by Shirl Henke
But what if she was innocent, forced out of Wescott’ s home into his bed against her will? “I’ll have to keep a cool head and learn the truth when she arrives. Then we can decide what to do if she has been the victim,” he murmured, praying he could maintain enough self-control to carry through the vow once she walked in the door. The problem was that the desire he felt certainly seemed to be mutual. If she was innocent and yet melted into his arms as she had done in the past, Samuel did not know what he would do. But he knew one thing he would never do—marry her.
Taking the responsibility of a mistress was encumbrance enough. Never again another wife. Even if he could trust a woman enough to want to build a life and have children with her, his work was too dangerous. Soon there would be war. He owed his first allegiance to Jemmy Madison, at least for the duration of the conflict.
Thoughts of the impending war again brought Samuel to consider Emory Wescott and his possible motives for placing Olivia in his life. They could both be working for the British. An unsettling thought indeed, but still one he would do well to consider and carefully question Mademoiselle St. Etienne about when she arrived.
Samuel glanced up at the Seth Thomas clock on the mantel. Midnight. Past time that she should be here. He rose and walked over to the front door to look outside. The night still held the brisk chill of early spring but the sky was ablaze with stars. The street was utterly silent in the isolated area where the house was situated. Good folks were asleep. Where the hell was Olivia?
* * * *
Baptiste Lacroix was drunk. However, his three-day binge was not the problem. The condition of his companion, Sylvestre Robard, was. Sylvestre was dead. Baptiste sat staring disconsolately at the other French Canadian trapper who had unfortunately incurred the wrath of a great “Boston” keelboatman.
Behind the waterfront tavern called Le Coq Rouge, Baptiste lay sprawled against the rough stone wall staring at Sylvestre’ s body that reposed in the gutter. It was rather the worse for its encounter with Bullfrog Gentry. One ear was chewed off and his jaw broken, but the coupe de grace was the gouged out eyeball dangling across Robard’s cheek.
“Mon ami, what am I to do now, eh?” Baptiste groused to the corpse in a slurred voice. “I have contracted you to Monsieur Lisa and you had to go and die on me. I must find another to sign on in your place or forfeit the bounty. And, sacre bleu, Marie will skin me slick if I have no coin for return passage to New Orleans.”
He held his head in both hands to still the pounding in his skull and tried to think. Perhaps the dawn would bring an answer. Already faint rays of pale blue and lavender streaked the flat Illinois prairie on the opposite bank of the vast rolling river. He crawled over to Sylvestre and struggled to hoist the slighter man’s remains on his shoulder, then stood up and began to make his way toward a copse of bushes a quarter mile down the bank. The least he could do was lay Robards out where drunken “Bostons” could not spit in his poor mangled face or teamsters run over the body.
Olivia made her way slowly along the riverfront, heading toward the mountainous piles of pelts deposited on the wharf at the bottom of Market Street. In the dim dawn light the boats clustered along the river’s edge looked like a low brushy forest in winter, the keelboat masts sticking up like so many dead trees. Numerous smaller craft, crude flatboats and graceful bark canoes, bobbed gently on the current as if signaling their readiness to embark up- or downriver from the central locus of the city.
Many of those boats were headed downriver to New Orleans where her mother’s brother, Charles Durand, resided. When first they landed in America he had turned them away just as all Maman’s family in France had done, disowning her for her forbidden marriage. Péré had spit on the banquette in front of the Durand mansion, saying he would never again beg from any man. At the time Olivia had been filled with pride for his boldness, but now she must return as a supplicant once more.
Pride was a luxury she could no longer afford. Uncle Charles must surely take her in, for the alternative was unthinkable. Samuel Shelby’s blinding white smile and magical lips flashed into her mind’s eye but she would never again experience his fiercely possessive kisses or bask in the radiance of his smile—that traitor’s smile. No, she would never come to his bed, a shamefully purchased plaything to be discarded when he tired of her.
