by John Brunner
“We don’t have a doctor aboard, do we?” Arthur muttered.
“I guess not. But—!” Joel snapped his fingers. “By a miracle we wound up with Cherouen’s nurse! Do you know where she’s been put?”
“Is something wrong?” inquired an unfamiliar voice, and they glanced toward the door. Framed in it, serious-faced under a black hat, was a man neither of them knew, who hastily averted his gaze on realizing Louisette was en déshabillé. “I’m Harry Whitworth, second mate,” he added. “Couldn’t sleep, thought I’d take a turn around, make sure all’s well.”
Arthur and Joel started to speak at once, and within moments other staterooms were opening to reveal cross expressions on sleepy faces. A fat, sour-voiced woman—who had, she declared, objected to being lodged next to a darkie—was finally able to identify the room allotted to Josephine, over on the far side.
As Whitworth departed with a promise to seek out Woodley, Joel rapped on the indicated door and whispered urgently, “Miss Var! Miss Var! We need your help!”
Josephine appeared shoeless but otherwise fully clad. She seemed little rested, but summoned enough energy to order everyone else out of the stateroom and shut the door so she could examine Louisette. At first the latter objected, but then lay resignedly still.
After three of four minutes she reemerged and addressed a point halfway between Arthur and Joel as though uncertain which was the husband.
“She must be put ashore as soon as possible. She’s in danger of losing the child.”
During the examination Whitworth had vanished. Now he returned, announcing that the captain would be here in a moment. But by then the cabin was awash with people. Auberon had appeared, belting a robe about him, prepared to be furious at the noise that had awakened him until he realized its cause; Gordon also, shouting for Matthew as though still half asleep and unable to react to what was actually happening; Matthew in his turn, barefoot and in a nightshirt, suddenly alarmed as he realized how many people were gathering and retreating in order to dress more decorously; Hugo and Stella Spring, who seemed to have concluded that the boat had struck a snag and was sinking… Moreover a number of men who were respectable enough to enjoy cabin facilities but either could not afford or had chosen not to book staterooms, who had been dozing on deck in canvas chairs, came sleepily to investigate.
At the focus of all this, Louisette lay striving not to moan aloud.
Belatedly her maid arrived, bringing some sort of sleeping draught. Josephine seized the bottle, inspected the label, withdrew the cork and smelled the contents, then gave a grudging nod of permission: all mannerisms copied from Cherouen. To her this was a weird experience, much as though she were caught up in a vivid dream.
For it required no gift of prophecy to predict what Woodley’s and Gordon’s reaction would be to the news that there was a woman aboard who risked miscarrying and must be landed at the earliest opportunity.
But it was neither of them who put that reaction into words. Instead it was Parbury, to whom light and dark were one, descending from the pilothouse by the guidance of his cane and still more than a trifle drunk.
“This woman is Cherouen’s nurse, isn’t she?” he rasped when the situation was explained. “And he’s aboard the losing boat, isn’t he? It’s another trick to delay us! She tried before, remember—wanted us to stop and search the boat for an imaginary stick of dynamite! When that didn’t work… I’ll lay Mrs. Gattry is in on the conspiracy, too, playacting for all she’s worth!”
There was a faint gasp from Matthew. Then Auberon took a long stride to confront Parbury.
“By God, if you weren’t blind I’d call you out!” he exploded.
Just in time Joel caught him by the arm. At the same moment Whitworth returned with Woodley, who barked in an attempt to assert his authority:
“I will not tolerate a brawl aboard my boat! Sir!”—using the tone he only adopted toward Parbury when his patience was exhausted—“both Mr. Gattry and Mr. Moyne have backed the Nonpareil, and what you just said was unworthy! We shall have to do as the nurse says.”
Gordon thrust his way to the front of the little crowd. “But Moyne backed the Atchafalaya!” he declared. “I’m sure of it!”
“No, he’s been backing us—” Woodley countered, and was cut short by Auberon.
“Only enough to keep up the odds! Upon my honor as a gentleman I want the Nonpareil to win!”
