Morning Song
Page 27
Jessie realized that there was a great deal about Stuart's life before he came to Mimosa that she didn't know.
There were women in the room, Jessie saw, perhaps half a dozen or so, and such women! Dressed in sumptuous gowns of silk and satin that made hers look positively Quakerish, they laughed and tossed back drinks just like the men at the close of a hand, and stood quietly behind the tables during play. Jessie watched them with some interest, wondering if they were females of ill repute. Surely not, but they were certainly very bold in the way they behaved.
Stuart seemed to have some difficulty with his scarred hand when it was his turn to shuffle the cards and deal. Jessie realized that the wound had affected the dexterity of the muscles controlling his fingers to some small but telling degree. He compensated for the injury by holding his cards in his injured hand and making most of the moves necessary for the game with the other. But the cramped position required for him to hold the cards must nave strained the muscles, because about half an hour 298
into the game he unobtrusively transferred the cards he was holding to his other hand, and dropped his injured hand below the level of the table. For a moment he flexed his fingers, stretching them wide; then he shook his hand vigorously. Jessie's first instinct was to catch that hand and massage away the spasm in the muscles as she had done once before, but even as the thought occurred to her, she realized that he wouldn't appreciate her mollycoddling in front of a roomful or strangers. So she sat back, and seconds later he resumed play, with no one save herself as witness to the small byplay with his hand.
"You have an ace up your sleeve." The comment, made by Stuart, was very quiet, but there was an edge to it that immediately brought Jessie's wandering attention back to him. He was addressing the man directly across the table, who at that point seemed to have most of the money in the game piled in front of him. As he spoke, Stuart's face was the hard, expressionless mask that she had seen maybe once or twice before. He looked like a different man from the laughing lover of just a few hours before, and Jessie felt her stomach tighten. When Stuart looked like that, there was trouble coming.
"The hell I do!"
"Shake out your sleeve."
The two other men at the table were dividing suspicious glances between Stuart and his opponent.
"I didn't see no cheatin'," the man Stuart had first addressed—
Harris, Jessie thought his name was—said testily.
"I did." Stuart's voice was icy, his eyes cold as they fixed on the man he accused. "You can always prove me wrong. Shake out your sleeve."
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"Won't hurt to do that," Harris said, as if reasoning it out. The third man nodded, but the man Stuart accused of cheating jumped suddenly to his feet.
"Don't nobody accuse me of cheatin'!" he bellowed, fumbling at his belt. Jessie bit back a scream as Stuart leaped up, diving across the table to catch the man's hand and twist it. A knife clattered to the floor. Then, still holdig the man's hand in a grip that caused an expression of agony to twist his mouth, Stuart unfastened the man's cuff and gave his arm a shake.
A card fluttered out to land facedown beside the knife on the floor.
"By gum, he was cheatin'! We owe you one, sir!" Stuart bent, scooped up the knife and the card, which was the ace of hearts, then released his victim's hand. Red-faced, the man backed away from the table, turned, and swiftly left the room.
"How'd you know? I didn't see a thing!"
With an assessing glance at Jessie, which apparently told him that she was holding up as well as could be expected, Stuart resumed his seat.
"I've played a few hands of cards in my time," he said by way of an answer. He and the two remaining players retrieved their money from the pot, and split the cheater's leavings between them as matter-of-factly as if that was the way it was supposed to be done—and for all Jessie knew, it might have been. A man who'd been standing beside the door apparently watching for an opening walked up to the table.
"Looks like you could use a fourth."
"Got a thousand?" It was apparently Harris's favorite line.
"Sure do."
"Have a seat."
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Cards were reshuffled and redealt, and the play was just getting under way again when a woman came rustling toward the table. Stuart's nose was buried in his hand, but Jessie, with nothing else to do, watched her come. She was smiling broadly, a voluptuous woman with most of her considerable charms on display.
"Clive!" she exclaimed when she was close enough, and came around the table toward Stuart, who finally looked up. "Clive McClintock, as I live and breathe! Where've you been hiding yourself, sugar?"
