City of Glory (16 page)

“A bit tired,” he said. “But I think I’d best sleep on Greenwich Street tonight. I’ve business in the Fly Market tomorrow. I wouldn’t want to be late.”

The previous autumn, when he’d quarreled with his cousin Andrew and moved from Ann Street, Joyful had rented a room at Ma Allard’s boardinghouse. At first he slept there only one or two nights a week—a respectable cover, he called it. During the past three months she could count on one hand the times she had wakened in the morning to find him beside her.

“Why the Fly Market? Is your new profession to be a butcher?” she asked. “Or a fishmonger perhaps?”

“Business,” he said curtly.

“As you wish.” Her tone revealed nothing of her anguish, or the fact that every time she looked at him she saw him as she had in that astonishing moment when he leaned out of the shay to sweep her to safety.

She’d not been sure he was real until he reached down and plucked her out of the street, the shay still thundering ahead, and Delight feeling that she might fall and be crushed beneath its wheels. Her bonnet had fallen off and her hair tumbled free—as it did now when she removed the pins that held it in place all evening—but miraculously she’d managed to hang onto her canvas valise.

“Look,” he’d said when they had cleared Canvastown, “if you’ve no place to stay, we can try to find you a boardinghouse. I know a landlady or two who might not mind being wakened at this hour for the chance to rent a room.”

They were on Broadway by then, at Wall Street, passing by Trinity Church, where every Sunday upright Christian gentleman who made money from the brothels and bawdy houses six days a week nodded in agreement when the preacher railed against them on the seventh. She’d put her hand on his arm, so he had to turn and look straight at her, see her clearly in the glow of the streetlights. “And will one of these obliging landladies be likely to rent a room to me?”

Joyful’s friend Barnaby Carter had made a sound that was something between a snort and a sigh. Joyful held back for a moment, then admitted, “In this part of town, probably not.”

“That’s what I presumed. It’s why I was where you found me.”

She remembered the silence between them, the beating of her heart, and the sound of the horse’s hooves clattering over the cobbles. Joyful spoke: “My name is Joyful Patrick Turner, I’m a ship’s surgeon. My friend Barnaby Carter has a warehouse on Pearl Street. It would do at least until morning.” And when Barnaby protested, Joyful said, “We can’t leave her on the street,” overruling everyone else in that way she would come to know so well.

He took her the first time right there in Barnaby Carter’s warehouse, in the same shay in which he’d ridden out of her dreams and into her life. Barnaby went upstairs to his wife, and Delight turned to Joyful and offered her mouth and he took it, and everything else beside. Quick the first time, slower and better the two times after. “What an extraordinary woman you are,” he whispered when the morning light seeped in under the big doors, reminding them the world remained to be dealt with.

Tell him, a voice in her head had whispered. Tell him how you used to busy yourself doing chores in Clare Devrey’s kitchen whenever he was there, come to visit the sister born twenty-two years before he was, whom he was just getting to know in that first month back in New York after Canton. Tell him how it was back when you were little Laniah stoning the hearth, or scrubbing the pots, listening to him talk about how he’d come home to be a doctor. Dashing out to get more coal or a few logs, and rushing back praying he hadn’t left in the meantime, just so’s you could go on breathing the same air he did. Tell him how not a day has passed since you ran away with his niece Molly that you haven’t dreamed of him. The words wouldn’t come.

They still hadn’t come. Not from that day to this.

Joyful got off the bed and came to stand behind her, putting a gentle hand on her shoulder, as if he were remembering too. She fussed with the stud of her left earring, meeting his glance in the mirror. “Delight…My dear, listen to me.”

“I am listening. But this earring has become troublesome.” Time was when she’d have asked him to loose the stud for her. Out of the question now. For months she’d told herself it was because of Joyful’s need to adjust to life with only one hand, to find a replacement for the surgery that had once been his passion, that he had seemed to cool toward her. She could fool herself no longer. Damn him to hell, she didn’t want to. “I’ve been thinking about the night you rescued me.”

“It was a good night. I’ll always remember it that way.”

Her heart plunged at the goodbye in the words. “Oh my, what am I thinking of!” The words rushed out of her, sounds meant to turn back the tide. “It’s so late and I’m so tired. Go on back to Greenwich Street, Joyful. We can talk tomorrow.” She was unable to keep the shiver from her voice, and hated herself for the weakness. “You’re coming tomorrow, aren’t you?”

“Perhaps. I’m not sure. Delight, listen…”

She turned to face him. “Very well. Speak your piece.” At least four times in the last month she’d been sure he meant to say it was over between them, and worked all her wiles to see that he did not have the opportunity to say it. She was tired of that game. Say what you want, Joyful Patrick Turner, and the devil take you. The last man who saw me cry was Jonathan Devrey; I was ten years old and he was fifteen. You won’t be the next one. Say whatever you want.

“I think…”

“Yes?”

There was a pause, as if he’d changed his mind at the last second. “This Tintin,” Joyful said, “I think he may be somehow connected to Gornt Blakeman. I think that business tonight with the wager was somehow for my benefit. If Blakeman comes again, keep a close eye on him. Let me know what you see.”

Relief flooded through her. “Yes, of course I will. I’ll tell Mr. Clifford as well.”

Joyful shook his head. “No, don’t say a word to Vinegar. Not about Blakeman, or about Tintin for that matter. I think the whipper is in league with Gornt Blakeman as well. I know that at least he runs errands for him on occasion.”

“What sort of errands? How do you know?”

“It’s a long story, and as you said, it’s late and you’re exhausted. We’ll save the details for another time. Meanwhile, be your usual clever self and keep me informed.”

“I’ll do that,” she promised as she lifted her face for his good-night kiss.

