by John Brunner
On being offered an eye-opener, Tyburn had accepted with alacrity, for if they hoped to stay in the profession pilots did not drink while working, and his latest trip had been difficult as well as dry.
To him Parbury directed a harsh question, his blind gaze perfectly aligned.
“What do you think of Drew?”
Tyburn sipped, and thought, and sipped again. Silence returned by degrees. At length he deemed it appropriate to deliver the verdict with which he had been pregnant most of the way since Cairo.
“Captain Drew—now he’s a daisy pilot! I’d trust him at midnight in fog and shoal water, spite of the rotting tub he calls a steamer, and I wouldn’t so much as breathe if he told me not to. But that don’t imply I have to like him.”
To emphasize, to underline this oracular pronouncement, the heavens wept. Warm summer rain began asperging New Orleans.
On this corner had stood Bonaventure’s Coffee House and Slave Exchange. Now it was a burnt-out shell. The rain gathered on charred timbers and dripped dirty to the ground. The banquettes, the wood-plank sidewalks of the Vieux Carré, were interrupted here with such contempt that no one had troubled to sling a warning rope across from what was left of the wall to what was left of the poles that formerly had upheld a handsome balcony ornamented with wrought iron. Incautious by night, a passerby might have stridden into a puddle caltrapped with rusty nails.
Coming on this, Drew was briefly disoriented. His sight of Parbury had so shaken him that he had nearly not arrived here in one piece. Descending from a streetcar on Canal—as much a boundary between the “American” and the “French” zones of this improbable city as though even now its English-speaking population constituted a besieging army—he had stepped off the “neutral ground” and almost been run down by a young man in a cut-under buggy who seemed to think he was Jehu reincarnate.
And who, on noticing Drew’s blue coat, lashed out with his whip. He missed by scarcely an inch.
These two encounters sufficed to evaporate the good spirits the captain had been enjoying. Distracted as he was, he briefly suspected he had missed his way. But, looking about him, he found that everything else was much as it had been when last he saw it. And if a slave exchange had been burnt down, surely that was the fair inverse of a Roman holiday…
Not, judging by the Negro beggars who whined after alms with one eye fearfully cocked for patrolling soldiers under orders to round them up and put them to work, that freedom had brought signal benefits to the colored Orleanians. The devil with them, though! Just let Marocain be at his office! When today was over, please the Lord, Hosea Drew would have time to spare for strangers’ troubles.
Obliged during this and every other sort of weather to maintain himself in a condition impeccable from his starched cravat to the high-sided boots on which his uncle, and employer, did not tolerate the slightest grain of dust, and moreover bored because so far today all the customers had been claimed by his cousins and senior fellow clerks Eugene and Richard—who were legitimate, and lost no chance of rubbing in that fact—Fernand Lamenthe was already on the verge of eruption when, through the glass door on which gold letters announced that here were the premises of E. Marocain, Goldsmith and Silversmith, Jeweller, Pawnbroker and Banker to Distinguished Families, he espied a shabby figure carrying a battered carpetbag.
Surely that could be no customer of Marocain’s!
However, having surveyed the vicinity—the shop faced not the street but a courtyard large enough to turn a carriage with four in hand—he set his hand to the door and thrust it wide.
At once, bristling, Fernand was at his side, hoping all he needed was directions to some place else. Four other clients were present, regular and valued patrons: Mrs. Imelda Moyne, who had come with her slim and pretty daughter Louisette to select a watch as a present to her husband Andrew on their twentieth anniversary; Major Hugo Spring of the Union Army, who wanted to choose a ring for the young lady he had it in mind to propose to; and his intended groomsman Arthur Gattry, who thanks to sleekly classical good looks had wider experience of women and had been pressured into offering his advice. All of them looked on the intruder with distaste and dismay.
So did Eugene and Richard, whose expressions were not devoid of glee that the lot of tackling this unsavory personage had fallen to their cousin.
