Morning Song (34 page)

"I thought you said you were getting dressed."

"This dress is perfectly proper!"

295

"Don't you have a shawl or something you could wear with it?" His eyes slid down to the valley between her breasts, which was visible to him only because of his height, Jessie thought with annoyance. Still, she could not help tugging at her bodice. Stuart grinned.

"If you're going to be ridiculous, I'll eat by myself!" She flounced away from him.

"Grumpy little thing when you're hungry, aren't you? I'll have to be sure to keep you well fed." He caught up with her, captured her hand, lifted it to his lips, and tucked it into the crook of his arm. "You look lovely, Jessie. I like the gown—what there is of it."

"Oh!" She tried to pull her hand free, but he held it in place, chuckling. When she would have hit him with her reticule, he cringed and held up his hand to ward her off.

"I'm only teasing you. Come on, let's eat. I seem to have worked up an appetite myself."

In the interests of satisfying her hunger as expeditiously as possible, Jessie allowed herself to be mollified. When they reached the dining room, she was positively glad of Stuart's presence. She shrank a little closer to his side as they waited to be shown to a table. The room was aglitter with chandeliers and crystal and white tablecloths—and people.

The meal was excellent. Stuart insisted that she try a fancy, French-named dish that turned out to be snails swimming in butter, and laughed uproariously when it arrived and she refused to eat it. To pacify her he ate it himself, and gave her his plain old Mississippi catfish, which she tucked into with relish. Only as she sat back, replete, after the last bite did it occur to Jessie 296

that the aggravating creature had probably meant to switch meals all along. He was much more the snail-eating type than she was. Stuart drank most of a bottle of wine, though he refused to pour her more than a single glass. It was on the tip of Jessie's tongue to remind him that he was her illicit lover now, not the guardian of her morals, but in the interests of harmony she held her tongue. Later, when a gooey gateau was brought to the table, she was about to refuse when he insisted that she be served a slice. It was delicious, and left her quite in charity with him again. The dining room was on the lower deck. As they left, Stuart had a low-voiced conversation with the steward. He was smiling when he returned to where she awaited him by the door.

"How much money do you have with you?" he asked, steering her outside.

"About seven hundred dollars. Why?"

"And I have a little over a thousand. That should be enough."

"For what?" Jessie was thoroughly mystified.

"For increasing our stake. Come on, Jess, and let me broaden your experience a little."

He refused to tell her more, but led her to a small parlor at the bow end of the upper deck. There he knocked on a closed door and was admitted to a smoke-filled room that appeared, at first glance, to be overflowing with gentlemen in various stages of inebriation playing cards.

"Be quiet, stay beside me, and if you should see any cards, try not to give my hand away," he whispered to her as he led her across the room to a table where some kind of card game was apparently just getting started.

"Mind if I join you?" Stuart addressed one of the men at the table.

297

"You got a thousand?"

"Yes."

"Have a seat, then. Name's Harris, this here's Ben Jones. Don't know the other gent, and don't suppose it matters. He's got a thousand, too."

Stuart pulled out a chair for Jessie behind the one he took, saw her seated, and then appeared to forget all about her. Jessie watched the steady progress of the game for a while, then got bored and allowed her attention to wander. She knew as much about cards as she had known that French dish Stuart had ordered at dinner. But he seemed totally absorbed in the game, which he had obviously played before.

Jessie realized that there was a great deal about Stuart's life before he came to Mimosa that she didn't know.

There were women in the room, Jessie saw, perhaps half a dozen or so, and such women! Dressed in sumptuous gowns of silk and satin that made hers look positively Quakerish, they laughed and tossed back drinks just like the men at the close of a hand, and stood quietly behind the tables during play. Jessie watched them with some interest, wondering if they were females of ill repute. Surely not, but they were certainly very bold in the way they behaved.

