Merline Lovelace

by Untamed

  “I’ll only be a little while. Just long enough to drink a toast to Nate and watch the officer of the mess retire his drinking mug.”

  “Another tradition?”

  “The last one. Can I get you anything before I leave?”

  All she wanted at the moment was a pen, an inkwell and a sheet of paper. She intended to write Harry now, while her heart ached for Nate. Maybe, just maybe, she could make her brother understand the consequences of his scheme. Perhaps she could also make him understand that he must leave America immediately. Since she couldn’t bring herself to ask Zach for the very implements she would use to betray him yet again, she merely shook her head.

  “I’m fine, thank you. I’ll just rest while you’re gone.”

  His keen glance skimmed over her face. She had no doubt she looked as miserable as she felt.

  “I went to John Stallworth’s this morning,” he told her. “I spoke with Hattie. She said she’d quit the tavern today.”

  “She would quit this earth if you asked her to.”

  “I’ll settle for having her keep an eye on you.” Leaning down, he brushed her mouth with his. “I’ll return shortly, wife.”

  “I’ll be here, husband.”

  He left the door open to catch the hope of a breeze. Barbara rested until his footsteps faded, then dragged her unwieldy bulk from the armchair. Zach kept his writing implements in his small campaign desk. She found a sheet of paper and a sharpened nib for the pen.

  Drawing out the folding stool from under the desk, she sank onto it clumsily. Her husband’s promise to return quickly made her missive necessarily brief.

  Harry—

  A dreadful thing has happened. Two soldiers and three farmers have died as a result of an altercation over a false quit-claim deed issued by Whitestone Title and Deed Company.

  She underscored the company name three times. Dipping the pen into the inkwell, she started on the warning she hoped would keep one of the men she loved from killing the other.

  You must cease operations immediately and disappear before…

  The thud of footsteps sent her pen skittering across the page. Guilty panic made Barbara grab another blank sheet to cover the first.

  It wasn’t Zach who appeared at the open door, however. It was Hattie. Letting out a shaky breath, Barbara nodded to her.

  “Hello, Hattie. Come in.”

  The woman who stepped over the threshold looked much different from the one who’d arrived at Fort Gibson battered and bruised all those months ago. Her skin was smooth, if flushed from the heat, and her brown hair neatly dressed. Her calico blouse clung to slender curves that must surely have caught the attention of the men she served at the taproom. As one of the few unmarried females on post, the woman could have her pick of husbands. Unfortunately, she wanted Barbara’s.

  Her expression held none of the enmity it had the few times she and her former mistress had crossed paths these past months. Still, Barbara could feel the dislike buried under the woman’s impassive demeanor. She knew instinctively what she’d told Zach last night held true. This arrangement wouldn’t answer.

  “Zach sought me out at the taproom this morning,” the maid said by way of greeting. “He asked me to come and give you some assistance.”

  “Yes, he said he intended to speak with you. I told him it wasn’t necessary. I’ve become quite adept at taking care of myself.”

  Hattie’s careful mask slipped. Her lip curled, and she swept her former employer with a mocking glance.

  “So I see.”

  Barbara stiffened. She felt as big and bloated as a dead horse. Her hair still awaited the washing Zach had promised. Worry over Harry’s role in the Whitestone Title and Deed Company gnawed at her conscience like a pack of hungry wolves. She neither needed nor desired the attentions of a serving woman who seemed to have forgotten herself.

  “Thank you for looking in,” she said coolly. “I’ll tell Zach you did so.”

  The unmistakable dismissal had Hattie swearing under her breath. Her heart had about leaped clear of her chest when Zach had sought her out this morning. She’d been sure, so very sure, he’d finally grown tired of this overblown blond bitch.

  Just look at her! Her hair all frowsy, her tits as big as udders, and that loose calico gown draped over her like a tent.