"Good God," Stuart said, staring at her. "Luce!"
XL
Clive's first crazy instinct was to be glad to see her. Luce was an old friend from the days when he'd been riding high as one of the best riverboat gamblers around; one, moreover, for whom he had a certain soft spot. But as he started to get to his feet to envelop her in a big hug, he remembered Jessie, sitting so primly quiet behind him. His jaw clenched with trepidation, and he regarded Luce with as much horror as he would have a scorpion crawling out from between his cards.
He could have pretended not to know her, of course, but he'd said her name in his first surprise, and anyway, Jessie for all her youth was no fool. It was pretty obvious from the way Luce swooped to plant a smacking kiss on his mouth that they were well acquainted. Clive endured the kiss because he didn't know what else to do, while the skin between his shoulder blades tingled as he imagined Jessie's eyes boring into him. 301
Then it hit him. Luce had called him Clive. He hadn't even caught it at first, had been mainly worried about Jessie's reaction to encountering one of his previous mistresses. He'd been feeling like Clive, like himself, since he'd made the decision just that afternoon to beat those laughing gods at their own game by throwing their munificent gift of riches back
in their teeth. He was sick and tired" of playing at being Stuart Edwards, who'd been a back-stabbing thief and a general nogood, from everything he'd been able to discover. Money, as he was certainly not the first man to learn to his cost, was not everything, or even the most important thing. The green-as-grass chit sitting behindhim was that.
He'd meant to tell her, he really had, but he'd thought he'd introduce her gradually to the idea that he was not quite what she thought him. First he'd warm her up to the intricacies of loving so that she'd be as hot for him as he was for her, and at the same time introduce her a little to the life he'd led before, so that when he revealed the truth—that he just happened to be Clive McClintock, river rat and former gambler, instead of Stuart Edwards, scion of the South Carolina Edwardses and heir to Tulip Hill-it would not come as such a shock.
Still, he had not anticipated the denouement with much pleasure. And now here it was thrust upon him with no time to prepare at all.
"I see your hand healed pretty well." Luce was beaming at him. Clive put his cards down on the table and got slowly to his feet. He was scared to look behind him, scared of what he'd see on Jessie's face, so he looked at Luce instead.
"It healed," he agreed in a hollow voice, then nodded at the men with whom he'd been playing. "Sorry, gentlemen, I'm out." 302
Picking up his money, he tucked it carefully into the pocket of his waistcoat. Then, and only then, did he turn to look at Jessie. She was wide-eyed and pale, sitting there as if Luce's advent had frozen her to the chair. Except for the fiery glints in the masses of hair she wore piled on top of her head, and the dark slashes of her brows above those big-as-boulders eyes, she could have been carved from white marble. Not a vestige of color remained in her cheeks.
"Jess." His voice was not his own. It sounded more like it should have belonged to a croaking frog—or the quaking coward that Clive McClintock had never, until this moment, been.
"Oh, Lord, Clive, am I causing you problems?" Luce sounded half amused, half rueful as she looked from his face to Jessie and back.
"Clive?" she said then. "Clive?"
"What's wrong with her?" Luce asked, puzzled. "She sounds like she don't know your name."
"Clive?" Jessie's voice was rising. Clive moved swiftly then, not oblivious to the attention they were starting to attract, but not concerned with it, either. He reached Jessie's side, tried to take her arm. She shook him off, took a step back, and looked at him as if she'd never seen him before in her life.
"Clive?" His name, now carrying an undercurrent of rage, seemed to be all she was able to say.
"I can explain, Jess." The words were feeble even to his own ears, and he was not surprised when she disregarded him to focus those huge eyes on Luce.
"His name is Clive? Clive-McClintock?"
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Luce turned swiftly to Clive. Luce was a good friend, she wouldn't want to cause trouble for him if she could help it, but she was clearly in a quandary. Clive shrugged helplessly. There was no way now to make the truth easier for Jessie to hear. Taking that shrug as permission to agree, Luce nodded. Her face was a study in fascination as she looked from Clive to Jessie again.
