Natchez Flame (33 page)

“Dear God in heaven.”

“We drew straws. They’d killed fifteen men by the time I drew the short one—” He looked up at her, his
eyes dull with anguish. “You know, I almost welcomed it. Anything to stop the hurting I felt inside. Seeing men tortured and starving, the wounded screaming for help…. They came for me at dawn, but …” Brendan swallowed and glanced away.

“You don’t have to go on,” Priscilla said softly. “It doesn’t matter. All of that’s in the past.” Her heart wrenched at the agony written on his face.

“No,” he said. “I want you to know what happened. I just pray it doesn’t make a difference….”

Dear Lord, what demons had she unleashed? “Brendan—”

“Alejandro crawled over to me—on his hands and knees because he could no longer stand up. ‘Let me go in your place’—that’s what he said. He said I had my whole life ahead of me, that he was just an old man days away from the grave.

“At first I wouldn’t consider it—at least I was that much of a man.”

“Don’t! For God’s sake, Brendan, it isn’t worth it.”

“I told him he was crazy. I walked away, but he kept calling out to me. I should have kept going, met my fate like the other fifteen men, but he kept talking, begging me to do as he asked. I could hear his raspy breathing across that filthy, lice-infested room—and I began to listen.”

“You must let me do this thing. I ask it as a favor.”

“If you die for me today, Alejandro, I’ll only have to die tomorrow. It’s only fair to the others.”

“Each day is worth living. You will have one more day of life, and I will go to my grave a soldier, instead of a withered old man. Besides … a man never knows what fate may bring.”

“He told me I’d be doing him a favor, letting him die like a man. At the time … I don’t know … I guess I wanted to believe him … I wanted to go on living.” Brendan turned to face her, and trails of wetness marked his cheeks. “I did it, Sill. I let him take my place. They carried him out into the sunshine and shot him in front of a firing squad. I’ll never forget the sound of those muskets—I felt every bullet as if it had entered my own heart.”

Priscilla touched his cheek, but Brendan pulled away.

“What kind of a man would do that, Sill? What kind?”

“You mustn’t do this to yourself. At the time you did what you thought—”

“The next day my brother fought his way into the prison, and those of us still alive broke out of there. That old man might have lived. A man of such greatness—and he might have lived if hadn’t been for me.”

She reached for him then, slid her arms around his neck and pulled his head down to her shoulder, pressing her face against his cheek. She could feel the wetness of his tears as they mingled with her own.

“Nothing happens without a purpose.” Priscilla stroked his hair. “God had a reason for wanting you to live. Alejandro Mendez believed that. He gave his life so you could go on. It isn’t your place to question God’s will.”

The tension in his body seeped into hers. She wished she could absorb it, along with some of his pain.

He pulled away to look at her. “Do you really believe that?”

“Your friend got to choose the time and place of his death. He got to die with dignity. It was God’s gift to him. Yours was to go on living.”

“It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about God.”

“God forgave you a long time ago, Brendan. It’s time you forgave yourself.”

Something eased inside him; she could feel the tension leave his body. He cupped her face with his hands. “Mendez would have loved you, Priscilla. But no one could ever love you like I do.” His mouth moved over hers in a gentle kiss that spoke more poignantly than his words.

Priscilla returned it, hoping with every touch, every caress, she could help to ease the sadness he had carried for so long. She kissed his eyes, the dampness on his cheeks, then returned to his mouth. When he urged her lips apart and his tongue touched hers, something flamed between them.

Brendan’s kiss, no longer gentle, stirred the fires inside her body. With an urgency she hadn’t expected, he opened the front of her dress and he slid his hands inside to cup a breast. As he pebbled her nipple, fiery kisses scorched her neck.

“I need you, Sill,” he whispered. “You’ll never know how much.” Pulling her down on the blanket, hidden from the river by a thin line of rushes, he shoved up her skirts, unbuttoned the front of his breeches and found the split in her pantalets.

In a frenzy of need, he jerked them open, positioned
himself above her, and with one determined thrust, buried himself inside her.

Priscilla moaned.