  It had near killed Hattie to watch her swell up these past months with Zach’s child. It had hurt worse to watch him limp home to her every night, his knuckles white on the handle of his cane. Barbara had done that to him. She and that handsome, no-good brother of hers. Zach might have been forced to marry the woman to give his child a name, but once she dropped her whelp, Hattie would see he was rid of her.

  She’d had months to think on ways to make that happen. Months to ponder and plot. She’d come up with a dozen different schemes and abandoned most of them as too chancy. She’d finally decided on the one with the least risk to herself.

  Barbara would die in childbirth. Women bled out all the time after delivering a babe. No one would question matters if this pale, overbred aristocrat never rose from the birthing straw. Cowbane had almost worked before. This time, Hattie would make sure it didn’t fail her. She still had the half-full twist she’d purchased in Washington.

  To use it, though, she needed to be present when Barbara’s pains started. And that meant swallowing her pride. With some effort, she adopted a tone of grudging gratitude.

  “I didn’t come just because Mr. Morgan asked it. You gave me work when I needed it most. I owe you for that. Why don’t you let me help you.”

  Shaking her head, Barbara laid both palms flat on the desk and started to push up. She rose only a few inches and froze.

  “Oh!”

  Her startled glance flew to Hattie’s. Beads of sweat popped out on her upper lip. She hung there for several seconds before sinking back onto the stool.

  Joy leaped in Hattie’s breast. Nature just might have arranged things perfectly for her. They were alone, just her and the bitch. Barbara would send her for the midwife, she didn’t doubt. Hattie would go after her, but she’d swing by her room at the tavern and get the cowbane first. She hid her excitement behind a spurious sympathy.

  “Are your pains starting?”

  “I don’t know.” She put a shaky hand to her belly. “I felt a sharp tug.”

  “Sounds like it to me. I’ll go fetch the midwife, shall I?”

  “Yes, please, and Zach.”

  Hattie started out the door.

  “No! Wait!”

  Swiping her tongue along her lower lip, Barbara reached across the desk and drew a page with writing on it toward her.

  “Before you…” She hesitated, swallowed hard, and started again. “Before you fetch Zach, would you put a letter in the mail pouch for me?”

  As curious as a cat, Hattie nodded.

  “Just let me scribble a few more lines and add my signature.”

  Sweat was rolling down her cheeks by the time she’d folded the page into overlapping quarters, dripped sealing wax onto it, and scratched out an address.

  “This is rather important.” Her fingers shook as she passed the letter to Hattie. “Please see that it gets posted before you do anything else.”

  Pigs would fly before the letter made it into the mail pouch. Agog now with curiosity, Hattie almost snatched it from her hand and left the Morgans’ rooms.

  The moment she turned the corner from the officers’ quarters, Hattie stuffed the letter in her skirt pocket. She couldn’t read herself, but there were plenty around who’d spell out the words for a snuggle or a kiss. She’d get O’Shaunessy to do just that.

  First, though, she had to fetch the cowbane.

  To Hattie’s bitter disappointment, Barbara experienced only that one sharp tug. The midwife poked and prodded at her distended belly and offered the opinion she had another week to go yet.

  Barbara took the prediction with a groan. “A week more in this heat?”

  Smiling sympathetically
, Zach stroked the sweat-dampened hair off her forehead. “How about Hattie and I take turns pouring buckets of water over you?”

  Barbara’s glance shifted to the maid. Hattie hoped her expression was suitably bland.

  “Don’t think I won’t hold you both to that promise.”

  With that wry statement, she sealed her fate. Hattie could barely hold back her glee.

  The midwife left with a promise to remain close to her own quarters should Barbara need her. Hattie accompanied Zach to the door when he, too, returned to his duties.

  “My thanks for coming to stay with Barbara.”

  “She didn’t want me to.”

  “I know.”

  “I think she holds a grudge against me for telling you about the dose she took in Washington.”

