Steal Me, Sweet Thief Page 24

  Macalester felt around and did, indeed, find blankets and several tins of water, among other staples. Billy, bless his heart, had apparently been planning this little cruise from the very start.

  "She looks bad," he heard himself report tonelessly, opening a tin of fresh water without taking his eyes from her smoke-blackened form. "But I guess she'll make it."

  I pray she'll make it, he thought bleakly.

  "Oh, she'll make it, Senator," Billy predicted with another laugh, extending an oar to push off from the port bulkhead of the Corvallis. "She'll want to slap your ugly face a few more times 'fore she's through with you. Count on it."

  Macalester could not help smiling. She will at that, he thought, bathing her face gently with a soaked bit of his shirt. And I'll kiss her hand when she does.

  "She needs a doctor," he said, pleased to see so much of the blackness yield to white, untouched flesh as he continued to wash her. "How far to Biloxi, Skipper?"

  "Biloxi, hell," retorted Billy from the stem, breathing hard as he pulled on the heavy oars. "We're headin' for New Orleans. I figure we're—uh—" he grunted again with exertion—" 'bout halfway between the two. Maybe a day. And I may as well tell you up front, Senator—" he paused to pull again—"I mean to winter in New Or-leans. Find me a plump little quadroon and stake out a claim till March or April. And after this, you owe me, so don't try to talk me out of it. Soon's you can manage it, I'd appreciate you grabbin' that other set of oars."

  Macalester did not reply. He pressed a clean piece of wet cloth against Geneva's cracked, dry lips and lifted her head, bracing it against his knee. With one hand, he plunged a dipper into the water tin and held it to her lips.

  "Drink, Gen," he urged in a quiet whisper, although he was almost certain she was unconscious. "It's water. Fresh water. You're safe now, honey. Billy's going to take us to New Orleans."

  She answered him by swallowing once. He pressed his lips to her forehead before covering her with a blanket and joining Billy on the oars. The exercise was excruciating, but it was nothing compared to the torture of thoughts of what would happen after they had reached New Orleans.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  "I hate comin' into town like a damned half-drowned water rat," Billy Deal declared, although his declaration came out in an exhausted whisper. Twilight settled over the Crescent City and the lifeboat from the Corvallis, a deep, rosy orange bleeding to violet. Kieran Macalester's body felt as if rusty iron spikes pierced his lungs with every breath. He no longer had any feeling at all in his back or his shoulders. These had long since ceased to feel a part of his being. He wished, surveying the reclining, immobile figure of the injured and abused soprano in the prow, that he could say the same about his heart. He pulled for one last time upon the heavy oars that had, along with Billy's, brought them to the barnacled pylons of this quiet dock in an otherwise bustling port. The lifeboat bumped gently against the dark brown clusters.

  It was low tide. There was a wooden ladder descending from the pier above into the shallows of the Pontchartrain, its wooden rungs hung with wispy white shreds of some unknown plant life, stranded by the receding water. It was no small task, but Kieran managed, with Billy's help, to lift Geneva's slight body out of the prow and up the five or six steps of the ladder onto the dock. Kieran, under Geneva's limp but inconsequential bulk, heaved a broken sigh of relief as his feet stood once again upon solid ground.

  A trio of stevedores strolled past, their labors apparently ended for the day. Kieran avoided their eyes, hoping they would ignore him. They did not.

  "Hey, watcha got there?" one man called genially, his drawl as thick as Spanish moss. "A mermaid?"

  "A half-dead one." Billy, behind him, answered the man in a reedy voice. "There a doc around here someplace?"

  The three men, dark brown from long exposure to a near-tropical sun, exchanged perplexed glances. Kieran endured their curiosity as they approached, but he held Geneva closer, drawing the blanket about her to shield her from their stares. He wondered, in an abstract and detached way, if wild animals protecting their young felt the way he did. He wondered further, feeling Garland Humble's greenbacks pressed against his sternum, how he and Billy would muster the strength to fight these burly and robust individuals, should they be of a mind to beat and rob them.

