Sword of Vengeance (31 page)

“Hold it!” A lone guardsman materialized out of the gloom, holding a revolver in his right hand. His left hand was thrust into the pocket of his greatcoat. The man’s voice sounded curiously muffled, and when he had drawn closer, Jesse could see why. His nose was broken and blood was beginning to cake on his upper lip. It was Gerard, and his boyish good looks were definitely a thing of the past. “You’re smarter than the colonel gave you credit for.” Gerard drew closer but was careful to stay out of arm’s reach. “I had a hunch you’d try something else. So I hung back and left my horse up the block. I reckoned as I’d have a better chance afoot. Makes less noise than a damn horse. Where the hell is Charbonneau? Well, no matter.”

Jesse calculated his chances of charging the Creole and reaching him before the young man could fire his gun. Pitiful odds, he thought, but when that’s all there is …

“I’m gonna shoot the legs out from under you so you can’t run,” Gerard continued. His round boyish features were bunched with pain. His thin blond hair was plastered to his head. He’d lost his sodden cap. “Then I’m gonna take this gun and bust your nose flat and let you see how it feels. After that, me and the others will finish what we set out to do and see you dance at the end of a rope.” The Creole chuckled and puffed out his chest. “See. I’m smart, too.”

“If you are, then you’ll drop that gun and walk on up to Canal. And don’t look back, or my friend in the gate back there will have to shoot you where you stand.”

“I may have been born at night, mister. But it wasn’t
last
night.” Gerard raised his gun.

A shot rang out and a fleeting tongue of fire spat through the intricate whorls of the wrought-iron gate. Gerard staggered and fell to his knees and looked up at Jesse in astonishment. “No,” Gerard gasped. “You weren’t … ” His eyes rolled up in his head and he fell forward.

Jesse staggered past the lifeless form lying in the middle of Camp Street and made his way to the wrought-iron gate that opened onto the courtyard of the Gascony, where a cloaked and hooded figure waited. Jesse had come so near to being lynched, his throat felt rope-burned. He’d been shot at and nearly ridden down. He was bleeding from a nasty assortment of cuts and scrapes. He was soaked and tattered and covered with molasses.

“Rough night?” Jesse’s benefactor asked in a woman’s voice. And she had the audacity to sound amused!

C
AITLIN BRENNAN LIKED WHAT
she saw, but she wasn’t about to tell that to Jesse McQueen. She had left the door to her bedroom ajar and couldn’t resist an innocent look in his direction as he emerged from her copper tub and wrapped himself in a towel. Muscles rippled along his back. His hips and thighs were lean and powerful. He stood a couple of inches under six feet, and when he moved, it was with sleek, sure grace. His hair was smooth and glistened against his skull. His jaw was white where he had recently shaved off his beard. A ridge of scar tissue streaked his left shoulder blade, the legacy of an old knife wound.

He dried himself, oblivious of the woman in the front room of the apartment. Caitlin found him a pair of woolen trousers and a ruffled cotton shirt in a trunk by the Sheraton writing table next to a shuttered window. She carried the clothing in for him. Jesse turned and arched an eyebrow as she placed the garments on her bed.

“I was supposed to be waiting for my husband, remember. I thought it better to have some of his clothes in my trunk. What a coincidence—exactly your size.” She sat on the bed, a tall winsome lady with an elegant neck and high cheekbones. Hair fine as corn silk and so light blond in color as to be almost white was coiled and curled in ringlets and gathered at the nape of her neck. She wore a blue flannel dressing gown and slippers to match. Her dress and the hooded cape she had worn in the courtyard had been draped across the footboard of her bed to dry. A four-barreled pepperbox, a gambler’s gun made for purse or pocket, had been left on the bed table. Jesse started to drop the towel, then paused, for modesty’s sake.

Caitlin winked, her green eyes twinkling, and returned to the drawing room, where she lowered the flame on the oil lamps and poured a brandy for herself and one for her guest. She opened the French doors leading out onto a balcony overlooking the courtyard. She could barely see the vine-covered walls in the feeble glare of distant lightning. The gate itself was a blur. The droning downpour hammering the tile-inlaid floor of the balcony filled the drawing room. She liked the sound, its melancholy beauty suiting her mood. She sat in a high-backed, velvet-covered chair and watched the rain as she waited for Jesse to join her by the balcony. She heard the door to the bedroom open and held out the extra glass of brandy.

