Morning Song (40 page)

From the darkness of the room and the utter stillness of the house, it was very late at night when Jessie awoke from the sleeping potion that Dr. Crowell had administered. It took her a 349

few minutes to orient herself, but at last she remembered what had happened, and realized, too, that she slept in her own bed. Gentle snores ensuing from the truckle bed across the room told her that she was not alone. Getting to her feet, Jessie tiptoed over to discover Tudi fast asleep.

Dear Tudi, guarding her lamb.

Jessie turned back to her bed, where her wrapper was laid out neatly across the foot. Shrugging into it, she tied the sash, then made her way out of the room on noiseless feet. Tudi was a great believer in the efficacy of fresh air at night for one's health, and had left her windows cracked despite the chilly November night. Through the slightly open windows had come the smell of a rainwashed world—mixed with the pungent aroma of cigar smoke.

Clive, apparently unable to sleep, was smoking on the upper gallery. Jessie meant to join him there.

The fairy lamps were lit in the hall, and the interior of the house was scented with the flowers for the funeral that had not yet been removed. An eerie stillness lay over everything, as if the house somehow sensed that its mistress had died just the day before. The queen was dead. Long live the king!

The door to the upper gallery was ajar. Jessie stepped through it quietly and turned to look for Clive.

He was seated, as he had been before, in the rocking chair at the farthermost end. Barefoot, she moved toward him over the rainslick boards. As yet unaware of her presence, he rocked slowly back and forth, staring out into the drizzle and puffing on his cigar.

When at last he looked around at her, his hand holding the cigar froze midway to his mouth, and his eyes widened. Jessie realized 350

that, in her white wrapper, with the dark shadows of the gallery obscuring her identity until she drew close, she must look disconcertingly like a ghost. The notion pleased her, and she smiled. But his alarm, if alarm it was, did not last long. In less than a minute his eyes narrowed in recognition, and his cigar resumed its journey to his mouth.

"Did you think I was Celia?" It was almost, but not quite, a taunt.

He ignored her question. "What are you doing up?"

"I smelled your cigar."

He looked at her again, a faint smile curling his mouth. "So you came out to join me. Does that mean you've decided to forgive and forget, Jess?"

"It means I think we should talk."

"Talk away." He took another puff from his cigar.

"Suppose you start by telling me whether or not you killed Celia."

His mouth quirked. "So it's going to be that kind of conversation, is it? Let me ask you something, Jess: What do you think?"

"That's no kind of answer."

"That's the best I'm prepared to give. I'm in no mood to be cross-examined at the moment."

"You wanted me to lie to Judge Thompson."

"Did I?"

"Yes. You'd already told him the same thing yourself."

"Maybe I just wanted to see if you loved me enough despite our disagreement to lie to protect me."

"I don't believe that."

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"What do you believe, then? That I rode nearly two hundred miles in two days to beat you back here, and on the way decided to take a little detour and murder my wife?"

"You could have stopped to change clothes and found her—

with—someone." Jessie vividly remembered how furious he had been when he'd come across Celia with Seth Chandler. He'd threatened her with murder then—and had looked perfectly capable of carrying out his threat.

"I could have."

"Why won't you give me a straight answer?" Jessie clenched her fists in frustration.

"Because I'm tired of your questions." He stood up suddenly, tossed his cigar over the railing, and caught her by the upper arms before she could so much as take a step back. "In fact, I'm tired of talking altogether. Come to bed with me, Jess."

"You can't be serious!" "Oh, I am, believe me. Very serious."

"We just buried Celia today!" "I didn't love her, and you didn't, either. Don't be a hypocrite, Jessie." "A hypocrite!"

"A very lovely little hypocrite." Before Jessie had any inkling of what he meant to do, he scooped her up in his arms and started walking back along the gallery with her.

"Put me down!" He was carrying her into the house.

"Shhh! You'll wake Tudi. Think how shocked she would be, to know I'm carrying you off to bed with me."

"I don't want to go to bed with you!"

He turned down the corridor that led to his bedchamber. "One thing I have learned about you, my darling, is that you don't know what the hell you want."

