River Magic

by Martha Hix

  Antoinette Lawrence strolled in, turning her breathtaking face from one arguer to the other. “What’s all the racket?”

  The cogs in India’s brain turned. Something Granny Mabel had advised before she’d set out on her journey came to the fore. If you can’t get in the front door, try the back. The beauty had possibilities as an ally in the cause of saving lives.

  The troublemaker clamped herself to the Lawrence niece. “Shouldn’t we rush, Miss Lawrence? Else we’ll miss the recital. Pity your aunt can’t join us.”

  “Aunt Opal wouldn’t get the full benefit. And you’re right, Miss Marshall, we should take to my buggy.”

  As Antoinette went to call for her conveyance, and as the supposed sanitarian tied a bonnet under her chin to ready for departure, Connor took pleasure in goading the petite Miss Marshall. “So much for worrying about the fate of fresh-faced lads?”

  Her nose lifted to a contemptuous angle, and without a word of reply, she swept down the front steps.

  Connor O’Brien had an urge to expose India Marshall as an impostor, if not a traitor. Yet . . . forever drawn to the wrong sort of woman, he itched to find out what sort of woman lay beneath that gray wig and that nettlesome veneer of supposedly aging sanitarian.

  He had plans, but they had to wait until Roscoe Lawrence’s missus retired to her rooms on the ground floor. Once he felt comfortable with snooping, he rummaged through India Marshall’s second-floor bedroom.

  The Persian cat had curled her white self amid a bag of yarn. Amelia paid no mind to Connor. He took his time milling through the peace dove’s stuff.

  Atop the bureau was a bottle of lavender water. Lifting the stopper, he took a whiff. Too strong. It smelled better on the mysterious Miss Marshall. Lavender. A favorite fragrance, thanks to Aunt Tessa making it her choice in scents after bringing back a case from southern France, going on four years ago. To Connor, lavender meant ladylike. Ladylike Aunt Tessa.

  His aunt had brought home more than perfume from her Grand Tour. She’d arrived with an unlikely suitor and a brass oil lamp, both of which she treasured.

  Enough about Aunt Tessa.

  He got back to meddling. It didn’t take long to discover a pistol tucked in Miss Marshall’s valise. An Adams revolver, double action, five shot it was. Even though carried by many soldiers from both North and South, the pistol wasn’t army issue.

  At that moment, the Persian crawled out of her makeshift bed to twine her abundantly haired body around Connor’s ankle.

  “Amelia, ladies carry derringers. Something else—since when have doves of peace come out firing?”

  Palming the Adams, Connor longed to take it outdoors for a try. He even walked to the window to gaze upon the frozen waters, the towns of Davenport, and Rock Island glittering like diamond necklaces along the banks of the great river.

  “I won’t be firing the Adams, Amelia. Gunfire’s forbidden hereabouts. It gets the citizenry of the cities that buttress this island to thinking the Rebs are rioting.”

  He couldn’t even saddle his warhorse, Intrepid, for a good ride, the island being too small to give a horse its head. “This was a helluva mess I’ve gotten into.”

  He looked to the low lights radiating from the stockade. A high fence surrounded it, with a deep trench inside serving as dead line, the point no prisoner should cross. “This island isn’t simply their prison. It’s mine, too.”

  For the sake of petty delight, the colonel would no doubt squelch any orders to send Connor O’Brien back to the battlefield, and would do it while in Washington.

  Lawrence despised his second in command, and had since the first time they met. Connor figured it all had to do with money. The colonel, reared in rusticating environs, had been given no privileges such as Connor had taken for granted. He scorned anyone with wealth, or came from it.

  Especially having it in for West Pointers, Lawrence had scars on his hands from clawing his way to the eagles of a colonel. Those scars were old. Were gotten in the war with Mexico. Like Connor, he’d been cordoned off to run a prison camp.

  Yet Lawrence didn’t recognize the similarities between himself and his subordinate. All his eyes could see were the O’Brien family successes and the supposed largesse it brought, such as fine uniforms and an even finer mount for an O’Brien army man. Connor bought his own clothes and horseflesh.

