Gwyneth Atlee (17 page)

“The hull’s not damaged! We’ll be landing soon!” Captain Mason
shouted.
But the soldiers on the hurricane deck swarmed past him, heedless
of his words. He could do nothing to save them, he realized. They
were an animal-like mob now, most of them too insensible with panic
to harness their energies to attempt to put out the spreading fire. God
help them all, he prayed as he turned away.
They might not listen to him, but the women and children on the
cabin deck might still be reassured. He climbed down to the second
level, where he found a group of ladies kneeling behind the main
cabin. Over the screams of the trapped and drowning, he could barely
hear their prayers.
“Help will be here soon,” he assured them. “Please, don’t give
up hope.”
They looked up at him as if his voice had been God’s, giving them
the answer that they sought.
Unable to bear their gazes, he turned and rushed inside the elegant
main cabin. Steam swirled throughout the shattered deck in scalding
clouds. The front of the room tilted, forming a deadly ramp into the
fiery center of the deck below. Glancing down into it, he saw bodies
strewn amid the flame and wreckage.
As the smoke thickened, he began to realize he’d been wrong. The
Sultana
would never regain the shore; nor would the rescuers arrive in
time. She was burning far too quickly.
Keeping toward the rear, Mason dashed about, alternately stopping
to try to free those trapped amid the wreckage and to hand passengers
everything that he could find that might float. A few soldiers and officers
were composed enough to join him, and together they passed chairs,
stateroom doors, and even sheeting from the cabin’s interior walls to
be thrown overboard.
On one trip to haul a door out onto the deck, a bone-thin former
prisoner clutched him by the arm. As Mason turned to look, he was
startled by the darkness of the man’s eye sockets, the skull-like
contours of his face.
“My brother’s dead! He’s
dead!”
Even as the prisoner sobbed the
words, his pale face transformed into a mask of fury. “You bastards
have gone and killed us all!”
Ripping free of the man’s grip, Mason recognized the grain of truth
in his ranting. But with the thought came a renewed surge of energy.
He stepped into the steaming cauldron to see who might be saved.

Gabe kicked at the strong arms that held his ankle and dragged
him ever deeper. He felt the man’s grip slipping to his foot. With
one last, powerful kick, he lost his shoe and sock to the poor fellow,
then struggled toward the water’s surface. His lungs burned with
the terrible need to inhale, and black dots with bright outlines
began to cloud his vision.

Too deep,
he realized, he’d been dragged too deep to make it back
without a breath. In a moment, he would pass out and take in
water, anyway.

Just as Matthew had, back on that cold December day. An image
flashed before him of his brother’s face after he’d been pulled out of
the river. So pale and swollen he couldn’t recognize the features.

The memory gave him strength enough to hold back the blackness
for another instant, during which he finally broke the water’s surface.
Gasping and coughing, he looked about him, hoping against hope
he’d find the cracker box. But it was gone now, along with any sign of
Yvette; he saw only the plank she had been holding, now claimed by
the two men who must have drowned her.
Grief cleaved him like an ax, sending sharp pain shooting from his
chest and out his limbs. But on its heels came even more powerful
denial. It could not be true. He had not seen her go under.
Perhaps she’d swum away. Or she’d found some better raft.
Somewhere in the dark and moonless night she still lived. She hadn’t
yet slipped under; she hadn’t yet drowned.
Over and over, his heart preached the message, irrational as it was.
He ignored his mind’s whispers that he deluded himself, that he’d
held out the same insane, impossible hopes the day that Matthew
disappeared beneath the ice.
Though his strength was fading, he swam away from the burning
steamboat in the hope of avoiding anyone else who might clutch and
drag him under. Farther away, the flickering firelight illuminated a
dark mound in the water, too rounded to be a plank, too large to be a
box. He prayed silently that he hadn’t located the crew’s pet alligator.
He did not stop swimming toward it, for his arms and legs now felt
so heavy that he knew this mound to be his only hope. Instead,
absurdly, he pictured himself riding the gator’s back to safety. He
nearly laughed aloud despite the realization that only shock and
exhaustion could lead him to find any humor in his situation.
At last he reached the floating mound and threw one arm over it. It
was a drowned mule, its body still warm from its futile struggle. He
thought how strange it seemed that he’d traded a live mount for a
dead one and how that choice might yet save him.
If it floated downstream fast enough to keep other men from latching
on and swamping him.
After pulling himself against its belly, between the front and rear
legs, Gabe leaned his face into the dead mule’s wet hide to draw the
last warmth from its cooling body. And as he did, he tried to convince
himself that both Yvette and his three friends still lived.

