by John Brunner
She spun around to confront him, taking his hands in hers.
“Is there nowhere?” she concluded pleadingly.
He hesitated. Though he no longer lived at his mother’s house, where his visits grew increasingly rarer, there was no question of taking her to the place where he lodged while in the city, since it was run “on respectable principles, for gentlemen only.”
At length he said, “There’s only one place I can think of.”
“We’ll go there! Right away! Is it far! Must we take a streetcar?” Her eyes sparkled.
“But”—as though she had not spoken—“there’s a risk.”
“Life is dangerous if you live it properly, and I want to!”
“A risk you might be taken for—for a harlot.” Fernand uttered the words with difficulty.
“Which is not something you want said about your future wife?”
“Naturally!”
“But I don’t care! I love you and I want you!” Abruptly she was almost crying. “Where is this place?”
“I was thinking of…” Once more a pause. “I was thinking of the Hotel Limousin.”
“Oh, yes! The one with an entrance for ladies who aren’t ladies!”
“How did you hear about that?” he demanded, taking her arm again and resuming their walk, for the crowds were constantly on the move and it was impossible to stand in one spot.
“Never you mind!” she retorted with a toss of her head.
He gave her a sidelong stare, then smiled against his will.
“But that’s not why I suggested it,” he said. “They have—well, their regular girls. An outsider would be thrown back on the street if she tried to go in that door! No, I had in mind something more fundamental. They say the owner, Mr. Barber, is making amends for a shameful episode in his past. At all events people like—”
A scowl accompanied the next words; he always so detested having to utter them.
“—like us may freely patronize his premises. This can’t be said of all hotels.”
“Praise God that there is one, then,” Dorcas said positively, “Take me there. Let us dine in public and spend the night together and not be ashamed of our love any more!”
“But if you don’t come home surely the Parburys—”
She cut him short. “Fibby is to say I already am indoors. Neither of them will doubt her.”
Fernand gazed at her with such concentration, he almost tripped over a drunken man sprawled on the banquette.
“Are you wondering whether you want me for your wife after all?” Dorcas demanded, real fear in her voice.
“No, a million times no! I was thinking there’s nothing in the world I want more. But… Well, tonight there may be no vacant rooms.”
“How can we be sure unless we go there?”
“You’re right.” Once more he halted, and this time hugged her close. “Oh, my darling! If we can—if we only can—I shall forever date our marriage from tonight!”
“Me too,” she whispered close to his ear. “Now let’s hurry!”
Piercing the hubbub of the Limousin’s lobby, a voice called, “Say, Captain Drew!”
Delivering his overnight bag to a bellboy, Drew glanced around.
“Siskin, sir—Joel Siskin! New Orleans Intelligencer!” Shedding overcoat, hat, gloves and cane into the charge of a waiter, the reporter revealed himself in evening dress of good cut but shabby and fractionally too tight. He added, “I’ve interviewed you aboard the Atchafalaya.”
For the sake of politeness Drew inquired, “Are you here on business?”
“Not in the strict sense, thank heaven.” Joel brushed back a stray lock of hair. “No, my work’s over for today. Took longer than I expected, though. Result is, I’m late. I’m to join Mr. Gordon’s party. Seems that boy of his is making his birthday tonight.”
“Hamish Gordon? Is he here?”
“And Captain Woodley. You didn’t know?”
“I just arrived,” Drew muttered, eyes roving the hall.
“I…” Joel hesitated. “Dare I ask what you think of the Nonpareil?”
“No!”—reverting to his habitual curtness.
“Have you seen her? I believe she’s—”
“Mr. Siskin, you said you were through with work for today. That holds for me as well.”
“Fair enough, sir,” Joel answered with a sigh. “I’ll ask again, though, soon as opportunity presents… Or maybe I could ask Mr. Lamenthe.”
“What?”
Joel pointed through the dense throng, but at that moment the band, which had been taking a breather, struck up again with a lively quadrille, and what he started to say was drowned out. An instant later, having been apprised of Drew’s arrival, Barber appeared, Jones and Cuffy at his heels as always.