  Even if he couldn’t be a soldier in combat, Connor played a prideful role. He liked uniforms tailor-made, and his horse of finest Arabian stock, albeit he’d chosen a brown over a white for tactical purposes. That his expenditures saved the government money ought to appeal to Lawrence’s miserly streak, but the colonel’s eyesight was, after all, cupped by blinders.

  Connor turned back to the valise and replaced the Adams. His Scots-Irish upbringing having introduced predestination, he knew God’s Will be done. “Rock Island is my lot. I must learn to accept it.”

  It certainly wasn’t how he’d planned it.

  As a youth, Connor had dreamed of following in his father’s boots to a career in the U.S. Army. He’d graduated first in his class at West Point. Afterward, he’d made an easy climb to major, had served with valor and honor in the early battles of the war, and had been decorated for that service. The Army was his life, his manna. That hadn’t changed, even after Gettysburg.

  Unlike Daniel O’Brien, Connor would never step out of his chosen footwear. “I will die a soldier with my boots on.”

  Amelia abandoned him, just as his meteoric rise in career was over. Be that as it may, and despite crossed swords with his commander, Major Connor O’Brien remained stalwart in his devotion to the military. Somehow, someway, he’d rise from disgrace.

  He now inspected a couple of small pots. “Ashes and charcoal, face paint of a sort,” he said to Amelia. “India Marshall should’ve been more prudent in hiding her telling gear.”

  A nightgown pulled from the valise, he laid the frogged garment across his trigger finger, then crooked a thumb beneath a long black hair that clung to the material. “So,” he murmured, “India Marshall is a brunette.”

  And this wasn’t much of a nightgown. “Certainly not the kind favored by older women in a cold climate.”

  Silken and short in the Oriental fashion, it promised seduction. The idea of seducing the mysterious Miss Marshall, provided she didn’t resemble Winfield Scott under her disguise, warmed Connor’s loins. With his mind racing along lines of finding out just how shapely her figure was, he tucked the garment away and got on with his search.

  He had just laid aside Arabian Nights Entertainment when India Marshall’s voice—no longer old-sounding—echoed through her bedchamber. “Jumping Jehoshaphat! What are you doing, man?”

  On an about-face Connor laid his wrist atop the hilt of his saber. She whipped off her cape, slammed the door behind her and charged forward. His eyes cruising up and down the drably frocked yet shapely form of Miss India Marshall, who hiccuped and expelled a spirits-soaked breath, he drawled, “It’s my thirtieth birthday. I’m wanting a present.”

  Three

  He wanted a birthday present?

  Jumping Jehoshaphat!

  In a casual pose running counter to his bizarre request, Connor O’Brien stood dressed in Union Army regalia sans a tasseled hat. All was challenge. Hiccuping, India heaved her chin way up to look the major straight in his sharp hazel eyes. There was nothing casual about the tall Yankee from Dixie who had a hard glint in those eyes.

  Her heart tripped. Did he know all about her? Had telegrams flashed between here and Washington?

  Gads. He wouldn’t sashay over and yank her wig off, then double over laughing as her nephew Catfish had done. Would he?

  Don’t be ridiculous.

  Filled with Dutch courage, thanks to sneaking elderberry wine at the voice recital, India had even more pluck than usual. She made a stab at joking, but even flubbed that. “Get out of my bedroom, Major, else I’ll hit you with my puss. I mean, purse.”

  “I’m not budging
until I get my birthday present.”

  India may have been filled with wine, but she wasn’t too inebriated to reason the humorless major wasn’t here for a necktie and a few jolly birthday spanks.

  He knows. But what could he prove, right? She rather doubted he’d had time, since she’d caught him red-handed, to fire off a telegram to Washington to get the inside facts on one India Marshall. You should’ve called yourself some fake name.

  Unworkable. Once, as a girl, she’d decided she hated her peculiar name and wanted to be addressed as Agnes, a common enough appellation. Trouble was, each time one of her siblings used the moniker, India forgot to give attention, so her real name had to work now.

  She lifted her nose at the intruder. Forward the Light Brigade! “Young man, you’ve a nerve, searching my room and demanding a gift.”

  “I wouldn’t throw a man’s nerve up to him, if I were you.”

