Nobody's Angel (5 page)

At his refusal to budge, the rope went taut and stopped Susannah in her tracks. She looked back over her shoulder at him to find the noose no longer about his neck but rather held in both his hands. Her expressive eyebrows lifted in silent inquiry. By way of a reply, he dropped the noose to the ground. His eyes challenged her to protest.

Instead she nodded once, in a decided way. "You are quite right, of course. I should not care to be dragged about at the end of a rope, either. Now please follow me."

Somewhat to his own surprise, Ian obeyed. With neither chains nor rope to hold him, freedom beckoned ever more brightly. But he could not very well just turn and walk away, however much he was tempted. Someone would surely give chase. He would be recaptured, probably harshly punished, and certainly guarded far more carefully in future. It was clear that his new owner had more heart than sense. He could tarry awhile in her household, regaining his strength and formulating a plan for the future, without fearing either physical abuse or humiliation. For the first time in a long time, his prospects looked bright.

At the thought, Ian felt a lifting of his spirits. Unfortunately, his body did not respond quite as swiftly to the renewal of hope as did his mind. As he set one foot in front of the other, Ian was disconcerted to realize just how weak he was. He had to force himself to concentrate even on so simple an act as walking, had to will his feet to obey the commands of his sluggish brain. Something—the heat, the sun, the damned sickening smell of rotting vegetation that permeated the place—was making him dizzy.

So dizzy was he that he was barely aware of the curious eyes that fixed on him from every direction as he followed his new mistress through the throng. He was only peripherally conscious of Susannah being greeted by what seemed to be half the matrons present, to which obviously expectant salutations she responded with no more than a smile and a wave. Trailing not too far behind him came the three girls he assumed were her sisters. He knew they were there because he could hear them whispering. One of them giggled.

That pricked the vertigo that half-blinded and deafened him. The chit snickered at him, of course. The burning shame reared its head again. How had he, Ian Connelly, fallen to such depths of ignominy? But he knew very well, of course, and knew who was responsible, too. He could consider himself fortunate that he'd not been murdered outright. But what had been done to him was almost as bad.

His sentence was seven years. Seven years was not that long a time for a man of thirty-one to wait to get his revenge. Not that he had any intention of serving out the period of his indenture, of course. He could walk away from his dowdy new mistress anytime it suited him and catch the next ship back home.

And then there would be bloody hell for his enemies to pay.

A few people with skin in various shades of coffee hovered on the edge of the crowd. They were conventionally clad, the women in long dresses that were certainly finer than the one Susannah wore and the men in shirts and breeches such as any man would wear. But the darkness of their skin made them stand out. Ian blinked at them curiously as he passed. With a sense of shock he realized that he was seeing African slaves. He had heard tell of such, of course, but had never laid eyes on one before. As they left the green, he stared at a tall, ebony- skinned woman with a turban wrapping her head who was approaching along the street. She wore a starched white apron over a full-skirted dress of pale blue calico and walked a pace or so behind a fashionably dressed lady who was presumably her mistress. To his shock, Ian found that the African woman was eyeing him with every bit as much curiosity as he felt toward her. It hit him then that he, as a convict who had been indentured, was as much an oddity to her as she, an enslaved African, was to him. It occurred to him that they had a great deal in common.

"Convict! Convict!" A rock flew out of nowhere to hit Ian's shoulder and bounce off. He flinched, looking sharply around as his arm came up to ward off other missiles. A tow-headed urchin of perhaps nine years was already running back to join a snickering group of his friends, who peeped around the corner of a dry goods shop.

"Jeremy Likens, you stop that at once! Or I'll have a word with your mama! And the rest of you had best behave yourselves as well or there will be a painful reckoning for you all in the very near future!" Susannah clapped her hands sharply to emphasize her words, and the boy looked alarmed as he scuttled out of sight. His friends had withdrawn around the corner already, and not so much as a hand or foot remained to be seen of them.

"Sorry, Miss Redmon. Please don't tell Ma!"

"Sorry, Miss Redmon!"

"Sorry!"

