Her Wicked Captain: The River Rogues, Book 1 (3 page)

Chapter Four

The town of Posey Hollow consisted of six ramshackle buildings on the side of a hill overlooking the river, but it took Rory two full hours to locate the apothecary. The only reason he’d found the doctor’s home, a pig farm in the woods, was Mrs. Violet Sharpe, the merchant’s wife. Although she didn’t stock the medicine Rory needed behind her counter, she knew where to get it, and with a few compliments and a wink, Rory procured the directions along with several cans of beans and corn for the crew.

Asa, his youngest crewmember at twelve years old, suffered chronic malaria. The outbreaks could be contained, but not without the right medicine.

Outside the doctor’s barn, Rory maneuvered around the nervous pigs, holding the tiny brown bottle of the famous Dr. Sappington’s Miraculous Fever Cure high in the sunlight. He studied it carefully, making sure there wasn’t any sediment in the liquid. He’d found in past dealings with drug merchants there was also a chance of the apothecary diluting the quinine—or just plain faking it.

He took out his folding dirk to open the bottle. When he had the knife’s sharp tip in the cork, he heard a whistle above the grunting animals.

“I hope that’s for your eyesight, Rory,” Philadelphia Samuels called. Dressed in an unbecoming calico frock, the woman glided down the pig trail that ambled between boulders and hardwood trees to the barn, carrying an enormous covered basket.

He slid the elixir bottle into his vest pocket and straightened to greet her. Yesterday, he’d barely recognized the coy young woman as his former playmate until she’d hiked her skirts and bounded off his boat to aid the slave on the shore.

Her Achilles’ heel had always been her desire to rescue others. Back then it had only been frogs and baby otters.

“Maybe you bought something to help you find your way back to the Mississippi?” she teased. As she walked closer, he noted a confident gleam in her dark eyes, though her knuckles were white, tightening her grip on the hefty-looking basket.

He twirled the knife in his hand, unable to stop his smile. “If either of us needs help findin’ the way back to Memphis, it’s you, Dell.”

Now she acted more like the girl he remembered, a six-year-old minx who’d worn her long hair in silken black pin-curls and whose sharp tongue and strong opinions caused him much consternation as she shadowed him along the waterfront and aboard Moreaux’s fleet.

Their conversation yesterday had convinced him she’d forgotten him or that he’d changed too much.

New excitement charged through him at her greeting. Perhaps she’d even come looking for him.

Dell’s delicate sable brows rose with feigned challenge. “So you do know me. I thought you’d forgotten.”

“Some things are easier to forget than others. Reverend Miller told me your mama is deceased. I am very sorry to hear that.” Very sorry indeed. Bringing Eleanor Moreaux back to Quintus would’ve saved their asses. No one could curtail his violence like that woman and her ability to get under his skin—to see a man’s thoughts and read his mind.

Dell’s face paled and she moved to stand in the shade of a tall pin oak nearby. Rory followed, his heart heavy for bringing up the matter.

“Pneumonia,” she offered quietly. “She had the sickness bad when she left Quintus.”

“I’m sure you miss her. But I hear you’re doing well.” He stuck his blade in the tree.

Quintus would be grieved to hear the news about his wife, but Rory knew what the gambler really wanted. A trophy to show off to his rivals. With the distraction and misplaced trust in a stepdaughter, his boss would suffer a devastating loss at the card table to Bartholomew Wainwright, the one opponent he would risk all to defeat. With Dell’s help, Rory felt sure he could make that happen.

With enough of a loss, the monster would lose the ships to a better man, freeing them all.

As a child, Dell had no apparent idea the monster her stepfather was—how Rory had kept her from suffering his wrath so many times. She’d tried hard to impress the one person in her life no one ever impressed—at least not outside of gaming halls. Young and artless, she never recognized she was the very last person who could please Quintus, being the constant reminder of Eleanor’s infidelity.

Now perhaps she could be everything Eleanor had been then—an uncanny people-reader at the tables and the walking embodiment of Lady Luck.

