Gwyneth Atlee (25 page)

Worry quickened Gabe’s steps, and a growing pressure swelled
inside his chest, making it difficult for him to breathe. Perhaps, he
tried to tell himself, Yvette had taken a different route. Right now she
awaited him in her room, just as worried as he was. Or maybe the line
at the telegraph office had been clogged with
Sultana
survivors eager
to contact home with news of their escape or pleas for assistance. Yet
neither of those scenarios slowed his progress, for he couldn’t escape
the need to see her, touch her, and reassure himself that all was well.

He wondered if his urgency was fed by guilt that he had doubted
her and for the suspicion that still lay coiled in his mind, tempting him
to wonder if she’d abandoned him.

“Expect little; trust less.”
Seth’s words again returned to haunt him,
and he could almost see the man’s gray eyes behind the cracked lens
of his glasses. How was it he’d never noticed how grim was his
friend’s expression? He wondered if somewhere, somehow, Seth
would ever move beyond his prison walls.

Gabe hurried on, knowing he’d rather learn that he was wrong,
have Yvette Augeron make a fool of him, than live without the
possibility of trust, without the possibility of love. He’d be
damned if he would let doubt ruin what he’d found with her.

He longed to somehow repay Yvette for his lack of faith, to show
her his commitment to forever. If he could only find her.
Inside the telegraph office, he found only a man with unlined,
milk-pale skin and snowy, shoulder-length hair. The clerk’s eyes,
framed by white lashes, peered out from thick glasses that magnified
their blueness into a pair of icy lakes.
The lakes blinked several times until Gabe closed the door and
shut out the afternoon’s bright sunlight. The window shades were
drawn, and it took several moments for his own eyes to adjust to the
new dimness.
“Would you care to send a telegram?” the clerk asked.
“No, thanks. I’m looking for my wife,” Gabe ventured, sticking
with Yvette’s story. “Have you seen her? She’s a small-boned woman,
about twenty, with dark hair.”
The clerk nodded and gestured toward the door. “She sent her
telegram and left not two minutes ago. She couldn’t have gotten
too far.”
Gabe thanked him, although he wondered if the fellow could
really see well enough to identify Yvette or anyone else. He’d never
in his life seen anyone wearing thicker glasses.
Once outside, Gabe trotted up and down the street in the hopes that
he might catch a glimpse of Yvette’s retreating form. As he passed an
alley, he was nearly overrun by a lively bay horse pulling a shay as it
emerged from between two buildings. Turning his head to shout a
warning at the driver, Gabe froze in horror and swallowed back his words.
Darien Russell held the driving lines in one hand. And beside him,
her face nearly as pale as the albino’s, sat Yvette. Russell was glaring
at her, saying something, so that his gaze never settled upon Gabe.
Yvette, too, gave no sign of recognition.
The horse and shay completed its turn and began to pull away.
Gabe hesitated, wondering how on earth Russell had convinced
Yvette to go with him without a fight.
He had to have a gun. Perhaps that would explain why only one
hand held the bay’s reins.
As the two-wheeled carriage began to pull away, Gabe wondered
how, using only his brain and his two injured hands, he could hope to
stop Captain Russell, an armed officer who would hide behind the law
to break it. How in God’s name could he save Yvette without costing
both of them their lives?

Yvette didn’t have the heart to ask where Russell was taking her.
Instead, she sat in silence as they drove past building after building:
churches and hotels, grand homes and lesser ones, businesses of every
ilk. She barely recognized the people that they passed as human,
whether soldier or civilian, man or woman, light-skinned or dark. It
never occurred to her to call out to any of them or that anyone would
either hear her screams or try to help.

Her mind spun like a wagon wheel seeking purchase in slick mud.
Try as she might, she couldn’t pull herself out of the hole in which
she’d been mired.

Gabriel could not have been the one who had betrayed her. Again
and again, she whispered those words to herself, then prayed desperate
prayers to God. After what she and Gabriel had shared, such treachery
was unimaginable, obscene.

And yet her thoughts turned time after time to Marie’s example of
what happened to a Creole girl when she entrusted both her heart and
body to a Yankee soldier. Why in the name of all the saints had she
refused to heed that lesson?