"Have you known him long?"
Clive didn't try to stop Jessie's questions. As Shakespeare—or somebody—had once said, the truth will out. And it was coming out now with a vengeance, far beyond his ability to contain it or even lessen the damage.
Again Luce looked at Clive for guidance. When none was forthcoming, she answered uneasily, "About ten years.''
"You've known Clive McClintock for about ten years." It was a statement, not a question. If possible, Jessie went even paler than before. "But you haven't seen him for a few months, have you?
Since right after he hurt his hand?"
"That's right." Luce sounded almost as puzzled as she was intrigued.
"So who," Jessie said, getting to the meat of the problem, her eyes swinging from Luce to Clive at last, "is Stuart Edwards? Or did you just make him up?"
The last was a sibilant hiss.
"No, I . . ." For once in his life Clive was fumbling for words. But Luce, getting into the spirit of things, answered for him. Clive winced.
"Stuart Edwards? Wasn't that the name of that thief you killed?
Oh, did you ever get your money back?"
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"You cheating—lying—fornicating—bastard." Jessie wasn't even shouting. Her fists were clenched at her sides, her eyes blazed fury at him, but her voice was scarcely louder than a whisper for all it flailed him with the stinging lash of a whip. The room had gone completely silent as one pair of eyes after another had become aware of the diversion going on in their midst. Neither Jessie nor Clive noticed that they had a large, and fascinated, audience. Luce did, but being the center of attention had never bothered her.
"You lied to us all from the beginning! Everyone— Celia—
Miss Flora and Miss Laurel—and me!" "Jessie. I know it sounds bad, but—" "Sounds bad!" She laughed then, a high, hysterical titter that alarmed Clive. She looked on the verge of hysterics, with her eyes grown black as coals and glittering in that paperwhite face, and her neck stretched high above tense shoulders so that the cords in it stood out visibly. Memories of other hysterical women he had seen, hooting in grating peals of laughter before dissolving into mindless shrieks, caused the hairs on the back of Clive's neck to rise. He had to get Jessie out of here, get her someplace where he could talk to her, force her if need be to listen to reason. What he'd done sounded bad, he agreed, but once he'd explained it all, surely she'd see that it wasn't nearly as terrible as it sounded. He hoped.
"I can explain," he said again, feebly. And again she laughed. There was nothing for it but to take her back to their cabin, sit her down on the bed, and spell things out for her. He was pretty sure that what was making her so mad was the fear that, if he had lied about everything else, he had lied about loving her, too. Even if nothing much else he'd told her was, that particular statement was the truth.
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"Come on, Jessie. We need to talk," he said, hoping to head off her impending explosion with his own calm reasonableness, and took her arm again.
Jessie looked down at his large bronzed hand on her bare white skin as if it were a copperhead ready to bite her.
"Don't you ever," she said distinctly as she jerked her arm free of his touch, "lay a hand on me again."
Then she turned on her heel and started toward the door. A wild chorus of cheers and clapping broke out amongst the onlookers to mark her progress. If Jessie heard them, she ignored them magnificently, sweeping toward the door with as much stateliness as a queen. For the first time noticing his audience more than vaguely, Clive felt the urge to preserve as much of his masculine dignity as he could. Taking care that Jessie didn't see, he shrugged as if to say, "Women!" and followed her toward the door.
She had almost reached it, and he had almost caught up with her, when she suddenly turned on him. Her eyes blazed with fury, and her body quivered with it. She was so angry that even her hair seemed to throw off sparks.
"You lowlife scum," she hissed through clenched teeth. Then, before Clive had the least inkling as to what she was about, she drew back one clenched fist and launched a roundhouse punch that caught him squarely on his unsuspecting nose.
