The horse’s ear-splitting scream overrode Shae and Phillip’s cries of surprise, even the dog’s yelp.
In the wake of that cacophony, a man’s curse caught Phillip’s ear. “Damned nigger-lover, maybe this’ll change yer stubborn mind.”
Phillip scrambled to his feet and stooped to help Shae. She grabbed her moth-eaten carpetbag as he pulled her by the arm. Turning to run with her, he felt sick to see what looked like buckets of bright blood pooling near Cure’s neck. The animal’s legs flailed dangerously as it struggled fruitlessly to rise.
Children’s screams, thin and high-pitched, rent the air. Abandoning bats and balls, they scattered like a handful of dropped marbles. More gunshots followed, and Phillip felt pain tear a path across the top of his left shoulder.
He grabbed Shae’s hand and half-dragged, half-led her behind the corner of the nearest house. The white dog crawled beneath some bushes and whined loudly.
“He’s heading that way! Get him!” A different man’s voice. A different angle.
Phillip realized at least two men were hunting him. His pulse pounded in his ears like the booming of great waves, though his mouth was desert dry.
Women boiled out of doorways, screaming children’s names. In the street, the wounded horse flopped spasmodically, then released a last loud, rattling breath. Despite his own injury, Phillip felt sick at his gelding’s death. Poor Cure the steadfast beast had never done less than his best to please.
“You can’t do this, Father . . .” Her arm pressed against him tightly, Shae moaned and shook her head in disbelief. “No, Father!”
Phillip clapped a hand over her mouth. “Be quiet,” he demanded. “They’ll hear and shoot us. This has nothing to do with your father.”
Shae’s eyes rolled toward him, and she nodded until he removed his hand.
“You’re bleeding,” she said, gesturing toward his shoulder.
“Damn it. And our route home’s cut off.”
Shae glanced over her shoulder, between houses. “Come this way. If you can still run, I know a place where we can hide.”
*
The rude curse at last registered in Shae’s mind. Phillip was right it had not been Father’s voice, thank God. Some other man had called out, “Nigger-lover.”
She recalled overhearing King’s discussion with one of his more loathsome customers. Though she hadn’t recognized the name earlier, she now realized that Phillip Payton Dr.Phillip Payton was the man who had set the dock workers and Port Providence’s men of business on their ears. Despite the public outcry, no amount of pressure had been sufficient to make the young upstart recant.
Normally, she would have paid the gossip little heed. Unrest among the laborers and the politics of the Port Providence Wharf Company bored her. But the pompous customer, a Mr. Ruffin, with his bushy sidewhiskers and his ready leer, sounded so annoyed at this “social reformer masquerading as a businessman” that Shae found herself cheering for whoever had caused the man such trouble.
So Phillip was the one who had stirred up all that commotion. Out of some perversity, she felt gratitude. Gratitude that she was not the only person in this city whose behavior incited turmoil.
Apparently, Phillip’s actions had enraged some mad fool with a gun. Phillip had been hurt already, and there was no reason to believe his attacker wouldn’t shoot again. As long as she remained by his side, she too was in danger. The thought chilled her, but she forced it aside. Phillip hadn’t left her with Ethan; she refused to simply leave him to his fate.
All the while she led him through back alleys between houses, terror nipped at her heels. The thought of someone shooting at their exposed backs made a scream catch in her throat.
Though she tried not to turn her head, she finally peered over her shoulder when Phillip stumbled. Blood soaked the torn edges of fabric at his shoulder. She paused to gently touch the wound.
“It’s all right,” he told her, though he winced at the light pressure.
She could see that he was lying anyway. His pale face contrasted starkly with his dark hair and brows. His hazel eyes looked unfocused.
With shaking hands, she took his handkerchief from his breast pocket and then tucked it into his torn shirt, where he was bleeding. “Here. Hold this with your other hand. To slow the blood. Not too much further.”
He nodded with apparent comprehension and managed one more word. “Where?”
