by Martha Hix
Harken? “V” and the lover mentioned by Fabienne Laure were one and the same? The sleuth was Burke’s mistress? It especially hurt when he didn’t meet his temporary wife’s eyes.
This man who’d won her love but didn’t want her forever now tore at the tenuous strings of their marriage. What had she expected though? Hearts and roses? His love didn’t bind them, and hers might not be enough to keep them together.
Yet it was time to buck up. She tenderly swabbed the mangled mess of Burke’s wrist. “Who did this to you?”
“West. Storey. But I’m not important. Vell is. She—”
Vell is? Vell is! One slat after another kept breaking beneath the foothold of composure. Susan spoke falsely, coolly. “Isn’t it cozy, your devotion?”
Burke shoved up to lean on an elbow, wincing. “Wife, it’s not what you think.”
“It rarely is. Husband.”
“I—I’ll explain later.” Burke raked the shaking fingers of his uninjured hand through wild hair, saying to the detective, “The Eel killed Velma.”
The detective squeezed his eyes and threw back his head, a ragged plea to God echoing. Tremors hunched him forward in the chair, and he buried his face in his hands.
It was quite unprofessional behavior, but Susan understood why when Burke said, “I’m sorry, Cinglure. I know you loved her too.”
Susan could have broken his other arm, thinking, Wasn’t Vell a lucky woman? All the men loved her.
“Why did you send her?” Cinglure lifted his head. “Why did you send a femme to West?”
“She demanded the job. Pointed out his weakness for women. Vell figured she’d have the edge.”
“Weakness for women,” the detective repeated with disgust. “It is true. But if what you charge is also true, no woman is safe from him.”
Burke’s troubled, pained eyes went to Susan. “I know.”
“More details,” Cinglure insisted. “Tell me everything.”
Susan pasted a confused and angry glare on her husband as he explained. “Must have been in the vicinity of Natchez. She—”
“You discovered this when you traveled there to look for her?” the detective asked plaintively.
Susan wanted to cover her ears, to shut out this hell, but she wouldn’t. Face it. Burke went to Natchez to search for Velma Harken. What luck, a lagniappe indeed, happening on the tidbit about Orson.
Burke’s face took on an even more ashen pallor. “The Eel ordered her scalp lifted.”
Shock and outrage subdued Susan’s jealousy. She gasped.
Cinglure rose to stand. “I . . . hope you are wrong about la jolie blon’. I hope West plays a trick.”
“I saw the scalp. Go to the cemetery, Cinglure. Be there at dawn. See the tracks for yourself. There’ll be mine, the Eel’s, and those of Storey. You may also find some . . . some stray blond hairs.”
Cinglure nodded, then bid a terse farewell.
To Susan, this room had never seemed so still, so strained, as when Cinglure left her alone with her husband. Her first thought was to rush away and leave Burke to his grief.
She wouldn’t. Her marriage might depend on understanding. Susan perched on the edge of the sofa. Her fingers smoothing the black hair that brushed Burke’s brow, she forced herself into the wifely mode. “You’ve had quite a night. See if you can get a moment of sleep before the doctor arrives.”
“I didn’t tell you my sleuth was a woman.”
Or a mistress. Susan didn’t dare look at him for fear his expression would give him away. She asked, “I wonder if she was as lovely as your Miss Lawrence.”
“You are my wife. There is none more lovely than you.”
Should she believe him?
His level of pain increased as he said, “Susan, I didn’t mention anything to Cinglure over and above West being wanted for Paget’s murder. The Eel is blackmailing me—us.” He gave brief, tortured details of the terms, plus: “I’ll give him the money. Ambush him. Or the accomplice who’ll lead me to him.”
“Why do you allow his extortion?” she asked, sickened.
“Angela Paget is with West. They want money for Pip.”
Orson’s worst punch had never struck Susan as hard as this disclosure. The insect—very like the roaches Keep Smile drove from the courtyard—would sell her son. But how was the Roach tied to the Eel? “How can that be?”
“Don’t know. Particulars don’t matter. West has threatened you and the lad.”