  The reminder of those bleak days took some of the easiness from Zach’s smile. Hattie hated to see it go, but didn’t want him to forget the pain and worry the woman in the other room had caused him.

  She held her own hurt for him deep in her heart later that night. The candle beside her bed flickered as she traced a fingertip over the squiggly lines O’Shaunessy had deciphered for her.

  The big Irish corporal had resisted at first. Claimed it wasn’t part of his kit to go readin’ letters writ by officers’ wives. Hattie had been forced to offer more inducement than she’d intended to gain his cooperation. His sweat now stank on her skin and his seed stuck her thighs together.

  She hardly noticed either the stink or the stickiness. An excitement that owed nothing to O’Shaunessy’s enthusiastic rutting pounded in her veins. As if it were yesterday, she remembered Sir Harry Chamberlain sauntering into the taproom. Remembered as well his casual questions about the false quit-claim deed that pig, Thomas, had got himself shot over.

  If Hattie was interpreting this letter right, Handsome Harry had dipped his fingers in the wrong pie. What’s more, his bitch of a sister knew just what he was about.

  She’d come within a breath of snatching the letter from O’Shaunessy’s hands, throwing on her clothes and running back to Zach’s quarters. The bitter acknowledgment of Barbara’s skill at wiggling her way out of situations every bit as bad as this one had kept Hattie right here, in her small, hot room.

  She’d use the letter against the woman. That much she was sure of. She’d have to think about the when and the where of it, though.

  Two days later, Sallie Nicks received word the steamer Arabella would arrive at Fort Gibson that very afternoon, almost a week ahead of its posted schedule. The usual anticipation of letters, newspapers and visitors rippled through the post. When Hattie mentioned the news to Barbara, her face went chalk white.

  “It’s too soon!”

  Hattie had to strain to catch the anguished whisper.

  “The letter couldn’t have reached him yet.”

  “Who was it to go to?” she asked, taking malicious delight in the game.

  Barbara turned a haunted look her way. “My brother. You met him, that day at the landing.”

  Hattie almost danced on her toes with glee. And well Barbara should look haunted. If that brother of hers showed his face at Fort Gibson, he’d have to face three hundred troopers still angry over the deaths of their own.

  And one very dangerous former lieutenant. Zach might walk with a cane, but Hattie had seen him in action. If it turned out Harry Chamberlain was behind the false deeds now peppering Indian Country, Zach would put him down without so much as a blink and get a medal for doing it.

  Shaking with excitement, Hattie didn’t realize fate had handed her the perfect opportunity until Barbara turned to her with a desperate plea.

  “Will you go down to the landing this afternoon and watch to see if my brother is among the passengers who get off the Arabella? I would do it myself but…”

  But she didn’t want her husband to see her and question why she was standing about in the hot sun, Hattie guessed.

  “I can do that,” she agreed. “If he does get off, I’ll bring him here straightaway.”

  “No!”

  She drew in a shaky breath and erased the panic from her voice.

  “Tell him it’s not convenient for me to receive visitors right now. I’m too discommoded to see anyone, even my brother. He’ll have to remain on the steamer and depart when it does. I’ll write out a note and explain things. You can take it with you.”

  By the time the Arabella steamed around the bend of the Grand, her smokestacks belching and her whistle shrilling, Hattie’s fertile mind had devised yet another plot. One that would rid the world of Barbara and leave Zach so disgusted he would never mourn her loss.

  Hoping against hope Sir Harry was indeed aboard the steamer, Hattie pushed to the front of the crowd that gathered at the landing. Her pulse leaped when she spotted his guinea-gold curls among the travelers lining the rail. She caught him right as he stepped off the gangplank.

  “Your sister sent me. She’s in a bad way. She wants me to take you to her.”

  25

  Hattie took Sir Harry straight to the stables behind John Stallworth’s tavern. When he surveyed the log lean-to, his sun-bleached eyebrows snapped into a frown.

  “My sister is here?”

