by Wilbur Smith
Amid the men in their sober suits, two women stood out. One was Chester’s mistress – some said a slave, though others insisted she was a free woman of colour – in a pure white dress that dazzled the dreary dock. Another was the Marquise Solange de Noailles, dressed in shimmering red silks, the most eligible lady in the city. No one knew why she had come. A slave girl stood behind her holding a parasol, though it cast no shade on a sunless day, next to a man in a black suit and a frown. Behind them, a handsome black carriage was drawn up awaiting the arrival of Chester Marion. Six black horses were harnessed in front of it, while Granville Slaughter sat up on the driver’s box with a pistol in his hand.
Also present was Mr Thomas Sinclair, though very few of the spectators noticed him. He lounged at the back against the warehouse wall, looking over the heads of those in front, smoking a cigar. Occasionally he checked his watch, and sometimes a woman would catch his eye and receive a polite tip of his hat; otherwise his gaze stayed locked on the approaching steamboat.
The captain was bringing her in quickly. She raced past the other ships in the river, rocking the smaller craft with her wake. One of these boats, a cutter, was sailing so close that she was almost swamped by the bow wave. The Windemere paid no notice. Her stern wheel beat the water, while smoke poured from her twin funnels.
In fact, a keen observer might have noticed, there was rather a lot of smoke.
McMurran did not smell it at first. He was watching the little cutter that was sailing upriver towards them. In the brisk wind, the cutter was fairly flying along, heeling hard over as she came dangerously close to the wind. Her skipper did not seem to care about the Windemere steaming towards him, but held a course almost as if he meant to ram her.
The cutter’s crew, McMurran saw from the pilot house, were mostly black. That was not uncommon – the crews of Mississippi boats were filled with free blacks and slaves – but something about them made him look again. He lifted his binoculars and scanned the faces of the men in the cutter. The man at the bow was short and lithe, with tightly cropped hair and very dark skin, but it was the look on his face that caught McMurran’s eye in particular. There was a strength to it, a sense of possession that to McMurran did not look right on a black man. It seemed not just liberated, but as if it had never occurred to him he might be inferior.
‘Sir!’ Belatedly, McMurran realised the first mate was tugging his arm. Not only tugging, but shouting and gesturing frantically over the side. ‘Captain!’
McMurran looked. Black smoke was billowing up from the main deck, gathering in ominous clouds around the pilot house.
‘Is something wrong with the boilers?’
‘It’s not the boilers!’ The mate was screaming at him, almost beside himself. ‘The cotton’s on fire!’
McMurran let go of the wheel and ran outside. He almost collided with Chester barging into the pilot house.
‘What is happening?’ Chester shouted. The boy was with him, clutching his father’s hand. ‘Put it out before we lose everything!’
The men had already run to the pumps. They worked the handles, while others trained the hoses on the lower deck. But as hard as they tried, no water came out.
‘The stop-cocks must be closed.’
The pumps were fed by pipes that took in water from the river. The taps that opened them were on the lower deck, packed deep in cotton.
Cotton that was now on fire.
Flames started to lick over the hurricane deck. The crew began to panic. Shouting, cajoling and threatening, McMurran organised them into bucket chains, hauling water up over the side and throwing it onto the cotton. But it was too little, too late. As quickly as the water put out one patch of flame, the heat of the fire dried out the cotton and set it alight again.
With sickening certainty, McMurran realised he was about to lose his ship.
‘Abandon ship!’ he called. ‘Save yourselves!’
It was a sight that no one in New Orleans would ever forget. Decades later, those who witnessed it would still talk of it in awestruck voices to their grandchildren.
With the cotton packed solid all around her main deck and her boiler deck, the flames caught hold of the Windemere like a bale of straw. But it had not yet reached her stern-wheel; indeed, the heat only seemed to make her go faster. She streaked along the river, streaming smoke and flames behind her, cutting a swathe of destruction through the river traffic. Small boats were smashed to pieces under her bow. The larger vessels at anchor tried to get out of her way, but there was no time. She barged them aside, smashing great holes in their hulls – and everything she touched was itself set alight and joined the conflagration, until the whole river seemed to be on fire. It was an utter panic. Many in the crowd tried to flee, while the horses waiting with the carriage reared up and lashed out with their hooves.