Susan shuddered at the compound of this nightmare. “She can’t have Pippin. I won’t let that insect eat her young.”
“Neither will I.” Burke tried to move. Groaning instead, he spoke in the halting pitch of injury. “Trust me.”
It was obvious Burke O’Brien wouldn’t be waltzing around, saving damsels and orphans, anytime soon. “If you’d gone to the judge when we were first married rather than haring off to Natchez to rescue your mistress, this—”
“I went there to save your neck from the gallows.” The clouds behind his eyes lifted to show annoyance. “But let’s get something straight. Vell was a sleuth. And a friend. No more.”
Susan yearned to believe him. “You never took her to bed and did all the things you’ve done to me?”
“She took half this city to her bed. She was a whore at one time. She was always my friend. I loved her like a sister.”
“You speak like an incestuous cur.” Unreasonably, Susan wished to have been the only lover to know how he used his hands, lips, and entirety to bring pleasure. If only she were the sole woman to know the length of his organ and the way it worked, or how his face tensed and he bared his teeth at the moment of petite mort . . . If only. “Do you love me like a sister?”
“I do not consider you a sister.”
“How many more ’friends’ should I expect to turn up, dead or alive, before this year is through?”
“Susan, I can do nothing about the past. We’ve got to go forward. It’s our future at stake.”
Our future?
Susan realized they had no future, not unless she stopped this jealousy. Really, there was no time for it. “Your past loves simply don’t mean that much in the broader scope of this horrible early morning. But you have my sympathies for Miss Harken. I was petty to let her bother me.”
“Thank you,” he said hoarsely. “Now we can get down to the business of beating Rufus West. Once he and Storey are captured, the O’Brien Steamship Company will endure.”
“How do you plan to ambush anyone when you’ve got several broken bones?”
A frown bracketed his mouth at her doubting words. “You sit tight in this house, and I’ll show you.”
“No. You’ve caged me for the very last time.”
“Shut up about cages. There’s a killer on the loose. I won’t have him coming after you. You’ll have to abide a cage.”
He spoke wisely; she accepted it. What she could not accede to were his next words. “Cinglure needs the whole story about blackmail. He also must know we don’t have rights to Pip.”
This was the last straw! Susan’s knees felt like sponges as she wrenched to stand. “In other words, you’ll sacrifice Pippin to save your shipping company. He’ll end up in another orphanage. Or worse. Eaten alive by his mother.”
Burke grimaced and rolled to sit up, gnashing his teeth at his malaise. “I should point out . . . your doubts never cease to wound my pride . . . but I won’t.” His breath drew shallow, rattled. “Once the Eel’s captured, Mrs. Paget will surface. Judge Duval won’t let her have the boy.”
Marcel Duval, the same judge who’d presided over their marriage.
“For God’s sake, she’s tried to sell Pip,” Burke said, his voice trailing to a whisper. “I’ll get the law on our side.”
He was an influential man, this Burke O’Brien. A powerful man with many friends. But when it came to picking between his business and the freckled waif, there was no choice.
Would that Rufus West and Angela Paget were never found
!
Twenty-five
Burke lay on a cot in the library, drugged out of his mind.
“Get out and don’t come back!” Susan yelled these words at midafternoon, two days after the cemetery havoc. Aiming past two rivermen standing guard at the rue Royale entrance to the house, she launched a bottle at the retreating doctor. “How dare you give my husband laudanum!”
“Shh, shh.” Zinnia placed her fingers on Susan’s shoulders after she’d slammed the front door. “It will be all right. We’ll get Mr. Burke back in shape.”
Susan turned into the servant’s comfort and cried. “How could he do that? He knows Burke’s trouble with alcohol. Now—”
“Doc Sawbones had to set that nasty break. Would’ve been cruel to make your man suffer.”
“He didn’t have to give more of it. And lie to me and you over it.”
“Shh. What’s done is done. Come on, girl. Let’s go to the kitchen. Zinnia’s gonna fix you a nice cup of tea. We’re gonna work this out.”
