Patricia Potter (21 page)

“Miss Seaton,” he said. “I’m glad you came today. I might have some news for you.”

Meredith held her breath. She had heard those words before. She trusted Bill Milligan now only because Elias did.

He unlocked the door and waited until she entered the dingy office.

“I’m checking out the latest information, but I think she might be in Kentucky.”

“A slave?”

He nodded. “I traced the sale of a girl named Lissa, a light-colored female, to a horseman in Lexington six years ago. She was sold again, and the records were lost, but I think I have a lead. I have someone checking now to see if she’s still there.”

“How long…?”

“Several weeks, maybe more.”

Her hands tightened on the small bag she carried. “Perhaps I should—”

“You should do nothing unless you want to spoil any chance we might have in getting her free,” he said curtly.

“However much it costs…”

“I know, Miss Seaton. And after two years I want to find her as much as you. I don’t like failure.”

She saw the determination on his face and some of her confidence returned. He was a burly man, a former policeman, and she sensed he could be very dangerous. He had no strong feelings on slavery one way or another, but he was immensely loyal to those who employed him, and that included both Elias and herself. Elias had used him years ago to expose a slave hunter who kidnapped free blacks in the North and enslaved them by swearing they were escaped fugitives.

“I’ll do as you say,” Meredith said finally, but Milligan noted the reluctance in her voice.

“I’ll contact you when I hear more,” he said. “Elias can get word to you.” He never contacted her directly. He knew little about her and he didn’t want to know more. His job was merely to find the girl Lissa, and he understood that Meredith would then try to purchase her freedom. He suspected both Meredith and the Quaker, Elias, were involved in the Underground Railroad, and he had dropped several broad hints to Elias whenever he learned of an impending police raid, but he did not know their involvement as a fact, and he kept it that way.

As Meredith emerged from the building, she felt a mixture of elation and apprehension. Perhaps after all these years, she was finally reaching the one goal that had eluded her. Yet she was desperately afraid to get her hopes too high. She had been disappointed too many times.

What would Lissa be like now? It had been nearly fourteen years since they had become separated. What had her friend and sister suffered? Meredith shivered, and the cause was not the damp cold wind blowing off the Mississippi.

The carriage returned her to the hotel, and Opal, florid and indignant, was waiting. “Respectable women,” she pronounced, “do not wander the streets of New Orleans alone.”

“I just went to see Brett Devereux,” Meredith explained soothingly. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

Molified slightly, Opal gave one last attempt at chaperonage. “I really don’t think…”

But Meredith suggested attending a play that night, and Opal’s disapproval quickly turned to delight. Meredith knew such an outing would tire Opal considerably and allow Meredith to slip out later to see Elias. She wanted to tell him about Jim, the slave at the Mathis plantation, and alert the Railroad to be waiting for him, and she also wished to share the possible good news about Lissa. Elias seemed to be the only one who cared. In the meantime, she and Opal would go shopping. It was expected.

But it would be a very long afternoon.

When Quinn returned to the
Lucky Lady
Cam was gone. It was just as well, he thought. He needed time alone, time to sort through things. His mind was jumbled.

It had been a disastrous day, starting with his confrontation with Meredith Seaton. It had not improved with his meeting with Brett.

Meredith had unsettled him in a way he had not been in years. He had thought himself content with his life. He was doing something he felt was important. At the same time, he was exercising his restless appetite for adventure and tweaking the nose of those who kept others in captivity. He had thought it sufficient to have Cam as his only friend, but now he wondered if Cam’s obsession with Daphne wasn’t a reflection of a need and loneliness he himself was feeling all too often. Was he being unfair to Cam? To himself?

He convinced himself that Meredith Seaton did not interest him, only that he longed for a woman he could love and be loved by. It scared the bloody fury out of him that even Miss Seaton was beginning to look good to his usually impeccable eyes. Was he really getting that desperate?

His brief visit with Brett had not helped the state of his heart. He had seen the wistful regret in his brother’s eyes as once more he refused a visit to Brett’s home, and the approbation when he deposited the results of his rather successful card games from the last trip.

Day by day it was becoming more important to him that Brett understand he wasn’t merely a wastrel, that someone other than Cam accept him for what he truly was. He ached with the need, though he didn’t quite understand why it had grown so strong. He had always been able to submerge this feeling before, to convince himself it wasn’t important. A momentary aberration, nothing more. But now it was eating at him like a cancer.

The only relief he had felt during his brief visit to his brother had come when he’d seen the painting lying on Brett’s desk. He had picked it up, glancing at it idly, his mind only vaguely paying attention. It was very poorly done, the colors gloomy with hovering clouds looking more like gunny sacks than anything else.

“Your taste has deteriorated, brother,” he commented.

Brett smiled wryly. “A present, I’m afraid.”

“From your worst enemy?”

Brett grinned. “From my worst client.”

Quinn’s hands stilled. “Don’t tell me…?”

“Miss Seaton. She was here for more money. This, I assume, was a bribe of sorts.”

“She really didn’t want the money, then,” Quinn said with laughter in his eyes.

Brett’s grin grew wider, although he was ashamed of himself for doing so. It
was
a gift. “She meant well,” he said.

Quinn looked at the painting again, this time with a closer eye. He remembered that the aunt had said something about Meredith’s hobby, mentioning it almost apologetically. Now he knew why. But for some reason, he continued to stare at it. The name “Seaton” was scrawled in the right-hand corner. Nothing about the painting was quite right, almost as if…

He shook his head at the thought that came and went as quickly as a summer storm. Yet something in his mind continued to nag at him.

