"You look to be in exceptionally high spirits this morning," Celia observed coldly, regarding Jessie with distaste as the younger woman drew rein in front of her. Her face was very pale, and her hair was slightly untidy, which was so unlike Celia that Jessie wondered if she might be ill. And there was 263
something in her tone, some edge that had never been there before. Of course, Celia was habitually unpleasant toward her, her animosity increasing daily as Jessie's looks began to eclipse Celia's own, but still . . .
Could her stepmother possibly know what had passed between her and Stuart during the night?
No, of course not. No one knew, save herself and Stuart. Still, Jessie could not help the tide of guilty color that rose in her cheeks.
"Did you want me for something in particular, Celia?" she asked, hoping to get away before Celia could notice the telltale blush.
"If you run across my husband, as you usually seem to do, I wish you would send him to me. Honestly, the man is never to be found—by me, that is. I understand you manage to find him a good deal." The petty disagreeableness in Celia's voice was no more pronounced than usual, Jessie told herself. For months Celia had been making insinuations about the time and attention Stuart accorded Jessie. Celia's comments were no more than another salvo on the same old front—were they?
"If I run into him, I'll send him to you." Already Jessie was edging Firefly away.
"Oh, I'm sure you'll run into him. You make it a point to, don't you?"
"I'll tell him you want to see him," Jessie said evenly, and turned Firefly toward the road.
"On second thought, don't bother," Celia called after her, malice plain in her voice. "What could be more appropriate than having you be the bearer of my good tidings? Just give Stuart a 264
message for me. Tell the randy bastard that he finally got what he wanted: I'm fairly certain I'm with child."
XXXVI
Jessie boarded the River Queen early that afternoon. Once she had made up her mind that leaving Mimosa was the only thing she could do under the circumstances, the details had become surprisingly simple. For a while after Celia had blown her world to smithereens Jessie had ridden blindly, sick at heart and stomach, her mind in turmoil. Then, when she forced herself to truly face the realities of the situation, an icy calm descended upon her, and she knew what she had to do. She returned to the house, packed a small valise, and wrote a note, which she left between her coverlet and pillow so that it would not be found until Sissie came by that evening to turn down her bed. Getting out of the house with her valise did not even present the difficulty Jessie had feared it might. The house staff was busy with the usual tasks, and Celia was either in her room or absent from the house altogether, which she usually was during most of the daylight hours. Jessie encountered no one as she left by the front (rather than the back, where she might have run into Tudi or Sissie) stairs.
Money had been the greatest obstacle when she had formulated the determination to leave, but it turned out not to be a problem. At this time of the year everyone, including Graydon Bradshaw, who ordinarily spent most of his working hours in the plantation office, was busy in the fields. The office, a small, separate brick building some way from the main house, was deserted. It was 265
also locked, but Jessie knew where the key was kept. Running her hand along the top of the doorjamb, she found it just where she expected it to be. That key unlocked the door. Once inside, Jessie went straight to where the strongbox, containing enough cash to cover any contingencies that might arise, was concealed beneath a loose plank in the floor. Lifting the board and removing the strongbox was the work of a moment, but like the door, the strongbox was locked. Fortunately the key was in the top drawer of Bradshaw's desk.
The theft was ridiculously easy.
Jessie was careful to return the strongbox to its hiding place and lock up behind her so that no one would be alerted to what had happened until her note was found. Then she mounted Firefly and rode to the landing where the riverboats docked. Getting Firefly safely back home again was another problem, though she could have just turned the little mare loose. Firefly would have returned to her stable before the day was out, but again Jessie did not want to alert anyone at Mimosa to her plan until it was too late to stop her. Fortunately some supplies for the Chandlers were being unloaded. Jessie knew the two Elmway hands who were piling the goods on the wagon. The obvious solution was to ask them to tie Firefly to the back of their wagon and convey her to Elmway for the day.
