Emma and the Outlaw

by Linda Lael Miller

  Emma was fairly quaking with rage, but she kept her smile in place and replied, “I’d sooner be a swamp rat’s mistress than yours!”

  Macon threw back his head and laughed at that, and it made Emma fume to realize the people around them probably thought the exchange was an affectionate one. “Your spirit only makes you more appealing,” he said presently. “I’ll break it, I assure you, if Steven’s hanging doesn’t do it first.”

  Saliva gathered in Emma’s mouth, but she didn’t quite have the nerve to spit in Macon’s face. “It might not be Steven who hangs,” she blurted out on some wild and ill-advised instinct. “Perhaps the real murderer will be brought to justice.”

  Catching her implication, Macon went pale with fury and lapsed into a stony silence.

  When the dance ended she offered a silent prayer of thanks and turned to flee. Flushed and angry, she fairly collided with an outraged Steven, who took her none too gently by the arm and dragged her out of the ballroom and into the garden. He didn’t release her until they were standing beside a moonlit marble fountain. It was covered with moss, and the flow of the water made an eerie sound.

  “What the hell are you trying to prove?” Steven bit out.

  Emma wrenched her arm free. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she retorted, and although she sounded indignant, what she actually felt was hurt.

  “You were dancing with Macon,” Steven pointed out, practically spitting out the words like watermelon seeds.

  Emma bridled, her hands on her hips. “Yes, I was. And I told him a thing or two.”

  Steven was suddenly still. Ominously still. “Like what?”

  “I let it be known that he isn’t above suspicion where Mary McCall’s murder is concerned,” Emma said proudly.

  Steven sputtered a string of swear words as he released Emma and turned away to shove a hand through his hair in frustration.

  “What’s wrong?” Emma asked, rounding him and looking up into his eyes.

  “Garrick has been investigating Macon,” Steven told her. “There was reason to believe he was involved with Mary somehow. Now that he knows he’s under suspicion, he’ll probably cover his tracks.”

  e flow of >

  Emma calculated the cost of her rash words and was devastated. She lifted one hand to her mouth. “I was only trying to help—”

  “From now on,” Steven interrupted harshly, “keep your help to yourself.”

  Stunned, she turned and fled, not into the house where everyone could see her crying, but into the darkness.

  “Emma!” Steven called after her, but she ignored him.

  She took refuge in the gazebo, where she crumpled onto a dusty bench, covered her face with both hands, and sobbed. She cried for a long time, giving way to all the emotions she’d been holding in check.

  She was startled when she felt a hand come to rest on her back, and whirled on the bench, expecting to see Macon or Steven, either of whom she would have slapped soundly across the face.

  But it was Cyrus who sat beside her. Wordlessly, he took Emma into his arms and held her. She relaxed against his chest, trusting him utterly. He didn’t ask what had upset her, because he knew.

  “What will you do if Steven’s convicted?” was his question.

  At first, Emma couldn’t face the thought. Then she allowed the nightmare to take root in her mind and answered. “I’d go away—maybe to Chicago or New York—and try to make a life for myself.”

  “You wouldn’t stay at Fairhaven?” Cyrus asked and, for all of it, he sounded surprised. Even a little wounded.

  She told him about Macon’s repeated threats and felt his arm stiffen around her shoulders.

  “I’d protect you,” he said after a long time. Then with a sigh he added, “But, of course, I’m an old man.”

  Emma caught one of his hands in both of hers and squeezed it. “I can’t tell you how much your kindness has meant to me. You’ve been so good to Steven—many men would have refused to acknowledge him, let alone take his side in a murder case.”

  Cyrus smiled sadly. “He’s got my blood flowing in his veins.”

  Emma frowned. “Why does Macon hate Steven so much?”

  He sighed. “Because he knows Steven’s a better man than he is. And that makes Macon damn dangerous.”

  Emma gazed up at the summer moon riding above the tops of the magnolia trees. “Sometimes I’m so afraid,” she confided in a small voice, “that I don’t think I can get out of bed and face another day.”

