by Martha Hix
If Burke O’Brien were so dependable, why did he balk at seeing his aunt?
It was then that the tall and lean baron of the Mississippi, a blood-soaked towel wrapped around one hand, yanked open the hatch. A dashing pirate in appearance, he was even more handsome than Susan remembered, albeit her recollections were brief and never of the acquaintance sort. No one will ever know I’ve seen him before. To mention it would unleash a secret best kept locked away.
In light of his unfriendly words beforehand, she presumed he’d tongue-lash Miss O’Brien, but his thunderous visage didn’t settle on his aunt. His glower—shadowed by whisker stubble—welded first to the boy Susan called son, then to her.
“Just as I suspected.” Burke O’Brien laughed without mirth, saying an odd thing: “You are a blonde.”
“Her hair is yeller. Like a daisy.”
“Hush, sprig,” Phoebe O’Brien said.
Susan tipped her head. “Sir, do I gather you prefer brunettes?”
“I prefer to be left alone.”
Don’t we all. She took her own measure of the man who continued to glare at her, seeing thick hair the shade of a raven’s wing. It whisked against his white shirt collar, a hank tumbling over a straight brow. His eyes were deepest green. Like the leaves of an oleander. Yet those leaves were blazing.
“Where are your manners?” his aunt piped up. “Step back, let us in, and pour us a tot of something expensive.”
Something cheap would work.
“I’m not running a saloon.” That fiery gaze burned toward his kinswoman. “This is a lousy trick you tried to pull, aunt.”
Trick? Whatever did he mean? Mystified by it—not to mention those strange allusions to a lamp—Susan patted Pippin’s shoulder when he inched closer, pulling Snooky’s cage with him.
The friction between relatives left no doubt that she’d stumbled into the middle of a squabble of long duration. Having flown from a worse situation of relations, she vowed to get past O’Brien family discord, even if it took perpetuating the Mrs. Paget ruse. “My son and I must flee this city.”
“We’re going to help.” Phoebe stamped a brogan.
“We? Got a midget behind your skirts?” he said snidely.
Knowing the captain did business with Seymour Pyrotechnics & Inventions of New Orleans, Susan considered a tidbit that might advance her case. She wouldn’t mention it. While the captain could be unaware Horace Seymour even had a lost-lamb daughter, she’d admit nothing. It would ask for trouble. The O’Briens might put two and two together and come up with several truths. Primarily, that she’d absconded with someone else’s son.
“Captain, I would like to book passage for two on the Yankee Princess.”
“I suggest you call on the Lucky Lady,” he snapped. “She’ll be along tomorrow at noon.”
“Tomorrow will be too late.”
He raised his injured hand to pat the air. “Lady, I’ve heard enough. Aunt, you and I have nothing to discuss. Take this woman and her boy, then get the hell off my riverboat.”
“Sir, you’re cantankerous from your wound,” Susan said softly. “Allow me to find the ship’s surgeon. Or let me have a go at your hand. You need attention.”
“Not from you.”
Insulting cad! But she needed—required!—every resource at his wounded fingertips. Captain Burke O’Brien, no matter what it took on Susan Seymour’s part, would help a desperate pair run away from the circus.
Two
Burke retreated to fasten the hatch.
A cracked straw bonnet topping a coronet of braids, the blonde stepped forward, a shaft of gaslight illuminating her. She wore no corset below a green frock that bore witness to many turns at a washboard. His suspicions increased. What was her trick? This dark-eyed Mrs. appeared too young to have given birth to the youth at her side.
Furthermore, someone had brutalized her; the evidence, a yellowing bruise on her chin.
The freckled lad, a cowlick at the crown of his dark head, showed similar signs. Purple blotches ran below the tatters of his shirt-sleeves. Undoubtedly the same bully had yanked him around, and hard.
His blue-gray eyes filled with trepidation, Pippin stared up at Burke. Trying for bravery, he whispered, “H-hullo, sir.”
How could anyone strike such an innocent?
Burke liked kids. While he didn’t want the hell of magic to pick him a wife, he couldn’t picture growing old without a Mrs., children, and resultant generations circled around the hearth on Royale Street. Once, he’d almost had a child, but those were circumstances he chose not to dwell on.