  “Since you barged into my bedchamber,” she said, hoping for the upper hand and sailing on the wine’s effects, “you might’ve thrown fire in the coal. I mean, coal in the fire. Fireplace.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “Yes, clever sir, I am.” But not pickled enough, probably. She didn’t need spirits for spirit. Her now-departed mother had many times accused her of already having a tongue as loose as a dipsomaniac’s.

  Stalking toward the bureau, she placed her cape, gloves, and reticule atop it. Her gaze faltered on a fragment of lavender silk peeping from Granny Mabel’s old valise. Uh, oh.

  Drat that nightgown! That awful, telling slip of silk that Papa had brought Mama from the Orient in ’59, and India’s younger sister, Persia, had forced into the portmanteau “just in case you need it.” India had tried to discard the garment while traveling west from the last prison scoured, but the conductor had been too good at his job.

  “Take off your clothes.”

  Sobering somewhat, she whirled around to Connor O’Brien. His arms were now folded over his chest. And he meant business.

  “I beg your pardon,” she protested, sputtering.

  Lowering his arms, he stepped toward her; his determined stride displayed an aristocratic bearing. There was nothing “white trash” about him, which she’d known, even when she had tried earlier to put him in his place.

  Tim Glennie had said an Irish surname didn’t bespeak the blue-blooded—neither did her own stock, truth be known. Tim, before joining forces with the Confederates, claimed the Irish were as sophisticated as the Acadians of South Louisiana. But then, Tim Glennie had said a lot of things.

  “Do it.” Connor O’Brien nudged his dark head. “Strip.”

  “Pervert! You dare order a woman old enough to be your mother to do such a thing?” She must cease the frontal attack. “I’ll just forget you asked. No need to feel embarrassed about your little slip, Sonny. I won’t tell, if you won’t.”

  Nothing worked with him.

  “I said, strip.”

  “I could scream bloody murder.”

  “Go ahead. Scream,” he taunted. “But what good will it do? Corporal Smith is in his quarters, and Mrs. Lawrence, well, I wouldn’t count on her, if I were you.”

  “You’re a bully.”

  “What are you?” His baritone lowered. “What exactly?”

  “You know who I am. A nurse and sanitarian with the Commission.”

  “You take me for a fool.”

  India took a backward step. Should she try to get the pistol? No. The last thing she needed was to have the United States Army after her for making a sieve out of one of its puppets-of-the-bayonet.

  What should she do? She extended her palm and shoved splayed fingers toward the advancing major. His lofty height went a long way in intimidating her. He was so tall, she so short. He could overpower her. Easily.

  She might be the most reckless of the Marshall daughters and surviving son, but there were limits. “Stay back, Major. I can kick like a mule.”

  The fingers of his left hand closed around her wrist, and a quiver of excitement went through her veins. “What’s this?”

  She glanced at the white circles of flesh where snake fangs had gouged her arm. “The reason I never go swimming.”

  “I’m not talking about the scar. I’m talking about the youthful appearance of your hand. If you’re going to masquerade as your own grandmother, you ought to wear gloves.”

  She couldn’t knit with her hands covered, had needed to keep busy this afternoon. Right now, she needed refuge from this interrogator. “Save your advice,” she ordered, too breathily.

  “You smell better in lavender than in wine.”

  “You’d smell better from a distance of a hundred miles.”

  “You’ve got a sharp tongue.”

  “Leave if you don’t like it.”

  “I never said I didn’t like it.”

  The air became close, too close, in the chilled room, and her heart thumped as his gaze raked her. Staring up, she noticed the only mars to his face. Two pockmarks. One on the forehead, the other at his left cheekbone. Even they gave him a certain attractiveness. As a woman of ordinary appearance, India had forever admired beauty in others.

  His princely lips twitched. “If you won’t take off your clothes, I’ll peel them away.”

  Forward as he was, inebriated as she was, she somehow dreaded his insistence less than she feared her own reaction. Be he beauty or beast, Major Connor O’Brien epitomized the vanquishing-warrior style of manliness, and her preference in gentlemen did, she thought again, run toward poetry readers.

  “Let’s start with your spectacles,” he said.

  “What are you intending to do? Exactly. Molest me?”

  “No. I want only the truth.”