“Hosea! Good evening! I’ve reserved space for you to dine. It’s at the common table, I fear, but… Why, Mr. Siskin, isn’t it? Mr. Gordon has been asking after you.”
“I’ll go and make my apologies,” Joel said, and excused himself.
“If you’d like to eat right away—” Barber resumed, addressing Drew again, and checked on realizing that the other was paying no attention.
“Is something the matter?”
“Hm? Oh!” Recovering with a start, Drew shook his head. “Siskin said he’d spotted my ex-cub—Fernand Lamenthe. I guess you don’t know him. At any rate I never saw him here.”
“Oh, but I do,” Barber corrected. “And you did see him here at least once, while he was still working for Ed Marocain.”
Before Drew could say anything further, he turned to Cuffy.
“Find Mr. Lamenthe and inform him that Mr. Drew would like a word!”
Having made inquiries, Fernand returned dispiritedly to Dorcas, who was waiting at the entrance.
“There’s no room anywhere,” he muttered. “They can’t even find us seats for dinner. I was afraid this might happen.”
She looked at him with hurt, betrayed eyes: her fairy prince failing to deliver a miracle… but she had renounced belief in miracles.
“Then we’ll go somewhere else—any place where people don’t point the finger! Fernand honey, you’re a man, you must have been places like that!”
So much was he at a loss to know what to say to this improbable new Dorcas, he had found no answer before Cuffy materialized at his side.
At the same moment a chance movement of the crowd allowed a clear view across the hall, and there was Drew beckoning with his knobbed staff.
“We better at least say hello,” Fernand muttered.
“Glad to see you again!” Drew extended his hand. “I hear you’re doing well.”
“Thank you, sir. You too, I hope. Ah… Dorcas dear, this is Captain Drew that I’ve talked so much about. Miss Dorcas Archer, Captain, my”—abruptly aware of the absence of a ring, but finishing anyhow—“fiancée.”
Drew looked at her as though assessing the lines of a steamer, and at last shrugged, as to say, bachelor-fashion: women are much of a muchness. Then he added hastily, “I hope you’ll be very happy!”
“As do I,” Barber put in; he had been temporarily distracted by some report from a bellboy. “But you must forgive me; I’m called away. Hosea, your seat will have to be at our common table, as I said, but it’s being held against your presence.”
“Thanks,” Drew said from the corner of his mouth, and went on, “You’re eating here too, are you?”
Fernand shook his head, and Dorcas said in a firm clear voice, “We asked whether it was possible, and they told us all the places are spoken for, so we shall have to go elsewhere.”
“Oh, but that’ll never do! Barber can make room for me on short notice, and I guess that goes for my friends too. He owns half my boat, damn him, and I get little enough in return—though thank God he’s never meddled with the running of her! It’s not ordinary for a lady to sit at the common table, but then I take the impression that Fernand wouldn’t get mashed on an ordinary girl.” With a nod. “I’ll
fix it.”
Turning, he threw over his shoulder, “Besides, I have a proposition to put to you, Fernand.”
For one terrible moment Fernand thought Dorcas was going to stamp her foot and march away. Then she yielded in resignation. A waiter took her cloak, revealing a dress that, by contrast with those worn by other women present, was drab and out of style, for she had never allowed Fernand to buy her clothes. Nonetheless head after head turned as they followed Drew.
The ground floor of the Limousin had been laid out as a vast suite for assemblies and balls. Barber had found it more convenient to divide it up. One section formed the dining room; another, an antechamber to the gaming rooms on the floor above; a third served as a salon for ladies waiting to meet gentlemen to whom they had not been formally introduced—as he sometimes expressed it with a chuckle.
Tonight, most of the partitions had been removed. The salon remained intact, but the dining room was no longer cut off from the main entrance hall, and the antechamber survived only as a group of sofas and armchairs jammed together under dust sheets.
To this area—too near the band for comfort—they had transferred the common table that normally stood in the dining room.
