Morning Song (2 page)

something as she ran after him. The officer of the watch popped out of the bridge to discover the cause of the commotion, but he was too far away to be of any help to Clive. The bastards had a punt tied to the rail.

"Edwards!" Hulton shouted to his accomplice, who was some two yards ahead of him. The first man turned to look without ever slackening his headlong flight. Even as Clive's hand came up, even as he paused to steady his aim because he'd never been as good a shot with his left hand as he was with his right, Hulton tossed the boot. The man in the lead caught it.

The first man was at the rail, about to leap into the punt. Clive jerked the mouth of the pistol from its intended target, Hulton, to aim it at the man who now held the boot. The man with his money. . . .

The pistol barked. The man with the boot cried out, staggered, and turned, falling heavily to the deck. Despite the less-thanoptimum conditions, Clive's aim had been good: he'd shot the thieving bastard clean through the back of the head. Even as the man writhed in his death throes, Hulton leaped over him, snatched the rope from the rail, and leaped over it, too, into the punt. The Mississippi
Belle
steamed forward. Hulton, rowing furiously in the opposite direction, disappeared into the misty gray darkness of the river at dawn.

Clive sprinted to the downed man. Footsteps thundered along the deck behind him, but he paid no attention, just as he paid no attention to Hulton's escape.

The boot. Where was the boot?

It was not on the deck, but the man had been carrying it when Clive had shot him. Could it have fallen overboard? Swearing, Clive shoved at the body, turning the man over so that he lay 10

faceup. Blood streaked the corpse's face from the exit wound above his right eye, matting hair nearly as dark as Clive's own. Blue eyes stared sightlessly upward. Clive spared the dead man barely a glance. He wanted his boot—and there it lay. The body had fallen on it. Discovering it, Clive felt a rush of relief. Hunkering down to retrieve his money, he became aware of the pain in his hand for the first time. Holy Christ, the thing hurt!

But that was nothing compared with the pain he felt when he looked into the boot, thrust his left hand inside for good measure, and found it empty.

"Bloody goddamn bastards!" he yelled, throwing the empty boot aside and leaping to his feet. He ran to the rail, to lean glaring out into the swirling darkness into which the punt had disappeared. It was maddeningly obvious that Hulton had only thrown the boot as a decoy, while keeping the cash himself. . . .

"You shot him dead, Mr. McClintock," came the voice of the young snip's officer, sounding both awed and a little worried.

"Bastard!" Clive snarled, referring to the dead man. Unless he chose to swim in pursuit of his money, there would be no pursuit, he knew. Turning a paddle wheeler around was not the work of a few minutes. It required an hour or more, and could be tricky under the best of conditions. The
Mississippi Belle
would not be steaming in pursuit of the thief. The best Clive could hope for was that she would stop at the next town so that he could report the theft to the authorities. Much good might it do him. Turning away from the rail, Clive stalked over to the dead man, barely resisting an urge to kick the corpse with his bare foot.

"Here, sugar." Luce had come panting up behind the ship's officer, who was kneeling over the body. She held out a sheet to him. Clive saw that she had the quilt that had covered them both 11

earlier wrapped around herself, and realized that he was standing buck naked in the cool of predawn, on an open deck, with curious heads starting to crane in his direction from the open doors of nearby staterooms. He took the sheet and wrapped it around his middle while his blood ran onto the white linen, striping it with scarlet.

"Oh, Clive, your hand. . . ."

"To bloody hell with my hand! The bastards stole my money. Hulton, and this one. Who the hell is he? I've never seen him before in my life."

"I believe his name is Edwards. Stuart Edwards. He came aboard in St. Louis." The ship's officer stood up. "Mr. McClintock, I hate to bring it up at a time like this, but there's the matter of your pistol____"

The man, either foolishly brave or stupid, held out his hand, palm up. Clive looked at him for a disbelieving moment, then with a shake of his head handed the pistol over without uttering a word.

"Thank you. I'm sure there won't be any legal repercussions for you over this. . . . "

"Legal repercussions?" Clive laughed, the sound unpleasant. His right hand, still dripping blood, dangled at his side, throbbing and aching like the devil himself had pierced it with his pitchfork, but that was the least of Clive's concerns. He wanted his money! "Legal repercussions? I just had forty-five thousand dollars stolen from me, and you think I'm worried about legal repercussions for shooting the son of a bitch who did it? I'm worried about recovering my money!"

