by John Brunner
It was a clear night: no sign of fog or even mist.
But it was a run to tax a pilot by day, let alone in the dark, and every now and again they passed other steamers that had made the safe decision to tie up.
Tossing restlessly, breaking the surface of sleep every time the boat’s engines changed their note in spite of his weariness, Fernand was wakeful long enough to feel infinitely glad that Tyburn had the wheel, even though it meant he himself might have to run Plum Point, the grandest challenge, before dawn.
Was this the way for an aspiring bridegroom to behave to his intended?
Dorcas was grieving to Eulalie about the fact that during the voyage Fernand had granted her so little of his time, and devoted part of that to angering both herself and his mother.
Who rewarded her with smooth reassurance.
“You must bear with him, my dear. Men are all like that, each in his own way. Women take second place in their lives, not to themselves—though there are some of that stamp—but to what they conceive of as their duty. And I would not wish any girl to marry a man who had no notion of what was proper, and behooving, and honorable.”
Dorcas cried, “It’s not honorable for a man to care most about the—?”
She had been going to say “mother of his child.” Eulalie read her mind.
“He will be a fine husband and a devoted father!”
“You can say that, when he ordered the waiters to wash away the charms you took such trouble over?”
“They served their purpose, did they not?” said Eulalie with composure. “Are we not still in the lead, despite the rush the Nonpareil made? Come, dear; it’s bad for you to be up late in your condition. Fernand will still be the same in the morning.
“But not, let us hope and pray, in a year from now.”
The point sank in. Slowly Dorcas began to smile. When Eulalie rose from her chair, she docilely imitated her and followed her down the cabin as the Atchafalaya plowed her course into the darkness.
At midnight she was exactly eight hundred miles from New Orleans and, in spite of all, had averaged comfortably over fourteen and a half miles for every hour of the race.
By way of celebrating his triumph—for that challenge with the swordstick had excited him—Auberon insisted on remaining in the cabin until the Nonpareil was well clear of Memphis. He made barbed remarks about Arthur, knowing that although Stella was safe abed, Hugo Spring was being adequately taunted, and more than once the atmosphere grew electric as he hit on a specially venomous turn of phrase. At the piano Manuel did his best to lighten the mood until he was exhausted. Eventually he quit, and Katzmann and Bates instructed their waiters and tenders to clear up and start laying tables for breakfast.
“You’ll burn yourself out!” Josephine mourned softly.
“And what’s it to you if I do?” Auberon countered, tossing back a final drink, aware it was probably the one too many but not caring. “You didn’t even know I existed until this trip began, any more than I knew about… Or did you?”
She was very tired, and confused from the effect of the ill-judged medication she had taken recently. She said without thinking, “Do you mean did I know my father had another family, by marriage?”
“Yes!” He leaned toward her.
“Of course I knew. So did your cousin. And your sister. They must have found out, I guess, when you were still in Europe. How long were you away—four years, wasn’t it? Was it after you left that you realized you were sick?”
“I think it’s monstrous!” Auberon exclaimed, and rapped the floor with his stick. Waiters glanced around, hoping this was not the signal to bring more liquor; reassured, they kept on clearing the other tables.
“What’s monstrous?”
“Keeping you a secret from us! I’d have wanted to know about you long ago! Has life been fair to you?”
She hesitated, then made the frank admission: “No! It’s been cruel!”
“Even though you wound up working for one of the most famous doctors in the whole of the South—drunken ass that he turns out to be?”
“He was kind to me once. At the beginning. Later…” She shook her head. “No, it’s gone badly for me.”
“Are you telling me the truth?” He gazed at her keenly. “Caesar made a claim about you, and it’s confirmed by the way all the coons act aboard this boat.” He sat bolt upright. “That’s it! I’ve seen it in Europe, but never in America before. They treat you like royalty!”
She made a dismissive gesture, but he caught her hand.
“It must be true, then!”
“I don’t know what you mean!”
“Don’t be elusive! From my gambling friends I’ve heard about Mam’zelle Josephine who makes charms and trickenbags! You magicked Caesar aboard Parbury’s boat, even though he was the man who sank the last Nonpareil! If you can do that, can’t you magic away my damnable sickness?”
“Oh, what nonsense!” she burst out, as though just this moment realizing how many people were still in the cabin, even though they were servants. “You shouldn’t be here, talking like this! You’re unwell!”
“Very well, then,” he said with gravity, gathering his stick and hat. “Nurse, be so good as to escort me to my stateroom and prescribe your next treatment! I shall need your guidance, since I see they’re putting out the lights!”
And coughed.
She was not quite quick enough to snatch up a napkin; a trace of blood spewed onto his hand as he clasped it over his mouth. The sound was brief, but nonetheless horrible. All eyes turned their way.
“I must put you to bed,” Josephine sighed. “Your brother-in-law did terrible harm when he hit you!”
“Ours,” Auberon murmured with the first breath available when the spasm was over.
“What?”
“Our brother-in-law! And I never thought Louisette could hate our parents so much… Give me that!”