Then he bent his head to catch her mouth. Jessie didn't even try to turn her face away. Suddenly she realized the truth: this,
this

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was why she had crept out on the gallery to join him. Her bruised heart ached for his kisses, she discovered as his mouth sought and found hers. Her body burned for his touch.

In the morning would be soon enough to do what she had to do, and call his bluff. Tonight she would give in to the devil's temptation one last time.

As he shouldered through his bedroom door with her, Jessie slid her arms around his neck and kissed him back.

"You know you love me, Jess," he murmured maddeningly near her ear as he kissed the soft hollow beneath it. Then he found her mouth again, and she was given no chance to reply. His boot shoved the door closed behind them. The latch caught with no more than a soft click. What passed between them was wild, and glorious, and wanton, both shaming and exhilarating. Clive left not so much as a centimeter of her body unexplored, and insisted that she return his ministrations in kind. When at last he allowed her to doze, the sky was turning gray in preparation for the dawn. Jessie didn't sleep long, not more than an hour, but when she opened her eyes the sky outside his uncurtained bedroom windows was bright salmon pink. He was already awake, sitting up in bed, naked except for the sheet he had dragged over his lap, and smoking one of his cigars. His eyes were possessive on her as she stretched like a contented cat against his side.

"Good Lord! I have to get back to my room. Tudi's probably already awake." Suddenly realizing how bright the dawn was, Jessie sat up as she spoke. She was naked, her bare breasts rosy from where his jaw had scraped them the night before, her mouth slightly swollen from his kisses, her hair a mass of tangled curls.

"If she's scandalized, you can always tell her you're going to marry me."

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That stopped Jessie in her tracks. Her head turned, and she looked at him without answering. Broad-shouldered and lean, his skin dark against the sun-bleached whiteness of the sheets, he was so handsome he took her breath away. The black hair, the blue eyes, even the red-tipped cigar, were the stuff of every girlish dream she'd ever had.

Was she going to allow Clive McClintock to dazzle her into giving him on a silver platter everything he'd schemed and tricked and cheated to take?

Jessie climbed off the bed, found her nightgown where he had tossed it on the floor, and pulled it over her head. Then she recovered her wrapper, too, and shrugged it on.

"Is that a proposal?"

"It is. Are you going to accept?"

The sound that came from Jessie's mouth then was a creditable imitation of a laugh. "I'm a fool, I admit, but not quite fool enough to agree to marry an admitted fortune hunter when I've just acquired a fortune. You signed Mimosa over to me—how very generous of you, considering the fact that your marriage to my stepmother was probably illegal!—and now you want to marry me to get it back! Was last night supposed to seduce me into agreeing? It didn't succeed. In fact, since you've been so very obliging as to give my property back to me, I want you off it before tonight."

He went very still. Even his hand holding the cigar froze. Watching his eyes, Jessie saw them flash. Then all outward signs of what he was feeling disappeared beneath a curtain of silverblue ice.

"If you want to cut off your nose to spite your face, then go ahead. Now get the hell out of my room, fast. Because if you 354

don't, I'm liable to lose my temper and kick the new mistress of Mimosa right in her very pretty ass."

XLVII

Clive
couldn't remember ever being angrier in his life. He was so furious that it was all he could do not to rant and rave and curse, not to storm down the hallway and kick in Jessie's door and apply his hand to her backside until her soft white skin was red and blistered. He loved the little bitch, damn it, loved her as he'd never loved a woman in his life. Loved her as he'd never thought to love anyone. After the night they'd just passed, to have her call him a fortune hunter and, sneering, throw his love and the only heartfelt marriage proposal he'd ever made back in his face infuriated him. If the reason he was so furious was because she'd hurt him, badly, well, that was something he refused to even think about.

His newly vulnerable heart was not lacerated; he was just damned mad!

So he dressed, slammed a few of his belongings into a bag, clapped his hat on his head, and stomped out of the house. Without waiting for Progress, whom he could hear moving around in the loft but who had not yet made it down the ladder, he saddled Saber himself (he'd given Jessie everything else; the horse she couldn't nave, even if she had him clapped up for horse stealing!), tied his bag behind the saddle, and was up and away. She wanted him off Mimosa, so, by God, he'd give her what she wanted, and be damned to her!