  Cyrus’s arm tightened around her. “This’ll all be over soon. Then you’ll be worrying about something else. Now, you go and find Steven, and you tell him he’d better straighten up or his granddaddy’s going to take a buggy whip to him. Hear?”

  Emma nodded, feeling better just for having told someone what she was thinking and feeling. “Thank you,” she said, kissing Cyrus’s cheek before she stood up and walked bravely back toward the French doors leading into the ballroom.

  She d barely stepped over the threshold when seventeen-year-old Nathaniel came up to her. He had the beginnings of a mustache, Emma noticed for the first time, and he looked nervous. “I was hoping—er—thinking—” He went crimson from his neck to his hairline. “Would you dance with me, Miss Emma?”

  She smiled and offered her hand. “I’d like that very much,” she said, hoping her face didn’t show the ravages of her earlier crying fit.

  Nathaniel cleared his throat and marshalled Emma awkwardly into a waltz. It seemed strange that, only three years before, she’d been his age.

  “If Steven or Macon is mean to you,” he ventured boldly, “you just come and tell me. I’ll give ’em what-for.”

  Resisting an urge to kiss his cheek, because she knew it would embarrass him too much, Emma nodded solemnly. “I’ll do that,” she promised, both amused and touched that Nathaniel was willing to do battle with such formidable opponents for her sake.

  Nathaniel’s handsome young face was dark with conviction and his palm was moist against Emma’s. “I know you think I’m just a kid, but I’m strong, Miss Emma. I won’t let anybody hurt you.”

  “Thank you,” Emma said, and she meant it.

  After that the conversation became less earnest and Emma began to steal subtle glances around the ballroom, searching for Steven. She wanted to find him and make things right between them; their time together was too precious for fighting.

  “Have you seen Steven?” she asked Nathaniel, just as the waltz ended.

  He shook his head. “I’ll find him for you if you’d like,” he offered eagerly.

  “No,” Emma said in a gentle voice, seeing a look of challenge in Nathaniel’s face that might just get him into trouble with his impatient cousin. “I’ll look for him myself.”

  Using her fan because the house was hot and crowded, Emma wove her way through the crowd of finely dressed guests. She smiled confidently as she passed, to let them know she didn’t consider her husband capable of murder.

  Climbing the stairs, holding her whispering skirts with one hand, Emma frowned as a strange sound came to her ears. It was muffled and distant, barely discernible for the music and laughter downstairs, and that made it all the more troubling.

  Reaching the upper landing, Emma strained to hear the noise, and decided it was coming from the master suite at the front of the house. Knowing that was Macon and Lucy’s room, Emma hesitated to investigate. After all, if someone came rushing to the rescue every time odd sounds came from her and Steven’s chambers, the results would be disastrous.

  Some instinct told Emma that what she was hearing was not ecstasy. She hurried along the hallway, and as she neared the luxurious rooms, Lucy’s voice reached her in a strangled sob of rage and pain.

  Her heart beating faster, Emma raised her hand to knock, only to find the door was open when she reached it.

  Lucy was half-sitting and half-lying on the floor, her back to a havy, ornately carved bureau. For all her cowering position, her brown
eyes snapped with hatred as she glared at Macon, who stood over her with one fist still doubled up.

  A slow trickle of blood came from the corner of Lucy’s mouth.

  “You’ve humiliated me for the last time,” Macon rasped, his shoulders tense beneath his evening coat as he glared down at his wife. He gestured wildly toward the door, though neither he nor Lucy seemed aware that Emma was there. “Do you know what they’re saying down there? That you’re insane, that you ought to be put away. And I’m beginning to think they’re right!”

  Lucy levered herself tremulously up from the floor, and it was all Emma could do not to rush forward and help her sister-in-law to stand. “I don’t give a damn what they think,” she spat. “And you can go straight to hell, Macon Fairfax.” She gave a bitter laugh that alarmed Emma and waggled her finger at her furious husband. “You had to bring Steven back,” she taunted. “You were so sure it would be he who hanged. Well, it won’t be—Mammy Judkins told me so. You’ve consigned your own soul to perdition, and I’ll laugh while you burn!”

  Macon advanced on Lucy again, then he raised his hand, and Emma was forced to interfere.

