The Ice Merchant
Paul Boor
Copyright © 2013 Paul Boor
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Writers House LLC at 21 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10010.
Cover design by Asha Hossain
Print ISBN 978-0-7867-5493-9
ebook ISBN 978-0-7867-5494-6
Distributed by Argo Navis Author Services
Contents
Acknowledgments
The Island City
1. Arrival
2. The Medical College
3. The Laboratory
4. Secret Cargo
5. A New Business Partner
6. Delivery
7. A Second Lesson in Science
8. Morphine Dreams
9. Uneasy Respite
10. An Unpleasant Business
11. Gruesome Discovery
12. Details of Business
13. Surprise Invitation
14. The Party
15. The Musicians
16. Uninvited Guests
17. Aftermath
18. The Beginning of Lent
19. The Medium on Ball Lane
20. Downtown
21. In Her Laboratory
22. At Myer's Shop
23. Supper at Trudeau's
24. Departure
25. Alone in Her Laboratory
The North Country
26. Layover
27. Buffalo
28. Icy Return
29. The Homes of Forestport
30. A Ghost in the House
31. The Lady of the House
32. A Garret Room
33. Sky Van Horne
34. Thomas Chubb
36. The Willing Daughter
37. First Letter
38. Bodies from the Woods
39. Cold Snap
40. Preparing to Harvest
41. In the Icehouse
42. Season's Last Harvest
43. A Correspondence Is Established
44. A Funeral in the Village
45. Knox
46. The Boss Man
47. The Undertaker
48. Mud Season
49. Letters: An Appeal
50. Letters: A Warning
51. In Her Lab Quietly
52. Letters: Epidemic
53. Return of the Wayward Son
54. Letters of Intention
55. Upstate Arrival
56. Saratoga
57. The Fort Stanwix
58. At the Tables
59. An End to Summer
Their Separate Ways
60. In the Laboratory
61. Under the Skin
62. The Hunt for Knox
63. At the Bottom of the Black River
64. The Arrival of Autumn
65. Buffalo
66. An Unpleasant End to Indian Summer
67. The Last Body in the Ice
68. The Time of Ice
Return
69. The Ugly Mississippi
70. Hasty Delivery
71. On the Dock
72. The New Van Horne Icehouse
73. Voodoo Doctor
74. Francis and Nicolas
75. In the Laboratory
76. Invitations
77. Coffee at Trudeau's
78. El Malhado
79. A Visit to Hutchinson Sealy
80. An Evening Circle at Madame La Porte's
81. A Second Revenant, This One Uninvited
82. In the Professor's Office
83. First Treatment
84. Abducted
85. Good Samaritan
86. Uncle
87. Businessmen
88. Second Treatment
89. Jaundice and Delirium
90. At Her Merchant's Bedside
91. The Bear
92. Visitors
93. Appointment at Myer's Shop
94. A Daughter's Letter
95. Pier 28
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Dan Conaway of Writers House for seeing a good story and having the tenacity to shape it; and to Katie Zanecchia and Julie Trelstad for following through.
I
The Island City
1
Arrival
4 March 1889
Galveston, Texas
My dearest Ruth,
I have arrived in this peculiar island city safely, though greatly fatigued from our ten days with the cargo. The ice fared well & God willing, its rising price will shore up the profit, as was our good fortune in New Orleans.
I profess my loneliness for you, my dearest, & for the children, though I fear for your well-being & again entreat you to refrain from visiting that quack Valdis, or any of those other charlatans promising a cure. Surely your symptoms will eventually abate. It’s best to remain snug at home, where our intrepid young Abigail (such a competent girl!) might seek your counsel during the final stages of the ice harvest.
I must be off to the docks now to find Adam & oversee the unloading. It promises to be an intriguing few days here. I am told that the local celebrations before the beginning of Lent are quite extravagant.
Yrs affectionately,
N
Nicolas Van Horne adjusted his tie and leaned across the writing table of the hotel’s postal office. He sighed, then took a moment to listen to the Gulf of Mexico thrumming onto the beach just yards from where he sat. In a way, it felt quite good to be so far from New York. His mountain home was a magnificent place of clear lakes and dense, green woods, but it held sorrow, and worries, too. Others might think his North Country calm and peaceful, even idyllic, but this Northern man of commerce knew otherwise.
Yes, it felt quite good to be on this island.
Nicolas made a move to cap the ink bottle, then decided to dip the pen once more.
p.s. I hope you’ve had word on the whereabouts of our wayward son.
He gazed for a moment out the open window, admiring the bright morning and the blue-green expanse of water. The elegance of his beachfront hotel, the balmy breeze, and the gentle pounding of the gulf seemed so unnatural to a hardheaded Yankee who, just days before, had left his upstate village in the cruel clutch of an Adirondack winter.
