“I hope we shall be traveling together for some time,” Joshua replied graciously. “As for the Fevre Dream, I am very proud of her, but your compliments should really be directed to my partner.” He gestured. “If you will permit me to make introductions, this formidable gentleman here is Captain Abner Marsh, my associate in Fevre River Packets and the real master of the Fevre Dream, if truth be told.”
The woman smiled at Abner again, while the man nodded stiffly.
“Abner,” York continued, “may I present Mister Raymond Ortega, of New Orleans, and his fiancée, Miss Valerie Mersault?”
“Real glad to have you with us,” Marsh said awkwardly.
Joshua raised his glass. “A toast,” he said. “To new beginnings!”
They echoed his words, and drank.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Aboard the Steamer Fevre Dream,
Mississippi River,
August 1857
Abner Marsh had a mind that was not unlike his body. It was big all around, ample in size and capacity, and he crammed all sorts of things into it. It was strong as well; when Abner Marsh took something in his hand it did not easily slip away, and when he took something in his head it was not easily forgotten. He was a powerful man with a powerful brain, but body and mind shared one other trait as well: they were deliberate. Some might even say slow. Marsh did not run, he did not dance, he did not scamper or slide along; he walked with a straightforward dignified gait that nonetheless got him where he wanted to go. So it was with his mind. Abner Marsh was not quick in word or thought, but he was far from stupid; he chewed over things thoroughly, but at his own pace.
As the Fevre Dream steamed out of Natchez, Marsh was only beginning to mull over the story he had gotten from Joshua York. The more he mulled, the more he fretted. If you could credit it, Joshua’s outlandish story about hunting for vampires did explain a respectable amount of the strange goings-on that had plagued the Fevre Dream. But it didn’t explain everything. Abner Marsh’s slow, but tenacious, memory kept throwing up questions and recollections that floated around in his head like dead wood floats on the river, good for nothing, but bothersome.
Simon, f’rinstance, licking up mosquitoes.
Joshua’s extraordinary night vision.
And most of all, the way he’d raged the day Marsh had come barging into his cabin. He hadn’t come outside neither, to see them run against the Southerner. That worried Marsh considerably. It was fine for Joshua to say he kept night hours on account of these vampires of his, but that still didn’t explain the way he’d acted that afternoon. Most folks Abner Marsh knew kept normal daylight hours, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t hoist themselves out of bed at three in the morning if there was something interesting to gawk at.
Marsh badly felt the need to talk it over with someone. Jonathan Jeffers was a demon for book learning, and Karl Framm probably knew every damn fool story that had ever been told along the damn fool river; either of ’em would likely know everything there was to know about these vampires. Only he couldn’t talk to them. He’d promised Joshua, and he was beholden to the man, and wasn’t about to go and betray him a second time. Not without cause, anyway, and all he had were half-formed suspicions.
The suspicions got more formed every day, though, as the Fevre Dream loafed down the Mississippi. Generally they ran by day now, and tied up at twilight, then set out again the next morning. They made better time than they had before Natchez, which heartened Marsh. Other changes pleased him less.
Marsh did not cotton to Joshua’s new friends; he decided in short order that they were every bit as queer as Joshua’s old friends, keeping the same night hours and all. Raymond Ortega struck Marsh as a restless, untrustworthy sort. The man wouldn’t keep to passenger territory, and kept turning up in places he didn’t belong. He was polite enough in a haughty, indolent fashion, but Marsh got a chill off him.
Valerie was warmer but almost as disturbing, with her soft words and provocative smiles and those eyes of hers. She didn’t act like Raymond Ortega’s fiancée at all. Right from the first, she was real friendly with Joshua. Too damned friendly, if you asked Marsh. It was bound to cause trouble. A proper lady would have stayed to the ladies’ cabin, but Valerie spent her nights with Joshua in the grand saloon, and sometimes took walks on the deck with him. Marsh even heard one man say that they’d gone up to Joshua’s cabin together. He tried to warn York about the kind of scandalous talk that was starting up, but Joshua just shrugged it off. “Let them have their scandal, Abner, if it pleases them,” he said. “Valerie is interested in our boat, and it is my pleasure to show it to her. There is nothing between us but friendship, you have my word.” He looked almost sad when he said that. “I might wish that it were otherwise, but that is the truth.”
“You better be goddamned careful what you’re wishin’,” Marsh said bluntly. “That Ortega might have his own opinions on the matter. He’s from New Orleans, probably one of those Creoles. They’ll fight a duel over just about any damn thing, Joshua.”
