Ready & Willing (2 page)

Styles had much changed since last he was home, he further noted. Though he recalled seeing dungarees similar to those she wore on stevedores and crewmen in his time, he’d never known women to don them, even for cleaning and moving things into an attic, as Mrs. Magill was doing now. And the white shirt she wore—at least it had been white when she started working, even if it was streaked with dirt now—was strangely free of any sort of closures like buttons or laces, and it clung to her body like a second skin.

What was less intriguing—and more than irritating—was the wall she had chosen for his portrait. A man of his stature and character should not be relegated to the third-floor landing. His painting belonged in the main room downstairs, over the fireplace, where it had hung for more than four decades when Silas was alive.
Ah, well.
He could fix that soon enough. After she went to sleep tonight. In fact, he’d be fixing quite a few things once Audrey Magill was asleep tonight. The portrait was actually the least of his concerns.

He did, after all, have a soul to save.

 

AUDREY DREAMED OF CAPTAIN SUMMERFIELD THE
night after she hung his portrait in her home. In her dream she awoke in one of the bedrooms on the second floor, but it wasn’t furnished the way she currently had it furnished—in Contemporary Living Out of Boxes. Instead, the room looked like something from a nineteenth-century novel. Written by Melville. During a testosterone surge. From using steroids. Abusively.

The bed was the only thing in the room that could be remotely called modest. But even it was a black, wrought iron monstrosity piled high with pillows atop goose down, instead of the low-slung platform bed with memory foam that she owned and had set up in the attic room on the topmost floor that she’d decided would be her bedroom. The rest of the furnishings were massive, aggressively hewn mahogany, from the oversized armoire to a highboy, which was so tall that Audrey, at five-four, could barely see over its surface. Hanging above the windows, where she had at least managed to get up some iridescent sheers, were heavy drapes of dark blue velvet that were held back with thick gold braid. And instead of the antique floor lamp with the embroidered, beaded shade she’d placed in that room, an oil-burning lamp whose fuse was turned low burned at the side of the bed. She wrinkled her nose at the unpleasant odor, thinking it odd, because she’d never smelled things in her dreams before.

As she sat up on the side of the bed and looked down at herself, she half expected to find herself clothed in an old-fashioned, white cotton chemise. But she was wearing what she’d had on when she went to bed: striped pajama bottoms and a Louisville River Bats T-shirt.

Somehow, she knew she was supposed to go down to the living room for something, so she made her way out of the bedroom and down the stairs, which didn’t creak nearly as much as they did in reality. The rest of the house was furnished much as the bedroom had been. Her own sparsely scattered furnishings and half-empty boxes were gone, and in their place were pieces similar to what she’d seen in the antique shop that day. Only they didn’t look like antiques for some reason, at least not all of them. The house was much darker than she was used to, too. And not nighttime dark. Just . . . dark. The colors, the furniture, the rugs, all of it. Even so, strangely, although there were no lamps burning in any of the other rooms she passed on her way downstairs, she could see everything very well.

Just as her bare foot connected with the hardwood floor of her living room, she smelled something burning again, but this time it was the more pleasant aroma of pipe smoke. Audrey smiled when she smelled it, because the fragrance reminded her of her father, who had died when she was in college. As a girl, she’d loved watching him fill his pipes, and still remembered the metallic snick of his lighter opening before he lit one. They were comforting smells and sounds still, the same way the aroma of meatloaf and the click of eyeglasses folding reminded her of her late mother. Halfway thinking she would enter the living room to find her father sitting there—and perhaps her mother, too—Audrey kept walking.

There was a fire crackling in the fireplace, even though the evenings lately had been too warm to warrant one, and a row of wooden ships lined the mantelpiece where there should have been a display of her hats. Above them, where Audrey had hung the stylized logo for Finery, was the portrait of Captain Summerfield. His face was bathed in dancing amber light, courtesy of another oil lamp that burned atop a ruggedly fashioned antique end table near an overstuffed Queen Anne chair. A book was turned facedown in the chair’s seat, and as she drew nearer, Audrey saw its title was
Mr. Midshipman Easy
by an author named Frederick Marryat.

