said Damon Julian. “Of course. Why, Billy, what would we do without you?” Sour Billy Tipton didn’t much like the smile Julian wore then, but there wasn’t nothing to be done about it.

A short time later, they set off to the place Billy had promised to show them. The house was outside the Vieux Carré, in the American section of New Orleans, but within walking distance. Damon Julian went in front, walking through the narrow gaslit streets arm in arm with Cynthia, wearing a private ghost of a smile as he regarded the iron balconies, the gates opening on courtyards with their flambeaux and their fountains, the gas lamps atop iron poles. Sour Billy directed them. Soon they were in a darker, rawer part of town, where the buildings were wood or crumbling tabby-brick, made of ground oyster shells and sand. Even the gas lines had not extended this far, though the city had had its gas works for more than twenty years. At the corners, oil lamps swung from heavy iron chains hung diagonally across the streets and supported by great hooks driven into the sides of buildings. They burned with a sensual smoky light. Julian and Cynthia passed from pools of light into shadow, back into light, then again into shadow. Sour Billy and the others followed.

A party of three men stepped out from an alley and crossed their path. Julian ignored them, but one of the men glimpsed Sour Billy as he passed beneath a light.
“You!”
he said.