The difficulty lay in making her way downriver. A woman alone could not travel with rough boatmen and she had no money for passage anyway. She seriously considered stealing some from Emory Wescott’s office but in spite of his perfidious attempt to barter her to Samuel, he had taken her in and provided handsomely for her with no obligation to do so. Anyway, if she took his money he might be vindictive enough to set the law on her, in which case Uncle Charles would certainly think her cut from the same cloth as her gambler father.
If only there was a good family heading downriver from whom she could beg asylum—or at the least a job as a nursemaid or servant in return for passage. But she knew of no such family traveling at this time, and time was her enemy for her guardian would have his agents out searching for her in a few short hours. Not that any decent family would shelter her or even hire her now that she had disgraced herself at the racetrack. Everyone would turn her away, possibly even forcibly restrain her until they could fob her off onto her guardian for his tender disposition.
She had no one to rely upon but herself. But if Julian St. Etienne’s daughter had inherited nothing else from her father, she had his keen instincts for survival to see her through.
She had employed the disguise she had used with such success for the past several years. Hidden in the bottom of her wardrobe had been several pairs of the baggy britches and voluminous homespun shirts which she had worn to race the Wescott horses. She had returned home after leaving Quinn’s warehouse yesterday and made ready for her escape. Pretending civility to her “uncle” had been difficult, but she had succeeded. Then before he could broach his odious news, she had pleaded a headache and sequestered herself in her room. By the time he discovered her absence at the dinner hour, Olivia had been gone for hours and a scruffy boy named Ollie arrived on the riverfront.
But St. Louis after dark was a dangerous place, even for a boy. The taverns belched forth smoke and liquor fumes that seemed all the thicker for the drunken French songs and coarse Anglo-Saxon oaths that also spewed out into the narrow streets. She found a root cellar behind a deserted cabin on Second Street and went to ground for the night. Dawn found her approaching the welter of boats and boatmen at the bottom of Market Street where she hoped to sign on as a crewman on a flatboat laden with peltries bound for New Orleans.
Moving the unwieldy boats was hard labor requiring brawny men. A skinny, smooth-cheeked boy like Ollie quickly encountered jeering rejection. After half a dozen false starts, she had become desperate, seeing in every hard-eyed riverman an agent sent by her guardian to penetrate her disguise and drag her back to Samuel. She was growing frantic when an argument between a swarthy Spaniard and a volatile Frenchman caught her attention. She edged closer to listen.
“You promised me a man for the journey, Baptiste. Without him I will not pay you,” the Spaniard said in heavily accented English.
“But, Monsieur Lisa, I must return to New Orleans else my Marie, she will kill me,” the French voyageur pleaded.
Olivia observed their argument, recalling her guardian’s mention of Manuel Lisa, a mysterious Spaniard from New Orleans who had begun to make money and enemies in the St. Louis fur trade. Taking courage in hand, she approached the disconsolate Baptiste after the beetle-browed, dark-eyed Lisa had dismissed him.
“I could not help overhearing your argument with the Spaniard,” she said in French, rubbing her dirt smeared hands on her pants, then hooking her thumbs arrogantly in her belt.
“Yes, and what of it?” Lacroix asked, too wretchedly intent on his hangover to pay attention to the scruffy urchin.
“I need that job—I am experienced. I’ve worked the boats from New Or
leans all the way up to the forts on the Missouri,” she lied.
“You look awfully young—and scrawny to have poled a keelboat.”
Dredging up every bit of information she had gleaned from her guardian’s river trade, she boasted, “I have cordelled through icy water shoulder deep and climbed on logjams. I was the one the men sent to shinny up the trees when we had to winch a keelboat past an embarras blocking the main channel of the Missouri. Why floating down to New Orleans will be child’s play for me.”
Baptiste’s bloodshot hazel eyes lit with interest. The boy mistakenly thought Lisa was headed to New Orleans, not up the Missouri, but he did seem to know about the river. Hell, Lisa had a big crew already. This little one could chop wood and haul water when they camped. “You come with me but let me do all the talking, eh?”