  Fortunately this seemed not to be their intention, whether because they were in fact honest men, or because they judged that three worn-out, ragged refugees obviously suffering from exhaustion, exposure and possibly one or two additional maladies could not possess anything of value, Kieran did not know. Nor did he care to speculate. Like a mute pack animal, he followed the men, along with Billy, lagging behind their annoyingly lively pace but steadfastly refusing offers to share his burden. Geneva was his burden, and he would not, if he could help it, ever share her with anyone again.

  Around the corner from the warehouse at the mouth of the pier, the marketplace seemed to be winding down business for the day. Awnings were being drawn over shop stalls, tarps strewn over crates of fruits and vegetables. Baskets offish, left too long in the warm October sunshine, were sold off wholesale for bait as fishermen prepared to head out to gulf waters for the night. Last minute bargains were struck with vendors by menials, mostly Negro ones, who no doubt would hurry home and add their finds to the evening's jambalaya. Kieran realized, glancing about himself at the aromatic produce, crates of squawking chickens and squealing pigs, and ropes of link sausages hanging from cypress rafters, that he was savagely hungry.

  "Sisters of Mercy Hospital is yonder, up on Paris Avenue." One man pointed a big, beefy finger in a vague direction.

  Another snorted. "That a fine hospital, do you like lice."

  "A doctor," Kieran heard himself say. "Just a doctor. No hospital."

  There was a doctor several streets down, they said, gesturing vaguely southward. The men then went their own way, glad, it seemed, to be quit of such dour company. Because he had no better idea, Kieran Macalester followed their direction, coming at last to a long, two-story clapboard structure that boasted CLINIC on its only painted surface. Doubtful, but too exhausted to search further, Kieran instructed the unencumbered Billy to knock and to try the door.

  Dr. Beaumarche was not in at present, a very correct, dusky little domestic assured them, not taking her black eyes from Billy's face. He would make his rounds shortly. She ushered them past a large, busy ward to a room that was spare but clean, with four neat, empty beds, one in each corner. There was one window, and it was clean, and there were plain white curtains framing it. The room smelled faintly of fresh-cut pine.

  Kieran laid Geneva upon the bed nearest the window, in the far corner of the room. The domestic returned with a basin of clear water, a cake of white soap and a pile of soft, white towels, and fell to helping him uncover and bathe the woman upon the bed. Kieran discovered very quickly that the serving woman possessed far greater skill in the area of nursing than he, and in spite of his desire to care for Geneva, he gradually allowed her to take over completely, although she had given no indication that he was in the way. In no time at all, the woman had completely stripped away the old blanket and the smoky, singed remains of Geneva's nightdress, and had washed her skin clean of dirt and soot, while he and Billy had stood by in relative helplessness.

  "Melusine!"

  A deep and mellifluous bass voice echoed through the place, emanating from the area of the ward. Kieran turned his head simultaneously with Billy at the sound. Together, they watched a tall and erect figure enter the room with grace and a dignity that, Kieran was certain, would have accompanied him even without his finely tailored gray linen suit and crisp dove-gray bowler hat. The man's age was indeterminable. He might have been thirty, or sixty.

  "Melusine, what have we here?"

  The man's words were strangely yet pleasingly accented, not Creole, or Spanish, or French, exactly. His tone was refined, and demonstrated, to Kieran, a high level of education.

  And he was as black as
bituminous coal.

  His obsidian eyes, set in his carved features like black pearls in an onyx sculpture, regarded Kieran and his partner expectantly. "This is a Negro hospital," the doctor remarked.

  Kieran felt the measure of the man and the comment like a powerful blow. "She needs help now" he said firmly, his glance straying to Geneva's limp form. "You can't turn her out!"

  "I turn no one away," was the stem, mildly rebuking response he got from the man, who did not move a muscle. "I merely point out the fact. Now then. Your wife?"

  Kieran swallowed, still tasting smoke in his mouth. "She's burned," he replied briefly, wanting to tell the man the whole story, but unable to form the words. "Help her. Please."

  "There is a tale behind this, I am certain," the doctor volunteered after a long moment, considering the outlaw with a slow nod. "One I am most eager to hear. But now is not the time."

  He turned to the woman in black, who seemed to wait upon his word.