  “No!” she screamed, starting into the room, but before she could step through the double doorway, Steven pushed past her, gripped Macon by the lapels of his fancy coat, and flung him against the armoire.

  “Come on, you courageous bastard,” Steven wheedled, beckoning with both hands. “Let’s see how you do against somebody who can give you a fight.”

  Macon, who’d had the breath knocked out of him, threw his half-brother a look of sheer hatred as he squared his shoulders and straightened his coat. “She’s a madwoman,” he muttered, gesturing toward his wife, who had lost her glorious bravado now and was huddled against Emma, watching the scene with wide eyes. “Always talking about that old swamp witch and her spells. Wearing those damned black dresses—”

  “I don’t care if she’s sticking pins in dolls and praying to the moon,” Steven broke in, his voice level and yet dangerous. “The next time you lay a hand on her—or any other woman—in anger, I’ll see that you hurt like you’ve never hurt before. Is that clear?”

  Macon didn’t reply. He just glared at Lucy for a long moment, then walked slowly out of the room.

  Steven went to Lucy and took both her hands in his. “Are you all right?” he asked hoarsely.

  Lucy shook her head, her eyes full of distraction and pain. “We’re damned,” she whispered. “All of us.”

  In those hot, muggy days preceding the start of Steven’s trial, Emma was torn between two conflicting needs: to be with him every moment of every day, and to separate herself from him, emotionally and physically, so the pain would be lessened.

  Her love for Steven would not allow he to take the latter course, and the former was impossible. As soon as the sun peeked over the horizon, he was up. Before Emma was fully conscious, he had left the house, and he generally didn’t return until ten or ten-thirty at night, by which time he was numb with frustration and fatigue. He never made love to her, and Emma had a poignant sense of the distance growing between them.

  One morning late in June, when Emma came downstairs to the dining room, dressed in yet another of her seemingly endless supply of new gowns—this one made of yellow printed lawn—she found Lucy lingering over breakfast.

  As usual, Lucy was dressed in black, and that day there were deep purple smudges beneath her eyes.

  Anger flared in Emma’s bosom, for she thought, at first, that the marks were bruises. Reaching Lucy’s side, she realized they had been caused by fatigue instead.

  After filling a plate at the sideboard and pouring coffee for herself, she sat down next to Lucy and spread her napkin in her lap. In all this time, Macon’s wife had not so much as glanced in her direction.

  “Lucy?”

  The small, doll-like woman looked startled to find she wasn’t alone. A distracted smile came to her lips. “Oh. Hello, Emma. Are you well this morning?” Ironically, considering her own situation, Lucy was always solicitous of Emma.

  Emma nodded. “You look very tired,” she commented cautiously, after a sip of coffee. “Have you been resting well?”

  Lucy arched her pale, perfect eyebrows in apparent surprise. “Why would you ask such a question?”

  Emma cleared her throat. “Well, there was that incident the night of the ball, when Macon struck you. I was just wondering if perhaps—”

  Lucy interrupted Emma’s words with a dismissive gesture of one hand and a shake of her head. “He’s not like that all the time,” she said. “He’d just had a little too much to drink that night.”

  “You shouldn’t excuse his behavior,” Emma dared to say. She’d learned her frankness from Chloe, and it was a trait that didn’t always endear her to others. “It was wrong of him to strike you.”

  Lucy sighed sadly, distantly. “I know,” she said in a soft and miserable voice. She sounded utterly without hope.

  Emma lifted her fork and pushed the eggs around on her plate. She’d come to the table with a voracious appetite, but now it was gone. “How long have you and Macon been married?” she asked, trying to make her tone bright and conversational.

  Lucy’s forehead puckered into a pretty frown as she calculated. “We were wed the year Macon’s daddy died, and Steven came to us. That was about—seventeen years ago, I guess. Nathaniel’s folks passed away when we’d been married just a few months—I was like a mother to him.”

  Although she was a bit jolted by the disjointed quality of Lucy’s remarks, Emma forced a smile to her lips. “I knew Macon was older than Steven, of course,” she said, “but I didn’t realize the gap between them was quite that wide.”