Nicolas sealed the envelope, slid it across the marble counter to the postal clerk, and reached in his pants pocket for some pennies. With the coins’ jingling, Van Horne’s thoughts turned to his steamer lying calmly at harbor, and to the ship’s cargo of ice, twenty thousand tons of it—dense, profitable, lucid three-foot blocks packed in sawdust and covered with canvas. And then there was the darker thought of the unusual goods concealed in the bottommost layer of his ice—the cargo he hoped to deliver quickly, quietly, and at a profit remarkable even for a Yankee trader.
Van Horne climbed into an open carriage at the southern entrance of Galveston’s most elegant accommodation, the Majestic Beach Hotel. “Pier 22,” he told the driver, a grizzled old man with a great chaw of tobacco stuffed in his cheek, and the carriage rolled off the sand and onto the bright brick streets of the city.
Warm salt air permeated the fine Irish wool of Nicolas’s jacket, the smooth, long-staple cotton of his tailored shirt. “It’s already summer here,” he muttered to himself as the carriage whisked him past row after row of gaily painted houses. Pink. Blue. Purple. The avenues were broad and the houses were graced with intricate decorative work and wrapped by sprawling porches on both first and second stories. Undoubtedly the homes of the island’s captai
ns of commerce, Nicolas thought. Even finer than those he’d admired in the most elegant sections of New Orleans.
Nicolas removed his homburg and jacket, leaned back, and stretched his lanky, six-foot frame in the warm morning sunshine. As the carriage crossed Galveston Island from gulf to bay, the graceful homes changed to commercial brick, and the quiet of the neighborhoods became the bustle of the harbor.
“Could you tell me, kind sir,” Nicolas called out over the clippity-clip of the mare’s hooves. “Where would one find your new medical college?”
The driver slowed his carriage and pointed east, over the warehouses, to a four-story, red-domed building towering shiny and new in the distance. “That’s it, right there,” he said. He jerked the reins in the opposite direction, and the carriage drew alongside the wharfs.
“An impressive structure. Quite imposing.”
“Huh. It’s sure pretty,” the driver grumbled. “But I’ll tell ya, the folks in this town wisht it was on some other island. It ain’t nothin’ but a—” The driver was drowned out by the low-pitched blast of a steamer’s horn as a great ship, low in the water from her load of cotton, eased from her berth.
Nicolas marveled at the many steamers and tall-masted sailing ships, flying flags from all points of the globe as they wove to and fro seeking berths for their cargoes of lumber; coffee; exotic, unnamable fruits; and tea and cloth from the Orient. In this booming port city, Nicolas’s cargo seemed almost ordinary . . . almost, he thought, as his nerves gave a troublesome jolt.
He stepped down from the carriage at Pier 22 and held out a coin to the driver. “Would that medical college have a dock of its own?” he asked.
“Ask the stevedores, why don’t ya?” the driver replied. Then, with a smirk, he said, “You won’t be going there alone, I hope. No telling what might become of a person at that gawd-awful place.” The driver spat forcefully onto the oily brick street, slapped the reins, and pulled away.
Nicolas spied his foreman, Adam Klock, waving from the bow of their ship at the far end of the pier. Adam was a sinewy rail of a man who stood a good six inches shorter than Nicolas.
“Ahoy there, Van Horne!” he shouted.
Nicolas wove his way down the dock, dodging around coils of rope, cotton bales, crates and barrels, and the dark, sweating stevedores who labored there—from men black as ebony to those who’d been roasted nut-brown by the sun.
“A good morning to you, Adam,” Nicolas said when he drew near. “How goes it?” Nicolas scrambled up a rope ladder and stepped nimbly onto the deck of their steamer, a double paddle wheeler that had been their home down the mighty Mississippi and across the open water of the gulf. “Did you hire the men?” Van Horne asked.
“Six of ’em, sir. A good enough lot—experienced longshoremen, and strong enough, I reckon.”
Nicolas lowered his voice. “How long will it take them, you figure? Unloading the top ice?”
“Don’t worry, boss. I’ll have ’em off the pier by nightfall, so’s we can take care of that bottom layer. And I’m told the medical place has its own dock at the east end of the harbor, though it ain’t much of a dock.”
Nicolas gave Adam a clap on the back and took his foreman’s hand, dark-stained and rough from the handling of horses and machines. “Good man, Adam.”
As his employer in the business of ice, Nicolas had shared a berth with Adam Klock for many a night on the long and arduous voyages from their home near the Canadian border. Though friends from childhood, these two men knew their differences. Van Horne, the boss, was born to commerce and descended from wealth. Adam Klock, inveterate woodsman and jack-of-all-trades, was the grandson of a Seneca Indian and descendant of a long line of rough-and-ready mixed breeds who’d inherited their beloved North Country from the mighty Iroquois, then fought both the French and the English to hold it.