“A friend’s house. Please, you have to move. We can’t stay here.”
Still panting, he nodded and followed her as she ran through another alley that would lead them to the house where Lucius had lived. A large dog barreled toward them, snarling and snapping, until a rope about its neck pulled taut. Its black jaws snapped at empty air.
Shae lurched away from the huge animal, then remembered Jasper. She glanced over her shoulder. The terrier was nowhere in sight. But she could not turn back for him. Not with Phillip bleeding with each step, nor with an armed lunatic somewhere behind them, on the loose.
Shae and Phillip nearly careened into a broad-shouldered youth, who was delivering a block of ice to a scrawny housewife. At their appearance from around a corner, his muscular arms jerked. He lost his grip on the ice tongs, and the block dropped onto his foot.
In their wake, Shae heard him howl with pain and cringed in sympathy and fear. If the gunman followed, the noise would surely draw him.
Another block, and Shae’s cut foot throbbed with every step. Her lungs felt shredded with exertion, and she had never known such exhaustion in her life. Even her arm ached with the effort of dragging Phillip along. At his increased resistance, she slowed to lean against a wooden fence to give them both a chance to catch their breath. Mentally, she counted streets. Which way must she turn?
Phillip panted beside her, gaping like a fresh-caught speckled trout. He looked pale, but the handkerchief beneath his palm seemed to have slowed his blood loss. Too impatient to wait longer, Shae urged him on again.
Luckily, her guess about the street was right. Ahead of them lay the safety of Lucius’s house. Even empty, she still thought of it as shelter.
A few steps from the gate, she froze and looked about. She knew that hours must have passed, but a memory of her father’s violent behavior lingered like a nightmare. Could King be lurking inside, waiting to see if she’d return? Dear God, what a disaster that would be!
But no matter how her father worried her, right now she feared the gunman more. Making her decision, Shae lifted the gate’s latch and led Phillip through the weedy front yard.
“Whose house?” Phillip asked. Nearly breathless, he struggled with even those two words.
“A man I’ve known all my life,” she said, “but he’s not home now.”
She could explain more once they were safe and she saw to Phillip’s wound. Shae rushed up the steps onto the porch where King had slapped her. She grasped the doorknob and rattled it. She cursed her father bitterly for locking up before he’d left here.
“I didn’t think a lady ought to know those words, much less let them pass her lips,” Phillip said over her shoulder.
She whirled to glare at him, but her anger died at the sight of his weak smile. God help him, he was trying to joke. As if some pitiful jest might relieve the horrors of this day.
Feeling more exposed than ever, she led Phillip around the house to the back door. It, too, refused to budge. Jerking it in frustration, she was rewarded by an unexpected click. She leaned into the stuck door and forced it open.
As she preceded Phillip inside, her heart raced like a bird’s. Could King still be inside, waiting for her?
Abandoning her companion, she rushed from room to room until she could assure herself the house was empty. When she returned to the kitchen, she found Phillip in a Windsor chair. He breathed noisily, staring past the mess still on the table. One hand pressed against the handkerchief atop his shoulder.
“I’ll find some clean linens to make a better bandage,” Shae
offered as she laid the carpetbag down on the counter of a cabinet. In less than a minute she returned, carrying a stack of bed sheets that reached to her chin.
When Phillip’s tired gaze met hers, he smiled again. “I thought you were going to bandage me, not mummify me. I don’t think I’m bad enough to warrant that much cloth.”
Shae set the stack down in an empty chair, then gazed at the remnants of the half-eaten food. She tried without success to push aside the thought that it was Lucius’s last meal. “I think I may as well start with your mouth. Come on. Let’s go to the parlor. I’m so tired. I need to sit down, too.”
She walked into the front room, and her gaze settled on the shattered dancer, on the table that still lay on its side. She shuddered, thinking of what might have happened here.