The culprits peeped out at them and were dismissed by Susannah with a stern look and a monitory gesture. Ian was impressed anew with the respect she seemed able to command at will. More than one able-bodied man of his acquaintance would not have been able to deal half so effectively with such a gang of restive boys.

"You are not hurt, are you, Connelly?" She did not stop walking but slanted him a glance over her shoulder. Those kind eyes were accented by lashes as long as his thumbnail, Ian noticed, and her nose was small and surprisingly pert. Had she possessed a better figure and a keener sense of style, she would not have been so very unattractive after all. But she was waiting for an answer. His head was throbbing and the sidewalk was beginning to undulate beneath his feet, but the spot on his shoulder where the rock had struck troubled him not at all.

"No," he said after a moment spent summoning the word to his tongue. Then, as an afterthought, he added, "Ma'am."

That bow to courtesy earned him a glimmering smile. She half-turned, slowing as though to allow him to catch up. It was her sisters she waited for, of course. He was not quite so light-headed that he did not realize that. But the smile was for him, and once again Ian was struck by what a smile did for her face.

"I did not think so, or I would have been more severe. Jeremy is not a bad boy, you see, but he is much interested in impressing his friends. His mother is a good woman, but his father is a notorious scoundrel, and that makes Jeremy susceptible to such behavior as you bore the brunt of."

"You would find excuses for the Devil himself, if he came in the guise of a child," the lovely one said, as, cautiously giving him a wide berth, the three girls scooted around him to gain their sister's side.

"I make no apologies for liking children." Susannah's answer was brisk as she turned her back and quickened her step again.

"By rights you should have some of your own, Susannah," Miss Pink-bonnet put in.

"She must needs be married first, dolt, and no one's come asking her that I have seen." That leveler came from the plump one in the yellow dress.

"Hush, Em!" said Miss Pink-bonnet, with a conscious look over her shoulder at Ian.

"It's all right, Sarah Jane. Emily is telling no more than the truth and must not be scolded for that." Susannah sounded untroubled, and Ian deduced that her apparently unwed and unsought state was not something that bothered her unduly. To his surprise he found that he rather admired her for that. Almost all the females with whom he'd been acquainted up till now had viewed marriage as their ultimate goal in life.

They turned onto a wide avenue lined on both sides with shops, the four girls in a fluid cluster with Ian a few paces behind. The few people who were not attending the auction sauntered along, in pairs or singly. The ladies they passed were surprisingly well-dressed, Ian considered, taking into account Susannah's appalling gown and the provincial nature of the area. Some carried baskets over their arms to hold their purchases, while others clung to the arm of a male escort. Nearly all called or nodded greetings to Susannah and her sisters, their faces reflecting their curiosity as they discovered Ian, filthy and tattered, lurching in the ladies' wake. Had he been feeling more himself, he would have snarled at the most avid, just to hear the women squeal and to see their eyes widen with fear. But he was growing more and more woolly- headed, and it required all his concentration to keep on his feet.

"Here we are." Susannah halted before a dusty, iron- wheeled wagon. Her sisters stopped too, as did Ian. A man sat on the high plank seat, his head in his hands, the picture of misery.

"Miss Susannah," he said thickly, glancing up. The movement must have pained him mightily, because he groaned and dropped his head back into the cradle of his hands.

"I have a very great deal to say to you, Craddock, but I will reserve it for a later time. You will oblige me by getting into the back, if you please."

"I didn't mean . . ." the man began miserably, but Susannah cut him off.

"At once, Craddock." Her voice was cool and perfectly polite, but Craddock said no more. Moving as if he were eighty years old and crippled to boot, he got down and crawled into the wagon-bed, where he sat with his back propped against an ironbound barrel and his feet dangling toward the street.

"You may get into the back as well, Connelly." Susannah turned her eyes on him. There was nothing of feminine coyness in the look, nothing that said that she was conscious of herself as a woman at all, but only the kind of directness that he might have expected from another man. A redoubtable woman was Miss Susannah Redmon, Ian found himself thinking even as he took a step forward to obey. But that step proved to be a mistake. His head whirled, and all of a sudden the ground seemed to tilt.