"Yes, well . . ."

12

Someone had evidently summoned the captain from his cabin, because he strode toward them along the deck, buttoning his shirt as he approached.

"Mr. Smithers! Mr. Smithers, what in the name of heaven is going on?"

Mr. Smithers, clearly the ship's officer, looked relieved to see his superior. He broke off whatever he'd been about to say and hurried over to confer with the captain in whispers. Luce moved to stand beside Clive, patting his bare arm comfortingly as he scowled down at the body of the man he had killed.

"You owe me, Stuart Edwards," he muttered at the corpse.

"You owe me, you thieving bastard, and I bloody well mean to collect."

I

He
was going to be trouble. Jessie knew it from the instant she laid eyes on him.

Disheveled and more than a little sweaty from her morning ride, she had just come up through the house from the stables and collapsed in a rocking chair on the second-story gallery, which, thankfully, was shady and situated to catch the faintest breeze. Her thick, curly auburn hair, having escaped from its careless bun long since, tumbled anyhow around her face and down her back. One particularly irritating strand had found its way inside her collar and tickled her neck. Grimacing, she scratched at the irritation, neither noticing nor caring about the smear of mud on her knuckles that her action dully transferred to her right cheek. 13

Indeed, the dirty streak was not the abomination it might have been, so well did it blend with the general unkemptness of her appearance.

The riding dress she wore had been made for her when she was thirteen, five years before. It had once been
deep bottle green, but it was so faded by years of hard use that in some spots it was the color of dust-dulled spring grass. To make matters worse, she had been considerably less well developed five years ago. The buttons up the front of the bodice strained to hold it together, mashing her generous bosom nearly flat in the process, and this despite the fact that only the previous year Tudi had added wide insets of fabric to the garment's side seams. The skirt was much darned and some three inches too short, allowing far more of her worn black boots to show than propriety permitted. Not that propriety even entered Jessie's head as she lifted her feet, crossed them at the ankles, and rested her lower heel on the railing that ran around the gallery, putting a scandalous amount of white cotton stocking and thrice-turned petticoat on view.

"Here, now, you cain't do that! You put your laigs down and sit like a lady!" Tudi protested, scandalized. She was seated in another of the half-dozen rockers that lined the wide porch, her gnarled black hands buried deep in a bowl of string beans she was snapping for supper. Jessie gave an ill-used sigh but obeyed, letting her feet drop loudly. With a satisfied grunt Tudi returned her attention to the beans.

Beside the porch, a ruby-throated hummingbird flitted in and out of the pink-veined blossoms of the mimosa from which the vast cotton plantation took its name. The tiny bird's characteristic sound and bright plumage drew Jessie's eyes. Watching it, she bit with relish into the cherry tartlet she had purloined from Rosa, 14

the cook, on her way through the house to tide her over until luncheon.

From the road that wound past the house came a series of rattles and clops as a buggy rolled smartly into view. Its appearance distracted Jessie from the feeding hummingbird, and she observed its approach with interest. When she saw that it would turn up the long drive that led to the house, instead of continuing on toward the nearby river, she frowned. It could only be a neighbor, none of whom she particularly cared to see, probably because they all disapproved of her and made few bones about it. "That wild Lindsay child," the planters'

womenfolk called her. Their delicate daughters scorned her as a playmate, and their eligible sons seemed unaware that she was even alive. Which state of affairs, Jessie continually assured herself, suited her just fine!

Then, with even less enthusiasm than she would have awaited the arrival of one of the neighbors, Jessie recognized the petite, exquisitely turned-out woman perched beside the driver as her stepmother, Celia. Her eyes moved on to the dark-haired driver, where they fixed, narrowing. Him she did not recognize at all, and in a community where one knew all one's neighbors, from the wealthiest planters to the poorest of the dirt farmers, that was cause for surprise.

"Who's that?" Tudi looked up, too, as the carriage bowled toward them along the oak-lined drive. Her hands, busy with the beans, never faltered, but her eyes were wide and curious as they fastened on the stranger.