“Come back here instead. I can’t concentrate, if I have to see this.” Shae led him to a small bedroom that Claire had once decorated for visits from occasional guests. A cream-colored, woven spread covered an oak bed with a tall headboard, and a matching highboy completed the set. Shae’s gaze lingered on an oil portrait of a ballerina, one she had painted for the Olivers last Christmas. Claire and Lucius had been so happy then. Now it seemed a thousand years ago.
“Yours?” Phillip asked, guessing.
She nodded.
“It’s extraordinary.” He leaned forward, as if trying to memorize each detail. Caught forever in a pirouette, the dancer looked away, apparently absorbed by her own efforts.
Shae nodded stiffly, embarrassed as always by attention to her art. Then she gestured toward the bed.
Phillip sat down on it. Shae hesitated for a moment, until exhaustion convinced her to ignore her misgivings and sit down as well.
“Before you start, is there someone we could trust to take a message?” Phillip asked.
“I’m afraid that I don’t know the neighbors, but I do have a velocipede stored out back. Maybe I could slip out later,” Shae said. “Now let me see this.”
Phillip peeled away the handkerchief and peered grimly at his wound. “You might have been right about bandaging my mouth. That’s what got me into this mess in the first place.”
“Really? From the little that I heard, I thought it might have been convictions. Here, let me have a look at that.” Shae helped him remove his jacket, which he accomplished with a groan. She draped it over one of the sofa’s overstuffed arms.
“I still can’t see it well enough. Take off your shirt, too,” she ordered.
His gaze, dark and intent, sought hers and held it. Shae could no more look away than the sea could escape the moon’s allure.
“The bullet only cut across it,” Phillip said after a pause just long enough to qualify as awkward. “Let’s not get hysterical.”
“Who’s hysterical?” she snapped. “Don’t you think we ought to see the damage? Or are you afraid of me? Do you think a ‘woman of my type’ simply pounces upon any exposed male flesh?”
His laughter, the spark in those hazel eyes, made her unreasonably angry. Damn his arrogance!
Even as the thought slid through her tired mind, Shae knew she was wrong. But right now she didn’t give a tinker’s damn. She could be right later, or fair to him, at least. For now, she only wanted out of all this, this entanglement with problems other than her own, this preposterous attraction at the very worst of times.
“Come now, Dr. Payton. Surely a man of your training knows this is necessary.”
His expression darkened. “Not ‘Doctor,’ please, Shae. That portion of my life is over.”
At her nod, Phillip unbuttoned his shirt and slipped it off. The appeal of his bare chest, surprisingly well-muscled with its scant curls of dark hair, was barely offset by the bloody gash across the top of his left shoulder. Shae’s fingers ached to touch, to comfort him.
Or was other than compassion stirring in her? She felt too aware of their closeness, of the fact that they were alone in a bedroom. Her imagination drew a ragged shudder from her body.
“It looks that bad?” Phillip asked.
She had never felt such relief to be misunderstood. With a quick bob of her head, she answered, “That’s going to be sore. Let me clean this and see if I can make an alum paste to stop the bleeding.”
She retrieved a bowl of water from the kitchen.Phillip hissed through his teeth as Shae began to clean the wound.
“I’m sorry. We could try witch hazel, or I’m certain that Claire had some laudanum.”
“Had?”
Shae nodded. “She died about a month ago. A cancer. Luciusher husband”
She couldn’t say it, couldn’t say that he’d died, too, just yesterday. Not in this room, with the crushed porcelain dancer still lying on the floor. But Shae’s face betrayed her; her lips quivered like a baby’s, and in a moment the heavy seas inside her burst through the levee of control. She turned her head as if to hide her tears, as if the choked sounds in her throat could be anything but weeping.
His arms encircled her, and she was conscious of his bare flesh against her body, yet too miserable to focus on anything but grief. For a few moments, at least. Then she carefully tucked in the shredded remnants of her emotions and pulled herself from his embrace.
“I’m sorry.” Her voice sounded rusty, as if the outburst had taken place long, silent weeks ago. “I should be helping you. You’ve been shot, for heaven’s sake.”