  "Make up two cots in my consulting room for these gentlemen, Melusine. Show them the bath, and send a messenger to my home asking cook to send a supper for four. I think I shall be working late tonight."

  The doctor shed his jacket, tossing it carelessly upon one of the empty beds. He removed his gold cufflinks and rolled up the sleeves of his starched white shirt even as Melusine ushered the weary outlaws from the room.

  The waterfront was a ceaseless buzz of activity. Camilla Brooks was restless, waiting in the carnage Dr. Beaumarche had hired for their afternoon outing. Why he insisted on visiting his clinic on his only free afternoon was a complete mystery to her. But then, many things about the handsome Dr. Beaumarche puzzled her.

  He would, for example, haggle with a merchant over the price of a loaf of bread, then hand the same loaf over to a ragged little street urchin, wordlessly, without waiting for a "thank you."

  Dr. Beaumarche was the only Negro man she'd ever known who had an education. He'd come from Africa by way of France, where he'd been trained as a physician. He had appeared one evening at The Hall and, after hearing her sing, had returned every night.

  She liked having a beau, a real gentleman who treated her like a real lady. She'd used some of Eve Lyons's three hundred dollars to improve her wardrobe, and some of it to bribe the manager at The Hall to listen to her sing, at first. Of course, it had only been a short while, but so far things were going even better than she'd hoped. Especially after Dr. Richard Beaumarche had become interested in her.

  Her boredom and annoyance and the midday sun finally got the better of her patience, and she jumped down from the hired rig, pulling her rosy pink satin skirts after her. She avoided a puddle in the cobblestone pavement, tiptoeing around it in her black kid shoes, and admitted herself to the building Beaumarche called his clinic.

  Inside was a long, low room crammed with crying children, old women, sick and injured Negroes of every age and description. Two gray-clad nurses, Negro, of course, moved among the metal cots like mother birds feeding hungry chicks. They glanced up at her, then continued about their endeavors, not interested in her, or too busy to be. But Beaumarche was nowhere in evidence.

  This was how the quiet but merry doctor, whose age she had been utterly unable to determine, plied his trade. Her heart swelled with pride at the thought, and she decided, on the spot, that she would be his wife. But where was he? She made for a closed door at the far end of the room, thinking that to be his private consulting room. She entered without knocking and came upon him changing a dressing. He had removed his charcoal-gray jacket, and it hung on the back of the caned chair upon which he sat. He glanced over his shoulder and, upon seeing her, his handsome features registered alarm.

  "Camilla! I mean, Miss Brooks! I—please, leave. This is not—" His accented bass trailed off unconvincingly. She smiled as she peeled off her long white gloves to help him.

  "Dr. Beaumarche," she began, thinking she'd never flirted in a clinic before, "I—"

  The rest of her remark died upon her lips. It was a white woman whose dressings the doctor was tending.

  The import of her discovery struck her like a runaway milk cart: If word of this were to get out, the gentle doctor could be in serious trouble. For perhaps the first time in her life, Camilla Brooks was stunned into a profound silence. Dr. Beaumarche had ceased his labor and was regarding her steadily. She could feel his gaze upon her even as she continued to stare at the scrap of a woman who lay unconscious upon the white sheets of the cot.

  "Two men brought her here three days ago," Dr. Beaumarche said, his concern apparent in his quiet voice. "She is burned. She had been heavily dosed with opium. And they had spent nearly two days in a lifeboat getting here. All three of them are suffering from exposure. The men are in back." He gestured to another door leading, Camilla supposed, to the rear of the building.

  "I could not turn them away, Camilla. And to move her—" he gestured to the wispy figure on the cot—"might kill her. We must keep this secret, Camilla. Their lives depend upon it. My life depends upon it. Do you understand?"

  Camilla, however, had stopped listening. She stood above the young woman on the cot and stared down at her, unable to believe her own eyes.

  "Eve," she whispered, rooted by the sight of her companion from the flatboat and the Arkansas woods, who very obviously had suffered much misfortune since. "Eve Lyons!"

  "What did you say?" Beaumarche challenged her in a whisper. "Do you know this woman?"