There were half a dozen vacant seats. Drew steered for them. The headwaiter objected, claiming that he had reserved only one place, and the others were booked for clients who doubtless had been delayed, while Drew asserted that it was their bad luck if they couldn’t keep a schedule.
He won. Dismayed, for they had been hoping for the opposite outcome, Fernand and Dorcas made a pretense of consulting the menu. Drew scrutinized them keenly under his bushy brows.
Abruptly he said, “I guess your minds aren’t too set on food right now.”
Fernand’s nostrils flared like a startled horse’s.
“Boy, you know me by this time—or should. I’m going to be blunt. You’re eager to get married, right?”
“Sure we are,” Fernand snapped.
“And the lady’s with you by herself. Just a minute!”—raising his hand as though it were his staff, which he had ceded into the charge of a waiter. “I don’t mean nothing to her derogation. I mean some young ladies don’t get to go anyplace without a chaperone. And they’re the sort that come equipped with a marriage portion. And before you do like you’re given to—blow your safety value for no good reason—let me guess why you two ain’t hitched up already.”
Dorcas leaned back, crossing her arms, as though on the verge of explosion herself. Drew disregarded her.
“You drawing full pilot’s scale yet?”
“Ah…” Fernand swallowed. Finally he shook his head.
“I been told not. Just a minute!”—to a waiter trying to take their orders. “I know it’s not for want of talent. I’d hire you back tomorrow. Said so at Christmastime to my sister-in-law. How about it? I’ll pay you what I pay Ketch Tyburn—I got him for this season—less fifty dollars. And next year the rate he gets. Is it a deal? I guess on pay like that you could plan the wedding, right?”
Fernand was on the point of seizing Drew’s hand to conclude an agreement on the spot, when Dorcas said, “This Mr. Tyburn—is he the one who was there at our second meeting?”
“Yes—why?”
“I don’t think he can be as good a pilot as you are.”
Both men blinked at her in amazement. Drew, his mood improved by his defeat of the headwaiter, said, “Why so, my dear?”
“Has Fernand told you how we found each other again? No? Then I shall.”
In a few crisp sentences, omitting the identity of Cherouen and her employers, she recounted her ordeal with Woodley and Whitworth. In conclusion she declared, “So you see, Mr. Tyburn couldn’t decide whether to do anything or not. So I don’t understand how he can be as good a pilot as Fernand, because you taught him, and everybody knows you’re the best on the river.”
Fernand stifled a sigh of relief. He had an existing contract to work out before he could accept Drew’s offer, and news of it might dampen the captain’s enthusiasm, so he had feared Dorcas might settle the matter the wrong way by complaining about him being paid less than the senior pilot. Finding the story’s end turned with such a neat compliment, he was delighted… all the more, because it showed Woodley in such a bad light.
Drew beamed indulgently. “Luckily for me, Ketch isn’t indecisive when he’s at the wheel. But he’s getting on, and plans to quit long-trade work next year. Which is why I want to sign your young man in his place. I trust you have no objection?”
“You’d better not,” said Fernand’s eyes, as plain as speech.
“It’s a deal, then. Waiter, a bottle of the champagne Mr. Barber drinks. We’ll toast our new partnership.”
And when the wine was brought—which was quickly, for a supply was constantly on ice—he declaimed as he lifted his glass, “ ‘I fill this cup To one made up Of loveliness alone, A woman of her gentle sex The seeming paragon!’ Edward Coote Pinckney who died in 1828 at the tragically early age of twenty-six. Who are you, Miss Archer? Who sent you on the errand where you met Fernand?”
She hesitated. Then she told him. He was taking a swig of champagne at the time. He hooted with laughter and the wine ran down the wrong way and he wound up croaking and coughing and somehow in spite of all still laughing.
“You remember Mr. Siskin, don’t you, boy?” Gordon boomed.
Matthew forced a smile and rose to shake Joel’s hand.
“Congratulations, and many happy returns!”
“Thank you!”
