Bristling with more curiosity and intrigue than he cared to acknowledge, Tarrington rose to his feet, acting on Sarah Courtland’s suggestion before Amanda had any chance to refuse.
“A pity you did not seem to enjoy your dinner,” he said as they exited through the parlor doors. “The creole was exceptional.”
“I wasn’t very hungry.”
“Nothing to do with the company, I trust?”
Amanda gave his attempt at brevity a measured look then searched the shadows until she saw the vague outline of Dianna and Ryan. They were strolling toward the summer-house, and even in the heavy gloom, she could see that Ryan’s limp was more pronounced than usual, a sure sign he was battling more emotions than he could handle.
She turned and walked abruptly in the opposite direction, leaving Tarrington standing alone in the glow of light from the parlor.
“Like my daddy always said,” he mused wryly, following after her. “A bad impression is better than no impression at all.”
“You take too much upon yourself, sir, to assume my mood is entirely owing to you.”
“Implying there are weightier subjects on your mind than your penchant for frequenting riverboats and dealing from marked decks?”
She stopped abruptly on the path and turned to face him. “Believe it or not, Mr. Tarrington, there are.”
Her voice was as cold and sharp as a blade, and Tarrington had to remind himself that she was not the helpless widow, despite the widow’s weeds. Nor was she the innocent, maligned, suffering Southern belle struggling valiantly to hold on to her dignity and pride despite the hardships of the war and the humiliation of defeat. She was not afraid to enter a man’s world and call his bluff. Nor was she reluctant to use her considerable talents to cheat, lie, and steal with the same impunity she used to start a man’s blood pounding in his temples and surging through his belly. She could shuffle, mark, and deal a deck of cards slicker and faster than anyone he had seen. She was clever and she was cunning.
She was a woman, for God’s sake, and that made her the most dangerous and deceptive creature on earth.
Tarrington watched her start along the path again, and followed thoughtfully behind. Insects hummed in the uncut grass and somewhere in the distance a dog bayed at the glistening crescent of the quarter moon. Stones and pebbles crunched underfoot, swept along by the hem of Amanda’s skirt. Slippery, opalescent light dappled the ground between breaks in the trees and, in the distance, gleamed wetly on the flooded fields.
Amanda stopped finally under the awning of the huge oak that stood guarding the front of Rosalie. There was enough light to see where Verity had been playing earlier in the day. Hardened mud cakes and moss pies littered the clearing, and they had to sidestep to avoid stumbling into the pit she had excavated.
“I suppose you are waiting for the explanation I promised,” Amanda began quietly.
“I confess, nothing I have seen or heard here today has done anything to alleviate my curiosity."
“Were you expecting to see silver and fine china? I’m sorry to disappoint you, but unfortunately, some Yankee captain took a liking to the d’Iberville crest and ‘appropriated’ it for his dear wife back in Washington. The china was two hundred years old, brought from France by my mother’s ancestors. Personally, I would have smashed it before I let some sticky-fingered Yankee take it away, but Mother was more sentimental. She helped him pack it, hoping she could at least protect it from rough handling.”
“I didn’t mean to imply—”
“I know what you meant to imply,” she interrupted flatly. “You were expecting to see evidence of how I spent my ill-gotten gains. Furniture without the stuffing torn out, perhaps, or pictures on the wall instead of faded squares on the paint. Eight matching chairs to put around a dining room table made of something other than two old doors nailed together. Again, I am sorry to disappoint you, but furniture and paintings were not a high priority these past few months. What you saw in the parlor and the dining salon tonight is the sum total of what was left and what we could salvage after your valiant army stripped us bare.”
She waited for him to rise to the bait so she could feel justified in letting go of her temper. But he did nothing. He said nothing. He merely watched her through dark hooded eyes that told her nothing of what he was thinking.
“I did not say that to brag about who we were or to buy your pity for what we have lost. I said it because there have been d’Ibervilles on this land since Natchez was nothing more than a trading post for trappers. In fact, the post itself was called Fort Rosalie.” Her gaze slipped past his shoulder and softened as she looked at the regal, columned splendor of the ghostly shadow that rose up behind them. “This was once a beautiful, gracious home. It was a beautiful, gracious way of life that no one who was not a part of it could ever hope to understand.”
“And never will if we are continually blockaded at every turn.”
Disdain rippled through her like a wave of ice water. “You don't even try to understand. You want to conquer and dictate. You want to make slaves out of the masters and teach us the error of our ways, and the irony of it is—you don’t even see the irony. Winning the war wasn’t enough for you. You brought in your military rule to degrade and humiliate us, to steal everything we own, to beat us onto our knees. You claim freedom to be the right of every man and slavery to be an offense against God, yet you see nothing wrong with putting those same free slaves to work on the same land for harder and longer hours in exchange for the ‘privilege’ of having ten square feet to live on and paying all their wages back in rent.