If he could convince Dell to return with him, he would keep her as safe as he had then. He would teach her how to handle frisky customers, and he would always be around to rein in dissatisfied gamblers. Being her protector came naturally, as he’d always admired her spirit.

“We do all right.” Dell’s soft words brought his mind back from his plans. She lowered her eyes and fidgeted with the linen covering her basket. “I read cards some, and my uncle sells a lot of moonshine. You probably wouldn’t think we have much, being from the city.”

His heart sped slightly with anticipation. So Eleanor had taught her the tricks of her trade! The woman lived in squalor, too, judging by her clothes and the whiskey smell. Better and better.

She glanced up, tilting her head. “I remember a few people from the big boat. How are Farley and…Trap? Oh, and dear Zeb?” Her rich, velvet brown eyes shone with a flash of a smile.

His chest tightened. She was surprisingly beautiful when she smiled, in contrast to her mundane clothes, like a vibrant butterfly emerging from a shabby cocoon. He yearned to make her smile again. But darkness edged its way into his heart at the mention of the crew.

“Farley died a year ago last August. Trap and Zeb are ever the same. Most of the roustabouts you knew are still on the Mississippi at various ports. Oh, and I’ve an apprentice. Asa. You wouldn’t know him. Moreaux took him as his ward shortly after—” Rory caught himself before he mentioned Eleanor’s betrayal of Quintus, or her flight with Dell. He pulled the knife from the tree and folded it shut. “We’re all bedding in the barn behind the lumber mill. Those of us capable of pilotin’
The Dark Enchantress
are taking shifts aboard the vessel until we’re able to continue on.”

“Where are y’all headed?” She shifted the large basket in her arms and its contents clinked.

“My apologies. Allow me.” He pocketed his knife and took the basket, allowing the subject to drop for the moment. “Are you delivering somethin’ to the apothecary?”

Their bare arms brushed in the transfer, and Dell moved back a step, frowning.

“No. Mrs. Sharpe told me you’d headed this way. It’s Aunt Ida’s muscadine jelly, an apple pie, and a bottle of my muscadine wine.” Her lips twisted with humor.

She pulled back the edge of the basket’s linen, showing him a small glimpse of the flaky, golden crust. The aroma of apples and cinnamon assailed him, making his stomach growl. She re-covered the pie with a bigger grin.

“All this for me?” His stomach squeezed, though not from hunger.

Dell shrugged. According to her cousin, she had yet to marry, but Rory found her heart-shaped face attractive. Her lips were full and soft looking. The fairness of her complexion suggested she didn’t spend much time in the sun. Rory recalled how Eleanor would scold her for staying outside so long she became “black” again. That would explain the kerchief she wore covering every single strand of her hair.

The basket suddenly felt heavier. He set the burden at his feet. “Ah. Now I understand. You’re tryin’ to pass as white and you want me to keep your secret from the good folks of Posey Hollow?”

She straightened. “I wouldn’t care one way or another, but my aunt would feel ashamed for what people would think of her sister.”

“You’ve lived a sad existence if you ask me, tryin’ to hide who you really are, Philadelphia.” He smirked. It might be easier than he’d thought, convincing her to go back to Quintus. Her cowardice angered him, nothing like the spunky girl he once knew. “What would you do if I refused your food and shared your secret?”

She bent over the basket, reached inside, and pulled out a worn-looking Brunswick hidden beneath the linens. The muzzle brushed his chest as she leveled the cold metal barrel between them. Her face hardened. “This is what I’d do.”

Rory chuckled. “Like any good gambler, I shall endeavor to keep my secrets to myself. Besides, I enjoy an apple pie.” Ignoring the graze of steel through his linen shirt and feeling obtuse for his miscalculation of her mettle, he continued to grin. “I won’t tell on you, but perhaps your uncle could spare an extra gallon of whiskey today for my crew, as well. I’m sure he has plenty. I smelled it on you yesterday.”