A waiter was passing with a laden tray; on it was a half-empty bottle of brandy, which he seized.
“Never mind about the cost—I’ll pay!” he declared, and rose. Unwaveringly he headed toward his stateroom, with Josephine trailing resignedly in his wake.
The moment the door closed, he poured drinks for them both, apparently again in total control.
“You never really knew our family, did you?” he said. “Even if you knew about us! Sit down, sit down! Your being here is justified: my nurse, my sister! Do you have anyone to go to bed to? And don’t pretend to be coy! I recall from my childhood what the devotees of your god were getting up to in the days of Marie Laveau and Doctor John, and often when I was in Europe I wished I could be with them! Often, I mean, after I started coughing blood.”
His tone, though emphatic, was soft, almost conversational.
“There’s a power in there somewhere, isn’t there? I don’t know what, but I can see the effects. Your Dr. Cherouen, for instance—isn’t he ruled as much by lust as by his medical principles?”
She had, with distaste, obeyed his instruction to sit, and perched on the edge of the bed.
“I don’t know what you mean!” she claimed, as before.
“You’re not afraid of me, for if you were, you’d already be the far side of that door!”
“What?”
She was utterly bewildered. She sipped from the glass he thrust into her hand as though believing it might offer consolation, while he kicked off his boots and removed his jacket and cravat and loosened his shirt before drinking.
“Oh, God, I wish I’d known of you before all this came about!” he muttered as he dropped on the bed beside her. “I wish even more you’d known!”
“What? What?”
“About my father, so insulted by the way he was cheated when that damned Scotsman got away with millions on a timber fraud—what am I saying? My father? Yours too!”
He threw his arm around her as she took another swig of the brandy, hoping for release, or surcease, or something…
“And to think I had k
infolk who danced in Congo Square all the time I was fretting over what I’d done with Loose and Jewel!”
“What? What?”
“Oh!” He gave a shrug, not removing his arm. “Playing the games any children play. The ones their parents would be angry over… But Loose was so sweet, sister or no! We called her that because we’d heard the term ‘loose women’!”
He capped the admission with a frantic gulp of brandy and resumed: “But for you it has a purpose, doesn’t it? Not just a game, but—something else.”
There followed a long pause during which Josephine’s mind was in turmoil.
At last she said, sensing disaster yet convinced it could not stem from any words she spoke, “Yes, when we dance in the ancient way, we come together to make a climax. Have you not seen it? Many—many white people watch from shadow.”
“I thought you had never been at Congo Square!”
“How did you know?” Her question was almost a cry; she transformed it into a whisper, remembering how flimsy the partitions were.
“I inquired there for a certain Mam’zelle Josephine,” he said. “I was told she made good charms for gamblers. I was losing more than I could reasonably expect to have covered by my—our father.”
Our father!
That phrase clicked in Josephine’s head like the cam of a steamboat’s piston meshing into place.
“And here I am doing it again! Joel’s right! The Nonpareil is bound to lose even if she is the newer boat! And I stand to lose a fortune! I don’t mind dying young, but I hate like hell the notion that I may die young and poor! Josephine, Josephine, even if you can’t charm me healthy, can’t you charm me rich?”
That, though, barely registered on her awareness. The brandy combined with the aftereffects of the arsenic and the drugs she had been taking, and together they conspired to breach all her defenses, like the conflux of three tributary rivers overwhelming the levees puny human beings erected against the might of the Mississippi. Of a sudden she found herself telling him about the rituals she had been obliged to undergo to acquire her powers—powers of which Cherouen understood nothing, obsessed as he was by mechanical devices… as though a machine could match the complexity of a person!
In turn he described to her the misery of being his parents’ son, the designated heir to the Moyne millions—depleted, surely, but at worst by half, so that ninety-nine out of any hundred would still feel jealous of the luxury he was alleged to be enjoying.
And envied her, who, regardless of what humiliations were forced on her, had at least a profit to look forward to: a thing earned by her efforts, or at least her submission. What could he earn? Moreover, what could he look forward to, save a premature and loathsome death?
The Nonpareil, still trailing despite the finest efforts of her crew, rumbled onward through the dark. It came to Josephine as in a vision that some great magic was required. She had forgotten her loyalty to Cherouen; let him find someone else to do his pandering! Here was flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone!
If a little disguised behind the pale skin she herself had hoped to wear one day…
Therefore when Auberon progressed from leaning his cheek against hers to supping at her lips with his, and when he started to unhook her bodice so he could lick and fondle her full breasts, and when he put aside his glass and blew out the lamp, too impatient to turn its wick down, too eager to bear her backward on the bed beneath him, she thought of this consummation as a ritual that would defend the Nonpareil and herself, and him, against all the perils of the Mississippi.
She had never before taken pleasure in the body of a man. But now she moaned and sighed and laughed and sometimes wept, as though all her life she had been waiting for this moment, and now it was upon her she had no faintest notion how to profit by it.
Lightening as her coal burned away, the Nonpareil “took another spell of running off” around three A.M., and embarrassed Hogan terribly by grounding on a bar of soft mud. By the time he had backed and freed her, he had once again lost precious miles of distance.