Stuart seemed to have some difficulty with his scarred hand when it was his turn to shuffle the cards and deal. Jessie realized that the wound had affected the dexterity of the muscles controlling his fingers to some small but telling degree. He compensated for the injury by holding his cards in his injured hand and making most of the moves necessary for the game with the other. But the cramped position required for him to hold the cards must nave strained the muscles, because about half an hour 298

into the game he unobtrusively transferred the cards he was holding to his other hand, and dropped his injured hand below the level of the table. For a moment he flexed his fingers, stretching them wide; then he shook his hand vigorously. Jessie's first instinct was to catch that hand and massage away the spasm in the muscles as she had done once before, but even as the thought occurred to her, she realized that he wouldn't appreciate her mollycoddling in front of a roomful or strangers. So she sat back, and seconds later he resumed play, with no one save herself as witness to the small byplay with his hand.

"You have an ace up your sleeve." The comment, made by Stuart, was very quiet, but there was an edge to it that immediately brought Jessie's wandering attention back to him. He was addressing the man directly across the table, who at that point seemed to have most of the money in the game piled in front of him. As he spoke, Stuart's face was the hard, expressionless mask that she had seen maybe once or twice before. He looked like a different man from the laughing lover of just a few hours before, and Jessie felt her stomach tighten. When Stuart looked like that, there was trouble coming.

"The hell I do!"

"Shake out your sleeve."

The two other men at the table were dividing suspicious glances between Stuart and his opponent.

"I didn't see no cheatin'," the man Stuart had first addressed—

Harris, Jessie thought his name was—said testily.

"I did." Stuart's voice was icy, his eyes cold as they fixed on the man he accused. "You can always prove me wrong. Shake out your sleeve."

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"Won't hurt to do that," Harris said, as if reasoning it out. The third man nodded, but the man Stuart accused of cheating jumped suddenly to his feet.

"Don't nobody accuse me of cheatin'!" he bellowed, fumbling at his belt. Jessie bit back a scream as Stuart leaped up, diving across the table to catch the man's hand and twist it. A knife clattered to the floor. Then, still holdig the man's hand in a grip that caused an expression of agony to twist his mouth, Stuart unfastened the man's cuff and gave his arm a shake.

A card fluttered out to land facedown beside the knife on the floor.

"By gum, he
was
cheatin'! We owe you one, sir!" Stuart bent, scooped up the knife and the card, which was the ace of hearts, then released his victim's hand. Red-faced, the man backed away from the table, turned, and swiftly left the room.

"How'd you know? I didn't see a thing!"

With an assessing glance at Jessie, which apparently told him that she was holding up as well as could be expected, Stuart resumed his seat.

"I've played a few hands of cards in my time," he said by way of an answer. He and the two remaining players retrieved their money from the pot, and split the cheater's leavings between them as matter-of-factly as if that was the way it was supposed to be done—and for all Jessie knew, it might have been. A man who'd been standing beside the door apparently watching for an opening walked up to the table.

"Looks like you could use a fourth."

"Got a thousand?" It was apparently Harris's favorite line.

"Sure do."

"Have a seat."

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Cards were reshuffled and redealt, and the play was just getting under way again when a woman came rustling toward the table. Stuart's nose was buried in his hand, but Jessie, with nothing else to do, watched her come. She was smiling broadly, a voluptuous woman with most of her considerable charms on display.

"Clive!" she exclaimed when she was close enough, and came around the table toward Stuart, who finally looked up. "Clive McClintock, as I live and breathe! Where've you been hiding yourself, sugar?"

"Good God," Stuart said, staring at her. "Luce!"

XL

Clive's first crazy instinct was to be glad to see her. Luce was an old friend from the days when he'd been riding high as one of the best riverboat gamblers around; one, moreover, for whom he had a certain soft spot. But as he started to get to his feet to envelop her in a big hug, he remembered Jessie, sitting so primly quiet behind him. His jaw clenched with trepidation, and he regarded Luce with as much horror as he would have a scorpion crawling out from between his cards.