Her eyes narrowed, but she lowered the gun. “My uncle is bringin’ every gallon he has to the barn for your dance. I hope you settled on a price.”

Rory schooled his expression. Her uncle could charge whatever he liked, and he would agree to it. With the crew guarding the boat, no one in Posey Hollow would be the wiser to his poor financial state. Promissory notes. Big talk. Flattery and winks. Gambler’s bluffs were all he had left to trade until the boys made their way back to the Mississippi with Dell, their “treasure.”

Despite Quintus’s methods of persuasion ingrained in Rory’s training, he wasn’t as inclined to threaten young ladies.

“Tell me, is this the life your mama wanted for you?” He softened his voice, gesturing at the doctor’s dirt-walled home and the pigs rummaging in the weeds nearby. “This outpost? When you once lived like a princess?”

A cloud passed over her pretty face.

“I don’t have the luxury to come and go, Captain.” Resting the barrel of the gun against her shoulder, she seemed to consider his words. “Mama did what she thought was best when she got sick. Of course I’d like to leave. I
will
leave Arkansas as soon as I can. But right now I have people who depend on me.”

“Surely you don’t think your patrons can’t get along without you.”

Dell shrugged again.

She had cousins to consider too, Rory supposed, but he judged them to be privileged and spoiled in spite of their parents’ hand-to-mouth existence. Then there was the black man she’d hastened to rescue. The flash of worry on her face when she’d seen him wrestling against the hands of the white mob…

Heat pushed up his neck. He shoved his fists into his vest pockets to hide his sudden displeasure, but feeling the quinine bottle hidden there, a splash of guilt hit him.

“I apologize. Of course I know exactly how you feel.” His face flushed for his momentary—and bewildering—anger. Was this what it felt like to be human again? He forced a smile. “I hope you’ll come to our little dance.”

She shook her head. “I’d rather not, but thanks for the invitation.” He opened his mouth to persuade her, but she waved off his objection. “I’m not fond of gatherings. People like to visit a soothsayer, but they don’t like one callin’ on them in their society, if you understand?”

He had a sudden urge to send her basket flying with a kick of his boot, but at least now he knew what obstacles were in the way of his plans to bring her back. And he had an idea how to overcome them, as well.

She sighed. “I should be leaving.” She scanned the sky and the buildings around them. A small line appeared between her eyes. “But why are you here at the apothecary, Rory? Are you…ill?”

His abysmal mood lightened a fraction. “Oh, the medicine? It’s not for me.”

She smiled.

Watching her back away, he shook his head. “Reconsider the dance, Dell. For once, put your desires above others’.”

Scowling, she turned her back to him. Then swinging her rifle as she went, she stomped back up the pig trail, leaving him with the swine.

Chapter Five

Dell waited until midnight to creep out of the sleeping house, trying hard not to let the rusty screen door squeak too much. The moonlight reflecting off the White River cast an indigo glow outside their dogtrot house, illuminating the porch and her uncle’s rocking chair. She got down on hands and knees in her nightgown and crawled across the weathered boards to the shabby quilt-bed of Fergus, the old coonhound.

“Good boy,” she murmured and let him sniff the piece of boiled chicken in her hand. “Fetch.” She hurled the meat down the hill. Fergus, named after a character in one of her beloved novels by Sir Walter Scott, stood on shaky legs and ambled off the porch in search of his treat. As she heard his paws shuffling in the fallen leaves, she moved his empty bed aside. Finding the edge of the loose board with her fingers, she pried the wood up and reached inside. Never knowing what might be hiding under the porch at night she braced for anything—spiders, an angry cat, or even a rattlesnake. Her fingers tipped the edge of the coffee can, and she sighed with relief.

Earlier that evening, after suffering another of Ephraim’s visits, she’d decided enough was enough. Although she didn’t have the money for the stagecoach fare to Illinois, she had plenty to go somewhere. The stage was due by three in the afternoon on Tuesday, and she intended to be on it. She could travel north, rent a room and find some odd jobs to earn the rest of the fare. Hell, she could sell fortunes there, too, if she must—anything to put distance between her, Ephraim, her greedy family and Rory Campbell.

