Marcus was swept up into Ransome’s seductive world of gamblers and whores, surrounded by men and women who were all trying to craft a new life for themselves in the bustling port that was welcoming the whole world. Ships put in at the mouth of the Missisippi from every place imaginable, some carrying passengers and others cargo.
Inch by inch, Marcus began to shed the layers of himself that had been bruised by childhood and revolution, and toughened by war and adversity. Surrounded by Ransome’s friends, Marcus often remembered his time among the Brethren—odd though it was to think of Johannes Ettwein and Sister Magdalene in a seedy bar or a whorehouse—and the way that these unlikely allies lived side by side. Marcus began to laugh at Ransome’s jokes, and to share gossip as well as political news when he sat down with his cup of coffee at Lafitte’s tavern.
It was in one of these easy moments that Ransome finally extracted Marcus’s secret from him.
They were smoking cigars and drinking wine at a gambling parlor on St. Charles Avenue. The thick red velvet drapes gave everything a lurid air, and the haze of anxiety rising from the players and the fumes from the tobacco were so thick they practically choked you.
“I’m calling your bluff, Doc.” Ransome threw a handful of tokens into the center of the table.
“You’ve caught me a bit short.” Marcus was out of cash, out of tokens, and out of luck.
“Of course, you could tell me your secret and I’d call us even,” Fayreweather said. It was his standing offer whenever Marcus lost a game of chance.
Marcus laughed. “You never give up, do you, Ransome?”
“Not if death himself was staring me in the face,” Fayreweather said cheerfully. “I’d simply challenge him to a game of monte and sucker him like I do all the others.”
Fayreweather had been teaching Marcus some of the tricks he used on the deep-pocketed visitors to New Orleans. Fanny would adore Ransome, Marcus thought wistfully, remembering his aunt’s bustling household and exuberant spirit. Marcus got lonelier and more nostalgic with every passing year.
“That’s a strange look for a successful man such as yourself,” Fayreweather said. Like all cardsharps, Ransome was a keen observer. “You look positively blue, Doc. Isn’t there something you can prescribe that will cure your doldrums?”
“Just thinking of the folks I left behind.”
“I hear you.” Ransome’s eyes flickered. “We all lost something on our travels here.”
“I lost my life, and got it back again,” Marcus said, staring into the depths of his wine. “I left my home, and returned to it, and left it again. I sailed the seas, and met Ben Franklin, and buried Thomas Paine. I studied at university, and learned more in the streets of Paris in one night than I did in a year in Edinburgh. I loved two women, and had a child, and here I am, alone in New Orleans, drinking sour wine and losing money hand over hand.”
“Ben Franklin, you say?” Ransome chewed on his cigar.
“Yep,” Marcus replied, taking another slug of wine.
“Son, I think he died before you were born.” Fayreweather put his cards on the table. A straight. “If you want to pass as something you’re not, you’ve got to be more careful with your fabrications. For a moment, I almost believed you. But your mention of Franklin—”
“I was born more than fifty years ago,” Marcus said. “I’m a vampire.”
“One of those bloodsuckers Madame D’Arcantel and her friends are always going on about?” Ransome asked.
“They’re witches,” Marcus said. “You can’t believe a word they say.”
“No,” Ransome said, his eyes narrowing. “So why is it that I believe you?”
Marcus shrugged. “Because I’m telling you the truth?”
“Yes, I believe you are—and for the first time, too.”
After that night, Marcus told Ransome more about what it was to be a vampire than he probably should have. He took Ransome hunting in the bayou and demonstrated how he sometimes applied a bit of vampire blood to a wound in order to save a life even though he wasn’t really supposed to. Once again, Marcus had found an unlikely brother, someone like Vanderslice who accepted him for who and what he was.
“Why don’t you just make us all vampires, like you?” Ransome had wondered.
“It’s not as easy as it sounds,” Marcus explained. “I made one child—a son—but he fell in with the wrong crowd, and ended up dead.”
“You need to pick smarter children,” Ransome said, eyeing Marcus with open speculation.
“I see. And you think you have what it takes to be a vampire?” Marcus laughed.
“I know I do.” Ransome’s eyes flashed with sudden desire, then returned to normal. “Together, we could make a family that would rule this city for centuries.”
“Not if my grandfather catches wind of it,” Marcus said.
But that didn’t deter Ransome. He offered to pay Marcus to transform him into a vampire. He threatened to expose Marcus to the authorities unless he was made immortal. When Ransome was dying of malaria, that scourge of the city’s watery location, he offered Marcus his gambling den, substantial fortune, and a private house Marcus didn’t know he owned in exchange for his blood. Ransome Fayreweather had, through grift and deceit, amassed enough money to open his own establishment in the old quarter of the city devoted to drinking, gambling, whoring, and other pleasures of the flesh. On a bad day, Ransome brought home a small fortune in revenue. On a good day, he pocketed more money than Croesus. When Ransome showed him a ledger outlining his various properties and investments, Marcus had been stunned—and then admiring.
Against his better judgment, Marcus decided to try fatherhood for a second time. Marcus had no desire to return to life as it had been before Ransome arrived in it: quietly productive with little laughter and much reading of Common Sense. Instead, Marcus wanted to take part in Ransome’s plans to further develop the bar that was known as the Domino Club, and to gather with New Orleans’s spirited citizens at dinner tables and in music halls to celebrate the pleasures of youth.
Marcus administered his blood to his dying friend in the opulent upstairs bedroom in Ransome’s grand new house on Coliseum Street.
Unlike Vanderslice, Ransome took to being a vampire like sucking the blood from humans was second nature. Marcus discovered in Ransome’s bloodlore that he’d been swindling people since he was a boy of eight, taking money from innocents by maneuvering three walnut shells and a kernel of corn atop a cellar door.
Marcus’s medical practice continued to grow after Ransome’s transformation. The city had swollen considerably in size thanks to the continued influx of refugees from the Caribbean, the slave traders who unloaded their captives on the wharves, and the speculators and land developers who arrived in pursuit of their fortune. Such a plan had certainly worked for Ransome, who was now one of the richest men in New Orleans and planned on remaining in that enviable position for the rest of his days.
Ransome’s future depended on him having his own children. He started with a mixed-race man called Malachi Smith—a small, agile fellow who clambered up the sides of houses and broke into bedrooms to steal women’s jewels. Marcus became a grandfather, and with that title came new worries about the family’s increasing notoriety.
Then Ransome adopted Crispin Jones, a young British fellow newly arrived in New Orleans with a head for business and a taste for young men.
“You can’t keep making vampires, Ransome. If you do, we’re going to get caught,” Marcus warned him one night when they were hunting in the swamps outside the city for something to feed to Ransome’s latest project, a Creole prostitute named Suzette Boudrot who had been run down by a wagon near the cathedral.
“So what,” Ransome said. “What are they going to do if they find out we’re vampires—shoot us?”
“A piece of gunshot between the eyes will kill you, vampire or not,” Marcus replied. “So will hanging.”
“They only hang runaway slaves and felons in the Place d’Armes. Worst I’d get is a day in the pillory with a placard around my neck,” Ransome retorted. “Besides, we wouldn’t have any trouble with the law at all if you would just let me make a few of the police into vampires.”