He could have pretended not to know her, of course, but he'd said her name in his first surprise, and anyway, Jessie for all her youth was no fool. It was pretty obvious from the way Luce swooped to plant a smacking kiss on his mouth that they were well acquainted. Clive endured the kiss because he didn't know what else to do, while the skin between his shoulder blades tingled as he imagined Jessie's eyes boring into him. 301

Then it hit him. Luce had called him Clive. He hadn't even caught it at first, had been mainly worried about Jessie's reaction to encountering one of his previous mistresses. He'd been feeling like Clive, like himself, since he'd made the decision just that afternoon to beat those laughing gods at their own game by throwing their munificent gift of riches back

in their teeth. He was sick and tired" of playing at being Stuart Edwards, who'd been a back-stabbing thief and a general nogood, from everything he'd been able to discover. Money, as he was certainly not the first man to learn to his cost, was not everything, or even the most important thing. The green-as-grass chit sitting behindhim was that.

He'd meant to tell her, he really had, but he'd thought he'd introduce her gradually to the idea that he was not
quite
what she thought him. First he'd warm her up to the intricacies of loving so that she'd be as hot for him as he was for her, and at the same time introduce her a little to the life he'd led before, so that when he revealed the truth—that he just happened to be Clive McClintock, river rat and former gambler, instead of Stuart Edwards, scion of the South Carolina Edwardses and heir to Tulip Hill-it would not come as such a shock.

Still, he had not anticipated the denouement with much pleasure. And now here it was thrust upon him with no time to prepare at all.

"I see your hand healed pretty well." Luce was beaming at him. Clive put his cards down on the table and got slowly to his feet. He was scared to look behind him, scared of what he'd see on Jessie's face, so he looked at Luce instead.

"It healed," he agreed in a hollow voice, then nodded at the men with whom he'd been playing. "Sorry, gentlemen, I'm out." 302

Picking up his money, he tucked it carefully into the pocket of his waistcoat. Then, and only then, did he turn to look at Jessie. She was wide-eyed and pale, sitting there as if Luce's advent had frozen her to the chair. Except for the fiery glints in the masses of hair she wore piled on top of her head, and the dark slashes of her brows above those big-as-boulders eyes, she could have been carved from white marble. Not a vestige of color remained in her cheeks.

"Jess." His voice was not his own. It sounded more like it should have belonged to a croaking frog—or the quaking coward that Clive McClintock had never, until this moment, been.

"Oh, Lord, Clive, am I causing you problems?" Luce sounded half amused, half rueful as she looked from his face to Jessie and back.

Neither of them bothered to answer. Her eyes fastening on his, Jessie rose slowly, with almost sinister grace, to her feet.

"Clive?" she said then.
"Clive?"

"What's wrong with her?" Luce asked, puzzled. "She sounds like she don't know your name."

"Clive?"
Jessie's voice was rising. Clive moved swiftly then, not oblivious to the attention they were starting to attract, but not concerned with it, either. He reached Jessie's side, tried to take her arm. She shook him off, took a step back, and looked at him as if she'd never seen him before in her life.

"Clive?"
His name, now carrying an undercurrent of rage, seemed to be all she was able to say.

"I can explain, Jess." The words were feeble even to his own ears, and he was not surprised when she disregarded him to focus those huge eyes on Luce.

"His name is Clive? Clive-McClintock?"

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Luce turned swiftly to Clive. Luce was a good friend, she wouldn't want to cause trouble for him if she could help it, but she was clearly in a quandary. Clive shrugged helplessly. There was no way now to make the truth easier for Jessie to hear. Taking that shrug as permission to agree, Luce nodded. Her face was a study in fascination as she looked from Clive to Jessie again.

"Have you known him long?"

Clive didn't try to stop Jessie's questions. As Shakespeare—or somebody—had once said, the truth will out. And it was coming out now with a vengeance, far beyond his ability to contain it or even lessen the damage.

Again Luce looked at Clive for guidance. When none was forthcoming, she answered uneasily, "About ten years.''

"You've known
Clive McClintock
for about ten years." It was a statement, not a question. If possible, Jessie went even paler than before. "But you haven't seen him for a few months, have you?

Since right after he hurt his hand?"

"That's right." Luce sounded almost as puzzled as she was intrigued.

"So who," Jessie said, getting to the meat of the problem, her eyes swinging from Luce to Clive at last, "is Stuart Edwards? Or did you just make him up?"