The Carhart Series

by Courtney Milan

  “Well, I’ve heard nothing but wonderful things. A friend recommended I come and I couldn’t resist.”

  Jessie flushed with pleasure. She took great pride in the shop and was pleased that her customers were happy enough that they spread the word. “Thank you, Mr. Solomon.”

  “Please, call me Tony.”

  She smiled. “Well, Tony, is there anything else I can get for you?”

  “Yes, actually,” he said, leaning casually against the counter, his eyes quickly glancing about the shop before coming back to rest on her. “I was wondering if the trout was fresh tonight.”

  Jessie stiffened and looked Tony over again. He had the question mostly right, but he’d gotten the fish wrong. And no penny. Only one other person had ever come into her shop obviously seeking information without knowing about the penny. And that person had turned out to be working for the Feds. Which meant someone may have put Mr. Solomon up to asking. It was a cryin’ shame. He was one tall drink of water, and then some, and it disappointed Jessie to no end to discover he might be nothing more than a cop, or worse, some stool pigeon who worked for them.

  Then again, she had no proof he was up to something. Maybe he was just inept and had forgotten. Better to be safe than sorry, though.

  She smiled brightly and walked to the fish counter. “Our fish is always fresh, brought in first thing every morning. I’ve got a lovely fillet here, if it’s trout that you’re wanting. Shall I wrap it up for you?”

  Tony’s brow furrowed in a slight frown but he quickly covered it with a smile. “That sounds great, thanks.”

  Jessie weighed it, wrapped it and handed it across to him. “That’ll be thirty-two cents.”

  Tony looked a bit surprised. Maybe he’d assumed she wouldn’t charge him for the fish since she hadn’t charged him for the chops. But since the most likely reason he’d asked about the fish was to find out when The Red Phoenix would be running, and since his reasons for that, being that he didn’t have the right pass code, were probably contrary to her business interests, well, he could pay for that big old fillet and be happy about it.

  He slipped the money across to her with a smile that would have made a rabid dog roll over and purr like a kitten. “Your parents should have named you Rosie,” he said with a wink, gently running a finger down her flaming cheek. She jerked back, her mouth dropping open. He grinned again. “It was very nice to meet you, doll. Keep the change.”

  “Likewise,” she managed to say, her unease at his bungled attempt to get information fading in the light of his unmitigated cheekiness and intoxicating smile.

  She watched him walk out the door, leaning over the counter until she could no longer see him through the window. Staring at him was definitely better than a stick in the eye, but then her ex had been a looker too and all that had gotten her was brokenhearted and betrayed. No, if it was one thing her time with Mario had taught her, it was that the wrapping didn’t always match the package. She would never be so foolish again. Still, the handsome Mr. Solomon was up to something. So…she’d keep an eye on him, just in case. A dirty job, to be sure, but someone had to do it.

  Want to read more? Romancing the Rumrunner by Michelle McLean is available now.

  Other Books by Courtney

  The Worth Saga

  Coming late 2014

  click here to find out more

  The Brothers Sinister Series

  The Governess Affair

  The Duchess War

  A Kiss for Midwinter

  The Heiress Effect

  The Countess Conspiracy

  The Suffragette Scandal

  Talk Sweetly to Me

  The Turner Series

  Unveiled

  Unlocked

  Unclaimed

  Unraveled

  Not in any series

  What Happened at Midnight

  The Lady Always Wins

  The Carhart Series

  This Wicked Gift

  Proof by Seduction

  Trial by Desire

  Madame Esmerelda’s Predictions for the New Year

  London, January 1, 1838

  “WELL, MADAME ESMERELDA.” Miss Elizabeth Gramble sat on the black-covered chair and waited for her yearly dose of lies. “What do you foresee for us in the coming year?”

  This visit to the London spiritualist was a decade-long tradition. Ladies—especially dumpy, forty-eight-year-old unmarried ladies—needed the occasional falsehood to continue on. Every year, Eliza and her sister, Miss Drusilla Gramble, visited Madame Esmerelda. Every year, they gawked at the gauzy fabric that fluttered on the walls, inhaled the sweet scent of foreign spices burning on the brazier.