"You goin' on a trip, Miss Jessie?" one of the men, George, asked her in some surprise as he accepted Firefly's reins.
"Yes, indeed. I'm going to Natchez for a spell. Doesn't that sound lovely?" Jessie hoped that the gaiety in her voice didn't sound as forced to George's ears as it did to her own.
"It does, Miss Jessie. You got your girl Sissie with you?" 266
Half the bucks in the valley were sniffing around Sissie's skirts. Jessie made a mental note to talk to Stuart about finding the girl a husband amongst the people at Mimosa before she could lose her heart to someone from another plantation, which could cause endless complications. Only as the thought was filed away did Jessie remember that she was leaving, and thus would not have the opportunity to talk to Stuart about anything, much less Sissie's love life, for a very long time.
Anguish smote her even as she lied brightly for George's benefit.
"She's already gone aboard. I'll tell her you asked after her, shall I?"
"You do that, Miss Jessie."
With a pat for Firefly and a wave for George, Jessie headed up the gangplank. She had a bad moment then, since it occurred to her that she had not the least idea how to go about securing passage. Fortunately the captain was more concerned with his cargo than his passengers, and seemed to require no more than payment to let her aboard. After the money changed hands, and she was walking along the deck with a key to her cabin in her hand, Jessie allowed herself a moment of relief. Funny, wasn't it, how terribly easy it was to tear one's life up by the roots?
Except for her trip to Jackson with Miss Flora and Miss Laurel, Jessie had never traveled. If she hadn't been so sick at heart over Stuart, she would almost have enjoyed the journey downriver. The Yazoo River had never seemed to her particularly small, but when the River Queen churned out of the tributary into the vast muddy waters of the Mississippi, Jessie was awed by the sheer grandness of it. Boats of every size and description chugged up 267
and down the huge waterway. Along the silty banks activity flourished.
When the River Queen docked briefly at Vicksburg, Jessie moved off the deck and returned to her cabin. Ladies rarely traveled alone, and to do so left her open to insult. One or two gentlemen on board had already eyed her in a fashion she could not like. It would be best to keep to her cabin as much as possible until the River Queen reached her final destination of New Orleans. She could use the time to plan what she would do when she finally had to disembark. The eight hundred dollars she had appropriated from the strongbox would not last forever. It was conceivable that she might at some point have to find paid employment, but as what? And how did one go about securing a position, anyway? Panic threatened to swamp Jessie as it became clearer by the moment just how very sheltered her life had been, but she refused to give in to it. If she was ill equipped to make her own way in the world, well, she would just have to learn how best to go about things. Somehow, some way, she would manage, because she had to. She was young, healthy, intelligent, and unafraid of hard work. So why should the world beyond the safe confines of Mimosa seem so overwhelming?
Of course she could always send to Mimosa for funds. Jessie had a strong feeling that Celia would pay handsomely to keep her despised stepdaughter from returning home. But it was a step that she hoped she would not have to take. Sending for funds meant that she would have to reveal her whereabouts to the folks at home. As sure as God made little green apples, someone from Mimosa would come after her—and that someone would
&
nbsp; probably be Stuart.
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Jessie didn't think she could face Stuart again. Not without falling into his arms and begging him to take her home. As the River Queen steamed farther from Mimosa, Jessie felt her resolve falter more than once. Night fell, and homesickness reared its ugly head, made far worse by the knowledge that she couldn't, ever, go home.
As sleep refused to come and Jessie tossed and turned in her bunk, the only thing that kept her from turning around and heading for home as soon as dawn broke the sky was the knowledge that in leaving Mimosa, and Stuart, she had done the right thing. The only thing.
Celia was Stuart's wife, whether any of the three parties most closely concerned was pleased with the fact or not. There was no magic solution that would make all come right. Now that the line had been breached and Stuart had become her lover, all the ingredients for disaster were in place. Add to that the child Celia expected—whether or not it was Stuart's, and the possibility that it was not was something that had occurred to Jessie early on—
and one thing became perfectly clear: there was no room for Jessie at Mimosa.