Chatham Street, 5:30
A.M.

Eugenie slept fitfully, her hand pressed between her thighs, conscious of the emptiness beside her in the bed. When she woke, it was with the unrelieved ache that had become her constant companion since she was widowed.

Damn Timothy Fischer for freeing the wanton spirit in his eighteen-year-old bride, then dying four years later and leaving her with nothing but debts and a constant hunger she was terrified to satisfy lest it destroy her status as something to be desired because it was difficult to obtain. Damn Gornt Blakeman as well. No, double damn him. May he rot in hell for indulging his need to brag, thinking that would more quickly gain him access to her bed. In reality, if she had not so soon realized how much she had to gain by refusing him, he would by now be her lover.

Eugenie felt a touch. It was far too early for her maid to come to wake her. And that stroke along her cheek—a man’s hand. Her heart thumped. Gornt? Would he be so brazen?

“Madame,
vous ne dormez pas.
I felt you stiffen at my touch. I stiffen as well.” There was a small chuckle that only served to stoke Eugenie’s growing terror. “But that is not why I am here. Open your eyes, Madame Fischer. We have business to discuss.”

Eugenie opened her eyes. Her gasp threatened to become a scream. Tintin placed his hand over her mouth. “
Ne criez pas!
I am here on business, madame. If I wanted something else, I would have it by now.”

He took his hand away and Eugenie scuttled to the other side of the bed. Tintin did not try to stop her, only noted the way the lace of her nightdress reached from her ankles to her neck but somehow left more exposed than covered.
Eh bien,
what would it be like to lie between those luscious thighs? He’d been watching her before he let her know he was there. He could smell the heat of her dreams. No husband for two years. She would shriek with pleasure.
Tant pis,
he was there on business.

“What are you doing here? What do you want with me?”

“I have brought you something.” He reached into the pocket of his satin coat. Earlier, when the dice would not fall for him, he had been tempted to put this treasure on the table. Then Blakeman had pushed himself into the picture, and,
merci à tous les saints,
the locket had not been lost to his foul luck.

Eugenie looked at the bijou swinging from his hand.

“Where did you get that?!”

“From a gentleman who made a bargain, madame. Your late husband.”

Eugenie reached out and snatched the bauble from his hand. Tintin let it go.

It was impossible, but yes, it was Timothy’s mother’s locket. Timothy’s father had given it to her as a betrothal gift, a gold oval with the letter
M
for Mariah inlaid on the front in pearls. And there on the side were the teeth marks said to have been made by baby Tim himself. “But it was given to a…a gentleman in New Orleans. A business matter. I myself sent word to say that my husband had died and to ask for the locket’s return. That was two years past.”

“At your service, madame.” Tintin bowed with exaggerated formality. “I am sorry to have been delayed in bringing your treasure back to you.” He would never have risked a thousand miles of blockaded coast simply on the chance that Gornt Blakeman’s scheme might succeed. But coupled with the likelihood that Monsieur Timothy Fischer’s widow would be as willing to do business as Fischer himself had been…That had been a gamble worth taking.

Eugenie looked at him, as if seeing for the first time the eye patch and the bandanna. Timothy had spoken of a pirate and a distant place near New Orleans called Barataria Bay, where clandestine slave auctions took place by candlelight in hidden caves and great wealth was to be had if only one were sufficiently daring. Holy heaven, it was true! “Turn around.”

“Why?”

“Because I wish to get out of this bed.”

“And why should I deny myself the pleasure of observing that?”

“Turn around, damn you!”

Tintin chuckled and faced the window, listening to the rustle of the sheets and her soft steps on the Turkey carpet. Some pleasures were best kept separate from business. But the mulatto bitch who thought herself good enough to make a wager with a white man and win, that was another matter.

“Very well, you may turn back.” She had put on a negligee made of the same lace as her nightdress.

“Now, madame, we must talk. Perhaps we can sit?”

“Not in here.” Eugenie led him from her bedroom to her boudoir, the adjoining parlor where just yesterday Gornt had bragged of his challenge to Bastard Devrey, and she had schemed for a proposal of marriage. Now, in less than twenty-four hours, everything might have changed.

Chapter Eight

New York City,
Maiden Lane, 10
A.M.

T
HE DUSTING
was a fine excuse. A woman came to scrub and polish three times a week and another once a fortnight to deal with the laundry, but in the frugal Vionne household the women of the family had always assumed a large share of the daily tasks. Now, with dear mama gone to her reward, there was only Manon. She carried her basket of cleaning cloths and scented oils and waxes into the room above the shop that served as her father’s study.

A tall bookcase stood on the wall opposite the windows, but the shelves did not provide enough space for all papa’s collection. Books of every size and shape were piled on the floor. This time of year, with no fire in the fireplace, there were even books on the hearth. Her hope was to find among them some notes papa might have made the night before when he received Gornt Blakeman. No such good fortune. The top of his desk was clear of everything but his loupe and more books.

Manon selected a soft chamois cloth from her basket and dabbed it with comfrey-scented beeswax, then began polishing the top of the cherrywood desk. It had been made by a local craftsman to her father’s exact specifications, and it glowed with the patina of many decades of use and care. How many times had she seen papa spread a dark blue velvet cloth on this surface and carefully place upon it one or another sparkling treasure dug from the earth or wrested from the sea? When she was little, papa would often carry her up here and set her on his lap while he examined some precious stone that had come into his possession, a treasure that would remain with him only until he could find a buyer. “We are the temporary guardians of all this beauty,
ma petite
Manon. We must take the opportunity to appreciate it.” Then he would show her how to hold the loupe to her eye (she was too little to screw it in place and free both hands) and peer through it into the depths of a topaz or an emerald, even a diamond, and see the fire dancing within.