“How old are you, lad?” Burke asked solemnly.
“Eight.”
Eight, and uprooted in the night. Pippin would be better supplied with McGuffey’s and a glass of milk than by the proof of upheaval: a traveling case tucked under his arm. The youngster also had charge of a carpetbag stuffed to the hilt, along with a wooden crate tied with grass twine.
“Who struck you, lad?” he asked.
“My father.”
“Your husband?” Burke inquired of Susan.
She nodded slowly, ashamed.
Stymied, Burke gave attention to his kin. Thin as a stick and straight as a broom, with more lines radiating from her eyes than she’d had four years before, the Hornet yapped, “This lady and her son require cabins, as will I.”
There were a half-dozen staterooms, all unoccupied, this being the last leg of the voyage, but the passenger manifest didn’t irritate him. The mere sight of Aunt Red Hornet, and to a lesser degree her presumptions, galled him.
What should he do? If he banished the Pagets, could he live with his conscience? This, he knew, was exactly what Aunt Phoebe counted on.
She announced, “By the time we reach your brother’s home in Louisiana, we will have settled this rift between us.”
Why not just rub his nose in reminders of the past? Being around Connor and India would surely do that, especially if the visit were so near to this particular birthday.
After a sharp bark of disgust, Burke challenged, “Make me believe you didn’t have ulterior motives for showing up”—his glower deepened—“with a prospective bride in tow.”
“What does that mean?” Pippin tugged his mother’s arm.
She shushed him while Aunt Phoebe reconciled her presence. “If you’d read my letters of late—by the bye, I am sorry about the Delta Star. What in the world happened?”
He refused to discuss the fatality. Yet he chewed the bitter root of recall. Last April, Rufus West arrived at the door of 21 rue Royale, New Orleans, laughing and jeering. His actions left little doubt in Burke’s mind who had ordered theexplosion. Proving it depended on Velma Harken’s talents.
Aunt Phoebe shook a finger. “If you’d read my last letter, Burky boy, you’d know to expect me. I’m within my rights. I did my part in wiping your nose and bandaging your skinned knees, so why shouldn’t I be here for your birthday?”
“You missed it.”
“That’s where you’re wr—”
“Enough!” He checked the impulse to jab a finger at her long, sharp nose. “I won’t tie in with a woman picked by magic, especially a married one with the hell beaten out of her.”
Having said his piece, he again started to close the hatch.
“But you gotta help me and Momma, sir,” the lad piped up in that brave manner of youths forced into nasty situations, something Burke knew everything about. “Else . . .”
Concurrently, Susan shoved the toe of a half-boot beneath the hatch. She carried herself with dignity despite her pathetic situation. “I refuse to believe you’ll turn us out.”
He had to admire her spunk. And her looks weren’t bad, although she was no fragile thing. She wasn’t overly tall. Nor was she short. Her bruised chin might be prominent, her mouth somewhat pinched and smallish, but expressive eyes, dark as the center of a black-eyed Susan, matched her name. Black-eyed Susan fit her. And it had nothing to do with her bruises.
; She took a step inside. This flower refused her namesake—a pleasant scent accompanied her. Heliotrope. Burke suddenly imagined Susan in a field of clover. A garland of wildflowers in her flowing golden hair, a clutch of youngsters and a handful of birds adoring her, she fed them milk and honey. He could not envision her abed, the musk of coupling in silken sheets, feeding a man from an abundant breast.
Her husky voice belied his imagery as she asked, “How much would it cost you, a scrap of grace and favor?”
“I don’t want trouble from your husband. And whatever you’ve got planned with my aunt—”
“I only just met Miss O’Brien. On the wharf.” Her plight gushed like the winds of a gale at his determination to keep out of her marital dilemma when she added, “If my husband catches me and the child, he’ll kill us.”
From Aunt Phoebe’s stunned mien, Burke realized the declaration came as a shock to her too. All right, she hadn’t connived this blonde into a plot.
Burke got to specifics. “We don’t travel at night. Your mister could board before we make steam in the morning.”