The wind out of his sails, Gordon pursued doggedly, “Well, then—at any rate, can’t Mrs. Gattry be put ashore in one of these things you call a yawl?”
Matthew giggled at the unintended and ridiculous rhyme; Gordon glared at him.
“My sister will be treated as she deserves,” Auberon whispered, very pale. “Not like a package—like a human being and a member of the gentler sex!”
“And anybody who says different will have me to answer to,” chimed in Joel. He pointed to the windows on the starboard side. Ahead, lights were gleaming on the bank. Producing—and remembering to wind—his watch, he continued, “I guess there’s a good hospital in Baton Rouge, and plenty of doctors! She must go ashore!”
From within the stateroom came a faint cry. “No, no! I just ate something I shouldn’t have, that’s all!”
“Now hesh yo’ mout’,” said Josephine firmly, reverting to the kind of phrase she ordinarily would have died rather than utter. “Ain’t no bad food gon’ make yo’ belly chu’n so! I done felt yo’ womb a-creepin’!”
And, with sudden dismay, she recollected there were strangers including men within earshot, and subsided. But she had won her point. Woodley slapped his hands together.
“Mr. Whitworth, since you’re here and handy! Up to the pilothouse, tell Mr. Hogan we have to put in at Baton Rouge long enough to land a sick lady and her husband. The wharf will be clear at this hour. We shall lose only a few minutes at worst, and the Atchafalaya is still too far astern to catch up.”
He put all the conviction he could into the statement, because he wanted—needed—to believe it was so. And letting a pregnant woman die on board would be far more of a smirch on his captaincy than losing even this longed-for race.
All who had laid bets relaxed visibly. To shave the lead was not as bad as losing it.
“You are certain, are you, Miss—uh—Var?” Woodley ventured as a last hope. She nodded firmly.
“No doubt of it, sir. I guess it’s the excitement. A lady in her condition shouldn’t have come aboard.”
“It was her idea,” Arthur said defensively. “She insisted!”
Ignoring him, Auberon demanded, “But she will recover?”
“Oh, sure. She’s young and in good health—a few days’ rest and a doctor’s care will see her fine. But not if she continues with the trip.”
“Okay,” Woodley sighed. “Do as I said, Whitworth. Ask the pilot to let me know how much time we lose so we can deduct it from the total in case of arguments.”
The gathering broke up. Immediately Joel rushed back to the table where he had left his draft report and sat down, dipping his pen to scribble a hasty addendum.
“I don’t want this in your rag!” Arthur rapped.
“You can’t stop me saying that the Nonpareil is making an unexpected stopover!” Joel flashed. “Don’t worry, though—I’ll keep it down to generalities.”
Arthur hesitated; then turned away, grumbling, to comfort his wife.
But within a very short while comfort had turned to recrimination. “Thanks to you,” Joel clearly heard, “I could lose every cent I’ve bet on this race!”
Poor Louisette… but there was no time for Joel to think about the fate of others. Unless this story was ready to be sent ashore in less than ten minutes, he would have to wait until their coaling stop at Natchez before he could telegraph anything to the paper, and that would waste all the advantage due to having a reporter on board.
Heedless of blots and erasures, he made his pen fly over the pages.
Fernand’s first watch of the tr
ip had started tolerably well but ended badly. Shortly after Drew left him, the Atchafalaya had come upon a lot of floating lumber, which the Nonpareil had encountered in a broader reach where it caused far less trouble, and he had had to play safe at bends where the leading boat’s wake disguised the familiar wrinkle of sand reefs. To his shame, he had lost as much as he had gained by the time Tyburn came yawning to relieve him.
Four-hour watches really were too brief, even though the sheer concentration involved meant that it took exceptional endurance to maintain speed over a longer period. Perhaps when the Guild and the government and the Army all got together and the river was properly marked with buoys by day and lamps by night, every boat might safely adopt the six-and-six system of the towboats. But that might well not be in Drew’s time. He was old-fashioned despite being progressive: a paradox often found in elderly pioneers. The first captain to work with a colored pilot might also be the last to give up the short watch.