Terrifyingly conscious of being watched, but determined to brave it out, Fernand said, “May I assist you—sir?”
And wished for once that his octoroon complexion, heightened by contrast with the fashionable beard and moustache he sported in imitation of Emperor Louis Napoleon, were dark enough to hide the violence of his blushing. He was nineteen, tall, lean, and—so he had been assured more than once—rather good-looking.
But he was not enjoying his career. His mother never tired of assuring him that his prospects were marvelous, which was probably true, and that his uncle had been very generous, which was beyond dispute. Even so…
“You owe me twelve thousand dollars,” said the man in shabby blue. He let fall his carpetbag. “Pack it in there, quick as you can. Gold, or Union bills—don’t make no odds, just so long as I get every cent.”
There was a moment of total silence. Then:
“Obviously crazy?” said Major Spring to his companion, who nodded. They rose and approached. Eugene, with a muttered apology to the Moynes, and Richard rounded the ends of their respective counters. Neither was as tall as Fernand but both were heavier-set.
It would have been pardonable for Fernand to stand aside. But the idea felt amiss. He could not have defined his reasons; they reached back to the first time he had come here, clad in hasty black for his father’s funeral. The Cathedral of St. Louis, redolent of incense, had that day become intermingled in his awareness with this temple to the rival deity Mammon, and there were certain acts he regarded on a less than conscious level as unbefitting to the shop.
Offering violence to a stranger was one of them.
Like steam in a boiler finding its proper outlet to the engine, his potentially explosive rage transmuted to decision. Stepping square in front of the newcomer, he said, “Do I take it you have funds deposited with us?”
“Damn’ right I do! Money I’ve sweated blood and eaten dirt to earn! And I want it now!”
This with a glare calculated to melt the younger man like a wax image over a candle flame.
Feeling the blood in his cheeks as hot as that image on the verge of flaring, Fernand said stubbornly, “Sir, I do not recollect that I saw you here before.”
“Hmm!”—after a pause. “No, I guess you wouldn’t remember me, at that. I last walked through Ed’s door in March of ‘61. Here, send my card to him. He knows me.”
He proffered a slip of pasteboard. It identified Hosea Drew, Master, Str. Atchafalaya.
Fernand almost dropped it in astonishment. This—this vagabond was the man who had brought off so barefaced a coup that the city, nay the state, nay the river community clear to St. Louis was gossiping about it! His Atchafalaya was being paid from public funds to transport prisoners of war to the river port nearest where they hailed from. Many were doing the same on an informal basis, but he was the only steamboat owner to have thought of applying for government money instead of negotiating with the prisoners and their families. A single telegraph message, rumor said, had assured him of six profitable trips and maybe eight.
Yet to look at him one might assume he was so poor he could not take his boots to the cobbler.
During one diabolically tempting instant Fernand considered letting Eugene and Richard make fools of themselves. He needed only walk out in the direction of the countinghouse as though to see whether Mr. Marocain was there. Having little to do, he had been watching the courtyard and knew his uncle had hobbled back to his bureau, which was connected to the shop by a speaking tube installed since his illness. He was virtually certain the others had been too busy to register the fact.
So by the time he came back to apologize for taking so
long…
No. His cousins were bound to rebuke him anyhow, for being right. There was no point in making matters worse. So he said loudly, “Ah, Captain Drew! I shall advise my uncle of your presence right away. Forgive my apparent discourtesy, but the Atchafalaya must have made capital time. I was expecting you tomorrow.”
“Expecting me, were you?” Drew said as the other clerks exchanged horrified glances.
“One tries to keep a finger on the pulse of business, you know.” Fernand gave a genteel wave, copied from his father. “Be so kind as to take a seat!”
Suddenly Drew’s mask of gruffness was displaced by a crooked grin that said as plain as words he had seen through Fernand’s pretense and didn’t give a damn. Richard came rushing to place a chair at Drew’s disposal while Eugene culled his repertoire of doubletalk to explain to the other clients why the steamboater had not been summarily ejected.