Then he was free to sit down again while Joel was being ushered to a place at the far end of the table. He had been overwhelmed by what Gordon had ordered: turtle soup, broiled red snapper, stuffed crabs, turkey with glazed yams… and there was more to come. Mechanically he picked at the food and occasionally sampled, more or less at random, the glasses before him, which contained red wine, white wine, and water. He had refused whiskey.
His companions were doing their best to be agreeable: Gordon at his right, Woodley at his left, beyond them the two pilots, conspiratorially chuckling at jokes that to Matthew seemed pointless, and occasionally erupting in roars of laughter. Their gaiety was infectious, bringing smiles to faces at adjacent tables.
But the guest of honor felt weaker and giddier by the moment. Lacking appetite because of his apprehensiveness, he had eaten little; wishing to seem neither ungracious nor ungrateful, every time someone toasted his birthday—and here was Joel doing the same—he had responded by taking a generous gulp of wine… thinking also of Dutch courage.
Now the room was blurring unless he concentrated hard, and there was a sourness in his belly that kept making him remember the man down on all fours and vomiting.
He began to believe he had made a terrible mistake.
A tap on his shoulder. He glanced up. A dumbwaiter had been wheeled to his side, bearing a dish with a great silver cover. Beaming, Barber was poised to remove it, asking permission with a twitch of his eyebrows.
The boy could only nod.
Disclosed, lifted up, placed before him with a silver knife beside it, here came a cake in the shape of—well, a heart. It was iced with pink sugar. Where the side incurved, a triangular—a deltar—zone of grated chocolate surrounded a candle of bright red wax. Striking a lucifer, Barber lit this and provoked applause and cries of “Speech! Speech!”
Forewarned, Matthew had drafted a pageful of elegant phrases. But there was nothing elegant about the symbolism of the cake. Staring at it, he felt all his memorized compliments blow away.
“Come on!” Woodley cried. He was growing very drunk, and his cheeks shone with perspiration. “Cut the cackle and come to the—cake!”
Matthew seized his chance, and the knife. Rising, smiling as best he could, he said, “Gentlemen, far be it from me to interrupt this evening’s pleasure with a lengthy address! Let me merely thank everyone who has consented to help mark my anniversary in such memorable style, and above all of course my employer, Mr.
Hamish Gordon!”
That was precisely to the company’s taste, and earned him claps and cheers while the waiter cleared away debris from previous courses and set out fine china plates, confectionery forks, more glasses, and bottles of brandy, rum, and the inevitable whiskey. Moving as in a dream, Matthew leaned forward and puffed out the candle, then awkwardly divided the cake. Its interior was rich; dark yellow, dotted with fruit, separated into layers by heavy cream. The others sampled it with forks and fingers and complimented Barber as they wiped stray cream from their lips. Matthew put a portion in his mouth. Somehow chewed it, somehow swallowed it, found he was being handed a glass of cognac and compelled to swig…
The macabre thought crossed his mind that from his private parts something else was now more likely to come pouring out than what a man was supposed to spend when with a woman.
But his time of waiting was over. With peculiar clarity he heard Barber whispering in Gordon’s ear that the young lady who had been requested was in the salon and at Mr. Rust’s disposal.
Most of those who had been at the common table when Drew arrived with Dorcas and Fernand had adjourned to the gaming rooms, and those for whom the vacant places had allegedly been reserved had so far failed so show up. The waiters took advantage of this opportunity to lay clean covers.
During the lull, there was a commotion in the main dining room and all heads turned.
Escorting Matthew, here came Gordon and Woodley, grinning and chortling. The boy was trying hard to smile, but kept biting his lower lip. Joel, jumping from his chair, made to intervene, but Gordon grunted something that might be interpreted as “This is none of your business!” He followed anyway.
Forewarned, a waiter darted to open the door of the ladies’ salon. Through it could be glimpsed a pretty dark-haired girl in a low-cut evening gown, rising from a sofa.
“Elvira my dear!” Gordon boomed, thrusting Matthew ahead of him. Woodley followed and closed the door again, so sharply that it almost banged Joel on the nose. He stepped back, cursing.