“Not if you take up the mooring lines and reposition this boat clear of the docks. You could anchor in midstream. I must reach New Orleans posthaste. My father resides there, and—”
“You don’t sound like a New Orleanian.”
“English people live there too.”
Burke then heard her stomach growling. Good God, she’s hungry! These two really are in dire straits, fugitives from hell. The least he could do was offer the bounty of his galley.
To take with them.
Marshaling his arguments, Burke pointed out, “You belong to your husband, and if he’s like most men, he’ll come looking for his wife. I won’t have discord on the Yankee Princess.”
Aunt Phoebe slapped hands to her scant waist, frocked in gray twill, the dye matching eyes that had snapped in disgust for fifty-eight years. “Where’s your decency? Surely you haven’t changed that much, since that nasty business with the Lawrence woman.”
“I’ve changed.”
“Strike off your chains, Burky boy. There’s another day ahead of us!”
Out of the blue, the earth mother gathered up the hand that he’d forgotten was injured and pulled back the toweling to pick a piece of glass from his palm. Head bowing, she began to dab his cut with her handkerchief. The timbre of her voice lowered to a seductive pitch. “You need me, sir.”
He didn’t feel pain. Susan’s touch, soft yet sure, bespoke the woman. She might be wounded, but she had strength to her. Just what he needed, to be attracted to a married woman with a violent husband in her wake. He drew back his hand and rewound the bloodied towel.
Yet Susan’s husband didn’t scare Burke. Delays and problems—and the possibility Velma would turn up nothing—put the fear of God in him.
Susan dropped her arm. “I’ll repay you for passage. Soon. For now I’ll be at your service.”
At his service? He grinned. From the suddenly abashed look on her pretty yet bruised face, Susan had realized the double entendre of her offer. She knew the joys of silken sheets, or at least sheets, he figured. After all, she had borne a son. Anything might happen if she weren’t married.
She looked him straight in the eye. “I can cook and clean and mend. Starting with your hand, if you’ll permit me.”
It would take the meanest son of a bitch on the river to send her back down the gangplank. Some people called him mean enough. Many said he made his own rules. Becoming a shipping magnate before reaching the age of majority, Burke found out early that rules were made to be broken. He did as he pleased. But he tried to be fair about it.
At the moment Burke wanted to be mean as the devil himself, but couldn’t. Had she cast some sort of spell over him?
He relented. “We’ll steam to a cove south of town. Your husband won’t know to look there.”
Hers was a huge sigh of relief.
Right then, a hiss from the crate caused both Pagets to start, which prompted Aunt Phoebe to inquire about the contents.
“It’s a, um . . . it’s a cat.” Susan licked her lips. “He’s quite a mouser, Snooky. He’ll do his part, Captain, should your boat need rid of vermin.”
“Mrs. Paget, I don’t need anything.”
Burke fastened a determined eye on his aunt, one that promised transportation hadn’t included her. His gaze returned to Susan. “Tomorrow we’ll beat for Baton Rouge.”
“But my father—New Orleans. If you wouldn’t mind—”
“I’ll take you to Baton Rouge.”
“But—”
“Don’t argue, Mrs. Paget,” the Hornet put in. “You needn’t travel farther than St. Francisville. I’m planning to summer there with Burke’s elder brother and his wife. Once the Yankee Princess reaches their plantation, we’ll make certain you and the lad have transportation south.”
Damn her wrinkled hide. I should’ve never opened the hatch. But Pandora’s box had been opened. He gave in. “Stop by the galley. Tell the cook to fix some chow. For all of you.”
“You are most kind, sir.” Smiling, Susan dropped a curtsy.
Pure sunshine turned her mouth wide and showed excellent teeth. That smile made her beautiful. Disregarding her chin bruise, her looks compared to, if not surmounted, Antoinette Lawrence’s moon-pale loveliness.
Susan touched his arm. “You won’t regret it.”
He regretted it already. This was dangerous territory, far more chancy than making or breaking rules. It would be a long journey, the short trip between there and St. Francisville. He might not be strong enough to leave Black-eyed Susan alone.