Parbury was snoring on the bench, oblivious.
But almost as gaunt, and almost as tall, and equally spectral in the darkness, Zeke Barfoot stood beside the starboard window.
His unspoken reproachfulness was colored by what he might have said, had he a mind to:
“I’ve served with Lamenthe and seen how well Drew taught him!”
Hogan wished with all his heart the other hadn’t been there. But it was contrary to all the customs of the river to drive him out.
For the first time he began to wonder whether Woodley, when he spoke of hiring relief pilots, might not have had a valid point after all.
The Memphis depot of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad was one of the godforsakenest places Joel had ever been in. It was not so much that at this dead hour after midnight most of the people moving back and forth under the great echoing barnlike roof had no destinations to go to, but were pretending to be on business in the hope of eluding the agents long enough to find a quiet corner and lie down for a rest—waifs of the war, many of them, even after the lapse of five years. Nor was it that the air stank even worse than a riverboat’s engineroom, with the fumes of burning wood and coal and hot oil cross-mated with the stink of penned livestock: pigs, cattle, sheep, waiting restlessly for the next stage of their journey to slaughter.
No, it was chiefly because here the machines were seen to lord it over the humans. Like tamed elephants whose training might yet break at a careless gesture, beyond an iron grille—which at a richer city would have been ornamental, with curves and flourishes, but here was strictly functional—there loomed the new monsters of the machine age: the common 4-4-0 locomotives with their enormous cowcatchers and their boilers sloping up just ahead of the cab as though they were the muscular hindquarters of the mechanical beast, and in addition a couple of the new ten-wheelers, the 4-6-0’s which could haul even more cars faster, farther, and cheaper.
No wonder they needed to be caged.
Feeling insecure on hard dry land, even after less than two and a half days on water, and realizing for the first time what was meant by the phrase “sea legs,” Joel gazed at them for a long minute. He had grown up with riverboats; he admired their luxury, their comfort, their ornamentation—in a word, their style.
They had the grace of swans.
Whereas these trains were more like boa constrictors snaking across the landscape on a rigid path, immune from the vagaries of that sleek brown god the Mississippi. No doubt of it: they had the last of the riverboats in their toils, and in a generation probably only the towboats would be left, which could move immense bulk very slowly but on a highway which cost nothing to build—though, given what the Corps of Engineers were planning, much to maintain.
A wistful echo of what Gordon had said aboard the Plott crossed his mind, and he decided he too did not much look forward to the time when the continent would be constricted in a corset of iron rails.
But there was no time for such musings. He had a schedule to check, a ticket to buy, and a cable to send, and he must hurry.
At least the clocks here showed, to within a minute or so, the same time as his watch, which he had set in New Orleans. As soon as the river began to slant northwest again, above Cairo, there would be problems far worse than those experienced in the lower river, where the westing on one day’s run would be roughly canceled out, as evidenced here, by the easting on the next.
It was not until, ticket safely in his pocket, he was waiting in the line at the cable office—busy, even at this hour, with people sending messages public and private—that Joel spotted a familiar figure on the concourse.
Whitworth.
Then it was his turn, and he passed over his dispatch, prepared to explain any unfamiliar symbols or abbreviations. But he was used to writing full copy, rather than an outline for the subeditor, and it went clear past the final DNQ—the do-not-quote where he explained his intention of trying to board the Atchafala
ya—with no hesitations. The clerk scribbled a note of the charge and nodded him toward the cashier, reaching for the next text to be transmitted.
Considerably the poorer, he left the cable office and set about tracking down Whitworth, for he did want to know the reason for his presence.
It smelt of news.
Growing light-headed with fatigue, Anthony entered his so-called “stateroom”; in fact it was half of one, partitioned off by a wall little thicker than paper. He welcomed what privacy the division allowed, though, for next door was Whitworth’s room, and he was forever turning in or getting up at unlikely hours, a task he seemed incapable of doing quietly.
Tonight at least, Anthony reasoned, he could sleep without interruptions.
But the moment the light from the lamp he held fell on his bed, he realized it was half covered with clean washing: not his.
Oh, that damned fool of a laundress! This was far from the first time she had left Whitworth’s belongings in here! He had informed Mr. Bates the steward, to no avail.
He gathered up the clothes with determination. Not that Whitworth could have immediate need of them, having got himself stranded at Memphis. But if, on his return, he found the stuff dumped all anyhow he might complain, and make more impression on the silly woman than a mere mud clerk.
He marched out, arms loaded, and kicked open the next door. Having thrown the clothes on their owner’s bed, he hesitated.
Perhaps it wasn’t politic to offend Mr. Whitworth. He could easily find out that it wasn’t the laundress but his neighbor who had made such a mess of his belongings…
Sighing, Anthony looked around for a place to put them tidily away.
His eye fell on a valise under the bed, and he started. He had never seen that before. Setting by the oil lamp he had brought in, he knelt down with a sense of great daring and tried the lock. It yielded.
And inside…
Rows of brown cylinders. With one missing from the top layer. And some documents.