On a normal trip Fernand found it easy enough to snatch catnaps. Right now his brain was infinitely too busy; it pumped and thumped like a doctor engine, full of images of his mother, and Dorcas, and what little he recalled of his father, and Drew, who had in some sense taken his father’s place—but too late, so that they met as men, not as man and boy—and Cherouen, with his haughty manner and overready temper, so different from the reassuring bluntness of Malone, who had very likely saved Dorcas’s life, and…
Well, there was at least one matter he could set his mind at rest about. He went to inquire after Walt Presslie. He was, it turned out, safely asleep; according to Ealing, he had declared his injuries were not as bad as they looked and sworn he would be fit for light work in the morning.
That was a relief, for there were bends and narrows up ahead where the lack of a single engineer could make a vast difference to the boat’s speed. Fernand ordered himself to turn in and made his slow way up to the texas. Just before going inside, however, he cast a final glance around. The Atchafalaya was pushing now into the straight reach above Bruly Landing; he was able to discern the church astern to larboard and the characteristic clumps of trees left by land clearance on the east bank, which he was used to navigating by.
Tyburn was keeping up a very fair speed. But there were still too many pieces of lumber in the water for Fernand’s liking.
Then he turned his gaze directly ahead and was scarcely able to repress a cry of amazement. It looked as though the Nonpareil— No! The Nonpareil was indisputably putting about, in a manner that could imply only one thing.
She intended to make a stop at Baton Rouge.
Impossible! Woodley’s clerks had gone to the greatest pains to ensure she had neither freight nor passengers for Louisiana ports!
He darted up the stairs to the pilothouse, shouting.
Drew beat him to it by a fraction. Coatless, collar open, hair untidy, he was staring at the Nonpareil with equal disbelief. In the almost total blackness of the pilothouse she could be seen much more clearly.
“A breakdown?” Fernand burst out.
“The good Lord knows,” Drew said with a shrug. “But it gives us an opening. Ketch, you thinking what I’m thinking?”
Tyburn hesitated. “We’re still meeting an awful lot of floating logs,” he said at length.
“And we’re farther behind than I figured we’d be at this time,” the captain murmured, not looking toward Fernand. But the words bore barbs; his cheeks grew hatefully hot, as they much too often did. When would he outgrow this juvenile reflex?
“It is our best chance before Red River Cutoff,” Fernand said in the firmest tone he could summon.
“I concur,” Drew said with utmost formality. “If you care to ring for full speed ahead, Mr. Tyburn, I shall raise no objection.”
“Yes, sir!” said Tyburn, and reached for the rope. Fernand felt a pang of envy. Serpent’s-tooth sharp, the realization came that, had he been here to take the wheel at starting time, it would have been to him that Drew issued his unprecedented instruction. Dorcas—his mother… The thoughts tangled up together and were firmly thrust aside. He must take the wheel again at five o’clock, and up around Angola, Red River, Mansura, there were a bunch of the trickiest bends on the whole Mississippi. Watch and learn must be his motto; between them these men beside him mustered sixty years’ more river time than he did.
But at all events Baton Rouge was about to enjoy one of the grandest spectacles of the century: a steamer passing at top speed in the dead of dark.
Another bell?
For a moment Fernand failed to register the signal. Calling out the polemen? That was reserved for picking your way through shallows, beating off mosquitoes by day and waving moth-infested torches by night, and in either case at less than walking pace.
Then a cheer rang out from the forward end of the main deck, and there was a tremendous hurrying and scurrying. Belatedly it dawned on Fernand what was happening. Old and canny in the ways of the river, Tyburn was resuscitating a technique that probably had not been used since “befohdewoh.” Already one could hear the excitement as Chalker and Sexton organized their men into gangs. The boat’s hull seemed to speak in answer to the shifting weight, for more than thirty deck crew had signed on for this trip, and that amounted to a fair load.
