Magic and the Texan

by Martha Hix

  “Say whatever’s on your mind.” A moment passed as he moved to her. “Beth honey, I’m glad to hear your spunk. I liked it in your letters. And feared, after you laid eyes on me at the post office, that I’d frightened the spunk out of you.”

  “You seemed to mind when I spoke of Hacienda del Sol.”

  “Guess I’ve got bridegroom jitters.”

  She couldn’t help but chuckle. “Then, sir, we’re in the same fix. Bridal jitters have attacked me, too.”

  “We’ll get past them”—he touched a tentative hand to her wrist—“before the wedding.”

  “How . . . how long do you think that will take?”

  “That, honey, is up to you. I want you comfortable with me, with the Caliente, before we take that big step.”

  “Sounds as if you’ve made it more up to you. Remember, you didn’t give me a choice. Do you regret sending for me?”

  “Never.” His eyes were on her in that charming yet disconcerting manner of rapt attention.

  Not up to his stares, she did, however, smile. She’d played her role to an acceptable degree. Miss Buchanan, an inspiration in reaching the marrow of others, would be proud. Yet Bethany hadn’t acted in this instance.

  As if swallowing ipecac, she managed to say, “I look forward to hearing you read from your collection of books. You have a fine voice,” she added truthfully, these words rolling smoothly. “I should imagine you’re a wonderful reciter.”

  “You’ll plump up my pride, get me fat as a Christmas turkey.” His long face angled to bookshelves. “Reading and having it come from the heart—two different things. I’m too much the brush popper to think in pretty terms. Guess you need to be pretty to think it.” He laughed at himself. “Which brings me to your own poetic work. I’d love for you to recite for me. Tonight would be nice.”

  What! Her own poetic work? Why didn’t the wooden floor open up and swallow her? Miss Buchanan hadn’t said a word, although that was to be expected in a case such as hers, about being a poetess.

  Of course, Bethany knew bawdy ditties brought home by her drunken father, who’d gone from barrooms to prison bars. Moreover, the painted ladies of the Long Lick had given her an education in twisting the tongue around ribald words.

  Vulgarity had never passed Miss Buchanan’s lips.

  I’d better find her own words, and reread Jon Marc’s.

  “Will you recite for me, Beth honey?”

  Comes our wedding night, we’ll turn down the light, and—my dear!—you will get a fright. The cherry you’ve expected, to tickle what you’ve erected, was picked by a very bad knight.

  Had but a year passed since Oscar Frye bartered his services as attorney for Pa, in exchange for her virginity as well as her servitude? It seemed more like a hundred lifetimes.

  Had but three weeks gone by since the sheriff threatened the Long Lick ladies with jail, if they protested when the upstanding citizens of Liberal chased Bethany out of town?

  She was no Beth, for certain.

  Bethany, bold Bethany, closed her eyes, having lived too fully in two decades.

  The fine, upstanding man who’d sent off for the Buchanan miss wanted to know: “Will you recite for me, Beth honey?”

  Chapter Four

  Beth did not recite her poetry that evening.

  When Jon Marc read from Mr. Shelley, she fell asleep in the settee that had been shoved up against the ebonized corner cabinet to make room for the grand piano Jon Marc ordered last Christmas, while in San Antonio.

  He eyed the sleeping, exhausted beauty, then studied how pretty she looked. He tucked a blanket under her chin, tiptoed outside, and snapped open his bedroll. A lantern beside him, he reread Beth’s poetry. It wasn’t great poetry, or even good poetry, but it was written from the purity of her heart.

  “Son?”

  “What the heck are you doing out here, Liam?” Jon Marc craned his neck, making out two figures in the shadows. He tucked those poems away. “You spying on me and my lady?”

  Moving through the rose garden, the postmaster toddled forward, old Stumpy staggering behind him. “Thought I oughta warn ya, son. Word has it Hoot Todd sold a mess of your cows over the border at Laredo.”

  “That’s old news. You were spying.”

  “Maybe I wuz. Figgered to drop in for a whiskey, or maybe one of them poetry or pianer recitals ya been braggin’ on. My eyes is wantin’ to see iffen y’all is gettin’ along. Worried me, when I found out ya sent a message to the preacher.”

  “Priest.”

  “Y’all gonna get married?”

  “I don’t know.”

  As the dog curled up on the ground to give his privates a bath, Liam reached into a back pocket to pluck a flask from it. “Have a sip, son. It’ll do ya good.”

  It did.

  “Beth be a purty thing,” Liam stated moments later. “Cain’t help but worry, though. Them eyes ain’t blue.”

  Liam Short wouldn’t have been Jon Marc’s first choice in crony, but a lack of respectable English-speaking neighbors in La Salle County, and the absence of the Caliente strawboss, had made him one. Jon Marc confided, “She won’t even look at me, not for more than a split second. The Caliente scares her, too. I know it does.” He thumped his chest once. “Right here.”

  “La Salle County’s run off many a gal. You know that, son. Like with Trudy Wilson. Why, she done got her man to sell out, nickel to the dollar.”

  It had taken a lot of Jon Marc’s nickels to get title to this spread, leaving him in a bind, truth to tell.