“Then there are those who think freedom means never having to work again. They suddenly discover their benevolent new Yankee masters are not prepared to feed, clothe, and house them for nothing, so they live in shantytowns and murder each other for a scrap of bread. Meanwhile, honest white folk—women and children for the most part, and men who would not have dreamed of treating their slaves as badly as you liberators treat the free-issue slaves now—are thrown out on the streets and are forced to beg for their next meal. Tell me, sir, what have you accomplished in your victory? How have you improved the plight of humanity? And how can you, in any honesty at all, expect anything but blockades at every turn?”
Tarrington took a moment to answer. Apart from his sisters, who were all as outspoken as magpies, he had yet to hear a southern woman express her feelings and observations so eloquently. Most lowered their eyes and bit their lips and kept their opinions to themselves ... if they were allowed to have any, that is. Even Dianna deferred to the Judge if one of his bushy eyebrows was raised.
"May I ask you a question?"
He nodded. "Of course."
“Why, exactly, did you buy Briar Glen? Surely you knew how the people hereabout feel toward Yankees and carpetbaggers. Why would you willingly stick your hand into a nest of angry hornets?”
“Maybe I like living dangerously. Maybe I like the challenge and maybe”—he paused and his gaze fell to the luscious pout of her mouth—“when I see something I like, I don’t mind taking a few stings to get it. But I didn’t think we came out here to talk about my motives. I thought we were going to talk about yours … or, more specifically, what sent you out prowling the night as Montana Rose.”
“Maybe I just like living dangerously,” she said, her eyes sparkling as she flung his own words at him. “Maybe I like challenges and maybe ... maybe I had no choice.”
"Everyone has choices, especially between doing something right and doing something wrong.”
“But if it is something necessary, do you stop to think if it’s right or wrong?”
He studied her in silence, his eyes reflecting pinpoints of light from the slivered moon. The urge washed through him, like a shower of cold water, that he wanted very much to kiss her. It was absurd and he knew if he did not back away, she would win her point by the mere act of him not stopping to debate the right or wrong of it, just the need.
“You said you had no
choice. What did you mean by that?”
She sighed and took a few steps into the moon-shadow to reach up and pluck at a hanging leaf.
“In ’56,” she began, “a blight went through the county, affecting the cotton crops along both banks of the river for a hundred miles or more. Rosalie suffered heavy losses that year. Not enough to ruin us, but enough to put a strain on our working capital and leave very little as a cushion against a second year of blight, should it happen.”
“Which, I assume, it did?”
“Three years in a row the harvest yielded less than a tenth of what it should have. We were still all right, what with our stables and what Ryan made each year from breeding and selling his thoroughbreds. But there was all that talk of war. Father was eager for it, as far back as I can remember. There were always men in the library holding meetings, arguing, haggling, planning for the glorious day when Mississippi would secede and the South would become an independent country.
“When the day finally came and war was declared, he nearly shot the provost marshal for trying to tell him he was too old to join the Army of the Confederacy. He and my brothers enlisted right away, and with everyone convinced the fighting would be over in a month or so, no one worried about failed crops or three years’ worth of borrowing on credit. And no one worried that the Confederate bonds we were given in exchange for our horses would eventually be worth less than the paper they were printed on.
“I suppose we were luckier than most when the fighting ended. Two of our men came home. Rosalie was still standing, though most of our slaves had run off and the fields were lying fallow. This close to the river, we were frequently pressed to play host to unwanted guests. The armies of the North and South used our home for their headquarters at varying times over the years. They ate our food and commandeered our livestock, but again we were lucky; the Yankees spared the house instead of burning it or blowing it up for sport. As an infant, Verity used to cry when she heard the sound of boots outside the nursery door. After a while, she even grew too frightened to do that and she would just sit there, shaking in terror while the soldiers ripped apart the bedding and floorboards searching for any hidden valuables.”
“Why the hell didn’t you leave? Or at least get away from the river?”
“We did leave for a while,” she said softly. “Alisha and I went to New Orleans. Verity was born there, but … we couldn’t stay. There wasn’t any point; it was the same everywhere, and we were needed here. Father had been sent home by then, and it was too much for Mother to cope with his injury and … and ... everything else.”
Amanda paused and looked up into Tarrington’s face. “He tries, he honestly does, but he gets confused so easily. He withdraws and shuts himself away somewhere in the past when things get too difficult, and it sometimes takes days for him to come back to us. He never talks about the war, never seems to notice how things have changed around here. He prefers to act as if Stephen, Evan, and Caleb are just out of sight somewhere … and for the sake of his peace of mind, we have learned to live with it.”
It was the first time she had mentioned her husband, and once again Tarrington found himself battling strange urges— to know what the man was like, to know how much she had loved him, how much she grieved for him now. Questions he couldn’t ask, of course.
“It must be difficult for the child. Not having a father, I mean.”
“Verity never knew him; Caleb is just a name to her,” Amanda said quietly, bowing her head.
“And … your husband? Did he know …?”
“Caleb died a month after we were married,” she said without thinking, without emotion. “So no, he never even knew he had a child."
“She’s a beautiful little girl,” he said quietly. “He would have been very proud of her.”
“She’s more than just beautiful, Mr. Tarrington. She is the most important thing in my life, and I would do anything … anything to keep her safe.” Amanda lifted her chin again. “Even dress like a two-bit whore and deal off the bottom of the deck.”