Only one man on the wharf remained entirely calm. Mungo did not move from his position by the warehouse, but surveyed the scene with an almost serene look on his face.
Camilla found him there.
‘What have you done?’ she screamed. Smoke blowing off the water had turned her white dress grey. Ash had landed on her face and been smudged black by her tears. ‘My son is on board.’
The letter had only arrived that morning from Chester confirming that he and Isaac were coming on the steamboat, but the news did not seem to surprise Mungo.
‘Isaac is quite safe,’ he said.
A crash rang out across the water. The fire had burned through the pillars that supported the Windemere’s hurricane deck; now it collapsed in an eruption of sparks that threatened to set the whole town alight. A gout of flame shot into the air as the deck planks were consumed in the inferno. Camilla screamed.
But one vessel had escaped the destruction unscathed. The little cutter sailed away from the burning steamer, blown on by the hot breath of the fire behind. Sparks and burning cinders rained down around her; it was a miracle she had not caught fire. One flaming coal touched her sail; a black hole began to open in the canvas. The spectators on the wharf gasped, but the crew were alert to the danger. They hurled buckets of water onto the sail to damp it down.
In the bow stood three bedraggled figures who had obviously been pulled from the water. One was an olive-skinned giant of a man, bare-chested and bare-headed. The second was a child. The third was Chester Marion.
The cutter nudged up against the wharf. The crowd surged down the steps, so eager to help they almost sank the boat. Hands reached out; it seemed there was no way through. But the giant found a way. Hoisting the boy on his shoulders, he moved forward; the crowd had to give way or risk being pushed aside into the river. Chester followed, dripping wet, and if anyone was tempted to console him for his loss, or congratulate him on his escape, one look at him made them shrink away in terror. His bare scalp was scalded red and blistered. His eyebrows had burned away, and there was a livid burn mark down his cheek where a burning fragment of wood had hit him. His face was black with soot, while his shirt hung off him in charred ribbons. It must have caught fire before he jumped in the water. Through the rents in the fabric, you could see more blisters covering his body like the scales of some hideous reptile.
Tippoo put Isaac down on the dock. Camilla ran to the boy and lifted him in her arms, stroking his face as she carried him away. She made her way around the edge of the crowd until she found Mungo.
‘We are free.’ Tears still streaked her face, but her eyes were bright with astonished delight. ‘We should go at once, before Chester sees you.’
Mungo’s jaw was set tight. ‘Not yet.’
‘But you have achieved what you wanted.’ She tugged on his arm like a child. Mungo did not move. ‘You have destroyed Chester, and I have my son back. If we wait, we risk everything.’
Mungo barely looked at her. He was still watching the stricken steamboat, a rapturous expression on his face.
‘I have not finished with Chester yet.’
The flames on the Windemere had started to lic
k lower, for there was not much left to burn. They glowed a dull orange, silhouetting what remained of her charred skeleton. A curtain of steam rose from her waterline where the fire touched the river. The watchers on the shore began to breathe again.
Then her boilers exploded.
The noise hit New Orleans like a thunderclap, shivering windows and making the church bells moan in sympathy. Fragments of machinery, timbers, furniture and human bodies were shot up in a column of fire that reached a thousand feet in the air. As they reached their apex, they arced out like the jets of a fountain, raining down all over the city. One of the iron connecting rods was shot through the wall of a house like a cannonball. Mangled corpses, and parts of corpses, dropped into the square in front of the cathedral and caught in the branches of trees. A hail of burning embers fell on the city. Men going about their business, women taking a promenade and babies in their carriages suffered terrible burns. Wherever the coals landed, new fires sprang up. The city was in uproar.