Whether or not she loved Stuart, or he loved her, didn't matter. Celia was his wife, and Celia was expecting a child that would be raised as his. The only thing that Jessie could possibly do under the circumstances was take herself out of the picture. If she had not already lain with Stuart, she would have wed Mitch without delay and thus put herself permanently beyond Stuart's reach. But she had lain with Stuart, given him her maidenhead as well as her love, so that option was closed to her. She would not go to Mitch as soiled goods. The only remaining 269
solution was to build a life for herself away from Mimosa, however much her heart bled to leave it.
Though what that life would be she had not, at the moment, the least idea.
Her heart ached as she tried to force it to accept the truth that, in renouncing Stuart, she renounced everyone and everything she loved: Tudi, Sissie, Rosa, Progress, Firefly and Jasper, Mimosa. .
. .
Tears stung Jessie's eyes as, one by one, the beloved faces appeared in her mind's eye. Stuart she tried not to picture at all, but in the end she lost the fight. She saw him in scores of different poses: the handsome stranger whom she had hated on sight, when he'd come to Mimosa as Celia's fiancé her first sight of him in a black temper, after she had told him that Celia was a whore; Stuart being kind to her that long-ago evening in the garden at Tulip Hill, when she'd wanted to die from sheer humiliation; how unbelievably handsome he had looked in his formal clothes at his wedding; the arrested look on his face when he had seen her in the yellow dress, his gift to her; the first time he had kissed her. The image of him as she had seen him last arose and stubbornly refused to be banished: Stuart, smiling tenderly at her when he had tucked her into bed just the night before, those sky-blue eyes that she knew she would remember until the end of her days aglow with love for her. . . . Finally the tears that had been pooling in her eyes burst forth to roll down her cheeks. For once she didn't even try to stop the flow. With a sob she turned on her stomach, buried her face in the pillow, and cried until there were no tears left. When the deluge was over, she was utterly exhausted. Her eyes burned, her nose was stopped up so that she could scarcely breathe, and still 270
her heart ached. Tears helped nothing, as she had learned long ago and should have remembered. Curling into a ball of misery, Jessie at long last fell into an exhausted sleep.
Jessie stayed in her cabin until the River Queen docked at Natchez early the following afternoon. Despite her soggy wretchedness of the night before, she had risen early and dressed in a gown of emerald-green broadcloth with befrilled, elbowlength white sleeves, a fitted bodice, and a full skirt trimmed with bows and ruffles about the hem. The gown bared her shoulders in the fashionable mode, yet it was still modest and well suited for travel.
She'd brushed her hair, pinned it atop her head— and sat down in the cabin's one chair. There she had remained, watching the passing river through the small square porthole that afforded her an excellent view, until the River Queen steamed into port and maneuvered into position between two other steamboats that made the River Queen look small in comparison. Finally, as ropes were thrown to men standing ready on a vast wooden wharf, and hordes of people swarmed over the wharf toward the boat, Jessie put on her hat with its huge upstanding brim and left her cabin. Surely, amidst all the excitement, no one would harass or even notice one young lady traveling on her own.
As she threaded her way through the crowd thronging the upper deck, Jessie realized that she was hungry. Perhaps she might disembark briefly and purchase something to eat from one of the quayside carts of the type she had seen in Vicks-burg. The River Queen had a dining room, but Jessie had not yet summoned up the courage to visit it. The intricacies of ordering a meal in a public dining room, coupled with the fact that she would have to eat alone, were something that she felt inadequate to deal with, at 271
least for the present. Although she would have to, of course, sooner or later. She would have to learn to do many things for and by herself.