"Connelly, are you all right?"

Ian swayed. Susannah moved toward him, frowning into his face, and placed a steadying hand on his arm. Ian heard her voice, felt the surprising coolness of her fingers against the bare skin of his forearm where his shirt had been ripped away, and smelled the fresh scent of soap and —was it lemon?—that hung about her person. Then, so suddenly that he was at a loss to do anything about it, the sidewalk seemed to heave beneath his feet. His knees buckled. He felt himself collapsing and clutched at the nearest solid object in a vain attempt to save himself.

That that object was Miss Susannah Redmon and that his arms were around her pulling her down with him was the last conscious thought he had before he spun away into oblivion.

5

Susannah pulled the horse to a stop before the two-story white clapboard house that the Redirions had called home since before her birth. Brownie, the family dog, rose from her preferred spot on the front porch directly in front of the main door to yap a welcome. She was a fat brown creature whose sole claim to distinction was that she had only three legs; her left hind leg had been amputated by a carriage accident some years before. Susannah had been in town that day and witnessed the accident and had brought the maimed stray home to save it from being "mercifully" shot. She had nursed the dog back to health and now Brownie's missing limb slowed her not at all. Only her age-acquired girth hampered her movement. But she was still capable of a mighty bark. Chickens that had been scratching in the yard clucked and fluttered, alarmed by the dog. From the pasture near the barn, Old Cobb the mule brayed a welcome to his stable-mate Darcy, who drew the buckboard. Darcy nickered back. Clara the cat, roused from her nap, stretched lazily on the porch railing, adding her voice to the general hubbub. Susannah, accustomed to being welcomed in such a fashion, paid no attention beyond telling Brownie, in a distracted tone that did no good at all, to hush. Her shoulder ached from where she had hit the ground when the bound man had collapsed on her, but she ignored the pain that shot down her arm as she moved.

"Craddock, you take his shoulders. Girls, you may help me with his legs."

"You can't mean that you expect
us
to move him?" Mandy pouted prettily. Unfortunately, the effect was entirely wasted on her sister. Susannah finished wrapping the reins around the knob at the front of the buckboard that had been put there for just such a purpose and gave Mandy an exasperated glance. The four of them were crowded onto the plank seat, and until that moment both Mandy and Em had been crossly remarking on how very cramped they were and how glad they would be to reach home. Now neither of them, nor Sarah Jane either, made the least effort to get down. Only Craddock, grimacing as if every muscle pained him, clambered to the ground.

"Yes, I expect you to help move him. How else are we to get him inside, pray? In his present sorry state, Craddock could not lift much more than an egg without help."

"Surely you don't mean to take that convict into our house!" Sarah Jane's eyes widened as she turned them on Susannah.

"Where would you have him taken? The barn? Crad- dock's quarters? Mayhap the chicken coop? Or shall we let him sleep in the loft with Ben? He's ill, and he'll need nursing. Of course I mean to take him into the house, for now at least. It ill becomes you, as the daughter and prospective wife of men of God, to speak of convicts in that tone." Susannah jumped to the ground. Her jarring landing sent pain shooting along her shoulder again, but she dismissed it. As always, she had too much occupying her mind to pay heed to any trifling physical discomfort.

"You are right, of course, and I don't mean to sound uncharitable, but—but he's filthy! And 'tis anyone's guess what he may try to do to us when he recovers! The only thing we know about him is that he has been convicted of attempted murder. You could be endangering all of our lives! I declare that I will be terrified to sleep in my own bed with that con—er, that man in the house!" There was real distress in Sarah Jane's voice.

"You're as poor-spirited as a declawed crab lately, Sarah Jane, do you know that?
I
have no objection to helping to carry him in, or to having him in the house, either," Emily said, sounding virtuous. She was seated next to Mandy who still occupied the far right end of the bench, and she did not let Mandy's presence keep her from jumping to the ground. She simply pushed her sister out of her way. Mandy, thrust from her perch without ceremony, fortunately hit the grass feet first, stumbling forward as she landed before finally gaining her balance.