Jacob realized he should be glad that he survived, that of all the
men who’d gone over with the stageplank, he’d been one of the few
who’d bobbed back to the surface. He felt no joy in it, though, no great
cheer that he’d been stronger than many of the other soldiers who’d
clawed at the long wooden walkway for purchase.

He hadn’t even meant to jump. He’d still been searching for his
brother, Seth, and Gabe. But the flood tide of men leaping at the
stageplank had swept him along, then forced him overboard before
he could veer out of its path.

The current and the remaining men clinging to it conspired to take
him farther from the burning steamboat. As his makeshift raft began
to move away, the last clear image Jacob saw was that of Captain Seth
running, then leaping from the main deck.

Captain Mason coughed to clear his lungs of smoke. As the fire
progressed, he’d been working like a madman to save all he could, but
now his arms hung like anchors at his side. All he wanted to do was
to sink down onto the deck and sleep, never again to open his eyes,
never again to face the devastation he had wrought.

But still passengers struggled in the water, so he forced himself to
resume the task of tossing pieces of wood into the water.
“Captain, help me!” a new voice shouted.
Panting, Mason turned toward a man he thought might be a guard.
“Please, he’s still alive!” The guard beckoned him to follow.
Mason strode after him, along the outer promenade. The man led
him to a spot where the hurricane deck had fallen onto this level. A
pair of legs jutted from beneath the wreckage. Surely the man couldn’t
be alive.
But when the guard touched the outstretched legs, they kicked.
Mason tried to help the man lift off the deck, but exhaustion had
drained him utterly.
He shook his head. “I can’t. I can’t.”
Then he shuffled back in the direction of the stern, hoping to throw
overboard a few more pieces of debris, not caring that when the fire
forced him to leave the
Sultana,
he’d held back not an ounce of
strength to swim.

Over and over, Darien felt the awful jolt leaping from the woman’s
skull into his arms, conducted by the plank he’d used to strike the
woman’s temple. One of the same planks he now gripped to save his life.
As he drifted blindly through the darkness, he saw the ebb and flow of
his act: the drawing back of his arms with the stolen length, the swing and
follow-through of the deathblow. The second woman he had murdered.

Yvette had asked him that, and the possibility it might be true rose
in his thoughts like gorge.
My child.
Could Marie have given him the
son or daughter that Constance never had produced? The darkness
and the river resurrected Marie’s face, but this time one cheek was
marred by a red discoloration like a hand slap, the same mark that
bloomed on the face of the blond woman he had struck.

Cold wavelets lapped against his back, but none came colder than
his recollection of the crack of the wood against her temple. The sound
washed over him, again . . . again . . . again . . . And then a voice rode
over the memory, his grandfather’s deep baritone, saying,
“This boy’s
going to be the finest Russell ever. I can tell he’s destined for great things.”

Great things. Like murdering two women, perhaps even his own
unborn child?
I might have been a father.
No, it couldn’t be. Yvette had
been only striking out at him with the only weapon at her disposal, a
hideous, cruel lie. He had to put her words out of his mind now and
instead focus on the ones Grandfather had uttered.