"I don't know," Jessie replied, which was the truth as far as it went. She shunned the neighborhood social doings as

assiduously as she would a nest of vipers, so it was always 15

possible that someone had a visitor whom she hadn't met. But it was quite clear that the man, whoever he was, was no stranger to Celia. Celia sat snuggled too closely against his side, so closely that their bodies touched. She wouldn't sit like that with any justmet beau. In addition, Celia smiled and chatted in blatant provocation, and her hand moved every few minutes to stroke the stranger's sleeve, or give his arm a pat. Such behavior was nothing short of
fast.
Coupled with Jessie's knowledge of her stepmother, it gave her a dreadful, disbelieving inkling of who the stranger must be: Celia's new lover.

She'd known for several weeks now that Celia had a new man. After ten years of living with her pretty blond stepmother, Jessie could tell. Jessie's father had been dead for nine years, and in that length of time Celia had had easily double that number of men. Celia was careful, but not careful enough to hide her indiscretions from the keen eyes of her lessthan-adoring stepdaughter. Jessie's first realization of the true purpose behind Celia's frequent prolonged absences had come when she'd happened upon a letter Celia had been penning to her latest paramour and had accidentally left in the back parlor. Knowing that it was rude to read others' correspondence, Jessie nevertheless did. The missive's blue language and impassioned tone had made an indelible impression on the innocent youngster she had been then. Once her eyes had been opened, Jessie had learned to read her stepmother like a book: the restlessness and petty meannesses when she was between men, the secretiveness and lack of concern over Jessie's most heinous transgressions when Celia was involved with someone.

Over the past few weeks, Celia had moved about the house with a sly little I-have-a-secret smile that told Jessie a new lover 16

was in the offing. From experience, Jessie had guessed that soon Celia would be making another shopping trip to Jackson, or would find herself invited to a house party in New Orleans, or would manage to come up with some other excuse to be gone for several weeks without giving rise to scandal, while she pursued her new interest away from watching eyes and the constraints of propriety. Such deviousness might fool the neighbors, who would be shocked and loudly condemning if they knew that the charming widow Lindsay had had as many lovers as a cat in neat, but it didn't deceive Jessie. After half a lifetime spent observing her, Jessie was thoroughly familiar with the real Celia, who bore only a surface resemblance to the sweet, slightly silly female she pretended to be. The real Celia was as hard and ruthless in pursuit of her desires as a tigress, and about as kindnatured as one, too.

"First time she's brought one of 'em home," Tudi muttered, scowling, her hands stilling in the bowl of beans at last as the buggy rocked to a stop before the front steps. It was true, Celia never brought her

en home, and that, of course, was one reason Jessie felt so uneasy at this one's advent. But to hear her disquiet echoed so succinctly by Tudi, before she'd even managed to pin the cause of it down herself . . .

Jessie glanced in sidelong surprise at her onetime nursemaid, who had taken over the reins of the housekeeping long since, when as a bride Celia had shown no disposition to do so. Though why Jessie should be surprised to discover that Tudi thoroughly understood the situation, Jessie couldn't fathom. Tudi, for all her comfortable girth and placid disposition, had the eyes of a hawk and the brain of a fox. Celia's subterfuges wouldn't have fooled 17

her any more than had Jessie's inventive excuses for misdeeds when she was small.

The stranger stepped down from the buggy, and Jessie's eyes swung back to him. One of the yard boys ran up to take charge of the equipage, but Jessie's eyes never left the man. So intent were he and Celia on each other that neither noticed that they were under intense and hostile observation from the upper gallery. Tudi's hands were still plunged deep into the bowl of beans, unmoving, while Jessie had stopped both rocking and eating to watch.

Even from the back the stranger was worthy of feminine attention. He was tall, with broad shoulders, long muscular legs, and an abundance of wavy black hair. As far as Jessie could tell, his black coat and tan breeches bore not so much as a speck of dust or a wrinkle, which by itself was enough to distinguish him from the planters and their sons who were Celia's official callers. It was mid-May of 1841, not as hot and sultry as it would be later in the summer in the steamy Delta region, but still quite warm, and already the menfolk thereabouts were rumpled and smelled of sweat by midday. But this man-why, his boots even gleamed!