Not one of her father’s. He’d preferred cop stories over anything else and had never touched historical fiction.

She looked up and was about to walk forward again, toward the dining room, when a shadow in the stairway landing above and to her left seemed to . . . move. She would have been alarmed had she not been dreaming. But then, had she not been dreaming, she would have been alarmed the moment she woke up and found her bedroom redecorated by HGTV’s latest makeover show,
Melville My Room
. So instead of running away from the shadow, Audrey turned around and walked back to the stairs.

It was then that the shadow took form and turned into Captain Summerfield. He stood on the second-floor landing gazing down at her, looking almost exactly as he did in his portrait. Though in place of the black uniform jacket with brass buttons, he was dressed in a roomy white shirt, open at the throat, and black trousers. His only accessories were black boots and a cut-crystal snifter half-filled with brandy that he cradled in one hand. His dark hair a was tad longer than in the painting, but his smile was every bit as tempting, and his brown eyes were every bit as knowing. He looked to be in his early to mid forties and was taller than she would have guessed, easily topping six feet. He, she was certain, wouldn’t feel at all minimized by the stalwart furniture with which he had filled the house when it was his.

And how do I know this is the furniture that filled his house?
she immediately asked herself. She was dreaming. All this furniture came from her own imagination, just like the good Captain had.

“Madam,” he said by way of a greeting. His voice was as dark as the rest of him, yet as rich and mellow as the spirits in his glass. “How nice of you to visit.”

She smiled at him, wondering why she didn’t feel intimidated by him. “I’m not visiting. I live here now.”

He smiled back, and something about the gesture made Audrey feel very intimidated indeed. The reaction was only compounded when he began a slow descent down the stairs, his eyes never leaving hers.

“No,
I
live here now,” he told her certainly. “You won’t live here for more than a hundred years.”

“This is just a dream,” she replied, the words coming out a little shakier than she wanted. Then again,
she
was a little shakier than she wanted.

So that explained that.

“Yes, it is a dream,” he agreed. “But whose? Mine or yours?”

She opened her mouth to reply, then realized she wasn’t sure how to answer.
It must be mine,
she wanted to say. Because she wouldn’t be conscious of one of his. She would only be a figment of it.

He came to a halt on the last stair before stepping down into the living room, something that only enhanced his overpowering height—and presence. “Actually, the
now
is immaterial,” he told her. “Right now, there is no
now
. There is only this dream. And it doesn’t matter whose it is. Only that both of us be in it.”

“And why is that?” Audrey asked.

“Because I need to speak to you, and I can’t do that outside of a dream. Well, I can,” he corrected himself. “But I much prefer this manner instead.”

Weird dream,
Audrey thought. She was going to have to cut back on the Chunky Monkey ice cream before bed.

“What did you want to speak to me about?” she asked.

“About my great-great . . .” He paused, seemed to think hard about something, ticked off a few numbers on his fingers, then waved a hand in front of his face. “About a descendant of mine.”

She hadn’t thought about him having descendants. But he might very well have family still living in Louisville. People from here tended not to move away very much, so it was likely.

“What about him? Or her?” she added.

“Him,” Captain Summerfield told her. “Nathaniel Summerfield. My great-great . . . Well, he’s a grandson of some kind.”

“I didn’t realize you were married.”

Not that she’d really given it any thought. After all, she’d just met Silas Summerfield that afternoon.

He took a step to the side, something that crowded his body against hers, even though their bodies weren’t quite touching. Instinctively, she took a step backward. When she did, her foot tangled with the edge of the Oriental rug, making her stumble for a moment, but she grabbed the newel post and righted herself just as the good captain had started to reach out to steady her. She was back on solid footing before he would have grabbed her, and she was suddenly strangely sorry she
hadn’t
fallen. She would have liked to see what happened when he touched her. Would his hand go right through her arm? Or would she feel the warmth of his fingers curling over her bare flesh?