Within a minute the first fire basket was lit and lofted, and the most venturesome of the men could be seen advancing on the forward guards with the long poles normally used for shallow soundings. Not tonight. By groups of three and four they were to fend off any driftwood that showed in the harsh yellow glare of the fire baskets—a second now, a third, and the final fourth hung on chains to keep their pitch-fed flame from infecting the wooden upperworks.
Fernand shivered. It would never have occurred to him to give such a signal. Did they know the pilot was gambling with their lives? One log too large to be diverted, and pole and men alike could be whipped overboard and lost in the dark and seething current.
Perhaps they knew; perhaps they didn’t care. He could not tell which possibility was the more frightening.
But the bells, and now the flaring light, had roused the deck passengers. They were shortly joined by people from the staterooms, including Barber, who usurped the speaking tube from the office to demand what was going on.
“We have a chance to pass her!” Drew shouted, and the wind the boat was making explained the rest.
Writing the record of her passage in a script of sparks, the Atchafalaya raced toward Thomas Point, while her passengers and crew joined in the cheering from the banks. Later the papers said all Baton Rouge awoke to greet her passing; most respectable citizens, however, cursed the racket and went back to sleep. Some on board her also swore: polemen who had thrust at nothing much, making too valiant a lunge at what proved to be an empty barrel or a bundle of drifting weed, and almost spilled overside. The densest of the lumber had been carried past and the water was clear again.
But that was nothing to the curses from the Nonpareil.
After delivering his report to the astonished owner of the launch Graves had hired by cable, by merely handing it overside, Joel returned to the boiler deck. Leaning on its rail, Auberon accosted him; being in nightwear, he had taken his leave of Louisette before she was wrapped in white sheets and carried to the wharf on an improvised stretcher, where she now awaited the summoning of a doctor.
“And how, pray, do you intend to describe this setback in your next dispatch? I can just guess how you depicted our early triumph! Superior skill in the management of the vessel will always tell—is that not close to what you said? And doubtless this will become an errand of mercy!”
He coughed as he concluded, and from the pocket of his silk robe produced a handkerchief with which he covered his mouth in a manner that was somehow guilty. Joel was seized with a wild surmise. But he was too pleased at having got his report away to make any comment… and also more than a mite too tired.
Besides, any attempt to make this stopover appear to be what Auberon ha
d ironically termed it was doomed, for Arthur was in a filthy temper, still shouting about how his wife had cost him a fortune because she had insisted on coming.
“Are you delighted by my sister’s choice of a partner?” Auberon murmured.
He coughed again, and this time was not quite quick enough to hide a dark stain on his handkerchief.
Oh, no…!
Full realization crossed Joel’s weary mind. Yet Auberon was speaking again before he could, catching his arm and pointing.
“Look at Parbury! Look at him waving that stick like a conductor with a disorderly orchestra!”
And indeed the image was exact: the blind man was standing near the bow, visibly boiling with rage.
Auberon gave a sour chuckle. “Ah, the stability of the Old World has much to command it, but for stimulation of the glands and guts, give me the New World!”
Joel faced him squarely. “Obe! I don’t like that cough of yours!”
“Oh, it’s only a nuisance! But listen, will you?”
He pointed over the rail. From the main deck words reached them with sculptural clarity. The voice was unmistakably Gordon’s.
“He paid ye! He bocht ye! It’s thanks tae what ye did that we’re o’erta’en!”
Confronting him, hands on hips, was Josephine. Her riposte was just as fierce.
“If I were a man you’d never dare insult me so! When I was an army nurse I watched better men than you cry like babies, and if you give me cause I’ll make you weep!”
“Now that,” murmured Auberon, “sounds like a woman one might respect. I’ll take her side on principle.”
He strode away, giving Joel no chance to raise again the question of his cough—or his awareness of Josephine’s identity.
The Atchafalaya drew level at that moment and roared past. Roared like a maddened beast! Like a twin-headed dragon rearing back to strike at an enemy, as though a serpent and an angry swan were to be combined at the whim of a sorcerer, then fed with coals and lava, she charged up the reach uttering such fiery breath as might have made a Saint George quail.