An hour later Baptiste Lacroix had purchased passage aboard a keelboat headed to New Orleans to meet his virago wife. Ollie, against Manuel Lisa’s better judgment, had signed on as cabin boy and cook’s helper. Neither Lisa nor the “boy” had any idea “he” was headed in the opposite direction from his desired destination.
Chapter Eight
Jeremiah, the Wescott butler, bowed deferentially as he ushered the tall army officer into his master’s dining room. Bright light poured in the bay windows at Emory Wescott’s back as the sun rose that morning. He sat at a Sheraton table while the remains of a hearty breakfast were removed by a kitchen wench.
“Good day, Colonel Shelby. I rather assumed you’d be around, although I confess I thought it would be a bit later. May I offer you coffee? Perhaps some of Sallie’s maple cured ham and biscuits?”
“What you may offer me is Olivia.” Shelby’s voice was low and deadly, his anger tightly leashed beneath an icy mask. He had waited until two before finally abandoning his vigil in the front parlor to ride through the streets of St. Louis, tracing Olivia’s route from his house to Wescott’s, fearful of foul play. Finding not a trace of the girl, he had returned home to finish off the bottle of brandy, assuming she had reneged on the deal. He was not in good humor.
“I’m afraid I must disappoint you, Colonel. Olivia is not available,” Wescott replied with a bitter twist of his lips. “The flighty chit took off sometime yesterday afternoon from what I can gather from her maid. Spoiled little baggage,” he muttered angrily into the delicate cup he sipped from.
“She ran away? From me?” Samuel struggled to keep the horror from his voice. Were his fears about her being an innocent pawn true?
Wescott scoffed in disgust. “Of course not. In fact, I had no opportunity to even discuss our arrangement with her. The damned gel just lit out, but not to worry, she’s done it before,” he lied smoothly.
“You mean she just rides off—dressed like a boy—to attend races without your permission?” Samuel asked incredulously. Surely no woman would dare...but then he had an insistent feeling Olivia St. Etienne would dare a great deal.
“She’ll be back, none the worse for it, perhaps a bit chastened. Probably she’s at some horserace in Kaskaskia or New Madrid. Gypsy Lady’s missing, as well.” Once Wescott had discovered that Olivia had fled early last evening, he’d taken the precaution of removing the mare to a safe hiding place. She had left everything behind but those clothes she rode in. Already he had his men combing the riverfront for a scruffy boy who wore a bandanna tied around his hair, covered by an oversized felt hat.
“I’m leaving on a trading venture for my brother-in-law and expect to be upriver for several months. I trust that will be adequate time in which to recover your chastened ward,” Samuel said sardonically.
“She’ll be waiting for you, Colonel, never fear,” Wescott replied.
Shelby arched one eyebrow and studied the crafty older man seated at the table. His jowly face was expressionless except for the feral watchfulness barely evident in those hooded gray eyes. “Just what game do you play, Mr. Wescott, I wonder?” Without waiting for a reply, Shelby turned and walked from the room.
* * * *
Lisa’s big keelboat was eighty feet long with a cabin box large enough for a man to stand upright in it, this despite the false bottom floor in which the dearest of their trade goods were concealed. The trader had the new boat made to his precise specifications with a two-foot-wide runway along each side of the cabin box on which the polemen could walk back and forth at their laborious task, propelling the boat against the big river’s powerful if sluggish flow.
Specially rigged with a heavy mast and square mainsail, the boat could take advantage of favorable winds when available. At the top of the mast a heavy cordelle rope was fastened to use when the crew was forced to pull the boat from shore. A heavy swivel gun perched ominously on the bow to repel boarders in the event of any encounter with either hostile Indians or river pirates.
Almost two dozen men were milling around Lisa’s boat, which was tied up fifteen miles above the small French village of St. Charles. The trading party had set out from St. Louis the preceding day but had been forced, as was often the case, to delay while drunken stragglers among the crew trickled into camp. Having paid their final farewell to the amenities of civilization by swilling rotgut whiskey, most of the men were penitent enough to allow Lisa’s second in command to round them up and bring them to fulfill their contracted obligations. Samuel Shelby had been assigned the unenviable task of collecting the unrepentant.