She listened to the voice of reason. Once at the kitchen table, the tea brewed, Susan rubbed her temples. “This should have been a grand time. Family in town and reconciled with.”
The O’Briens had been by time and again to check on their fallen kinsman. In fact, there had been a line of well-wishers to call. And a detective with evidence in his custody.
Cinglure. How long could they keep the whole truth from him? How much longer would it be before Pippin was snatched away? How much longer would Burke’s shipping line survive, should West not resurface?
Keep faith in your husband. Everything will work out.
Susan stared at her teacup. “Burke will be beside himself, Zinnia, once he realizes he hasn’t called for Remy Cinglure.”
“You did the right thing, when Miss Laure come by, having her gather some of the shipping-line boys to watch the house.”
Yes, Susan had willingly made her own cage.
She tried to inject a brighter note. “Mam’selle Laure is really quite nice. Very loyal to Burke.” Recollections of particular well-wishers—comely widows bearing covered dishes for “sweet Captain O’Brien”—played havoc with the brighter note. “I hope Fabienne doesn’t turn out to be another of his very good friends.”
Zinnia shook her head. “She ain’t. She’s just a fine young lady wanting to make a place for herself in a man’s world.”
Susan left the table, went to the chicken she’d earlier abandoned. Soup was good for the infirm. If they could get Burke to eat it.
“I should’ve had Fabienne’s ambition,” she said. “I could’ve supported Pippin on my own, without help from anyone.”
“You’re doing all right.” Zinnia got rice from a cupboard. “Even if you did send that letter of credit back to your daddy.”
Yesterday a letter had arrived. Father, from Galveston, had second thoughts about his daughter. He wanted a reconciliation. Moreover, he sent enough credit to fund her dream. “You may need this, should your situation with Captain O’Brien deteriorate,” he’d written. Her reply had gone out that morning. Harmony between father and daughter was much welcomed. But she didn’t accept the letter of credit. “I bet everything on Burke. And on our marriage,” she admitted. “It must survive.”
“That’s the spirit, girl.” Zinnia refilled the cups. “What makes you think it won’t survive?”
“Don’t be coy, Zinnia Jefferson. You know as well as I do, ours was a business arrangement.” Coupled with lust. But it had become more than that.
Zinnia said, “Figured you’d of gotten past that, all that hugging and loving you two were doing. He’s crazy about you, girl. Needs love, and family. Always did. Like I told him when that Antoinette and her baby died, get himself a wife and another baby. Let himself love.”
Susan latched on to the baby part. Burke had fathered a child with Antoinette? The cleaver whacked down; chicken flew. “Another baby?”
“Oh, Lordy, you didn’t know.” The servant slapped fingers to her lips. “Me and my big mouth.”
“You opened it. Keep talking.”
Zinnia took the weapon out of Susan’s hand, saying softly, “Li’l ole boy died being born. Took his mama with him. Doctors said it was expected, her being all broken up in body and head.”
“No wonder he’s so very opposed to magic.” He’d not only been thwarted in marrying his beloved Antoinette and keeping her safe from harm, he lost his son too. Susan’s heart went out to him. Star-crossed Burke, set against by sorcery and the evil of mankind. “I’m glad I didn’t defy him about hoodoo.”
“Well, uh, um. Reckon I ought tell you. I been to St. Ann. Asked the lady for more gris-gris.”
“What kind of gris-gris?”
“Fertility.”
“Get it out of this house this minute!”
“In a minute.” Zinnia plunked chicken into the pot. “Is the gris-gris working?”
“No.” But how would Susan know? Her monthly flux hadn’t appeared in all her time at rue Royale, but she’d never been regular. Reared by the celibate Anne Helene, she knew nothing about having babies.
Zinnia cocked her tignoned head. “You don’t want your man’s baby?”
“No.”
It was the biggest lie of Susan’s life.
Susan tried to nurse her husband back to health, but he demanded more laudanum. He refused soup. On the fourth day she went to the library and found a fever had come on Burke. A different doctor was summoned. The patient begged relief, and Susan wasn’t cruel enough to argue when laudanum slipped down his throat.