  Camilla felt a lump in her throat, recalling their brief chance meeting that had resulted in friendship.

  "Eve is the lady I met on the flatboat," she replied, overcoming a desire to cry. "We got to help her, Richard! She saved my life!"

  Camilla worked the afternoon at Dr. Beaumarche's side, and the doctor seemed more than glad of her gentle assistance.

  Geneva lay still for a very long time without opening her eyes. She saw images in her head, and she was not certain whether these were real or illusion. The most vivid of these was of fire, a golden conflagration. The next was of pain. The pain was a real and palpable thing, like embracing a pillow made of long, sharp needles. But the pain was all around her, a prison for her body as well as her mind. Every breath she drew, every swallow, burned and stabbed her. She did not remember her life without pain.

  "We must not use the morphine, Melusine," she heard a deep, unfamiliar voice opine in gentle remonstrance. "See her arms. Morphine is a poison, if used to excess. It merely replaces one pain with another."

  She wanted to speak. She wanted to plead for the drug to assuage her suffering, to release her from the imprisonment of pain. She wanted the drug, or she wanted to die.

  There was something gentle touching her cheek, and for an instant the pain vanished, unable to stand against the tenderness. "Gen." Another voice spoke, a voice she knew. "We made it. You're going to be fine. Can you hear me, Gen?"

  Then she slipped into dreams. Awful dreams, dreams of such startling clarity that she thought them to be real. Terrible things happened in these dreams. Bizarre things. People changed into animals. Flowers became large and deadly insects. Nothing was what it seemed. Reflective, she thought, in her more lucid moments, of what her life had become, since boarding that train in New York with R. Hastings McAllister more than a month before.

  She had no idea how long she remained thus, hovering on the Singes of dreams and death, steeped in pain. She knew only that she awoke one morning and opened her eyes at last, aware that the pain had eased. And that, after a long and blessedly dreamless night of sound sleep, she had finally awakened to the world she had come perilously close to leaving.

  "Well, what do you know?" a deep, unfamiliar voice mocked lightly. "Our celebrity has decided to join us this morning. Welcome to New Orleans, Miss Lionwood!"

  A tall man of perhaps thirty stood over her with his thumbs tucked into his belt. His eyes, the startling and intense blue of a clear autumn sky, surveyed her with some amusement. His was a handsome face, with its dimpled chin an
d a nose sculpted with great care atop a full golden mustache. Billy Deal, she thought, but was unable to form the name with her lips. She opened her mouth, but could not persuade a sound to come forth. She swallowed. It was as if there was a knife in her throat.

  Billy Deal seemed to sense at once that something was wrong, for his blond brow furrowed over his narrowing azure eyes. "What's wrong? Can't you talk?" The humor vanished from his voice.

  Geneva stayed her panic and tried again. Her throat yielded no sound.

  Billy Deal flashed her a quick grin, and she thought at once of Kieran Macalester.

  "Wait here," he told her, but his buoyant tone rang false. "I'll find the doc."

  Wait here, she mused. Where else would I go? with no clothes and no voice? She noticed, for the first time, the white gauze bandages covering her arms like a second skin. She could feel the same about her feet, and the soft cotton lawn of a delicate nightgown from her neck to her knees. She drew the clean, fragrant sheets of the small bed up to her chin, willing herself to think of nothing.

  She was startled by the abrupt advent of a large black man, followed by Billy Deal.

  "This is Dr. Beaumarche, Miss Lionwood," the younger man explained. "He fixed you up real good when we brought you here two weeks ago. I'll just bet he can fix this, too. Don't you worry about a thing."

  Billy Deal disappeared again, and Geneva watched the big, well-dressed, dark-skinned man intently. He had kindly eyes, but just now he wore an expression of regret upon his features, broadcasting the fact that he was not pleased by Billy's generous assurances.

  "Good morning, Miss Lionwood."

  Geneva liked his voice. It was as deep as a lake, laced with a rich, unidentifiable accent and as soothing as a gentle breeze in an exotic tropical tree. She wanted to reply to him, to thank him for all he'd done so far, but still could not coax a sound from her throat.