It was a punch worthy of a champion. Clive howled and staggered a pace backward, his hand flying to his injured nose, which felt as if it might be broken. When he took his hand away, he saw to his disbelief that his fingers were covered in blood. Jessie had already turned her back on him and sailed out the door. The onlookers were shouting with laughter, hooting at him 306
and bombarding him with snippets of mostly obscene advice that he didn't even register. Luce laughed, too, although she tried not to show it as she hurried to his aid. With a shake of his head and a swipe at his bleeding nose, Clive shrugged aside her offer of assistance. He had more important things to worry about at the moment than a bloody nose, such as shaking some much-needed sense into Jessie.
In hitting him, Clive realized, Jessie had really done him a favor. He was no longer quite the cringing penitent he'd been just moments before. His own temper was starting to heat. He'd be damned if he would put up with much more in the way of abuse from a wet-behind-the-ears snip of a girl!
As he stalked out the door in Jessie's wake, he caught one final contribution to the general hilarity.
"Round one to the lady!" some wag cackled. Clive gritted his teeth. Somewhere, he knew, the gods were laughing again. He could almost hear their raucous chuckles at his expense.
XLI
Jessie slammed the door to her cabin, turned the key in the lock, and leaned against it, still in shock. Rage bubbled like boiling liquid in her veins, but overriding that and every other emotion was sheer, quivering disbelief. The man she had loved had never even existed. Stuart Edwards was no more than a role Clive McClintock had assumed to gain control of Mimosa. And Clive McClintock was a slimy, low-down confidence man whose 307
business it was to take advantage of everyone with whom he came into contact, including herself.
In short, she'd been had, in more ways than one.
A brisk rap made her jump away from the door and turn to survey it as if it had suddenly come alive and tried to bite her.
"Jessie. Let me in."
How dared he even foul her name with his mouth! Jessie glared at that closed panel as if her eyes could bore right through it and stab him.
"Jessie. Open the door. Please."
Hah! It was all she could do not to say it aloud, but she refused to give him the satisfaction of exchanging so much as another word with her. She was going home, home to Mimosa and people who were what they seemed whether they all loved her or not, as soon as the blasted boat touched dry land again. As for him—Jessie would take great pleasure in trumpeting his infamy to the skies! If he ever dared to show his face
in the Yazoo Valley again, he'd be lucky not to be run out of there on a rail!
"Jessie. I mean it. Unlock this door!"
So he thought he could still give her orders and have her obey, eh? Was he in for a shock! The man she obeyed was the man she had looked up to with sickening adoration, and that man was not Clive McClintock, curse the name!
"Jessica!" The knob rattled. A sneer curled Jessie's lip.
"Damn it, Jess!" The knob rattled again. "If you don't open this damned door right now, I'll break it down!
His voice was getting progressively angrier. So Clive McClintock was upset that his little game had been disclosed before he was quite done playing, was he? Jessie wondered what his next step would have been. After seducing and ruining her, 308
would he have abandoned her somewhere and gone back to Mimosa to play at being Stuart Edwards until it no longer suited him? Or had he looted the plantation of its operating cash and the profit from the cotton before leaving, intending all along not to go back, but rather to live high on the hog on Mimosa's money until he could locate another victim?
There was a thud, and the door shook as if he'd thrown his shoulder against it. Eyes widening, Jessie took another step backward as she realized that he truly meant to break down the door. On the third try the lock broke and the door crashed back on its hinges, leaving Clive McClintock looming large and threatening in the frame. For just a moment he was a darker shape against the gathering night beyond, and then he was strolling almost casually into the cabin. Annoyingly, he didn't even seem out of breath.
"Get out of here!" Jessie hissed at him. He didn't so much as look at her as he gently closed the damaged door behind him. With its lock broken, it immediately swung open again. Crossing the room with a purposeful stride that made Jessie jump out of his way, he picked up the chair that was his objective and set it beneath the knob, this time effectively closing the door. "Get out of here or I'll scream!" "I wouldn't do that if I were you." There was the slightest edge to his voice.