“But I’m afraid there’s another problem,” Adam said with a frown. “A harbor inspector was nosing around the pier early this morning, and he said he’d be back.”
“I’ll make for the medical college then, and arrange delivery. Keep an eye on those longshoremen of yours, Adam. They’ll be asking questions . . . just make sure they don’t touch that bottom layer.”
Adam nodded. Then, looking down the pier, he whispered, “Oh-oh. Damned if it ain’t him. Mr. Harbor Inspector himself.”
A tub of a man with a full red beard walked up to the ship, clamored clumsily up its side, and stepped on deck. He wore a grimy blue coat with dull brass buttons. His breath stank of whiskey.
“Mornin’, gents,” he said. “I see the owner’s up and about.” He glanced at Nicolas without offering his hand. “I’m the tariff inspector, as ya can tell”—he tapped the tarnished badge on his coat—“and I’ll need to have a look-see at your cargo here.”
The inspector threw open a hatch and stared into the hold. “Ice, is it?”
“Yessir, yessir, that it is,” Adam said.
“The finest Northern ice,” Nicolas added coolly. “Pure and clear as crystal. We’ve recently unloaded her sister ship in New Orleans, sir, without event, I might add.”
“You ain’t got no apples, eggs, fresh produce . . . nothin’ like that down there, eh?” the inspector asked as he brushed sawdust away, pulled up the corner of a canvas cover, and squinted into the ice. “There’s a different tariff rate for such, and you ice traders been known to maximize yer profits thusly.”
The inspector shaded his eyes from the sun and peered deep, where the morning light filtering into the bluish ice outlined row upon row of large, ill-defined shapes, like sides of beef wrapped in canvas.
“Somethin’ big down there?”
Adam, his eyes like tea saucers, stared blankly at the inspector’s broad back.
In a single motion Van Horne reached inside his jacket and smoothly extracted a well-worn leather billfold. “We’re due to unload shortly,” he said, flipping the purse open. “If there’d be an additional tariff of some sort, sir, I’d be happy to settle it.”
The inspector turned. “Now that, sir, would be most expeditious.” He dropped the hatch and stretched himself up; he was near six feet in height, almost as tall as Van Horne, though twice as big around. He reeled back on his heels, his hand extended.
“Would three be enough?” Nicolas asked.
“That’ll do nicely.”
Nicolas peeled off the bills; the inspector smiled and slipped them into his pocket. “I thank ya,” he said, “and I’ll make a note down at the office. You’ll encounter no problem with yer commerce here, sir. I assure ya of that.” He jumped from the ship with a thump and ambled down the pier. “And I bid ya both a good day.”
Once the inspector was out of earshot, Adam asked, “Whatta ya think? He see something?”
“If he did,” Van Horne said with a smile, “I’m sure a few drinks will help him forget . . . but I’d best get to that college straightaway.”
“You figure to try their newfangled electric trolley, boss?” Adam asked, pointing to a bright orange trolley car that rumbled along the waterfront under a shower of sparks. “They tell me the college is only a few minutes away, if you dare ride that blasted thing.”
“Come, come, my man.” Nicolas guffawed, his ice-blue eyes twinkling. “Just because we’re from the woods, we needn’t act like bumpkins.” He clapped his friend’s bony shoulder. “I’m sure it’s safe enough.”
Just as Nicolas was set to swing over the ship’s rail, another distraction—a young man of about eighteen years—bounded down the pier. The youth was red-faced and out of breath.
“Are you the ice merchant?” he shouted up.
“That I am,” Nicolas replied. “Who are you?”
“A student from the college.”
Nicolas scrambled down the rope ladder. Throwing glances furtively up and down the pier, he drew the young man near the ship’s hull and asked, “What is it you want, son?”
“I’m to enquire, sir, if you have any fresh ones.”
&
nbsp; “Fresh ones?”
“Not embalmed.”
Facing the young man so close, Nicolas perceived the odor of rot, a most foul stench, like that of a long-dead deer stumbled upon in the woods on a hot summer day. The youth appeared clean-shaven, eager, and bright enough, but he wore a tattered, badly patched coat and pants caked with a yellowish, greasy substance.
“My professor needs to know.” The youth persisted. “Any not embalmed?”
“There’s one, yes. One left.” Nicolas felt his stomach tighten. Why had the last of his special cargo tried his nerves so? “It’s a mere boy,” he told the young man. “He was found buried in a snowdrift.”
“How fresh?”
“Quite. Frozen solid. We loaded him in Buffalo.”