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Jessie, still in her wrapper and nightgown, was standing at a window in her bedroom as Clive rode down the drive and turned west, toward Vicksburg, less than an hour after she'd fled from his room. She'd told him to go, and he was going. She should feel deliriously happy. What she had done was absolutely the sensible thing. So why did she feel so desolate?

Tudi, behind her, evidently saw Clive leaving, too.

"That's Mr. Stuart," Tudi said, surprised. "Where can he be goin' at this time of a mornin', and in such a hurry too?"

"I sent him away," Jessie said in a voice that, for all her fine protestations, sounded suspiciously hollow.

"Lamb, you never did that!" Tudi's hand on her arm turned Jessie around to face her. "Why, it's been as plain as the nose on your face that you're crazy in love with that man! I was scared, while Miss Celia was with us, of what was gonna happen, but I never said anything. But now—why on earth would you go and send him away?"

Jessie hesitated, but the temptation to confide in someone was too great. Besides, Tudi was the one person who might be able to help her make sense of her feelings. And Jessie knew that her secrets would go with Tudi to her grave.

"Oh, Tudi, he's not what you think," Jessie said. Sinking down upon the bed, she proceeded to tell Tudi, in detail, about Clive McClintock and his schemes.

"That boy's been
bad!"
Tudi exclaimed when Jessie had finished, her eyes wide with shock.

"But I love him," Jessie ended miserably. "Or at least, I loved him when I thought he was Stuart. But I keep telling myself that I don't even know who Clive McClintock is."

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"Lamb, you've done gone and bedded with him, too, haven't you? Last night, that was where you went, and not out on the gallery at all like you said."

Jessie hung her head. Tudi hugged her. "Just never you mind. Lots of ladies have done worse. Let's just hope and pray there are no consequences to worry about. If your baby was to be born in this house without a marriage, your granddad would rise from his grave at night and haunt me, he'd be that mad."

"Oh, Tudi!" At the idea of the shade of her grandfather, the kindest man in the world, frightening Tudi, who had been known to rout copperheads with a broom, Jessie had to smile. Then, as she considered what else Tudi had said, her smile faded. "I never thought about getting with child."

"Well, we'll cross that bridge if and when we come to it. No point in worrying your head about it, because it's in God's hands now."

Jessie looked up at Tudi then, her eyes wide and shadowed. "I never thought being in love could hurt so much." Tudi shook her head and pulled Jessie's head against her shoulder. "Lamb, love hurts us all. Ain't nothing we can do about that."

A week passed, then another, and a third. Life at Mimosa resumed its usual pattern. Sad as it was to say, Celia was not much missed, although an investigation into the circumstances of her death was continuing. With each day that went by, Jessie became more and more convinced, in her own mind, that Clive could not have murdered her stepmother. He was an unprincipled liar, a rake, and a cad, but she did not think he was a killer. If he had returned to Mimosa and found Celia with a lover, he would likely have wiped the ground with the man but left Celia 357

relatively unharmed. And if he
had
caughf Celia with a man, where was that man?

If Clive had not killed Celia, who had?

The idea of a murderer at large in the vicinity of Mimosa caused Tudi to start sleeping in Jessie's room each night. As an extra precaution, Progress gave up his beloved spot in the loft and slept in the still room off the back hall. Such evidence of their devotion touched Jessie deeply.

Gray Bradshaw and Pharaoh between them did the best they could to take care of the day-to-day work of running the plantation. Jessie thanked the Lord daily that Clive had not left during the cotton season. It was amazing, considering that he'd been at Mimosa such a short time, how much he'd learned and how much of the actual running of the plantation he'd assumed. With no one but Jessie to make final decisions on everything from the amount of new harness to purchase to the best time to shoe the mules, she was spurred to a renewed appreciation of exactly what Clive had taken on when he'd married Celia for Mimosa.

If nothing else, the man for all his elegant good looks was a workhorse, she had to give him that. But he was also a scheming, conniving opportunist, out to acquire riches any way he could. Despite the fact that the plantation missed him, the servants missed him, the Misses Edwards missed him, and she missed him (though she was loath to admit it, even to herself), she had done the right thing, absolutely the right thing, by sending him away. So why did her heart ache so, growing more painful instead of less so with every hour of every day?