Coupling with an urgency that shook them both, they made wild, passionate love. As Brendan drove into her, Priscilla met each of his demanding strokes, arching her body, needing him as badly as he needed her. She reached her peak in minutes, her body tightening around his shaft, urging him to join her. Stars burst and the heavens seemed to open, lifting the burden from Priscilla that she had taken from him.

Afterward they lay sated, closer than they’d ever been before. For Brendan it seemed the past had at last been put to rest. For Priscilla, the future was all that mattered. God had spared Brendan’s life and given him another chance.

Priscilla prayed God would grant that same fate to her.

They returned to their quarters late in the afternoon to find the children awaiting them outside the door. Priscilla looked down at her slightly rumpled dress and flushed. She fiddled with loose strands of her hair.

Brendan just grinned. When he bent down, the children gathered around him, and Priscilla thought again what a wonderful father he would make.

“Do you children think you can keep Aunt Silla entertained while I’m gone?” he asked.

“Sure, Uncle Brendan,” Matt said. “We’ll let her play soldier with us. Mama bought me some new dragoons. Would you like to see them?”

“I don’t have time right now, son, but I will when I
get back. I’ll show you how the Texians took the battle of San Jacinto.”

Matt bobbed his head with such enthusiasm his pale blond hair tumbled forward into his eyes.

“I won’t be long,” Brendan said to Priscilla. They went inside, and Brendan headed straight for the gun cabinet, where he kept his rifle and both his pistols locked away.

While the children talked to Priscilla, he opened the desk drawer and took out the key, then unlocked the cabinet and withdrew his .36 caliber. Stuffing the gun into his breeches behind his back, he went into the bedchamber and came out wearing a soft black leather vest that camouflaged the weapon a little.

Priscilla glanced up from her place on the brocade sofa. “How long will you be gone?”

“Not long. Maybe an hour or two.” He strode toward her, leaned down and kissed her, then walked away.

“Be careful,” she called after him.

“You can count on that.” With a look that could only be called hungry, he strode out and closed the door.

The man had an appetite—that much was clear. Priscilla smiled. She’d discovered, to her astonishment, she had one, too.

Brendan strode along Silver Street toward the Keel-boat Tavern on Royal. He had never felt better, more certain things would work out. Thanks to Priscilla, he’d dealt with the past and laid it to rest. And now that he could look at that awful day with some sense
of objectivity, he knew that the decision he had made that morning was the right one at the time.

There’d been his men to consider, and Alejandro’s men, and his old friend never would have survived the escape, weakened as he’d been. The burden of the old man’s death, which had haunted him so long had finally been put to rest by Priscilla’s words.

Brendan reached the tavern and pushed open the swinging double doors that led into the low-roofed, wood-framed building set into the hillside. It was noisy in the dimly lit room, rowdy with the sound of men’s laughter and the strum of a guitar played by a scantily dressed woman in bright orange satin. Brendan searched the throng of men, some seated at tables playing cards, others standing at the long rough-plank bar, but saw no one he needed to avoid.

Shouldering his way through the crowd, he crossed the room to the bar beside a beefy, thick-chested man with a heavy, gray-black beard and shaggy salt-and-pepper hair.

“I’ll have a whiskey, barkeep.” Brendan looked at the man’s empty shot glass. “And bring my friend here one, too.”

“Thanks, mister.”

“Name’s Avery,” Brendan lied, “Jack Avery.” He extended a hand, and the beefy man shook it.

“Marlins mine—Boots Marlin. You from up-river?”

Wearing his ruffle-fronted white linen shirt, black pants, black leather vest, and flat-brimmed hat, Brendan looked the part of the gambler he had been more than once. “New Orleans of late. You?”

“Been here nigh on two years. Used to flatboat
downriver, then take the Trace back home. Helluva life, I’ll tell ya.” Boots stroked his heavy graying beard.

“So you wound up stayin’ here?”

Boots grinned, exposing a missing eyetooth. “Got a better proposition.”

Brendan took a drink of his whiskey. “What kind of proposition?”

Boots’s grin faded. “Nothin’ a tinhorn like you’d be interested in.”

“That so?”

Boots just grunted.

“Why not?”

The riverman reached a brawny arm behind his back and came up with the longest “Arkansas toothpick” Brendan had ever seen. “Ever use one a’ these?” He stuck the wicked, gleaming blade into the bar, so close to Brendan’s hand it almost cost him a finger.