Lisa’s expedition provided him with the perfect cover to head up the Missouri into Osage country. In addition, the shrewd trader was well-known among the Big and Little Osage bands and would quickly learn of any rumors regarding the Englishman as they traded and gossiped with the Indians enroute. All Shelby had to do in return for his passage was to round up the drunken engages and hunt for game.
The former chore he completed after breaking one trapper’s nose and loosening several teeth of another. He nursed a bruised left fist from punching Jean Lebeck and a sore jaw from Billy Walgren’ s roundhouse swing. Of course the clumsy blow would never have landed had not the colonel been occupied at the time breaking a cane chair over Hiram Skeeter’s head. When the dust cleared after his brawl with the three drunken rivermen, he had become something of an instant folk hero around the St. Charles countryside. Eight sullen men, reeking of stale whiskey and all but bleeding through their eyeballs, stumbled listlessly into camp to the jovial catcalls of their fellows.
“All present and accounted for,” Shelby said as he swung down from his horse.
Lisa nodded. “I see Santiago Quinn did not exaggerate your skills,” he said in Spanish. His shrewd dark eyes assessed the tall Anglo from beneath beetled black brows. Manuel Lisa was slight of stature but deceptively strong. He was dressed in typical rivermen’s garb, greasy buckskin breeches and a laced buckskin tunic. His belt held a wicked looking skinning knife and a brace of pistols. From his piratical appearance, no one would mistake him for one of St. Louis’s leading businessmen. He grinned, revealing two missing teeth and one prominent gold one. “Come, have some coffee and we will talk.”
After pouring steaming inky coffee into tin cups, the two men walked between several campfires that crackled brightly in the spring twilight. They quickly left the raucous babble of laughing, cursing Frenchmen and Americans behind. “How many days until we reach the first Osage village?” Samuel asked in Spanish, a language he had been fluent in since childhood.
Lisa shrugged. “With good weather, ten days, two weeks, but I do not know if your Englishman will be at the first camp we encounter. Already the Indians have begun leaving the big winter settlement where the Osage River runs into the Missouri, heading onto the plains for the spring hunt.”
“They trap most of their beaver before the hunt. I’d think British traders would arrive before the Osage scatter,” Shelby speculated.
“British traders, yes, but this particular man who brings whiskey and weapons, promising the return of their ancestral hunting lands when the great king across the ocean defeats the Americans—of this
one I do not know.”
“You told Santiago you thought it might be Robert Dickson from Prairie du Chien.”
“Last winter I believed so, but having heard the rumors my men brought back as they traveled downriver from Fort Raymond this spring, I no longer think it is him.”
“If only we had a name, or even a description of the bastard,” Shelby said in frustration.
Lisa grinned. “To an Osage, all white men fall into two categories, the Heavy Eyebrows or the Long Knives. As a Spaniard I am one of the former, you the latter, as are all Englishmen from Canada. Not much to go on, I fear.”
“Once I pick up his trail in an encampment, I’ll follow it until I find him.”
Observing the steely determination in Shelby’s hard blue eyes, Lisa said, “Tread lightly, my friend, with the Little Ones. The Osage have been allied with the Americans for a long time, but they demand proper respect, ceremony and dignity—things the British excel at. You cannot barge in waving an American flag and drag away this English agent, no matter if he is trespassing on soil your government has purchased from Napoleon. Before there was a United States or even a France, there was an Osage nation hunting and farming along the Mississippi.”
Samuel raised an eyebrow sardonically. “You sound like my brother-in-law.”
“We are both Spanish, yes, but we are men without a country now, belonging neither to the Old World nor your United States. Perhaps that is why we deal so well with the Indians. We understand dispossession.”
Shelby sighed thoughtfully. “Tom Jefferson believes that one day the United States will stretch across this continent. That means Spain and Britain will be forced to give way. So will all the hundreds of tribes of Indians, I’m afraid.”