Jesse sauntered across the room. The hot bath had eased the soreness from his limbs and cleansed his cuts and scrapes. He gratefully accepted the brandy and stood by the French doors, peering out at the night.

“A poor showing for a Union fish to be caught so easily in Confederate waters,” Caitlin chided.

“Bah, Colonel Baptiste used a dragnet,” Jesse replied. “I was one of many. That bastard didn’t care who he lynched. Even when I told him the truth, I doubt he believed me. It didn’t matter. And it didn’t save the other poor innocent souls.”

“Innocent?” Caitlin remarked. “They were Confederates.”

“Merchants and artists?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does to me.”

“Then I pity you.” Caitlin set her drink aside and rose from the chair. A night breeze felt cool and moist, but she found the smoky residue that permeated the air distasteful. She closed the doors, turned, and placed a hand on his forearm. “But let’s not talk of war. Our task here is ended.”

“We aren’t safe yet. The Creoles are still after my head. More so when Baptiste finds the body of the man you killed.”

“By then, Faragut will have landed troops in the city. New Orleans will be under federal control. And this Colonel Baptiste will have to flee or wait out the war in a prison ship.” Caitlin parted the folds of his shirt. A shiny English coin hanging from a length of braided leather dangled against his chest. It was an old coin dating back to the days when thirteen American colonies rebelled against the might of the British empire and miraculously won their freedom. The letters “G.W.” defaced the image of the English monarch stamped on the coin.

“Did George Washington really give this to your grandfather?” she asked.

“My great-grandfather.” Jesse tilted her chin. He would have elaborated, but at the moment, the scent of her was so tempting. “You smell like lilacs.”

Caitlin chuckled. “That’s you, silly. Remember, I let you have my bath.”

Jesse wrinkled his nose and sniffed his forearm. By heaven, she was right. He was about as perfumed as the belle of the ball. He grinned. She moved closer still, her breath fanning his lips and chin. They might have kissed but for the sudden rapping on the apartment door. Jesse tensed and his rope-burned neck began to ache anew. He took another whiff of the perfume and muttered, “Well, if it’s Baptiste, he’ll have to decide whether to hang me or just dance with me.”

“Hide in the bedroom,” Caitlin whispered.

“What about your reputation?” Jesse retorted, padding across the room.

“It will hang with me if you’re discovered here,” snapped the lovely Union agent. For a spy, the threat of execution was a constant danger. The hangman’s noose made no distinction between sexes. Woman or man danced the same jig to the gallows’ tune.

Jesse left the door to the bedroom slightly ajar. He wanted to hear trouble before it came. He noticed the pepperbox on the bed table and palmed the weapon. There were three shots left. Hefting the gun, he felt a certain sense of dismay. After the dragoon Colt, this popgun didn’t feel like much of a weapon. But it had been plenty for Gerard. Jesse cursed himself for a fool. He had left Gerard’s revolver in the street. Too late now. He cocked the gun, its four-chambered barrel offering meager comfort, and waited.

Caitlin gingerly approached the door to her apartment. Her mouth had turned dry, her flesh ice cold. She shivered. Someone dancing on her grave? An old wives’ tale? The story might come true. She leaned against the door. “Yes?”

“Señora … oh, Señora Brennan.”

Caitlin sighed and sagged against the walnut panel. “Yes, Señora Martinez. I have just come from my bath and cannot open the door.”

“No matter, Señora Brennan. I thought I heard gunfire. Outside in the street. I see two figures—men, I think—through the courtyard. Our courtyard. I dress and go outside, but there is no one. They have gone, I think. I pray. Still, I visit all my people here, to see if they are all well.”

“I heard nothing,” Caitlin replied. Lies came easily to her now, after two months of pretending to be a loyal Southern lady hoping to rendezvous with an imaginary husband. “But I assure you, I am safe and sound.”

“
Bueno
, señora. Such terrible trouble in the city, eh? Burning. Stealing. While the good stay home and wonder what will happen when the federals come. But I know what will change. Nothing. Babies will be born, the old will die, and life will go on.
Buenas noches
, Señora.” The old woman’s voice had already begun to grow faint as she continued down the hall.