“When are you leaving again?” Brett’s words brought him back to the conversation.

“Tomorrow afternoon.”

“You’re quite sure you won’t come for dinner tonight?”

“I wish I could,” he’d said, and there was a soft note of yearning in his voice. “But I have a business meeting.”

“Quinn…?”

Quinn turned and looked at his brother, at the wistful expression on his face.

“The children keep asking for you.”

“Next time, Brett. Next time. I promise.”

“I’ll hold you to it,” Brett replied. He went over and held his hand out to his brother, taking it with a warmth that both hurt and pleased Quinn.

He had nodded and left. Now he wondered where in the hell Cam was.

He needed something to take his mind from thoughts he found both destructive and unproductive.

Quinn went to his cabin, seeking refuge from his confused emotions. He felt like the turbulent Mississippi in the painting that adorned the wall and wished, for a moment, that he had something of the tranquility of the rainbow.

Perhaps it was time to consider the future. He and Cam would probably be discovered sooner or later, and he needed to develop an escape plan. And then what? The future seemed to stretch emptily and endlessly before him.

More for the activity than anything else, he changed his clothes, exchanging his black suit for a loose flowing linen shirt and more comfortable black trousers. The mirror caught the ribboned scars on his back, and he imagined the horror Miss Seaton, or any other woman, would feel at seeing them. His hands clenched as he remembered the pain of the lash….

He tried to remember O’Connell’s words as they stripped his shirt from him and tied his arms securely around the mast.

“Don’t let the bloody bastards git ye down. Think o’ the meadow, lad, o’ the bright sky. Fix yer eyes and yer mind on that, and don’t let it go.”

He tried to do that, but the first slash of the skin was like fire running through his body, and the second was like a red hot poker pressed against it. He knew his body jerked, and he bit his lips to keep from screaming, until his throat choked with blood.

The lash tore into his shoulder, and he felt the skin ripping through the previous cuts. Even his bare chest was covered with splattered blood now, and his eyes swam with red mist as he struggled to keep his voice inside him.

Keep your mind on the meadow, on the sky, he told himself. But how could he when his body was fiery agony, and each additional slash added to a torment he had never known could exist, and never known a body could endure?

He screamed, and the scream echoed in his ears. But it wasn’t an echo. It was another scream, and another…

“Capt’n?”

Quinn shook his head to rid it of the memory.

“Cam.” He opened the door.

Cam looked at him in concern. The captain’s face was white, his mouth tense, his eyes bleak.

“Somethin’ wrong?”

“I saw Miss Seaton this morning. Daphne’s with her.”

Cam’s face fell, and his hand stilled on the knob of the door. He had been expecting word any day that Daphne was safe in Illinois.

“It’s just a matter of a few more weeks,” Quinn said.

“It’s gonna be harder every day for her to run,” Cam said quietly.

“I know,” Quinn replied. Slavery, any form of captivity, had a way of wearing a person down, of sapping courage, particularly courage that was but a bud. He often thought there was no greater bravery or gallantry than that of escaping slaves, of men and women who knew nothing of freedom, who had had no experience with it, yet were willing to risk everything for it.

“Perhaps,” he said thoughtfully, “perhaps we can help her from here. Perhaps Elias…”

“And she could travel with us.” Cam’s voice was explosive with a feeling that Quinn had never seen in him before.

“Why not?” He grinned.

“How?”

“Elias. I was going to see him tonight, anyway. I received a message that he expects a new shipment. I’ll ask him then.”

Cam’s face relaxed, his lips broadening into a smile as he thought about Daphne. It would be a hard journey in the bowels of the steamboat, but he would be able to see her, to reassure her. He would make sure she was safe and situated happily. Eventually…well, eventually, perhaps he could even court her.

He didn’t know why she meant so much to him. Perhaps, he mused, it was the innocence she still had, the innocence that he had never had. Or even that reservoir of courage he had sensed in her. He only knew he wanted to protect her, to give her the world.

And then…?

As long as he remained with Captain Devereux, there was no safety for him. And yet, he knew he couldn’t leave the captain or the
Lucky Lady.
They had given him a reason to live, had returned his heart and soul to him, had made him feel his worth as a human being and, after thirty years of being considered little but a beast, that was very much indeed. Each escaped slave was a victory that raised his self-esteem.

He could not give Daphne a secure life, not if he continued with the Underground Railroad, and how could he do anything else? How could he not help his own people?

He stared out at the levee, at the bales of cotton waiting for loading, at the dark bodies lifting and stacking under white overseers. He quietly figured the number of bent and tired bodies that had been required to bring the cotton here, from the preparing of earth to final harvest to hauling. He remembered the way every bone and muscle in his body ached and burned and suffered after fourteen straight hours in the field.

Daphne. He would see her to freedom and an unfettered life in Canada. And that, he realized now, excluded him. He could never give up his work. With a pain that had no physical cause, but was perhaps even more debilitating, he turned and went below deck to prepare the secret space between the walls.

C
hapter 12

SHIVERING IN
the cold, a heavily cloaked Meredith clutched her wrapped painting and slipped through the streets of a darkened New Orleans.

Elias Sprague’s warehouse was on Canal Street, not far from where she was staying, but it seemed a hundred miles away. Coming to him was very dangerous. If the connection between them was ever discovered, she knew it would be disastrous for both of them. Yet there was no other way.

Her blond hair was twisted into a knot and well-hidden under the hood of her cloak. The dark gray of the material blended into the night. She was thankful there was very little moonlight, and that the back of Elias’s warehouse was not lit by the gas lamps that adorned so many other parts of New Orleans.