And why did she even ask herself that? Not only was this just a dream, but so far, everything else in it felt substantial enough. Why wouldn’t Captain Summerfield be substantial, too?

After a small hesitation, he put down his hand and strode into the living room. Audrey followed until he came to a halt by the fire. He placed a hand on the mantelpiece and gazed into the flickering flames, lifting the brandy to his mouth for a generous taste before speaking again.

“My marriage only lasted six months,” he said when he finally did. “We were both very young. She was the daughter of one of my father’s business partners, and we . . .” He sighed deeply and turned to look at Audrey. “Well, as I said, we were very young. And impulsive. And neither knew to take the proper measures against . . .”

“She got pregnant and the two of you had to get married,” Audrey finished for him.

His expression changed at her assessment, but she wasn’t sure if it was because he was distressed at the mention of his wife’s doubtless unwanted condition or because he was perturbed by Audrey’s frankness. Finally, he said, “Yes. She increased. Unfortunately, she didn’t survive our son’s birth.” Before Audrey had a chance to remark on that, he hurried on, “As her mother was also deceased, my mother took the child and raised him. After Rebecca and I married, I had taken a position on one of the riverboats that traveled between New Orleans and New York, so I was often absent. I barely knew my son, Mrs. Magill. For that matter, I barely knew my wife.” He looked into the fire again. “Even after the boy grew to be a man, married, and had children of his own, I saw him only sporadically. I wasn’t suited to family life. I grew too . . . restless.”

Really
weird dream,
Audrey thought. Captain Summerfield’s portrait had definitely made an impression, if she was dreaming about exchanging deep, dark secrets with the guy.

“In any event,” he continued, “my son’s sons married and had sons, and then their sons married and had sons, and so on and so forth, and each new generation made the Summerfield name more honorable and more respected than the one before it.” He looked at Audrey again, and the unmistakable, unmitigated fury in his eyes pinned her to the spot. “Until now,” he said. “My great-great . . . et cetera . . . grandson Nathaniel Summerfield has been suffering for some time now from a slowly deteriorating sense of duty and obligation. Over the years, he has blurred his personal line between right and wrong to the point where it is nearly indistinct. The boy is in terrible danger from himself, and I need for you to go speak with him.”

“Me?” Audrey echoed. “Why me? I don’t even know your great-great-et-cetera grandson.”

“There will be an article about him in tomorrow’s newspaper,” Captain Summerfield told her. “Read it, and everything will be made clear. You must go speak to him directly after reading about him.”

“And tell him what?” Audrey asked. “That his great-great-et-cetera grandfather visited me in a portentous dream and made me go talk to him about his representation in the media?”

Silas Summerfield sighed heavily. “No, Mrs. Magill. Tell him I visited you in a portentous dream and asked you to tell him that he’s in danger of losing his soul.”

“
What?
”

“And that once lost,” the captain continued as if she hadn’t spoken—or, rather, yelled—“his soul will be gone forever.”

“Oh, well, in that case,” Audrey said sarcastically, “he’s sure to listen to every word I say. Then call the guys in the white jackets.”

Silas Summerfield’s expression turned confused. “What men in white jackets?”

“It’s a figure of speech,” Audrey told him.

“Translation?”

“They’d haul me off to the loony bin.” Then, in case that particular phraseology hadn’t been around in the captain’s time, she clarified, “An insane asylum. Madhouse. Bedlam. The place where they put people who see and hear things that aren’t really there.”

He smiled at that. “Ah. Then you shall have to phrase your admonition to my grandson about the loss of his soul in a way that sounds logical and credible.”

“Oh, is that all?” Audrey said. “No problem.”

“Do whatever you have to do, Mrs. Magill,” the captain told her. “Because tomorrow, Nathaniel will enter into a business liaison with a very dangerous man. A criminal. One who surrendered his own soul quite willingly long ago. And the product of this enterprise will completely sever the tenuous hold the boy has left on his soul. You must speak to him, Mrs. Magill, and you must do it tomorrow. Otherwise, the boy will be lost. Forever.”