Filling his lungs before applying his lips to the speaking tube—it required a deal of wind to sound the whistle at its distant end—Fernand had to struggle not to laugh. Ever since childhood he had been fond of the phrase “poetic justice.” He relished this, the first occasion he had found it applicable to the real world.
Real…?
Guiding Drew toward the bureau, Fernand tried to revise some of what he had not until recently thought of as his illusions. Having repeatedly been told—chiefly by his mother—that it was time to discard vain ambitions about becoming an explorer or a deep-sea mariner, and being dutiful and because steamboat piloting was one of the careers he had vaguely dreamed of, he concentrated on the fact that the man beside him was ill-dressed and ill-mannered, and right now was scratching without shame.
But what did it spare you to be “respectable”? Certainly it could not save you from the Angel of Death! Perhaps avoiding liquor and low company might prolong life in this world, but priests were forever uttering warnings against attachment to the treasures of Earth. Sometimes it seemed that only a handsomer tomb rewarded those who sacrificed their lives to stuffy dull convention…
He had not quite completed that thought when he rounded on Drew.
“Say, Captain!”
“Yes, boy?”
Fernand almost bridled, but was glad he managed not to.
“Captain, you may need to prepare yourself for my uncle’s condition.”
“Don’t be so cryptic!”
“Well, last year he had rheumatic fever. Left him very stiff and weak, and as for his heart… Well, he’s not in his first youth.”
“To every thing there is a time,” Drew said sententiously. “Thanks for the warning, though.” And before Fernand could knock on the bureau door he added a further one-word question.
“Uncle?”
His face a sudden mask, Fernand forbore to answer.
But once again Drew deciphered his expression. He said softly, “Don’t get me wrong, boy—youngster. I have all possible respect for people who honor family obligations.”
Shabby and prematurely gray this man might be; incontestably his wits were razor-keen. He seemed to have analyzed Fernand’s position in the world within a couple of minutes… not that it was so rare as to make the feat truly astonishing. His mother, one of the prettiest quadroons of her generation, had lived en plaçage; in other words she had been the acknowledged mistress of a wealthy white man. That man was dead: Alphonse Marocain, Edouard’s younger brother, carried off by yellow fever. The relationship had been as close and nearly as formal as a marriage, but their son was called Lamenthe, a common New Orleans patronym: her name, not his. Fernand, at least, they had agreed on…
He was an only child—now. There had been twin girls before him, but they were sickly from birth and both were dead by the time he learned to walk. No more had followed.
Many people thought of origins like his as romantic, invoking terms like “love-child” and the attendant superstitions that made bastards somehow special. He disagreed. Nothing in his heredity had saved him from the future he must endure. For him a path had been mapped through a monotone world of bookkeeping. Adding endless columns of figures was not how he had hoped to spend his life. However, since he was now his mother’s sole support apart from his uncle’s allowance to her—
The idea flashed into Fernand’s mind that Drew might have taken “uncle” for a euphemism. Well, that was a pardonable error, and were it to prove true he would not be altogether disappointed…
He rapped on the bureau door.
For a while after replacing the speaking tube on its hook, Edouard Marocain sat thinking how he had altered since he and Drew last met, and how much he would have preferred to see his visitor tomorrow, at all events later. Word had reached him that the Atchafalaya was making exceptional time, but that was a small surprise; the river was being kind to its navigators this spring. Even so, what was Drew about? He could not possibly have supervised the disembarkation of passengers and the unloading of baggage and freight, and complied with the unwritten law of the Pilots’ Guild that obliged him to report at their parlor before proceeding about other business. What had driven him to come straight here? A cold shoulder from his colleagues? The Drew he had known in the old days would certainly have brazened matters out, defying everyone to divert him from his solitary course. Admittedly, stress and sickness might work improbable transformations…
“Who should know that better than I?” whispered Marocain to the still air of his darkened office. Its windows were tightly shut against the miasma that might bring renewal of his fever; heavy drapes obscured them not so much to exclude the sun on this cloudy and intermittently rainy morning as to disguise from visitors the scrawniness of his hands, the parchment tautness of his cheeks, the shivers that racked him and occasionally peaked in fits of coughing. Against these, a device like an incense burner rested atop his English roll-front desk, uttering pungent fumes: not that he could have sworn to their doing him any good.