If the army caught him, Gabe doubted they would bother with a
prison term. Yet as he watched the soldier tie a rangy black gelding to
the telegraph-office hitching post, he wondered how much any of that
mattered. After all, as far as he knew, they could only hang him once.

He forced himself to wait for what he judged half a minute, though
his body tensed like a drawn bowstring, ready to launch him in the
direction that Yvette’s carriage had vanished. He glanced once more at
the storefront windows and thanked God for its lowered shades.
Praying that the soldier would stay inside awhile, Gabe untied the
horse. He scrambled aboard its military saddle, though pain in his
hands shot up to his shoulders. More mindful of his fear than the
discomfort, he dug his heels into the animal’s sides and urged it to cut
between two passing freight wagons.

As if it understood his need, Gabe’s new mount hesitated not a
moment. Instead, with near-perfect equine grace and speed, the black
horse negotiated tight spaces until their flight drew several curses
from startled teamsters. Pedestrians pointed, and a broad-hipped
woman shouted, shaking a hammy fist at this disruption of the peace.

Yet no one cried out, “Horse thief!” At least not anyone Gabe heard.
But his relief was short-lived for two reasons. First, he had not the
slightest idea how he might rescue Yvette from Darien. Second, and
far worse, he could not see the black shay even when he followed the
turn that he had thought Russell had taken.

What could he do now? Surely, if he remained near, circling the
area, he would be caught and arrested for the horse’s theft. But that
outcome scarcely mattered, for if he could not find—and save—
Yvette, he could not imagine living, anyway.

Yvette began to notice how thickening clouds had dimmed the sunshine,
how huge trees replaced the buildings and undergrowth the people.
Abruptly, the dark haze of her shock lifted, and her body shook with
the strain of attempting to reckon how long the bay mare had been
trotting. How many miles had they come? But try as she might, she
had no way of guessing where they’d gone or where Darien Russell
might be driving.
No
way except to ask him, which she could not,
would not, do.

Besides, their location mattered little, only the marrow-freezing fact
that, just as she’d suspected, Darien had no intention of allowing her
even the slim chance the courts would offer to a Southern “traitor.” He
could ill afford the possibility that some softhearted judge would look
at her and think of his own daughter, then allow her a few words.
Words that would damn Darien, if she only had the chance.

Instead, Russell meant to silence her, using the same methods
as he had her sister. And she, acting like a docile little fool, was
going right along with him without raising a fuss, as if she
believed the threat of being shot were worse than whatever death
he had in mind.

To the devil with that idea! If he meant to murder her, she was going
to make the cad work for it! She’d never lived as the dutiful and lamblike woman-child, so why should she fit in that mold as she died? And
if revenge against Capt. Darien Russell were not reason enough to
fight him to the death, she thought of all the venom she would like to
spew at Gabriel, who would repay her gift of love with this betrayal. If
she had to claw and bite her way through Darien like a tigress for the
chance to have her say, then so be it! It certainly wasn’t as if she any
longer had a genteel reputation to protect.

“Use your mind, Yvette.”
The voice sent a clean jolt along the column
of her spine. Marie’s voice, so clear and true that all the tiny hairs
along her arms and nape rose in recognition and her stomach leapt
into her throat.

Mon Dieu!
She must be dying, to hear words spoken by the dead!
Her quivering redoubled, and she thought that she must vomit. Yet as
she bent forward, she recalled the strange story Gabriel had told her,
about seeing his dead brother on the battlefield. Gabriel Davis had not
died that day.

Neither would she perish. Perhaps, like her lover’s brother, Marie
had returned when death loomed near, intent only on coaxing her out
of its path.
“Use your mind,”
she’d said. And suddenly Yvette could
see
Marie’s last moments, how, finally understanding, she had fought
with all her strength. And how futile, how completely useless, that
final effort had proved.

Like her sister, Yvette lacked the strength to physically overpower
Darien Russell. But she’d already outwitted him on more than one
occasion.