Darien had never questioned the old man’s proclamation or
paused to wonder if it had been less the result of patriarchal foresight
than a consequence of shattered hopes for his only son. But now, as
the current carried Darien downriver, he at last comprehended his
grandfather’s loss and the tremendous blow to the old banker’s
pride. His only son, Darien’s father, had been stabbed behind a
tavern in some sordid misadventure involving a loose woman.
Jonathan Russell had bled to death there, leaving behind nothing
except gambling debts and a pregnant wife.

Darien’s thoughts turned to his mother, a hollow shell of a woman.
With her own family dead, the beautiful young widow had been
forced to live as a permanent guest of her husband’s father.

From the time Darien had been able to speak, he’d been aware of
an almost overwhelming strain between the two. He’d seen
Grandfather touch her cheek once, gently. His mother had cried out
and fled the room.

Grandfather, seeing the child’s wide-eyed confusion, explained to
him. “Sensitive woman, your mother. But she knows I mean you both
the best.”

Beyond that, neither ever spoke of their disagreement within his
hearing, but the tension was so palpable that Darien often watched them
carefully for any sign of the explosion he knew must surely come.

But it hadn’t. Instead, one evening when Darien was five years old,
his mother had kissed her son good night. Tears had glistened in her
eyes, but his mother had often seemed so sad that he’d gone right on
babbling about the pony Grandfather had promised for his birthday.

“. . . the finest Russell ever.”
Putting aside the disturbing memories of
his mother, he focused on Grandfather’s words instead. How many
times had he spoken them in that ringing voice that sounded like the
thunder of God? As a child, Grandfather
had
been God to Darien, and
his prediction had become a holy prophecy, made all the more sacred
by the old man’s death six years ago.

For the first time ever, Darien wondered about Thomas Russell the
man
. Could his proclamation have been no more than wishful thinking?
Had he seen Darien only as a final chance to leave a better legacy than
his wastrel of a son?

That couldn’t be right, could it? For if Darien weren’t really destined
for great things, then that would mean that there had been no reason
to build his fortune as he had, no excuse to take three lives. Instead of
succeeding on his dead father’s behalf, it would mean that Darien had
instead far exceeded him in villainy.

No!
Why else did he yet live when so many had burned to death or
drowned? Why else had fate always protected him from calamity,
from the battlefield to this very night?

He held on to the two planks and to all he had— the certain
knowledge that he was meant to live beyond this. He was meant to
survive and find that grand fate in his future.

Gabe didn’t know how long he had dozed, only that his fingers
ached where they’d been cramped so long in one position, knotted in
the dead mule’s mane. His legs felt numb and his brain logy with . . .
what? Exhaustion? Cold? He could barely think.

He peered around a world of velvet darkness, cold darkness, without the flickering
Sultana
to add light. Had the steamboat burned
completely, or had he drifted far downstream?

He lifted his head from the mule’s cool belly and noticed for the
first time the way the backs of his hands and forearms stung. Maybe
he’d been burned in the explosion, or maybe it was only the night’s
breeze blowing across exposed, damp flesh.

Even more disturbing than the darkness and the pain was the eerie
quiet that had descended upon the river. He wondered if it might be
possible that he alone survived, that no one else was clinging to
flotsam. A more frightening idea brought him fully awake. Had he
dozed through a rescue? Had the others all been picked up by passing
steamboats while he’d drifted past?

The idea so unnerved him that he was glad to hear the splashing of
another swimmer’s approach. He felt a body thud against the mule’s
back, opposite him.

Recovering his senses, Gabe hoped that it would be just one. The
mule could certainly float two of them to safety. How many more than
that, he couldn’t guess, and he lacked both the strength and will to
fight off others.

The other person bumped his arm while seeking a handhold.
“Are you alive over there?” a hoarse voice asked.
Despite the hoarseness, he recognized the Southern accent. His

heart gave a leap, and he instantly awakened fully.
“Yvette?” he asked.
A pause stretched on and on, so long that he was certain he’d