Out on the water, the explosion had split the Windemere’s hull in two. It collapsed inwards and sank in a whorl of steam, the two halves of the boat folding together like a monstrous jaw closing. Then she vanished. All that remained was flotsam, and the hiss as burning debris rained down on the water.
Like the eye of a storm, the wharf remained strangely detached from the carnage. The power of the explosion had thrown the debris far over the spectators’ heads. While blood and fire consumed other parts of the city, the dock and the levee remained untouched.
All eyes turned to Chester. The crowd had formed a semicircle around him, keeping a wary distance. But one man pushed his way through. François was weeping, his hair askew and his face grey with shock. He clutched Chester’s arm like a child.
‘What will we do? What will we do?’
At the back of the crowd, a young clerk sidled up to the president of the Bank of New Orleans.
‘I think you had best come back to the bank,’ he murmured.
‘Why?’
‘Rumours are spreading.’
He pointed back down the levee, to the marble columns that fronted the bank. Even with the city on fire, people were not insensible of their savings. A crowd had already started to gather outside the doors. Their mood seemed nearly hysterical.
‘What do they want?’
‘People are saying that all our capital was invested in Chester Marion’s enterprise, and now he is bankrupt.’
Jackson went pale. ‘Keep your voice down.’
It was too late. One of the bystanders had overheard the clerk and was hurrying towards them. To Jackson’s dismay, he saw it was his client, Thomas Sinclair.
‘Your bank has the bulk of its capital invested in Chester Marion,’ said Mungo. The emotion of the moment seemed to have got to him. He spoke in a loud voice, apparently oblivious to the effect it was having. ‘You told me that there was no risk attached to it – now I see that is not the case. I shall require you to return the money I deposited with you.’
Jackson seemed to be struggling to breathe. ‘How much?’
‘All two hundred thousand dollars.’
The people around them had begun to listen. Some were already hurrying away down the levee towards the bank. Panic threatened.
‘We do not have two hundred thousand dollars left in the vault,’ the clerk whispered in Jackson’s ear.
Down the levee, the crowds outside the bank were now hammering on its doors.
‘Well?’ Mungo pressed. ‘Can I have my money?’
Jackson stared at Mungo, and every fibre in his body seemed to rupture with the effort of what he had to say. The words every banker dreads.
‘I do not have your money,’ he croaked. ‘If you could wait a few days . . .’
‘Perhaps I could be of assistance.’
A new voice – that of a beautiful woman in a striking crimson dress who had come up beside Mungo. A stern-faced man in a black coat trailed behind her.
‘I am the Marquise Solange de Noailles,’ the woman announced herself, though Jackson knew who she was. ‘And this gentlemen is my attorney. I am willing to buy all Chester Marion’s debts from you, for the sum of one million dollars.’
Jackson looked at the woman as if she had suddenly started speaking in Chinese.
The attorney produced a sheet of paper from his case.
‘I have drawn up the contract. Everything is in order.’
Jackson seized it like a drowning man grabbing the rope. He read it quickly.
‘Why are you doing this?’
‘The Marquise does not want to see your bank collapse in a panic,’ said Mungo. ‘She knows how vital it is to the commerce and prosperity of New Orleans.’
‘The alternative does not bear thinking about,’ murmured Solange.
So many extraordinary things had happened that morning, Jackson had lost all sense of reality. If he had paused to think, he might have started to wonder at the remarkable chain of events, each more sensational than the last, that had driven him towards this conclusion. He might have asked himself how Solange came to be there at that moment, so well prepared that the paperwork was already written. He might even have wondered at the role of Thomas Sinclair in all that had transpired. But at that moment, the only thing he knew was that the city was on fire, and he had a few minutes at most to save his bank. All his fortune was invested in its stock. If it went under, he would lose everything. His wife would be impoverished, his children destitute.
He signed the contract.
The moment he had finished, the attorney took the paper from his hands and passed it to Mungo. Holding it close to his chest, protecting it from the cinders and sparks that still occasionally drifted down, Mungo shouldered through to the front of the crowd.