“You still haven’t told me why you chose gambling as a means to try to improve your lot. Or where the hell you even came up with the idea, let alone the nerve to try something so outrageous. I don’t recall any of my sisters saying five-card stud was a required course at the finishing school.”
"We went to the bank first, to the Natchez Mercantile. They loaned us enough money to buy seed to plant the fields last year and again this year. There were already huge debts against us, but again, we had no choice. Ryan had to sign more notes and until a few weeks ago, there was a good chance we could have paid some of the loans back and still have had enough left over to see us through next year.” She paused and smiled grimly. "Unfortunately, God and E. Forrest Wainright conspired to make sure that didn’t happen.”
“I am passingly familiar with the one entity,” Tarrington said with a small curve to his lips, “but who is E. Forrest Wainright?”
My future husband, she thought abruptly, shaking her head slightly at the irony. “A speculator and a profiteer. He bought up all the notes on Rosalie and demanded his money within thirty days of giving us notice.”
“Were those the original terms of the loan?”
Amanda smiled bitterly at his lack of understanding. “There were no terms, Mr. Tarrington. Not as you might know them. Our family had been doing business with the Mercantile since the day it opened its doors. Our word was our bond, our honor our collateral. Had the bank still been in the hands of men who would no more doubt Ryan’s promise to honor my father’s debts than they would doubt the sun coming up each morning, we could have survived any number of Yankee bureaucrats.”
Tarrington refrained from pointing out the material flaws in all of this Southern chivalry. He patted his breast pocket in search of a cigar instead. “How much do you owe this Wainright fellow? And when is the loan due?”
“Fifty thousand dollars,” she said calmly. “By the end of next week.”
Tarrington whistled softly and forgot all about the cigar. “I admire your initiative, madam. You expected to earn it all in a few hands of cards?”
“I was on my way to doing so, if you’ll recall.”
Tarrington did not rise to the bait. “I am still pressed to ask how you arrived at that particular method to try to earn the money you needed.”
Amanda hesitated, but only briefly. What did it matter now anyway?
“You are no stranger to the riverboats yourself, sir. Have you ever heard the name Billy Fleet?”
“Fleet?” Now where the deuce was she going with this? he wondered. “He worked the river back in the forties, if I remember correctly. Somewhat of a legend in his own time, he was said to have the fastest hands and keenest card sense of any sharp before or since.”
“I shall have to tell Father that,” she murmured with a crooked smile. “He would be tickled to hear himself called a legend, I’m sure.”
“Father? Your father is Billy Fleet?”
“Was, Mr. Tarrington. He was Billy Fleet. And it was just a game to him, the bored, spoiled son of a wealthy man who found it exciting and stimulating to ride the riverboats and challenge his own destiny. He gave it up when he married Mother and had to assume the responsibility of the running of Rosalie. For the past twenty-seven years, he has been just plain William Courtland, one of Natchez’s most upstanding, law-abiding, eminent citizens.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Tarrington muttered, genuinely impressed.
“No doubt you will be,” she agreed. “And long before you ever intended if so much of a whisper of this goes beyond these shadows. Judge Moore would shoot you himself, without blinking an eye.”
“The Judge knows William Courtland is Billy Fleet?”
“Everyone in Adams County knows, Mr. Tarrington, so it would hardly be worth your while to take out an announcement in the Gazette”
“Your high opinion of me is flattering, Mrs. Jackson.”
“It would be even higher if I tho
ught you were the kind of man who would destroy the reputation of an old, broken man in a wheelchair.”
“You don’t seem to be too worried about your own reputation.”
“I am doing a fine enough job ruining it myself.”
“Not without a little parental guidance,” he countered smoothly. “Or are you going to tell me your esteemed father had no hand in teaching you the art of ...what did you call it? Challenging destiny?”
“It started out as simple parlor tricks,” she explained, discarding the shredded oak leaf. “As an amusing way for the family to pass a rainy afternoon.”
“The family? You mean you weren’t the only one to benefit from your father’s knowledge?”
“I wasn’t even the best. My brother Stephen could have played naked and still won every hand with four aces.”
“An enviable talent,” he said with a wry smile. “And the others?”
“Evan was cautious, but he usually won if he put his mind to it. Alisha is good, but she tends to get greedy and, when she does, she overplays her hand.”
“And Ryan?”
“He used to drive poor Father to distraction. He could gentle an unschooled Arabian with a touch of his hand, but put a deck of cards in those same hands and he was all thumbs.”
Tarrington nodded. “Which explains why you were the one seated in the games and he was merely there to guard your back. Is he the only one who knows?”
“Besides you, yes,” she said miserably. “And he would have been quite happy removing you from the list if I hadn’t talked him out of it.”
Tarrington’s eyes glittered strangely. “May I ask why you did?”
“I didn’t think Alisha would appreciate gunfire at her wedding,” she said bluntly.
“Probably not,” he agreed, his smile concealed beneath the full moustache. “All the same, the wedding was several days ago and I am still in one piece.”
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