Conor's Way (8 page)

"I have three children," she said.

Conor knew a sucker punch when he got one.
The lie died on his lips.

Those brown eyes regarded him without
blinking, as the eyes of a wild doe might watch a hunter approach,
wise and wary, with a hint of fear. Oddly, that bothered him. He'd
told her about prison because he'd wanted to shock her, to shatter
her self-righteous indignation. He had succeeded, it seemed. She
was afraid of him, afraid for her children. "Christ," he
muttered.

He looked away, feeling unexpectedly awkward.
Staring at the cracks in the white plaster ceiling, he told her
part of the truth, the unimportant part. "I was arrested for
attempted robbery and treason against the British Crown. I was
convicted of the attempted robbery, but not the treason, and I
spent fourteen months in a Dublin prison, then I was granted
amnesty and released. I’ve no mind to steal your silver or murder
you in your bed, Mrs. Maitland."

He didn't expect that simple statement to
satisfy her. He steeled himself for more questions, questions he
had no intention of answering.

But she didn't ask them. She rose to her feet
and said, "Thank you for telling me. You're welcome to stay until
your injuries have healed. However, I'd appreciate it if you would
refrain from swearing."

With the tray in her hands, she walked toward
the door, but paused in the center of the room to glance at him
over one shoulder. "By the way," she added, "it's Miss Maitland.
I'm not married. Never have been."

With that unexpected pronouncement, she
turned and walked away.

Vernon was in his office at the sawmill when
Jimmy Johnson brought him the telegram. He tossed the boy a
picayune for his trouble, and Jimmy caught the five-cent piece in
his hand. "Thanks, Mr. Tyler."

The boy pocketed the coin, then left,
whistling, as Vernon unfolded the telegram. He read the short
missive, crumpled it in his fist, and after shoving it into his
pocket, he rose to his feet, crossed the room, and opened the door.
Over the roar of saws, he shouted, "Joshua! Get your butt in
here."

Vernon resumed his seat behind his desk just
as his foreman entered his office. "What is it?" Joshua Harlan
asked as he shut the door behind him.

"I just got a telegram from New York. My
father-in-law wants an immediate report on the situation."

"What do you suppose that means?"

"His investors are probably getting antsy
about the railroad, is all. Hell, none of us thought Olivia would
be so damned stubborn about this."

"You're sure there's no way to go around her
place?"

Vernon yanked open a drawer and retrieved a
surveyor's map. He slapped it down on the desk. "If you can find a
way to lay track around Peachtree without going straight through
Choudrant Bayou or dynamiting through the mountains, would you
kindly tell me what the hell it is?"

Joshua didn't bother to look at the map.
"Sorry," he muttered, sinking into a chair. "Stupid question."

Vernon jabbed one finger at a point on the
map. "Any way you look at it, Peachtree is smack-dab in the way.
Olivia's got to sell that land."

"She's already told you flat-out she won't
sell. What do we do now?"

Vernon reached into the box on his desk and
pulled out a cigar, but he didn't light it. He drummed it against
the desk top, thinking of all the work he'd done during the past
four years, all the money he had spent, and all the plans he had
made. They had to get that railroad built.

When he'd married Alicia Jamison in '63, he'd
promised her daddy they could make millions down South after the
war. He'd known even then the Confederacy was doomed and there
would be plenty of opportunities. He'd come back to his hometown in
'67 just the way he'd always known he would, as a wealthy
businessman. He'd used Hiram Jamison's money to buy every piece of
land and every business that he could get his hands on, taking
advantage of the hard times and low land prices. Now, he controlled
the lives of the same people who had once looked down their noses
at him. Not a day went by that he didn't savor the satisfaction of
that.

But Vernon had bigger ambitions. He and Hiram
had purchased all the land for a very good reason. They were going
to build their own railroad, with track running all the way from
Monroe to Shreveport. Surveyors and engineers had already told him
that for geological reasons it wasn't possible to bring the
railroad through Callersville, but Vernon didn't care. He planned
to build a whole new town. He already had the site picked out, six
miles to the north, right at the edge of Olivia Maitland's peach
orchard, and right on his proposed railroad line. The only thing
that stood in his way was Olivia's stubbornness. Damnation. She
could ruin everything.

He thought of the day eleven years ago when
her daddy had laughed at him, throwing his request to court Olivia
back in his face and firing him for even daring to make it. Even
after so many years, he could still hear Samuel Maitland's drunken
laughter, and it still rubbed him raw.

"What are you going to tell Mr. Jamison?"

Vernon came out of the past. "The truth. That
I have everything under control." He bit off the end of his cigar
and spit it into the brass cuspidor beside his chair. "I'll get
Olivia to sell me that land somehow."

"How?"

"I'll have a little talk with her about it at
church on Sunday, up my price, and see if that persuades her," he
said, lighting the cigar. "If she still won't sell, we'll just have
to use some stronger methods of persuasion."

Joshua looked up, his pale gray eyes meeting
Vernon's green ones over the desk. "If it comes to that, I better
get a nice chunk of money."

"If it comes to that, you will," Vernon
promised. "You will."

Conor wanted out of bed. Endless hours of
lying here with nothing to do but sleep, think, and stare at the
walls was driving him stir-crazy.

He wanted out of this house. The knowledge
that his private torments and shameful secrets had been heard by
three innocent little girls and their puritanical mother appalled
him. He didn't know how much he had revealed about his experiences
in the Mountjoy, but whatever they'd heard was too much.

If one of his bad spells was coming on, he
wanted to deal with it in his own way. Alone. Here, there was no
boxing ring to act as a physical outlet. There was no anonymous
hotel room where he could take refuge, no whiskey to numb his
brain, no beckoning road to provide a means of escape.