"Hey, missy, need somebody to show ya the sights?" The speaker was a man, fortyish, wearing the gaudiest waistcoat Jessie had ever seen. It was of silk, with bold red-and-white stripes, and nearly succeeded in distracting her attention from the ingratiating grin on his florid countenance as he approached her. Averting her face as soon as she could tear her eyes away from the ridiculous waistcoat, Jessie hurried along the deck without replying. When she reached the gangplank she looked over her shoulder and was relieved to see that she was not being followed. The gangplank was used for both boarding and disembarking, while another gangplank at the stern of the boat was used for cargo. There was a crush of people moving in both directions on the passenger gangplank, so progress toward the dock was necessarily slow. Jessie found herself squashed between a stout, well-dressed elderly lady carrying a parasol, who was hard of hearing, judging from the volume of the remarks shouted at her by her less-well-dressed female companion; and a flashy couple who had eyes for no one but each other as they inched their way toward the quay arm in arm.
"It ain't safe for a young lady such as yerself to sashay around Natchez by her lonesome. Harley Bowen, at your service." Jessie was horrified as the man in the gaudy waistcoat squeezed around the flashy couple to pop up beside her with a triumphant smile. Hoping that if she ignored him he would take the hint and leave her alone, she quickly turned away.
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"You're a real looker, aren't you, sweetheart? But you don't need to put on that cold face with Harley Bowen. Ain't never been a female yet that wasn’t safe with me."
Jessie cast him a desperate glance out of the corner of her eye. She had no reason to be frightened of the man, not out here surrounded by people, but dealing with a fellow of his stamp was something she'd never had occasion to do. Still hoping that if she ignored him he would give up and go away, she lifted her chin and fixed her eyes firmly on the ebb and flow of the crowd along the wharf.
"There's some places under the hill that I'd sure like to show you."
Jessie's feet moved slowly forward along with everyone else's as she tried to affect both deafness and blindness to the dreadful creature who pestered her. The River Queen was only one of the many steamboats tied up along the dock, she saw. A great deal of the hustle and bustle at quayside was caused by boisterous dockhands loading cotton. The iron wheels of the cotton wagons rolling over the uneven boards of the wharf resulted in a constant clatter. The dockhands' frequently profane shouts to one another added to the din. Vendors hawking their wares from portable carts, and friends and relatives of arriving passengers pushing through the crowds to call to their loved ones, combined with the rest to create general bedlam. From a large paddle wheeler just docking farther down came a sudden burst of gay calliope music. Jessie had to fight the urge to put her hands over her ears.
"So what do you say, pretty thing?" Harley Bowen persisted, and
had the audacity to actually put a hand on her elbow. That brought Jessie's head jerking around. "Take your hand off me," she hissed, tired of pondering the correct way to deal with 273
the situation. Ladylike reticence had never been one of her virtues, and she saw no reason to practice it on the lout beside her!
Harley Bowen's nearly lashless gray eyes widened as she turned on him. Instead of dropping, his hand tightened on her arm. "Oh-ho! Hoity-toity, ain't we? Be careful of your tone, missy. I ain't a man to tolerate no snot-nosed females."
"Take your hand off my arm!"
"Are you having problems, dear?" The primly dressed companion of the hard-of-hearing lady looked around to inquire. Gray-haired beneath a hat that resembled a flattened pancake, and much thinner than the lady she accompanied, this woman was clearly not the sort to stand much nonsense. Glancing at her, Jessie was reminded of the Latow children's stern governess. Jessie half expected her to smack Mr. Bowen's encroaching hand.
"Well ..." Jessie was reluctant to involve a stranger in her difficulties, but she was growing less confident by the second of her ability to deal with the situation on her own. The hand on her elbow tightened.
"Mind your own business, old woman," Harley Bowen snarled.
"Indeed! An innocent young lady being molested is the business of any God-fearing citizen, sirrah!"
The stout woman turned to look as her companion bristled and exchanged glares with Mr. Bowen.
"What is the matter, Cornelia? You know how I dislike loud voices." The words were trumpeted.
"This . . . gentleman—and I use the term advisedly!—is pestering this young lady, Martha." Cornelia voiced the 274
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