  “No.”

  With a furtive glance over her shoulder, she drew him into the shade of the log building.

  “I couldn’t speak of it with all those people milling about on the landing, but word has got around about those false quit-claim deeds you had printed in New Orleans.”

  He drew himself up to his full height. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about. Now take me to my sister. At once, if you please.”

  The demand scraped Hattie just the wrong way. What gave this crook the right to look down his nose at her? Or speak to her in the same haughty manner his sister used? Hiding her animosity behind a worried face, she dug Barbara’s letter out of her skirt pocket.

  “If you don’t believe me, perhaps you’ll believe you sister.”

  She thrust the letter into his hand. His scowl deepened when he saw the broken seal.

  “What’s this? Have you taken to reading the letters your mistress writes?”

  “No, I never got taught to read. Your sister gave it to me this way. She said Zach—Lieutenant Morgan—found the letter and read it.”

  Still frowning, he scanned the few lines.

  “Hell and damnation!”

  “Barbara says you’re in terrible danger. That’s why she set me to watching every steamboat, so I could catch you and tell you so. She wants you to hire a horse here at the livery stable and leave the post before someone recognizes you. You’ve got to get out of Indian Country.”

  He crumpled the letter in his fist. “I’m not leaving without my sister.”

  “She doesn’t intend for you to. There’s a cave about three miles up the Fort Smith road, back in a stand of rock. I tied a bit of cloth around a tree limb to mark the place you turn off. You’re to wait for her there. She’ll meet you there as soon as she can throw a few things in a valise for herself and the baby.”

  “She’s birthed the child?”

  “Not yet. But she’s due any day. That’s why she’s so frantic,” Hattie added, inventing wildly. “She knows Zach’s just waiting for her to deliver the babe. He thinks she was in on this scheme with you. He’ll take the child and let her rot beside you in prison.”

  His hot blue eyes grew hard and cold. “Barbara said he only married her to give his bastard a name. I should have tossed him overboard when I had the chance.”

  He slapped the letter against his leg while Hattie waited with near breathless impatience to see if he would take the bait. She could have kissed him when he did.

  “I’ll tell you this. I’ll never wear a set of leg irons again. Nor will my sister see the inside of any prison.” His jaw tight, he stuffed the letter in his pocket and drew out a silver card case. “Give her this card so she’ll know I’ve arrived. In the meantime, I’ll hire a mount and find this cav
e. Tell Barbara I’ll wait for her there.”

  It was as easy as that! Hattie almost danced a jig as she watched him stride into the livery stable.

  After that, it was child’s play to hitch up the neat little buggy Zach had purchased for his wife’s pleasure and bundle Barbara into it. All Hattie had to do was wave that bit of cardboard under Barbara’s nose and echo her brother’s own words.

  He’d come for his sister.

  He wouldn’t leave without her.

  He’d wait for her on the Fort Smith road.

  Hattie could have laughed aloud when the cow started for the door, then ground her teeth and said she’d have to empty her bladder before she could climb into the buggy. While she squatted over the chamber pot, her onetime maid lifted a long-bladed hunting knife from one of the wall pegs. She would have preferred to use a pistol. A bullet was quicker and cleaner, but also noisier. She couldn’t risk someone hearing the shots. The knife was safely in her pocket when Barbara waddled out of the back room.

  As Hattie gave her a boost into the buggy, she remembered one last detail. She would have to hurry back and pack a valise to make sure the tale she’d tell Zach rang true. She’d do just that after she saw Sir Harry and Barbara on their way to hell.

  26

  “Zach?”

  Sallie Nicks tapped lightly on the door to the hot dusty room where Zach and the clerk assigned to the federal commission sat sweating over a map of the proposed Seminole boundaries. They’d both shed their coats and rolled up their sleeves, but Zach’s white linen shirt stuck to his shoulders and back like a wet rag.

  “May I speak with you a moment?”