Her stomach gave a tiny flutter recalling the seriousness in his green eyes as he’d invited her—her!—to his dance, “…put your desires above others’.” No doubt the finely dressed captain followed his own advice.

Still, she smiled, imagining the faces of the other women in town as she stepped onto the dance floor in the arms of handsome Rory Campbell with his laughter and attention centered on her. He would hold her hand, his arm banding around her waist…

It wasn’t meant to be. She sighed.

Taking the two dollars she’d earned selling her last bottle of wine, she pulled out the can from under the boards to add to its contents. But instead of a bundle of bills, a chunk of burnt firewood rolled onto her lap. “What in the blazes?” She reached into the coffee tin. Empty. All her money and savings gone.

“No!” she whispered. There’d been sixty dollars in the can a day ago! No one in the house had said anything about finding her secret stash, the sum total of two years’ worth of side jobs: tells, reading lessons, selling her muscadine wine, and scrubbing clothes for the widower, Mr. Shumaker.

Furious, she chunked the crumbling, charred wood toward the river. It landed with a thud on the slope and rolled. Unsatisfied, she hurled the can, too, and heard it thunk on a rock somewhere in the darkness. Fergus woofed, startled by her temper, and ran to the side of the house. Footsteps sounded on the floor inside the home, making her cold with dread, but Dell was beyond caring. The screen door opened, and Uncle Reuben leaned on its squeaking hinges. Dell climbed to her feet to confront him.

“What in the hell, woman?”

She folded her arms over her gown, feeling anger pounding in her chest. “You took it. That money was mine.” Tears pricked her eyes. She lifted her face skyward so he wouldn’t see her weakness.

He rubbed his face wearily. “I didn’t take anything. You best ask your aunt about that, but in the morning, not now.” He held the door open and swung a bony arm toward the darkened room inside. “Git back to bed. We got a lot of work tomorrow.”

Dell slid past him, hanging her head so the fall of her long hair would conceal the pain and fury she felt.

The rest of her night was long and sleepless in the uncomfortable bed she shared with Sarah. She couldn’t recall any signs her aunt had given that she’d found the money. How would she ever convince her to return it? She must. They’d had arguments over her education before when she’d first mentioned her desire to become a teacher. But now with a virtual stranger in Posey Hollow who knew Dell was mixed, maybe her Aunt Ida would agree she’d be safer gone. Better to be poor, respectable and free up north than to stay, bringing more shame on all their heads.

Just when she was almost asleep, her mama’s face, slack and pale with sickness, hovered in her mind reminding her nothing good could come from Memphis. Least of all, a golden-haired riverboat captain with a quick smile.

The next morning, Dell spotted Jeremiah standing in the street outside the lumber mill’s barn, while her family stopped to deliver whiskey to the steamboat’s crew. Other wagons and riders went by on their way to the store while her friend lingered for a moment beside Ephraim’s buckboard, petting his mule. Jeremiah was the only person she could talk to about her troubles. He alone would understand.

As her aunt, uncle and cousins were busy unloading their wagon, she hurried over to speak with him. “Don’t tell me you’re here delivering items for that dance too?”

He glanced up, apparently shaken from his thoughts by the sound of her voice. “No, ma’am.” His mouth curved in a half-smile, and he gestured meaningfully at the boards stacked in the bed of the wagon. “We’re getting some wood for the outhouse.”

It gave her heart a pinch knowing how hard Ephraim must be making him work on the new building—one that Jeremiah wouldn’t even be allowed to use.

Laughter came from a group of men standing between the lumber mill and the barn, while some women, possibly their wives, stood outside the mercantile. Too many eyes were watching them.

She ran a shaky hand down the mule’s flank and lowered her voice. “Something awful’s happened. Do you have time to step inside the store for another reading lesson?”

His expression sobered with concern. He glanced around, then nodded and followed her inside the store.