  As she had every year before, Madame Esmerelda bent her kerchiefed head over the dregs of a teacup. But before the fortune-teller could pronounce their future, Drusilla sighed.

  “Madame Esmerelda need say nothing to me,” she said sadly. “Last year she promised I would obtain my dearest wish. Which is to own a pianoforte; yet here I sit with no instrument.”

  Madame Esmerelda glanced up from contemplation of the teacup. Her lips pursed.

  Eliza resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Of course Drusilla’s wish hadn’t been granted. The point of this visit was to pretend to have what they wanted, so they could survive the remainder of the year without.

  “My dear Drusilla,” Eliza said into the waiting silence. “Where in our dwelling could we fit an instrument?”

  Drusilla’s hands trembled. “I suppose you’re right. It’s foolish to want too much.”

  Of course. On New Year’s Day, Eliza and her sister indulged in idle fantasies. But they gave up those wishes come the second of January.

  Maybe Drusilla was as weary of surrendering as Eliza.

  “Let me tell you what I see.” Madame Esmerelda’s voice was dark and smoky, weaving the stuff of every spinster’s fantasy. Eliza shut her eyes and waited in quiet desperation for her once-a-year dream.

  “I see more of the same.”

  The words were so coldly shocking, so unfairly pragmatic, that Eliza opened her eyes wide. “But—”

  “More gray afternoons with cold toast for tea,” Madame Esmerelda said briskly, “more arguments over the level of the coal-scuttle.”

  She and Drusilla had argued about precisely that, just yesterday morning.

  “Madame Esmerelda!” Drusilla looked as shocked as Eliza felt. “We didn’t come here to—”

  “To hear the truth?” Madame Esmerelda finished.

  Of course not. They came to escape their long, slow slide into genteel spinsterhood.

  Eliza shared a shaky, indrawn breath with her sister. “No,” she finally whispered. “It’s not the truth. I can’t bear for it to be.”

  “Well.” The fortune-teller favored Eliza with a tight little smile. “What are you going to do to prove the tealeaves wrong?”

  Prove. A challenging word, that, one that required more than sitting in a tiny parlor watching the pattern on the paper fade into oblivion.

  Drusilla stood and offered her arm to Eliza. “We don’t have to listen to this. We’re leaving.”

  It would have been a fine thing to sweep out of the room, noses upturned in glorious denial of reality; instead, it took a small eternity to extricate themselves, fussing with wraps and scarves and gloves. Ten minutes later, Eliza was walking down the snow-covered pavement with her sister.

  Prove the woman wrong. But how were they to do that, when she was so unfortunately correct? Ladies didn’t prove anything; they acquiesced.

  Eliza was tired of acquiescing. And like that, the germ of an idea came to her—not an unrealistic fantasy, but a reality so possible that her breath stung in her lungs.

  She stopped and turned to her sister. “What if we were to invest the capital remaining to us in a pianoforte? You might teach young women of good family to play. I might instruct them on deportment.”

  Drusilla reached out for her, hope trembling in her wide eyes. “Do something
to earn an income? But we’re ladies. Our reputation—”

  “Pffft.” Eliza smiled at her sister. “So far, our reputation has purchased us a small flat above a shop and boiled beef on Wednesdays. If Madame Esmerelda won’t give us a false dream this year, we’ll invent a real one on our own. One that will last every day, not just the first of January.”

  Not twenty yards behind the two sisters, Madame Esmerelda stood at her window. She’d opened the black curtains, and the rays of the winter sun illuminated her small front room. Down the street, the two sisters walked away, arms linked. Their heads bent together; a spring had entered their steps. They didn’t look back.

  The chance to tell the truth didn’t come often to fortune-tellers, but oh, it was sweet when it did. The woman who called herself Madame Esmerelda pulled the kerchief from her head and smiled.