The only distraction was her. Olivia
Maitland, who brought him trays of soup and emptied his bedpan and
said nothing more about the nightmares that had kept her daughters
awake those first few days. She tried to feed him and he rebelled,
refusing to be coddled like a babe. After that first meal, he fed
himself, fighting the exhaustion of his efforts.

He wondered about her statement that she'd
never been married. He tried to imagine starchy Olivia Maitland in
the role of a scarlet woman and failed utterly. Those girls were
adopted, no doubt about it.

As if sensing his restlessness, Olivia
brought him some books. He didn't tell her they wouldn't be much
good to him. He did not know how to read, he'd never gone to
school. Schools and books were for rich Protestant children with
tutors. Reading was something he'd never thought much about, but as
he flipped through the pages of one of the books and stared at the
unintelligible words, he suddenly wished he knew how. Not that it
mattered, of course. Reading wasn't important to a man who made
his living in the boxing ring. He set the book aside.

Restless, frustrated, and bored, afraid to
sleep and unable to do much else, he began to long for something to
distract him. On his seventh day in bed, his desire for a
distraction was granted. Carrie paid him a visit.

When the door opened and he saw her standing
there, he was so glad for the company that he didn't care how many
of his secrets she knew.

"Mornin', Mr. Conor," she greeted him in a
whisper.

Leaning back in the doorway, she took a look
down the hall, then she stepped inside his room and shut the door
behind her. "I'm not supposed to be in here," she confessed in a
normal voice. "Mama said."

"I wouldn't want you to get in trouble."

"That's okay. I've been in trouble lots of
times."

He remembered their first conversation, and
her announcement did not surprise him. He grinned.

She walked across the room to the end of the
bed and leaned over the footboard, studying him. "I thought you
might be lonesome."

Lonesome didn't even begin to describe it.
"Thank you."

"I hate being sick," she told him. "There's
nothing to do. I don't have to go to school if I'm sick, but that
don't matter. If you're sick, you can't do anything fun
anyway."

He thought about all the drinking,
card-playing, and women he was missing, and he couldn't agree
more.

"You like to go fishing?" she asked
abruptly.

He thought about all the fish he'd stolen out
of the landlord's streams back home. There were severe penalties
for those who were caught, but he had never been caught. And he and
Michael had taken a great deal of pleasure in stealing Eversleigh's
precious trout. "I love it."

That seemed to make her happy, and she
smiled. "What about climbing trees? Ever do that?"

"I've climbed many a tree in my time,
lass."

"Do you know how to whistle?"

He pursed his lips and gave her a few bars of
"Pop Goes the Weasel."

She laughed. "I like you, Mr. Conor," she
said. "You'll do just fine."

Do for what, he didn't know.

Carrie's smile faded. She tilted her head
thoughtfully to one side and frowned as if she were trying to work
something out in her head. "Mama doesn't like you, though. She says
you're not nice 'cause you were in prison. She says you got a
filthy tongue and a vile temperament. What's 'temperament'?"

"It means the kind of person you are."

"Oh." She straightened and turned to lock her
hands together around the bedpost. She leaned back, swinging to
and fro. "But vile means bad, and I don't think you're bad. You
shout awful loud, though. The first night you was here, you was
screaming there were orange men everywhere." She stopped swinging
and looked at him around the bedpost with a frown. "Men aren't
orange, Mr. Conor. 'Less they're painted. Were they painted, like
Indians?"

"No," he answered. "Just British."

He knew a nine-year-old American girl knew
nothing about British Protestant orange and Irish Catholic green,
but his brief explanation seemed to satisfy her nonetheless.

"Carrie!"

Olivia Maitland's voice floated to them
through the open window. Carrie frowned in consternation and let go
of the bedpost. "I got to go."

She walked to the door, but she paused with
her hand on the knob and looked back at him again. "You got any
little girls?"

"No."

"Boys?"

"No. I don't have any children."

"No wife neither?"

"No."

She smiled at him and opened the door.
"That's good. A man can't have a wife if he's already got one, can
he?"

For a moment, he didn't understand what she
meant. The door closed and realization hit him. He sank back into
the pillows with a feeling of dread.

Oh,
Christ
. He knew he had to get out of this
house.

***

That afternoon, Conor tried to get out of
bed. He managed to get his legs over the side, and that was all.
Too weak and in too much pain to go any further, he gave up.

The next day, he gave it another go, but his
knees buckled the moment he tried to stand, and he fell right back
into the bed. Despite the softness of the mattress, it was a
bone-jarring experience that left his ribs aching for hours. But it
gave him something to do. He occupied his time cursing Vernon
Tyler for having him beaten, and himself for being stupid enough to
allow it.

He thought about Dan and wondered where the
old man was now. Probably back in Boston, searching the docks for
another Irish lad fresh off the boat with no money and plenty of
anger. It wouldn't take him long to find one.

Conor pressed a hand to his ribs and winced.
Even if he managed to get out of bed, it'd be weeks before he could
walk out of here, another month before he'd be in any condition to
fight. There was no point in rushing things. But then he remembered
Carrie's words about wives and kids, and decided he didn't care.
Even if he had nowhere to go, he wanted out of here.

Frustration, restlessness, and boredom
motivated him to try again the following morning. He moved to lie
sideways across the mattress with his feet on the floor. He then
worked his way to the foot of the bed, grimacing at the pain that
radiated through his body with every inch he moved. He gripped the
footboard, took three quick breaths, and jerked himself to a
sitting position.