Strolling past the barrels, she picked up the packaged items and read their names aloud. Jeremiah parroted her, duly pronouncing and sounding out the letters. When they reached the hanging garment racks, she spun around to face him. “My aunt has taken all my savings. Everything. She says I won’t need money once I marry Ephraim. After all, he’s rich. Oh, God, Jeremiah!” Her voice broke as she fought back tears. She hadn’t meant to let her friend know how desperate she was, but seeing the worry reflected in his eyes sent panic through her.

He put a kind hand on her shoulder. “They won’t make you marry him. You help with the still. They won’t wanna give up the labor and money you provide them. You’re a seer, too, right? People pay to talk to you.”

Voices grew near. The mercantile owner leading another woman to the fabric. Jeremiah dropped his hand from her shoulder.

“People come to me for things.” She shrugged. “I mostly just find lost items. Sometimes I simply tell folks what they want to hear. I don’t charge them a price, but they definitely pay. It’s not much. But Jeremiah, I can’t make things happen or prevent them from happening.”

His expression smoothed as an idea seemed to come to him. “What if I told you I knew where Mr. Matthews keeps the rest of his money? Beneath Painter’s Bluff where the bats gather. I dug the hole myself.”

Tempting though it was, she narrowed her eyes. “I’m a fortuneteller, not a thief.”

“We could take the money. You could leave. Go north and live like a queen. Heck, throw his money in the river, if you want! Your aunt and uncle wouldn’t find the man so appealing without his money, would they?” His words came faster as he tried to convince her.

“You don’t know them,” she scoffed. “I’d be afraid you’d get in trouble. Ephraim would know you were responsible. It’s not a viable answer.”

Ephraim had to leave town for good. Perhaps she could persuade the wretched man that something awful would happen to him if he stayed in Posey Hollow. Perhaps an act of God, a terrible storm coming that would take all his possessions…

“These fortunes of yours, Mr. Matthews puts a lot of stock in them. Maybe you could give him another reading.”

“Yes.” She nodded, watching the front of the store. “Now you’re reading my mind, Jeremiah.”

Watching Reuben Samuels, the moonshiner, back away from a loaded wagon with two jugs of whiskey in his arms, Rory’s heart gave a hard thump. He told himself it was just a heavy dose of anticipation, seeing Philadelphia’s uncle, because here was another opportunity to move closer to his goal of getting the card-reader on Moreaux’s steamboat. Surely it was only that, and not that he hoped to see the vivacious Miss Dell too.

However, something about Dell’s family—the greasy-headed, scowling moonshiner and his dour-faced wife—ran a foreign splinter beneath his skin. This once, he must keep Moreaux’s words to heart.

A gambler cannot afford empathy.

He excused himself from the conversation he was having with a cattle farmer and hastened to catch the whiskey peddler at the entrance of the crew’s barn. “Good morning, Mr. Samuels. Allow me.” Taking one of the coarse, dusty jugs against his silk brocade vest, he bit the inside of his cheek and feigned indifference.

With a gesture at Trap and Zeb, his oldest friends and best crewmembers, Rory had them unloading the brew while he had Dell’s aunt and uncle to himself. He pulled out one of the cigars he’d managed to pinch from Moreaux before leaving the Mississippi and passed it to Samuels. Ida’s nose wrinkled as her husband took the first puff. People in polite society probably didn’t smoke in front of women, but Rory ignored those conventions, never having the experience of polite society himself.

Leaning against a cedar post outside the barn, he exhaled a puff from his own cigar, and through the swirls of smoke, he regarded the children playing in the road outside the mercantile. He made idle conversation with the couple while he waited for the tobacco to mellow the gruff moonshiner and loosen his tongue. And truth be told, if Samuels had brought Dell to town with them, he might enjoy another exchange with her.

“Your whiskey is highly regarded in these parts, Mr. Samuels. I spoke with a man in Batesville when we were passing through who claimed yours was the purest quality.”