Joshua York smiled. “I have no fear of Raymond, but I thank you for your warning, Abner. Now, please, let Valerie and me conduct our own affairs.”
Marsh did just that, but not comfortably. He was certain that Ortega would make trouble sooner or later, especially when Valerie Mersault went on to become Joshua’s constant companion during the nights that followed. The goddamned woman was blinding him to the dangers all about him, but there wasn’t a thing Marsh could do about it.
And that was only the start of it. At each landing, more strangers came aboard, and Joshua always gave them cabins. At Bayou Sara, he and Valerie left the Fevre Dream one night and returned with a pale, heavy man named Jean Ardant. A few minutes downriver, they’d put in at a woodyard, and Ardant had gone and fetched this sallow-faced dandy named Vincent. At Baton Rouge, four more strangers had taken passage; at Donaldsonville another three.
And then there were those dinners. As his strange company began to grow, Joshua York ordered a table set up in the texas parlor, and there he would dine at midnight with his companions, new and old. Supper they took with everyone else in the main cabin, but these dinners were private. The custom started in Bayou Sara. Abner Marsh allowed once to Joshua how the idea of a regular meal at midnight took his fancy, but that didn’t get him invited. Joshua only smiled, and the meals went on, the number of diners growing each night. Finally Marsh’s curiosity got the better of him, and he managed to walk by the parlor a couple of times to glance in the window. There wasn’t much to see. Just some folks eating and talking. The oil lamps were dim and subdued, the curtains half-drawn. Joshua sat at the head of the table, Simon on his right-hand side and Valerie to his left. Everybody was sipping from glasses of Joshua’s vile elixir, several bottles of which had been uncorked. The first time Marsh wandered by, Joshua was talking animatedly and the rest were listening. Valerie stared at him almost worshipfully. The second time Marsh peeked in, Joshua was listening to Jean Ardant, one hand resting casually on the tablecloth. As Marsh watched, Valerie placed her own hand on top of it. Joshua glanced at her and smiled fondly. Valerie smiled back. Abner Marsh looked quickly for Raymond Ortega, muttered “Goddamn fool woman” under his breath, and hurried away, scowling.
Marsh tried to make sense of it, of all these queer strangers, these odd goings-on, of all Joshua York had told him about vampires. It wasn’t easy, and the more he thought on it the more confused he got. The library on the Fevre Dream had no books about vampires or anything like that and he wasn’t about to go stealing into Joshua’s cabin again. At Baton Rouge, he took himself into town and bought a few rounds at some likely grog shops, hoping to find out something that way. When he could, he’d introduce the subject of vampires into the talk, usually by turning to his drinking companions and saying, “Say, you ever heard anything ’bout vampires along the river?” He figured that was safer than raising the subject on the steamer, where the very word might start some bad talk.
A few f
olks laughed at him or gave him odd looks. One free man of color, a burly soot-black fellow with a broken nose whom Marsh accosted in a particularly smoky tavern, ran off as soon as Marsh asked his question. Marsh tried to run after him, but was soon left behind wheezing. Others seemed to know considerable about vampires, though none of the stories had a damn thing to do with the Mississippi. All the stuff he’d heard from Joshua’s lips, about crosses and garlic and coffins full of dirt, he heard repeated, and more besides.
Marsh took to watching York and his companions closely at supper, and afterward in the grand saloon. Vampires didn’t eat nor drink, he’d been told, but Joshua and the others drank copious amounts of wine and whiskey and brandy when they weren’t sipping York’s private stock, and all of them were only too glad to do justice to a nice chicken or pork chop.
Joshua was always wearing his silver ring, with its sapphire big as a pigeon’s eye, and none of them seemed bothered by all the silver about the cabin. They used the silverware proper enough when they ate, better than most of the Fevre Dream’s crew.
And when the chandeliers were lit by night, the mirrors all up and down the main cabin gleamed brilliantly and crowds of finely dressed reflections came to life on either side of them, and danced and drank and played cards just like the real folks in the real saloon. Abner Marsh, night after night, found himself looking into those mirrors. Joshua was always there where he was supposed to be, smiling, laughing, gliding from mirror to mirror arm in arm with Valerie, talking politics with a passenger, listening to Framm’s river yarns, sharing private talks with Simon or Jean Ardant; each night a thousand Joshua Yorks walked the Fevre Dream’s carpeted deck, each as alive and grand as all the others. His friends cast reflections too.