And if they were, to what end? What was he going to leave behind? The riches of this world, of course, to the best of his ability—and none could say he had not made painstaking provision for his heirs… but if Richard were to marry that girl so much like—so much too like—the gaudy frivolous butterfly Eugene was tethered to…
Maybe, in spite of all, the sound strain of the Marocain family had passed via Alphonse’s loins? No, that was pitching it too strong. Likelier there had been excessive interbreeding among the old French families of the city, and some sort of outcrossing—even to the stock of their former slaves—was essential to renew the vigor of the line. At all events Fernand… poor Alphonse’s only… Fernand…
Adrift, his thoughts were rammed by a loud knock. He gathered his wits. On the desk lay a mound of confidential papers. Effortfully, for every time he raised his arm above shoulder height he suffered twinges, he drew down the roll front. He turned his chair, which was modern and mounted on a swivel, so he was facing the door. At least his voice had survived his illness; except when coughing interfered, it was as mellow and resonant as ever. Therefore he declaimed his greeting as soon as the door swung wide.
“Captain, welcome back to New Orleans! Fernand, dispose a chair for our visitor. Call for oysters and a decanter of the Muscadet that arrived by the last liner. And bring the captain’s ledger of account. You’ve posted the telegraphic credits, I feel sure.”
“At your service, Mr. Marocain,” said Fernand with the formality which the old banker insisted on even his sons displaying when a client was in his presence.
“That nephew of yours,” said Drew, “was shook by my looks.”
“And so are you by mine,” said Marocain.
Disconcerted by such directness, Drew surveyed the room. New and fashionable European paper decorated its walls; a cut-glass chandelier depended from its ceiling; the carpet was resplendent with the latest chemical dyes. He said at length, “Don’t look like you let it interfere with business.”
“In spite of everything one continues to make ends meet. Now there’
s a chance of trade reverting to normal, one looks forward to a brighter future. Doubtless your beautiful steamer will contribute to the renewal of our prosperity. The fact that you’re here sooner than expected suggests that she suffered no harm while she was laid up.”
“There’s damn’ all traffic on the river,” Drew said curtly. “That’s how I got here ahead of schedule. The boat? Hah! You can’t scarcely take ten steps along her deck without the planking threatens to give way!”
Marocain raised his eyebrows. But before he could speak again Fernand returned bearing a leather-bound book on whose spine was stamped in gold DREW Capt. H. He set it on Marocain’s desk, open to the current folio, and would have withdrawn but that a black maidservant appeared with a tray on which reposed oysters in cracked ice, a bowl of hot sauce, a barrel of small crackers, the wine Marocain had specified, and the requisite forks, glasses and napkins. Fernand helped arrange these on a table between his uncle and the visitor. Then once more he turned to leave, but Marocain checked him.
“Captain, you’ll not object to Fernand staying? I move now only with difficulty; even using the speaking tube calls for vast effort.”
Drew doused an oyster liberally with sauce. “Makes no odds to me,” he grunted, and gulped it down, then helped himself to crackers with black-nailed fingers. Puzzled, for his uncle did not ordinarily welcome company when interviewing clients, Fernand took station by the door and maintained an expression of courteous alertness.
“That there book,” said Drew after swallowing noisily, “should show you hold twelve thousand dollars of my money.”
“Including the credit you left at the beginning of the war,” Marocain murmured, not even glancing at the ledger, “the total comes to twelve thousand eighty-three. And six cents.”