  “Is this the way you go after it, by demanding a defenseless lady disrobe? Don’t disgrace your uniform.”

  “We’ll talk about character later. For now . . . who do you think you’re fooling by dressing up like this?” His thumb slid along her cheek, taking a smudge as it went. “Do you think this prison is guarded by blind men? I guarantee my eyesight is perfect. I see right through you.”

  She could explain, but wouldn’t, even though she objected to his assumption. Her disguise was pretty darned good. Anyway, what else could she have done? She couldn’t masquerade as a soldier, not with an overripe bosom and even more overripe behind. No one would ever call her “lad.”

  Nevertheless, India accepted the futility of perpetrating her facade, especially after forgetting to use the old-lady voice upon catching sight of the major. “You’re the first person to question my appearance.”

  “Perhaps I’m the first person in a position to protest.” He lifted her plain-lens spectacles away, tossing them to the counterpane. “You don’t have an old woman’s eyes. Behind your makeup, you have the eyes of a vibrant young woman.” His voice softened. “You have lovely eyes, India Marshall. Exotic eyes. Indigo flecked with lavender. They’re too lovely to hide.”

  Lovely eyes? As the plainest amongst four living sisters, India was new to flattery, and it got to her. She had to seal her lips to keep from grinning.

  “What do you have under this wig?” he asked.

  He pulled it away; the fresh air felt good to her scalp. And he didn’t Catfish-laugh.

  “I knew you were a brunette. Let’s see what we can do about this hair. It’s all plastered to your head.”

  India grimaced. There were more facets to humiliation than a scamp nephew’s out-and-out belly roll. None of her sisters would ever be accused of having flat hair. They were a brunette lot, the Marshall offspring, thanks to Papa’s part-Arabic lineage, but only India had been cursed with Granny Mabel Mathews’s baby-fine English hair. While it curled, it had no body whatsoever and hung in clumps, unless Sister Persia or their grandmother put their magical fingers to work on it. They, alas, were on the southern stretch of the Mississippi River, not up here in Yankeeland.

  And O’Brien’s reaction hurt worse than the memory of a twelve-year-old makin
g fun of his spinsterly aunt as she had tested her stores of disguise.

  The major began to comb fingers through the flat mass. Another quiver ran through her. Would that her hair could spill lushly and heavenly . . .

  Forget eyes and hair and kinfolk.

  Her ruse was coming unraveled.

  “Take your hands off my person, Major O’Brien.” She stepped back. “You needn’t undress me. You’ll get your truth.”

  Triumph jumped into his heavenly eyes. “I’m waiting.”

  “The Sanitary Commission refuses to allow spinsters under thirty to volunteer for field duty. Washington wants no distractions to fighting men.”

  This was a truth, and from the ease in his tense stance, he seemed to accept it. Or at least to doubt his conclusion.

  “I had to dress this way,” she added, “else they would’ve run me off like I was a polecat invading a chicken yard.”

  He twirled the gray wig on a forefinger, then threw the fakery atop her spectacles. “Let’s see your orders, Miss Marshall. Now.”

  She pulled an official-looking document from her reticule. “Signed and sealed by Surgeon General William A. Hammond.”

  The major scanned the parchment, then refolded it. “Colonel Lawrence has gone to Washington to parlay with the War Department. Until his return, Rock Island Prison Camp will retain its status quo. There will be no inspections by outsiders, even those representing the Sanitary Commission.”

  Wait until Colonel Lawrence’s return? India wouldn’t, just couldn’t. Fresh from Washington, he might know her papers were forged. “Surely you don’t begrudge your prisoners some of the necessities that might save a few lives. Surely you don’t.”

  “We had this discussion this afternoon.”

  “Yes, but I thought by now you might have reconsidered.”

  “I don’t reconsider.”

  Oh, yes, he did seem implacable. Drunk or sober, India Marshall wasn’t a woman to give in, either. “You’re selfish.”

  Her charge seemed to take him aback. His hand on the saber hilt, Major O’Brien turned toward the window and walked to it. He pondered capitulation. After staring in the prison’s direction, he curved his heavily lashed gaze toward India. “I do as I’m told. Colonel Lawrence dictates how this camp operates.”