Creole Fires (46 page)

NATCHEZ FLAME
by Kat Martin
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Galveston, Texas
July 20, 1846

Lord in heaven, what have I gotten myself into this time?
Priscilla Mae Wills stood at the rail of the steamship
Orleans
surveying the scattered wooden buildings, weathered and unpainted, and the unkempt, seedy-looking men who lined the dock of the strand.

In the distance, the dirt streets of Galveston bustled with activity, wagons heavy with bales of cotton rumbling toward the wharf, men and animals clattering along in confusion. Puddles of mud still dotted the road from a recent summer rain.

Though the rest of the passengers had already departed, Priscilla searched the long wooden dock for the hundredth time, hoping against hope that Barker Hennessey, the man sent to meet her, had discovered the
Or lean’s
early arrival and might yet appear.

You’re a grown woman, Priscilla. You can do this on your own.
But in all her twenty-four years she’d never traveled by herself, and even with her Aunt Madeline had never gone far from home. And she’d certainly never expected the newly formed state of Texas to be this untamed.

Bedraggled and wind-chafed and tired clear to her bones,
Priscilla scanned the dock in search of anyone who might be Barker Hennessey. Several brown-skinned Mexican men singing in Spanish strolled past, but no one that her fiancé could possibly have sent to meet her.

Forcing a stiffness into her spine, she stepped off the wharf into the wide dirt streets. A hot, muggy breeze whipped the dark brown skirts of her serviceable cotton day dress, and with every weary step the stiff white ruffle around the neck scratched the soft white skin beneath her chin. Strands of dark brown hair had come loose from the tight chignon hidden at the back of her bonnet and whipped tauntingly in the wind.

Priscilla glanced up the street. The sign for the Galveston Hotel and Saloon gleamed red and white in the hot July sunshine beside another large painted sign advertising Samuel Levinson’s Bath House. Barker Hennessey, the man her fiancé, Stuart Egan, had sent to escort her on the final leg of her journey, would look for her at the hotel once he discovered her ship had come in.

And someone from the hotel could fetch the heavy steamer trunks that contained her trousseau: the finely crafted dresses she had carefully sewn over the past few weeks, as well as the doilies and linens and dainty embroidered tablecloths she had stitched and laid in her hope chest throughout the years.

Determined to ignore the heat and the tightly laced stays of her steel-ribbed corset, Priscilla walked the bustling dirt streets. Weathered batten-board structures crouched beside a few sturdy establishments built of pinkish-white stone.