Samuels nodded. His wife, who must have been the late Eleanor Moreaux’s sister, wore a high-necked gray frock and an expression of sour disapproval. “I’m surprised you spoke to anyone there a’tall, Captain Campbell, bein’s how you managed to strand that boat of yours. Looks to me like someone downriver coulda told you that you’d never make it to Calico Rock.”

Shrewd woman. He’d like to see her tangle with Moreaux. He smiled. “I’d been warned, but I wanted to see how far I might push her. Seeing the joy
The Dark Enchantress
brings the children is worth the effort.” The woman’s wrinkled brow smoothed slightly, but the set of her lips persevered. She had none of the legendary beauty of her fair sister, who’d stolen the hearts of many river pirates, including him, in her day. “I hope you’ll save a dance for me, Mrs. Samuels, with your husband’s consent, of course.”

She blinked. “I haven’t danced in years—”

Her husband interrupted between drags on his cigar, “I’ll need two dollars a gallon on the whiskey.”

“Of course. You must run quite the business, operating the only still in these parts. Does your son help you?”

“Nathaniel? No. He’s only six. He’d get in the way.” He made no mention of Dell or her help.

Rory’s cigar tasted bitter. He smashed it under his shoe. “What about the rest of your family? Are there more? Surely you can’t do all the work yourselves.”

Rory’s men passed by, steadily carrying heavy whiskey jugs inside the barn with an occasional gleam of spite in their eyes for their captain. He gave them a half-smile, certain he’d hear their opinions of his leadership later.

“My niece helps somewhat.” Mrs. Samuels frowned and rose on her toes for a better look at the storefront across the street.

“And her husband doesn’t mind?” Rory coaxed.

“No husband.”

“Not yet.” Mrs. Samuels’s eyes brightened. She indicated a lanky man standing outside the mercantile. “Ephraim Matthews standing there is Dell’s intended. He made a fortune in gold, and once they’re married, he’ll likely send his boy to work at the still.”

Philadelphia’s intended? Even from their vantage point, he noted the man’s emerald frock was a cut several years out of fashion. Would a young woman, such as Dell, want to be saddled with an older man bearing a full beard? Rory scratched his chin, noting a razor wouldn’t be remiss for him, either. Perhaps this Matthews was responsible for Dell’s reluctance to leave if she expected him to propose marriage at any moment. If money was what Dell pined for, Rory couldn’t compete. At least not here, so far from his boss’s bank account.

But perhaps Dell’s concern rested elsewhere. “Did you say his ‘boy’? He has children?”

“No. His slave. He’s a young man, but he’s strong as an ox.”

Rory struggled to keep from frowning. Dell had abandoned the
Enchantress
immediately to aid a slave. Perhaps they were one in the same. He longed to prod the couple more about their niece’s interests—more specifically about her card reading—but he caught a subtle wave from Trap, who headed inside with the last jug of whiskey.

“I expect your business will grow by leaps and bounds with more manpower in the near future. Thanks for the whiskey, my friend. When we retrieve your money from the
Enchantress
, perhaps I’ll bring it by myself.” If it didn’t rain soon, he’d be forced to tell half the town they didn’t have anything to pay for the provisions. Leaving one more debt he never intended to pay, he extended his hand to Samuels and gave him a firm shake. “I’d love to take a look at your operation.”

Sullen after being dismissed, the couple turned to leave. Out of the corner of Rory’s eye, he saw Ephraim Matthews amble toward the store where he met a black man coming out with a heavy-looking sack slung over one shoulder. Rory leaned against the post, casually watching their interactions. Matthews climbed aboard the wagon and waited as the other man, probably his slave, loaded his burden and hopped up to sit in the back.

Rory loved the South, with the Spanish moss of the lower Delta, and the lovely, obliging ladies of New Orleans, but right now he pined for the North. For the progressive thinking of Illinois or Wisconsin. Anywhere the Mississippi might take him far from slavery and oppression, which he knew all too well. Yet he couldn’t avoid his obligations no matter which direction he headed.