Caitlin willed her hands to stop trembling, but the adrenaline pumping through her veins made it difficult. She took another deep breath, slowly exhaled, and chided herself. Here she was, twenty years old, two years younger than Jesse McQueen, and she was shaking like some old crone five times her senior. Caitlin took her own sweet time walking across the drawing room to the bedroom. Halfway across she noticed that Jesse was watching her. A blush spread to her cheeks.

“What? Spying on me?”

“Don’t worry. Faragut needs no more of my reports. New Orleans has surrendered, remember? Besides, why would the commodore be interested in knowing you are not the iron-willed, fearless lady you pretend to be.” Jesse danced aside as she brushed through the doorway. In the few months they had been together he had never seen Caitlin so vulnerable. That facet of her character appealed to him as much as her stalwart, self-reliant side.

Caitlin gave him a shove that propelled him out into the drawing room and then, when he spun around, promptly shut the bedroom door in his face.

“Now what are you doing?” Jesse asked through the door.

“Waiting for Faragut to land his troops.”

“That will take a while. Probably not until tomorrow,” Jesse said. He glanced over at the couch, a short, hard-looking bench padded with cushions of russet-colored velvet. “Perhaps we could think of something to do to pass the time. …”

The next couple of minutes took an eternity to unfold. Silence, save for the spring rain rattling the windowpanes and cascading from the eaves to splash and crash upon the stones in the courtyard below.

The bedroom door creaked open.

Caitlin Brennan waited within, her dressing gown fastened by a single bow, a tempting cream-colored thigh barely visible where the ribbons were untied. Her expression was haughty again, belonging to a woman in complete control of herself.

“Do you love me?” she asked.

“No,” Jesse answered.

“Good,” Caitlin replied, and pulled him into her arms.

The bedroom door creaked shut.

J
ESSE WAITED ON THE
hurricane deck of the
Cairo Belle
as Ethelred Jones, the riverboat’s captain, a dour-looking officer whose right arm had been blown off by an exploding boiler, brought the side wheeler gently into port. As the sleek ship settled against the pier its crew escaped to the planking and tied off the ropes. Other men, clad in Union blue, hurrahed the ship and its crew and surged forward to greet their comrades at arms, whom they hadn’t seen since the campaign against Fort Donelson upriver.

McQueen adjusted his hat to shade his eyes and studied the city spread out along the bluffs. It was the fourth of October, and the fall of New Orleans was just one of many memories tucked away to be relived in simpler times.

He’d spent part of May in Washington and had been planning a trip to the Indian Territory when orders came directing him to Cairo, Illinois, and two tedious months of inaction. A berth aboard the
Cairo Belle
had been the answer to a prayer, as had the dispatch from Major Peter Abbot instructing Jesse to rendezvous in Memphis and there receive his orders.

The gangplank landed on the dock with a reassuring thump. Jesse bided his time as the crew and the dockworkers mingled and exchanged pleasantries and began to unload the riverboat. Captain Ethelred Jones had brought barrels of salt pork, crackers, and apples from the loyal people of Illinois.

“Well, what do you think of her?” Captain Jones remarked. He clamped a pipe between his strong teeth. The smoke curling from the bowl was as white as his hair and beard. “I’m always partial to a city when I don’t have to run beneath its batteries just to reach harbor.” The captain merrily puffed on his pipe, enjoying both the taste of the tobacco and the satisfaction of a job well done. Jesse studied the stone-and-wood buildings whose whitewashed outer walls all but gleamed beneath the sun’s glare. He noticed the batteries overlooking the Mississippi and shared Captain Jones’s relief that the nine-pounder rifled cannons were manned by federal artillery crews instead of Rebel marksmen.

Jesse spied a stern-featured young officer wearing a lieutenant’s uniform similar to his own. The lieutenant appeared to be in charge of the supply detail, that ragged column of men eagerly ferrying foodstuffs from the riverboat to one of five canvas-covered military wagons.

“Say, Lieutenant,” Jesse called down to the officer ashore. “Where might I find General Sherman?”

The officer wore a blue, short-brimmed cap, which he removed to further shade his eyes as he peered up at the hurricane deck. It took him a few moments before he realized where the voice came from. Then he waved to the man above, his smooth cheeks and freckled features lit by a grin.

“General Sherman is it you want? Well, you’ll find him in school, sir. In school.” The young officer began to laugh, and the Union dockhands, sweating in the heat, joined in.