If she tried to leap out of the carriage now or wrestle away his
weapon, he would only shoot her. Along this empty pathway, with no
one as a witness. But if her strength could not stop a bullet, how could
she manage that same feat with her mind?

Marie whispered no more words of advice. Perhaps she hovered
nearby, silently encouraging her sister. Or maybe she had been no
more than a trick of the mind, a manifestation of the human will
to live.

It scarcely mattered to Yvette, who slumped even farther forward.
Though she had no real plan yet, she decided that feigning weakness
would put Darien off his guard. Her furious thinking halted even as
the horse did.

Russell made fast the driving lines, then gently touched her cheek,
as if to offer comfort. Yvette flinched at the contact.
“I’m sorry to see you’re feeling poorly,” he told her. The jubilation
had faded from his voice, faded into what sounded for all the world
like sympathy, or even sorrow.
Was he sorry for her or for himself and what he meant to do? Did a man
who had already murdered still fear earning an even hotter place in hell?
Or was there something else that troubled him, something she might use?
Marie’s features flashed through her mind like summer lightning,
and Yvette decided on the chance that she would take.
She glanced up at Russell through lashes thickened by the droplets
of her tears. “Marie comes to you, too.” She spoke without the slightest
hint of hesitation, surprised that her voice would not betray her
mind’s doubt. “She comes to you and damns you for her murder and
the death of your own child.”
The hand that gripped her upper arm closed tight enough to make
her cry out in both pain and surprise.
“I didn’t kill them.
You
did!” he accused her.
“Why not let a court decide? Why not let them hang me for all of
New Orleans to see? You know that would destroy my family . . . or
what’s left of my family, I should say.”
“You want a trial?” he raged, pausing for a moment to tighten his
left hand’s grip on the reins, which had come loose when the horse
had started at his outburst. He braked the shay and retied the reins,
then shoved the pistol’s muzzle up beneath her chin. “Then by all
means, let’s have one!”
She leaned backward in the seat and tilted her head to escape the
weapon’s painful pressure. But her shifting made no difference, as he
pushed even harder than before.
“Who
in God’s name tried to run me out of New Orleans with her
spiteful little ditties?” he shouted. Then, answering his own question,
he said, “Miss Yvette Augeron!”
Without allowing her a chance for a reply, he continued.
“Who
spied
on me from dawn to dusk and stole my property?”
Twisting away, Yvette argued. “If you’re speaking of that letter, you
must know it was destroyed before I could prove anything. There’s no
need to kill—”
“Silence!”
He punctuated that command by clubbing the side of her
head with the pistol.
Yvette’s world careened amid a sickening jolt of pain. Blackness
threatened to drop down like a curtain, but she fought it and struggled
to make sense of Russell’s words.
“And who told Lieutenant Simonton about that letter and showed
it to Marie—
Marie!
God, how I loved her, and yet
you,
you goddamned
interfering bitch, you
made
me—”
The accusation was too much for Yvette, and with all of her
remaining strength she slashed at his eyes with her nails. She felt
them dig deep into the beard-coarsened flesh of his cheek, heard
him shout out some obscenity, just before he grabbed her and
began to shake.
And as her head struck the shay’s side, her tenuous grip on
consciousness melted into darkness.

Both boys bobbed their heads and peered down the road, along a
pathway that cut through virgin forest. Neither pointed to indicate
the answer to Gabe’s question, for their arms were loaded with firewood.
Dirt filmed their dark brown skin, and Gabe imagined they were
contrabands, former slaves who had flocked to Union-held territory
to guarantee their freedom.

“They just come along this way, white folks in a two-wheel carriage
with a brown hoss,” the older of the two said.
As Gabe glanced in the direction Russell and Yvette had taken, he
thought he could make out a haze of dust, still airborne after the
passage of the horse and shay. He thanked the boys and kicked his
stolen mount into a gallop, more alarmed now than ever.
It had been bad enough when he’d imagined Russell taking Yvette
to a jail cell to face trial, but with each step the two took beyond
Memphis, Gabe’s apprehension grew. This journey into the isolated
woodlands could only mean one thing. Yvette was dangerous to
Russell, too threatening to live to speak her piece. The captain intended
for her only execution, not a trial.