  “Yes,” she said softly. “This year, I think you’ll prove me wrong. It’s about time.”

  Dark Horizons

  NIGHT IN THE JUNGLE was darker than a ship’s bilge in a storm. Louder, too; the humid air carried the clicks and whirs of a cacophony of strange insects. Likely, Tom Blewitt thought as he lay on the rough pallet underneath the oiled canvas that served as shelter, they were all out for his blood in typical insect fashion. He should have stayed on the ship.

  “Hell. I should have stayed on the farm.” Even spoken quietly, those words sounded gruff, his vowels too long, his r’s too pronounced. It was the speech of an ignorant man.

  It was some kind of a cruel joke God had played on him, his rough speech. Words had always fascinated Tom. He collected them, the way some sailors stored up India-ink sketches of scantily-attired women.

  Words meant adventure. Take the sea, the ocean, that great expanse of tide and wave that swallowed up the dreams of a thousand boys and spat them out in a spray of salt. The words for the ocean were as limitless as the horizon on a clear day, stretching off into the curving blue of the sky. Tom could look out over that distance and forget he had all those words trapped in his head, unable to release them except through the roughest of betraying grunts.

  This trek into the jungle had seemed like such a wonderful idea when Carhart approached him aboard ship and asked him to serve as translator. At the time, Tom had felt lucky that he’d learned rough sailor’s Portuguese. After all, Carhart didn’t talk much, but when he spoke, he used words that bespoke intelligence and wealth. Tom had wanted to chase that horizon, too. He’d hoped to absorb some of that quiet eloquence.

  Ha.

  There were words for the jungle, too. Rain forest. Woodland. Impossible green tangle. But even with the western face of the oiled canvas drawn back to let in a breeze, the jungle’s horizon at night was three feet of black shadow in front of Tommy’s nose. He felt confined in that tiny space, cabined about by darkness and humidity.

  And Carhart was sitting silently at an improvised writing desk, unaware of anything but the paper in front of him.

  The porters lay on pallets next to Tom, talking only to each other. “Look,” Luys was saying in Portuguese, his voice pitched low so as not to risk the ire of Mr. Carhart. “What is this?”

  It was probably another insect. Tom shut his eyes and turned over, imagining what the thing might look like. Shiny enough to reflect the dim light. Probably another beetle. He was beginning to hate beetles.

  “It’s fuzzy.” That was Alfonso.

  Fuzzy beetles. God had never intended insects to grow fur.

  “It’s not much bigger than a housecat.”

  This brought Tom sitting up with a jerk, peering to see the bug for himself. But the figure he made out at the edge of the platform had no waving antennae. Its shape was all too familiar, and it sent a jolt of terror through Tom.

  “Oy, you idiots!” he shouted in Portuguese, jerking to his feet. “Get it away! Don’t you know what that is?”

  A few yards beyond them, Carhart looked up from the makeshift desk where he worked. His eyes narrowed in displeasure at the interruption and he turned back to his papers.

  He hadn’t seen the jaguar kitten.

  “But it looks so soft,” Luys complained, reaching forward. The noise of the jungle swelled around them, monkeys calling in alarm. A kitten-silhouette reached out a black paw to bat at his hand. “And friendly.” The little cat bounded onto the platform.

  There fell a cold and murderous silence, more frightening than all those shrieks of warning. Tommy could hear his heartbeat in that oasis of quiet.

  The shadow launched itself through the gap in the canvas. Inky darkness resolved into a massive black cat.

  Luys shrieked. Alfonso fell over backwards. Mother cat curled about kitten, as if the great beast were composed of liquid midnight instead of muscle.

  Beyond Alfonso, Carhart stood, finally aware that all was not well. The black cat lashed its massive tail and fixed its gaze on the man.

  Tom couldn’t let himself think about what he had to do or his blood would turn craven in his veins. He held up his blanket, waving it stupidly at the creature. Claws struck out, catching against the cloth. Before he had time to reconsider, he dashed out the gap in the canvas, blanket trailing behind him like an invitation.