“No more,” she ordered the doctor as he took his leave.
“He may not live to ask.”
She went back to the sickroom and bathed Burke’s fire-hot brow. “Please don’t die on me, darling. Please don’t die. I love you. Love you with all my heart.”
“She’s dead.” He tossed in his stupor. “Baby’s dead. No! No, Storey. Get the hell away from me! Can’t stand it. Wanna die. Can’t live with it. Love her! I killed her. My fault. Damned lamp.”
He carried on in his mental anguish. The washrag dropped from Susan’s fingers. “You still love her. You’re not over her. Or your child. I never stood a chance, did I?”
Of course he didn’t hear her, his mind being too fogged, his heart too crowded.
Shaking, Susan straightened and backed away. He’d given and given and given. To everyone—Antoinette Lawrence, Velma Harken, and perhaps to more. Why had he never mentioned his love for the dead child created with Miss Lawrence? The answer was simple enough. His tattered heart hurt too much to discuss it.
Susan went to the kitchen. “Zinnia, you take over in the sickroom.” She couldn’t watch him die . . . with another woman’s name on his lips.
When Burke began to revive from the opiates, he barely noticed his surroundings, but knew he rested on a cot in the first-floor library. With a hangover. Two years sober, he’d thought he didn’t need drink, and surely nothing stronger. One taste, and he’d reveled in blunted sense. Until it became a nightmare. He was not a happy man.
The next morning Susan entered the library to straighten the linen. He hadn’t seen her in days. Where had she been when he needed her?
“Remy Cinglure came by again yesterday,” she said coolly. “He’s been a regular caller.”
“Why didn’t you bring him to me?”
She tossed a single braid over her shoulder. “So you could tell him about the blackmail? I think not.”
Burke closed his burning eyes. His ribs and arm equally afire, his senses screaming for relief, he adjusted the sling that kept his splinted arm inert. “Then tell me what he said.”
“He found the tracks. And some blond hair. The police are searching for West and Storey.”
“Searching. They haven’t found them?”
“No, thankfully.”
Too weak to argue, Burke knew why she’d said that. If West were arrested, the truth could come out about Pippin. “Susan, we need guards on this p
lace.”
“It’s taken care of.”
She handed him a glass of tea, which he gulped.
“Pippin would like to see you,” she said.
Burke smiled. “Send him in.”
She didn’t. “Why are you attached to my boy?”
“He’s easy to love.”
Brushing a stray lock of hair from her temple, Susan asked, “Are you using him to make up for that baby in Ohio?”
Reality shoved at injury. “Zinnia told you.”
“It should have come from you.”
The truth in her statement made him angry. He should have been honest. Wasn’t that what love is all about? Suffering the dregs of soporific and berating a fool called Captain Burke O’Brien, he shouted, “Why are you dragging this out now? Dammit, we’ve got enough on our shoulders without your whining about Ohio.”
Susan stood as still as a statue. “Believe me, you won’t hear another word of it from my lips.”
Then she rushed away.
Burke lunged up from the cot to go after her. To apologize. To declare his love.
He fell on his face.
He was losing Susan.
She didn’t return to his bedside.
“I won’t let my wife go,” Burke vowed after Zinnia took his breakfast tray the following Monday. “I’ve got to set-tie. . . everything.”
He gathered strength to climb the staircase. Reaching the bedroom where he’d known so many intoxicating moments with his adored wife, he found her reposed on the fainting sofa, Fabienne Laure painting a very small picture of her in a very high-necked dress.
“Go, Fabienne,” he growled.
“Monsieur Cinglure has been coming around the office,” the auburn-haired young lady said. “He says you will not see him. He wants to know why. So does Sir Joshua Tate. I told them—”
“Go, Fabienne,” Burke repeated.
The artist gathered her supplies, leaving him alone with his wife, but Susan shot from the sofa.
“Just because I grieve for Antoinette’s boy doesn’t mean I can’t love yours,” he said quietly. “Pip. Or ours.”
“Therein lies your problem, Burke. You love everyone.”