Fevre Dream Page 0,8
home; there he had grown up, there he had learned to survive. The slave girl Emily scurried after him as best she could, her bare feet pounding on the brick sidewalks. The streets of the Vieux Carre were lined with brick and plaster houses, each with its graceful wrought-iron balcony overhanging the narrow walk, fancy as you please. But the roads themselves were unpaved, and the recent rains had turned them into a sea of mud. Along the walks were open gutters, deep ditches of cypress full of standing water, fragrant with filth and raw sewage.
They passed neat little shops and slave pens with heavily barred windows, passed elegant hotels and smoky grog shops full of surly free niggers, passed close, humid alleys and airy courtyards each with its well or fountain, passed haughty Creole ladies with their escorts and chaperones and a gang of runaway slaves in iron collars and chains cleaning the gutters under the careful watch of a hard-eyed white man with a whip. Shortly they passed out of the French Quarter entirely, into the rawer, newer American section of New Orleans. Sour Billy had left his horse tied up outside a grog shop. He mounted it, and told the girl to walk along beside him. They struck out south from the city, and soon left the main roads, stopping only once, briefly, so Sour Billy could rest his horse and eat some of the dry, hard bread and cheese in Ins saddlebag. He let Emily suck up some water from a stream.
"Are you my new massa, sir?" she asked him then, in remarkably good English.
"Overseer," said Sour Billy. "You'll meet Julian tonight, girl. After dark." He smiled. "He'll like you." Then he told her to shut up.
Since the girl was afoot their pace was laggardly, and it was near dusk when they reached the Julian plantation. The road ran along the bayou and wound through a thick stand of trees, limbs heavy with Spanish moss. They rounded a large, barren oak and came out into the fields, red-tinged in the somber light of the setting sun. They lay fallow and overgrown from the water's edge to the house. There was an old, rotting wharf and a woodyard along the bayou for passing steamers, and behind the great house a row of slave shanties. But there were no slaves, and the fields had not been worked in some years. The house was not large as plantation houses go, nor particularly grand; it was a stolid, square structure of graying wood, paint flaking from its sides, its only striking aspect a high tower with a widow's walk around it.
"Home," said Sour Billy.
The girl asked if the plantation had a name.
"Used to," Sour Billy said, "years ago, when Garoux owned it. But he took sick and died, him and all his fine sons, and it don't got no name now. Now shut your mouth and hurry."
He led her around back, to his own entrance, and opened the padlock with a key he wore on a chain around his neck. He had three rooms of his own, in the servants' portion of the house. He pulled Emily into the bedroom. "Get out of them clothes," Sour Billy snapped.
The girl fumbled to obey, but looked at him with fear in her eyes.
"Don't look like that," he said. "You're Julian's, I ain't going to mess with you. I'll be heatin' some water. There's a tub in the kitchen. You'll wash the filth off you, and dress." He threw open a wardrobe of intricately carved wood, pulled out a dark brocade gown. "Here, this'll fit."
She gasped. "I can't wear nothin' like that. That's a white lady's dress."
"You shut your mouth and do like I tell you," Sour Billy said. "Julian wants you pretty, girl." Then he left her and went through into the main part of the house.
He found Julian in the library, sitting quietly in darkness in a great leather chair, a brandy snifter in his hand. All around him, covered with dust, were the books that had belonged to old Rene Garoux and his sons. None of them had been touched in years. Damon Julian was not a reader.
Sour Billy entered and stood a respectful distance away, silent until Julian spoke.
"Well?" the voice from the darkness asked at last.
"Four thousand," Sour Billy said, "but you'll like her. A young one, nice and tender, beautiful, real beautiful."
"The others will be here soon. Alain and Jean are here already, the fools. The thirst