That ought to have been enough, but Marsh’s slow, suspicious mind was still disquieted. It wasn’t until Donaldsonville that he hit on a plan to stop his fretting. He went into town with a canteen, and filled it up with holy water from a Papist church near to the river. Then he took aside the boy who waited their end of the table, and gave him fifty cents. “You fill Cap’n York’s water glass from this tonight, you hear?” Marsh told him. “I’m playin’ him a joke.”
During supper the waiter kept looking at York expectantly, waiting for the joke to get funny. He was disappointed. Joshua drank down the holy water easy as you please. “Well, damn,” Marsh muttered to himself afterwards. “That sure ought to settle it.”
But it didn’t, and that night Abner Marsh excused himself from the grand saloon to do some thinking. He’d been sitting up on the texas porch for a couple of hours, alone, his chair leaned back and his feet up on the railing, when he heard the rustle of skirts on the stairway.
Valerie drifted over and stood close beside him, smiling down. “Good evening, Captain Marsh,” she said.
Abner Marsh’s chair thumped back to the deck as he pulled his boots off the rail, scowling. “Passengers ain’t supposed to be up on the texas,” he said, trying to hide his annoyance.
“It was so warm down below. I thought it might be cooler up here.”
“Well, that’s true,” Marsh replied uncertainly. He didn’t know quite what to say next. The truth was, women had always made him feel uncomfortable. They had no place in a steamboatman’s world, and Marsh had never quite known how to deal with them. Beautiful women made him even more ill at ease, and Valerie was as disconcerting as any fancy New Orleans matron.
She stood with one slender hand curled lightly around a carved post, looking off over the water toward Donaldsonville. “We’ll reach New Orleans tomorrow, won’t we?” she asked.
Marsh stood up, figuring it probably wasn’t polite to be sitting down with Valerie standing. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “We ain’t but a few hours upriver, and I mean to steam in sparklin’, so it won’t take hardly no time at all.”
“I see.” She turned suddenly, and her pale, shapely face was very serious as she fixed him with her huge purple eyes. “Joshua says you are the true master of the Fevre Dream. In some curious way, he has much respect for you. He will listen to you.”
“We’re partners,” Marsh said.
“If your partner were in danger, would you come to his aid?”
Abner Marsh scowled, thinking of the vampire stories Joshua had told him, conscious of how pale and beautiful Valerie looked in the starlight, how deep her eyes were. “Joshua knows he can come to me if he’s got trouble,” Marsh said. “A man who wouldn’t help his partner ain’t no kind of a man at all.”
“Words,” Valerie said scornfully, tossing back her thick black hair. The wind was in it, and it moved about her face as she spoke. “Joshua York is a great man, a strong man. A king. He deserves a better partner than you, Captain Marsh.”
Abner Marsh felt the blood rushing to his face. “What the hell you talkin’ about?” he demanded.
She smiled slyly. “You broke into his cabin,” she said.
Marsh was suddenly furious. “He told you that?” he said. “Goddamn him anyhow, we had it out over that. It ain’t none of your never mind, neither.”
“It is,” she said. “Joshua is in great danger. He is bold, reckless. He must have help. I want to help him, but you, Captain Marsh, you only give him words.”
“I don’t have one goddamned idea what you’re talkin’ about, woman,” Marsh said. “What kind of help does Joshua need? I offered to help him with these damned vam—with some troubles he got, but he didn’t want to hear none of it.”
Valerie’s face softened suddenly. “Would you really help him?” she asked.
“He’s my goddamned partner.”
“Then turn your steamer, Captain Marsh. Take us away from here, take us to Natchez, to St. Louis, I don’t care. But not to New Orleans. We must not go to New Orleans tomorrow.”
Abner Marsh snorted. “Why the hell not?” he demanded. When Valerie looked away instead of answering, he went on. “This here is a steamboat, not some goddamned horse I can ride anyplace I got a notion. We got a schedule to keep, folks who’ve taken passage with us, freight to discharge. We got to go to New Orleans.” He scowled. “And what about Joshua?”
“He’ll be asleep in his cabin come dawn,” Valerie said. “When he wakes, we’ll be safely upriver.”
“Joshua’s my partner,” Marsh said. “Man’s got to trust his partner. Maybe I spied on him once, but I ain’t goin’ to do anything like that again, not for you and not for nobody. And I ain’t goin’ to turn the Fevre Dream around without tellin’ him. Now if Joshua comes to me and says he don’t want to go on to New Orleans, hell, maybe we can talk it over. But not otherwise. You want me to go ask Joshua about this?”
“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.”