His hand reached out and stroked her hair just once before he drew away. “Cut a bit. That’s all. I’ll be fine. Now tell me. I have a feeling whatever it is that’s troubling you is as bad as being shot at. What’s happened to your friend? The table’s down, there are shards all over, and the kitchen looks like someone left it in a hurry.”
She worked on his wound without speaking for a while, as she struggled to frame her fear in words, and to balance her family shame with a need for respite. It had been so long since she’d had anyone to speak to openly that she wasn’t certain how to go about the task. She almost wished instead that she had a wound to show him, or that she could craft some symbol for him, an artifact of pain.
Yes, an artifact. Once he was cleaned and bandaged, sitting before her as patient as a Buddha, she retrieved her carpetbag, withdrew the cameo, and showed him.
“This was my mother’s,” she explained.
He touched it reverently. “It’s lovely.”
“Someone left it for me yesterday. Yesterday . . . but it seems so much longer. I think that Lucius did it, because my father fired him. He was our bookkeeper.”
“Why would he have it in the first place?” Phillip asked.
Shae shrugged. “I wanted to I needed to ask that, but I couldn’t come here right away. There were so many questions, hard questions that I’ve been keeping inside for so long. I confronted Aunt Alberta first.”
“Judging from the one time that I met her, that couldn’t have been easy.”
“You’re right. She wouldn’t answer me. And then I saw these.” Shae pointed out the brown flecks in the filigree. “Do you think do you think they could be blood?”
Phillip stared hard, as if he were at least considering the possibility. She felt weak with gratitude. For so long, she’d been dismissed by King, by Aunt Alberta, even by Ethan when it mattered.
“I can’t tell. It could be, or it could be old dirt, even flecks of paint.”
Shae couldn’t look at him as she put her worst fear into words. “I think he might have killed my mother.”
“This Lucius? This friend?” Phillip asked.
She shook her head. “My father.”
Phillip looked stunned, yet relief flooded through her. She had finally put this terror into words and told someone. It felt as though a glowing coal had burned inside her heart, and now she was passing it to Phillip. She was so relieved to be free of the secret’s heat, it took her several long moments to find her voice once more.
Phillip didn’t speak, as if he sensed she wasn’t finished. Or as if he were too astonished to
form words.
“When I finally got the courage to come see Lucius about the necklace this morning, he was gone,” she said. “And then my father came here. He said that Lucius died last evening. King claimed he thought it was his heart.”
“Oh, Shae . . .”
“I was so upset. I accused my father of killing him because he sent me the cameo. Of killing Mother, too.”
“Good Lord. What did he say?”
“He hit me . . . and then I ran away and went to Ethan. I needed to find out how Lucius really died, and I needed help.” She dropped her gaze, ashamed of her decision. “I wanted to find you, but I was too frightened too shy, I suppose. I know it must sound foolish, but I didn’t think I had another choice except to go to him.”
She didn’t protest as he wrapped his arms around her once again. It felt so good to lean into his strength.
*
When a man was violently attacked, his mind did strange things. Phillip knew that from his brief career in medicine. He’d seen men do all sorts of foolish things just after being stitched up from a fight. Some grew belligerent, some pensive, others tearful. But he felt nothing but relief. Relief he had escaped with Shae, so he could help her to face this. As he held her, protectiveness surged through him, edged him past the burning pain.
“You’ll never have to go to him again,” he promised. “To either Ethan or your father. I swear it.”
“You’re right. I won’t.” She moved away from him and scooped the cameo into her hand, then wrapped her fingers around it tightly. “I’m going to find out what really happened. I’ll check first at the infirmary. I have to know how Lucius died. And if my father’s lying, I don’t care what becomes of me. I’m going to make him pay for taking Mother from me.”
“I’ll help you, Shae. I promise.”
“You don’t have enough troubles of your own?”
He shrugged, a careless gesture that hurt enough to make his breath catch in his throat. When he recovered, he said, “You at least have some idea what to do with yours.”
Night Winds Page 13