Brendan smiled thinly. Easing his hand away, he reached behind his back, jerked his pistol, and jammed it beneath the big man’s chin before he had a chance to move or even breathe. “You don’t need one of those when you can use one of these.”

Boots grinned again, this time a little nervously. “I take yer point. No offense intended.”

Brendan pulled the knife from the bar, handed it to Boots, who slowly resheathed it, then he stuck the gun into the back of his breeches beneath his leather vest. “None taken.”

“Buy my friend here a drink,” Boots ordered, beginning to relax again. The barkeep brought them both a round, and Brendan tossed the balance of his
first shot back in one gulp, the liquid burning a path down his throat.

“I’m gettin’ damned tired of running up and down this river,” Brendan said. “Gambling isn’t the most reliable profession a man can pick. You need any help with that
proposition
you got, you let me know.”

Boots eyed him a moment, then slugged back his whiskey. “Just supposin’ that might be—how would I find you?”

Brendan polished off his second shot and set the glass back down on the rough-hewn bar. “You won’t have to. I’ll find you.” Touching the brim of his hat in farewell, Brendan turned and strode to the door.

Outside, he ignored the smell of dead fish and rotting wood and headed back up the hill. Things were coming to a head—he could feel it in his bones. Now if his luck just held a little longer….

Brendan’s bright mood faded. His gambler’s instinct said every lucky streak ended sooner or later, and his had already gone on far too long.

“If you children will give me a moment to get my shawl, we can take a walk. How does that sound?” When all three young Bannermans nodded enthusiastically, Priscilla left the parlor and went into the bedchamber, where she found the blue woolen shawl Sue Alice had loaned her.

She joined them out on the porch and thought how like his father Matt looked, how adorable the two little girls were standing there in their identical lace-trimmed pink pinafores. Patience stood a little taller, or Priscilla would have had trouble telling them apart.

“Where shall we go first?” she asked.

“Let’s go see Herbert,” Charity suggested.

“First I want to show you my new toy soldiers,” Matt said. “They’re guarding some enemy troops out in the garden.”

How early they learn, Priscilla thought, wishing little boys didn’t have to play war. But Patience took one hand, and Charity took the other, urging her along. Together the three of them strolled into the garden, helped Matt rearrange his troops, then checked on Herbert and several other of the family’s animals. All the while, Priscilla listened to their tales of adventure.

Though she nodded with enthusiasm, she found it hard to concentrate, her mind turning instead to thoughts of Brendan. She wondered where he was and what he was doing.

If only he would confide in her.

Then she remembered the scene at the river, the way he had opened his heart and soul. In time, she believed, he would tell her what she wanted to know.

But as the afternoon wore on, she watched the sun make its way toward the horizon, and her worry increased. She hardly noticed when the twins got fidgety and asked to run ahead to the house. It wasn’t that far away, so she nodded and they raced off while she walked back with Matthew, who held on to her hand.

They had just rounded the corner of the main house when she heard the shot—a loud echoing blast that vibrated the air around her. It took only a moment for Priscilla to realize it had come from the bachelor quarters. When she did, her heart nearly
slammed through her chest. Grabbing up her skirts, she started running.

Heart pounding, terrified of what she might find, she raced toward the sound, opened the heavy front door that led into the parlor, and stopped dead in her tracks.

The desk drawer stood open; the key to the gun cabinet still rested in the lock of the open cabinet door. Brendan’s spare pistol lay on the carpet at Patience’s feet, and Charity’s small body sprawled on the floor just a few feet away.

Dear God in heaven.
Charity’s pinafore ran red with blood, the carpet beneath her pooled with it, and it had splattered on the curtains. Priscilla gripped the doorjamb.

“Dear God….” She looked at the lifeless little body and swayed on her feet.
Do something!
her mind screamed, but the walls moved in on her, squeezing her breath, and the room grew dim and narrow. Her vision blurred and the focus shifted until all she could see was the blood-drenched little body in front of her.

“What the hell … ?” Brendan stood behind her, but only for an instant. “Sweet Jesus!” Then he was moving, racing toward the stricken child. “Get me something to stop the bleeding,” he commanded, but Priscilla didn’t move.