  “Oh, yes. It’s a good thing Steven was almost fullgrown when he came to Fairhaven. If he’d been little and helpless, like Nathaniel was, I’m fairly certain Macon would have killed him.” After delivering this opinion in a sunny tone, Lucy smiled and stirred more sugar into her tea.

  Emma choked on the bite of fried sausage she’d tried to swallow and dabbed at her lips with a table napkin. Suddenly, she just couldn’t face the prospect of spending another long, pampered, dreary day in that house, doing nothing but waiting. Once she’d recovered herself, she asked, “How well did you know Mary McCall?”

  At the mention of Steven’s alleged victim, Lucy pursed her lips for a moment. Immediately afterward, however, her vaguely hysterical smile returned, dazzling in its brightness. “Not well, of course,” she said cheerfully, flouting protocol by resting her elbows on the table, her tea cup between her palms. “Mary was much—younger. She was Dirk’s friend, and Steven’s.”

  “Did she leave any family? Friends?”

  “Her father, Jessup. But he died two years ago of a heart ailment.” Her brow creased again as she thought hard. “Oh, and there was her aunt, Astoria.” Lucy paused to make a face. “Dried up old prune. She probably hasn’t so much as stepped outside her front door in twenty years.”

  “She lived in the same house as Mary, though?” Emma pressed, feeling a strange excitement building within her.

  Lucy nodded and gave her sister-in-law a surprised look. “Why are you so interested in Astoria McCall? I promise you, she’s dull as cold dishwater.”

  “I want to talk to her about Mary’s murder,” Emma said, pushing her food away virtually untouched and shoving back her chair. “I’m going into town,” she announced. “And I’d like you to come with me if you would.”

  Lucy still looked baffled, but she put her napkin on the table and stood. She clasped her hands together automatically in a pathetic wringing motion. “Well, I guess I could—” she looked down at her black dress and smoothed the shiny sateen skirts with nervous hands, then touched the back of her chignon. “Do you think I look all right? Astoria might not get out much, but she’s a dreadful gossip.”

  Emma gave her sister-in-law a reassuring smile. “You’re the most beautiful woman in Orleans parish,” she said, thinking her words might be true i
f only Lucy would wear becoming colors and get out more often. “Anything Astoria might say about you would surely be grounded in pure jealousy.”

  Twenty minutes later Emma and Lucy were settled in one of the Fairfaxes’ several carriages, passing beneath the fragrant blossoms of the magnolia trees. Half an hour after that, they drew up in front of a brick house that must once have been elegant but now had cracked walls and an overgrown garden.

  Emma shuddered at the sight of it. “The murder happened here?” she asked in a very small voice.

  Lucy looked out the carriage window and made a tsk-tsk sound as she straightened her gloves. “Yes, but it was a grand place then. Fit for receiving guests.”

  “The family must have had money once,” Emma observed, her tone hushed as the driver opened the door and helped her down. “What happened?”

  Lucy sighed as she joined Emma on the buckled sidewalk, where grass sprang up between the cracks. The metal fence had rusted through in places, and the gate creaked as the carriage driver opened it. “Old Jessup was never the same after Mary died. He adored the little scamp, you know. He became careless, according to Macon, and one day all the money was just—gone.” She threw up her small gloved hands to emphasize this last word.

  “Astoria never married?” Emma asked, feeling sad for this broken family, and reluctant to stir the ashes by presenting herself as Mrs. Steven Fairfax.

  When they’d climbed the steps and approached the front door, Lucy reached out and turned the bell-knob.

  Emma flipped open the ivory-handled fan Cyrus had given her as a gift and began waving it in front of her face. She was never going to get used to the heavy heat of New Orleans, she reflected, as she waited.

  A small black woman with very large white teeth and a kerchief tied over her many tiny braids answered their call. She peered at Lucy, then at Emma, as though her eyesight weren’t quite what it should be. “Yes’m?”

  “Please tell Miss McCall that Mrs. Macon Fairfax and Mrs. Steven Fairfax have come to pay a visit,” Lucy said in a business-like tone that belied her odd ways. “And kindly don’t leave us standing out here in the midday sun while you dillydally.”