  He turned, a few feet out, in time to see the jaguar launching itself towards him.

  Its weight hit. Claws raked his chest like a splash of fire. The ground rose up to meet him in a teeth-rattling impact. He was going to die—

  A roar filled his ears. A cloud of searing black powder overtook his vision. The weight lifted from his chest. As Tom coughed the acridness from his lungs, he saw Carhart standing on the platform before him, rifle in his hand.

  His shot, fired in the air, had frightened the two cats away.

  Tom took a deep breath. He’d been lucky. He could have been hurt worse than… than… His chest was barely lit by the spill of light from the platform. The blood seeping into his shirt wasn’t quite dark enough to be crimson. Too dark to qualify as primrose.

  What ought he to call it?

  That was his last thought for a very long time.

  “HERE. DRINK.”

  Tom coughed as he came awake, water dribbling down his chin. He tasted the bitterness of laudanum under his tongue. Carhart stood above him, as imperious as ever. How the man managed to look fresh and crisp in the middle of a jungle, Tom would never know.

  His chest hurt. His hand crept up his ribs, seeking out the damage, and found those burning cuts. The wounds had been closed by a series of knots.

  “Carhart. Didn’t know you could sew.” The laudanum had fuzzed his mind enough that Tom felt only a twinge of shame at his rough accent.

  “The principle is simple. The execution took me inexcusably long.”

  The knots seemed tidy, neatly spaced. “Not as oblivious as you look, eh?”

  A slight frown touched the other man’s lips. “Oblivious? That’s quite a word for a sailor laboring under laudanum.”

  “English,” Tom heard himself say, “is a language composed of parallel sets of vocabulary.” Each syllable of that last word had been steeped in the sound of his father’s farm—vah-cobbler-ee, all wrong. “There’s one set of words for folk like me. Another for you. ‘Oblivious’ is a word used to describe someone too rich to be called stupid.”

  “Write that down,” Carhart said dryly. “I’m sure the penny presses will pay good money for that piece of revolutionary sentiment.”

  “Can’t write,” Tom admitted. “Rather limits my ability to rouse the rabble.”

  A pause.

  “Don’t mind me, Carhart. It’s the laudanum, chipping merrily away at the natural stone of my reticence. Normally, the words stay in my head where they belong.”

  A longer pause. Then: “How disconcerting. You sit there, looking like a mass of ignorant muscle, but inside you employ the vocabulary of an Oxford don. That’s deceptive, and I don’t truck with deception. Are all laborers like you?”

  “Like what?”

  “Intelligent.”

>   “Probably,” Tom said. “We’re just too dumb to admit it.”

  Carhart set the glass down. “Well. I can’t have that kind of deception going on in my camp.”

  “Not ready to go anywhere, if you take my meaning.”

  “Too true. And then, you did save my life. Which ought to count for something.” Carhart let out a pained sigh. “I suppose I’ll have to teach you to write instead.”

  A gentle rain began to fall, drumming arrhythmic fingers against the canvas overhead. “Did you just offer to teach me to write?”

  Something shifted inside Tom. A new vista opening in front of him. If he hadn’t been so tired…

  “Go to sleep before I change my mind.”

  “Brusque,” Tom breathed out, “is what we call someone too wealthy…”

  Sleep came before he could finish. He dreamed of the jungle: trees spread out underneath him, acres and acres of a wide green world, seen from a bird’s vantage point. Green stretched out until it kissed the sky. In his dream, nothing could stop him from touching his fingers to the horizon.

  This Wicked Gift: Enhanced Content

  A London Street

  © Tintin Pantoja.

  Before this novella was first published in late 2009, I wanted to do a book trailer. In preparation for that, I commissioned a number of images to use in that trailer.

  But I never liked the voiceover I obtained, the video never worked properly, and eventually I ran out of time and gave up on the idea. The illustrator, Tintin Pantoja, graciously allowed me to use these images in the enhanced edition of the work. This is the first image I commissioned: a picture of the street where Lavinia lives.