“That was close,” Susan said to herself in the privacy of Pippin’s small, borrowed stateroom, where she drew the mosquito net aside to tuck him in the narrow bed. The contradictions of her upbringing compelled her to say a silent prayer of thanks, both to God and the hoodoo deity Mama Loa.
“Stay with me, Susan. I mean Momma.”
“Of course, dumpling.” She had no burning desire to proceed to her assigned room abutting the irritable captain’s quarters. Nor did she wish to duck outside when the Yankee Princess began to steam toward the secluded cove, for Burke O’Brien was stomping up and down the outer deck.
His aggravation drowned steam-whistle honks—not to mention filling Susan’s ears—as the freighter glided along the water on her southbound course in the tangles and turns of the river.
At one point he threatened to make some hapless boatman “swab the heads” for “letting women traipse up the gangplank.”
She felt guilty for bringing trouble. Another emotion arose—disappointment. He was a far cry from the half-clothed, firelight-etched dancer who beguiled her from afar during the Mardi Gras season of 1866.
Moreover, he had relented. She and Pippin were on their way to freedom. They would not set foot on land until reaching the Crescent City. And then . . . and then on to England, where she would climb from a total fall from grace.
First she must collect money that waited in New Orleans.
“Momma, that cap’n is sure crabby,” Pippin said, his voice sleepy from the late hour.
“Is that any way to speak of our savior?” She tapped his freckled nose. “Go to sleep, dumpling.”
She then studied the black that tainted a corner of Pippin’s mouth. This discoloration was the good sort, having come from a licorice stick given to him by the ship’s cook. Would that Pippin’s life could have been licorice and full bellies!
Abandoned as a toddler by his father, the boy spent most of his life in an Iowa orphanage. His insect of a mother plucked him out, only to dump him at the Best Ever Traveling Show. But Orson Paget showed no interest in taking up where he’d left off as a father or as Angela Paget’s husband.
“I’ve got a new wife,” he’d lied.
Amoral Orson hadn’t bothered to divorce before asking Susan to become his bride. The soothsayer Carmelita told her the truth just before the mockery of a marriage would have taken plac
e last October. But there had been no escaping the brute.
It had been but twelve weeks before that Pippin became the light of Susan’s life. Always—always!—she’d wanted a baby, or several, but she got a child. No matter. At last she had someone to love who neither ignored her nor treated her harshly.
And at last, tonight, she’d protected young Pippin from yet another beating.
“Momma? Can I let Snooky out?”
“I think not. The least we can do is make the journey to New Orleans as pleasant as possible.”
“New Orleans?” Pippin said with boyish astonishment. “The cap’n said he’s gonna leave us in St. Something-or-other.”
“He’ll change his mind.”
St. Francisville, in a direct line to New Orleans, lay too close to Natchez. Too near Orson. Without delay she had to reach New Orleans. Furthermore, Susan wouldn’t expose Miss O’Brien, or the Louisiana O’Briens, to the trapeze artist’s wrath, should he track them down.
Burke O’Brien seemed more than capable of dealing with any sort of trouble. But what about that strange interchange between nephew and aunt, the one concerning “tie in with a married woman” and “prospective bride”? Then there was “trick” and those strange allusions to a lamp. He hadn’t dealt well on those issues. Odd two, those O’Briens. Almost as strange as the motley entourage of the Best Ever Traveling Show.
Pippin called her attention, saying, “Ole Snooky’ll smother in that crate. He ain’t got no food neither.”
“No pets, Pippin. And don’t say ain’t.”
Making a last stab at wheedling, he bent a forefinger and thumb to indicate a fraction of an inch. “Please, please, please, can I just have one little peek?”
Was that too much to ask?
Susan contemplated the rope-bound crate. Those of the family Boidae were suitable enough companions, in proper hands. Yet she’d been against bringing Snooky along, even though the old cyclagras gigas couldn’t sink fangs into flesh, was harmless when he spat, and Pippin had proven deft at handling him.
Moreover, the boy had never owned a pet, not even after circumstance caused him to join the circus. She’d given in, mostly in the interest of expediency. At any rate, if word got out that the “cat” had scales, no telling what the testy Captain O’Brien might do.