The guards Chester had placed around the warehouse had made a line across the door to hold back the throng. Chester stood in their midst, still staring in disbelief at the wreckage of the Windemere floating on the water.
Mungo stepped out in front of him, holding the paper aloft. The wind blew back his hair and a shining light filled his eyes.
‘Chester Marion!’ he called, in a voice that rose above the chaos in the city. ‘It is time to pay your debts!’
It was a moment Mungo had long anticipated. In the darkness of the Blackhawk’s hold; in the steaming jungles of Africa; in the long days aboard the Raven listening to the groan of the slaves, he had dreamed of it. Since the day he returned to Windemere, face down in the mud outside the observatory, he had worked to achieve it. And now that the time had come, it did not disappoint.
Chester had imagined it too, but not like this. All the defences he had built against this moment had proved worthless. Now he turned to see the vision from his nightmares standing in front of him.
Mungo St John.
Their eyes met: steel grey and smouldering yellow. A snarl of surprise and fury twisted Chester’s mangled face. He went so still, Mungo wondered if the shock had stopped his heart. Only his eyes moved, darting between Mungo, Isaac and Camilla. A thousand agonies seemed to shatter those steel-grey eyes as he took in the breadth of the destruction Mungo had wrought.
Then he remembered himself.
‘What are you waiting for?’ he shouted to his guards. ‘This is the man I warned you about, the man I pay you to protect me from. Shoot him!’
‘Yes, shoot me,’ said Mungo coolly. ‘Shoot an unarmed man in front of two dozen witnesses. You will hang for murder – and why? To defend the honour of a bankrupt man? You will never see another penny of the wages he has promised you.’
He turned in a slow circle, looking each man in the eye. One by one, they lowered their guns.
‘Your power is finished,’ Mungo said to Chester. ‘This piece of paper I have in my hand is the bill for all your debts. I am calling them in.’ His lips twisted in a cruel smile. ‘Do you remember what you told me once? Credit is as vital to a man as the air that he breathes. Cut it off, and he dies.’
Cheste
r took a deep breath. It caught in his throat, sparking a fit of coughing. Spittle and black phlegm sprayed out over the wharf.
‘It does not end here,’ he said. His voice was hoarse and rasping. ‘You can burn my boat, kill my men and steal my property – but if you attempt to repossess Bannerfield, I will fight you every inch of the way. Even if you hired the fanciest attorneys in New Orleans, I will run rings around them in a courthouse. You will die an old man, still without the thing you crave.’
Mungo did not dispute the truth of what Chester had said.
‘There is a faster way to settle this.’ His eyes flashed with the challenge. ‘Like gentlemen.’
Chester stared at him. ‘A duel?’
Mungo could see the fear in his enemy’s eyes. Mungo was tall, lean and strong; Chester was scarred and burned from his ordeal aboard the boat. Even without that, he was shorter by eight inches and carried a hundred pounds more weight.
‘I will not fight you,’ said Chester.
Mungo waved at the crowd. ‘Then every person in New Orleans will know that Chester Marion is a man without honour.’
‘If you believe in honour, you are a greater fool than I thought.’
‘A man without honour is a man without credit,’ Mungo reminded him.
He saw Chester’s calculation changing. The jibe had struck where it counted. A Southern gentleman placed so much weight on his honour – and would be so quick to defend it – because his bank credit depended on it. And a man in the South was nothing without credit.
‘I will give you another reason to fight.’ Solange stepped into the circle, drawing gasps from the onlookers. She plucked the piece of paper with Jackson’s signature scrawled across the bottom from Mungo’s hand. ‘This is the deed to all your debts. If you win the duel, it is yours.’
Chester’s mouth dropped open. ‘That is worth a million dollars.’
Mungo, too, looked astonished. ‘This is not your fight.’
‘It is my name on the deed. I can do with it as I want.’ Her eyes met his in an ironic smile. ‘For the sake of your honour.’