  “Beth knows about Trudy,” he replied. “Took it like a true pioneer.” But she’d eyed the Caliente like a city girl.

  He glanced at the modest home that took more of those nickels to build and fill. “I tried to make it nice for Beth. But it’s still a shack.”

  Having grown up amid wealth and privilege, Jon Marc knew the difference.

  “Did she cluck over—dad burn it, Stumpy, leave them fleas be!” The toe of Liam’s boot nudged the dog from the nasal serenade in concert with a chewing raid into his remaining canine hindquarter. “Did she cluck over them furnitures you barged in?”

  “Nope. Not a word.”

  “That don’t sound good,” Liam said.

  Jon Marc walked over to the hitching post, leaned his butt against it, and crossed his arms. “Figured she’d gush over the piano, her being a master at it.”

  “She didn’t? Lordy mercy! And to think me and you, and your boys, near to broke our backs—” an exaggerated show of rubbing the base of his spine “—shovin’ the biggest danged piano in the Lone Star State into your house.”

  Jon Marc grinned despite his disquiet, but said nothing.

  “Son, what about that new outhouse we built her and you won’t let nobody use, no matter how full a feller’s bladder be?”

  “She appreciated the privy. Matter of fact, she set some sachets in it.” Her stores included a collection of dried flowers, pine cones, cedar shavings, and spices. “She put little bowls of po-porridge around.”

  “Potpourri,” Liam corrected, not usually able to.

  “Potpourri. Adds a nice touch.”

  “All ain’t lost, then.”

  “Let’s hope she’s rested enough in the morning to appreciate the whole of our efforts. She was tired tonight,” Jon Marc tacked on in her defense.

  “That explains it. She wuz tired. She’ll feel better, come morning. Just wait and see.”

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you’re on her side.”

  “I’d like to be, son. Ain’t nothing’d make me happier than to see ya settled in with the purty little lady of your dreams. What you need is that magic lamp of your aunt’s. A rub on two on it, and you’d be in high cotton.”

  Jon Marc laughed. “Too late for magic. Didn’t I tell you it got blown up, when the Yankee Princess went down in ’68?”

  “Ya mentioned your brother Burke and his string of bad luck with his first two flagships.”

  Both
the senior O’Brien brothers had experienced trouble aplenty in days gone by.

  Connor, the eldest, had been a Union Army officer, until blue-eyed India Marshall of Louisiana, a miss who arrived at Connor’s army post on the day he became thirty in 1864, got him in trouble as well as into a spin. They worked everything out, despite Jon Marc himself having unwittingly added to their dilemma in his capacity as a spy for the Confederacy.

  Nonetheless, Connor and India eventually settled at Pleasant Hill Plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana.

  Then 1868 came to pass. That was when the second of the brothers, Captain Burke O’Brien of New Orleans, reached his fated birthday, amid treachery from within his steamship company. Add the problems of making Susan Seymour—snake charmer, kidnapper, accused murderess—his bride, well, Burke had had his hands full.

  Every bit of the trouble Connor and Burke experienced had been complicated by the interference of a magic lamp.

  Forewarned, forearmed, and eager for his own bride, Jon Marc hadn’t and wouldn’t fight the magic. It brought Beth here. If only magic were available to make her happy.

  The postmaster lifted the flask to his own lips. “The genie’s still around, ain’t he?”

  “Around, and married to Tessa, according to Pippin O’Brien.” Jon Marc smiled while mentioning his adopted nephew. Now twelve, Pippin provided information by mail. “Eugene Jinnings lives like a regular fellow nowadays, in Memphis.”

  Liam scratched his beard. “Ya know, ya oughta mend fences with kin. Someday, you look up and it’ll be too late.”

  “I’m not ready for peace. Probably never will be.”

  The last time he saw an O’Brien had been November first, going on four years ago, the day after a double wedding linked Phoebe O’Brien to brother Burke’s first mate, Throckmorton. Burke had also married Susan Seymour in that Presbyterian ceremony.

  As if it were now, instead of long in the past, Jon Marc recalled the morning he’d left New Orleans, a dawn reeking with the sweet-rotten stench of the Crescent City.

  “Uncle Jon Marc!” The boy’s voice carried down the banquette fronting the St. Charles Hotel. It mingled with a pup’s bay and the cathedral bells that beckoned worshipers to mass. “You going to Texas again without saying good-bye?”

  Such had been his intention. Yet Jon Marc didn’t keep walking. He had a soft spot in his ragged heart for Burke’s adopted son, even though their acquaintance had been but weeks in the making. It was empathy Jon Marc felt for the boy. Both in bygone days had witnessed their share of the sordid.

  “Gotta go, Pippin.” Jon Marc notched the brim of his hat a mite lower and turned back to glance down at the freckle-faced child who toted a bloodhound puppy under an arm. “Time I got back to the Caliente.”

  He’d leave as he arrived, no closer to reconciling with the O’Briens. In a way Jon Marc was worse off for the trip.

  “You promised to teach me another rope trick.” A foghorn bleating from across the levee, Sham II wiggling to get free, Pippin O’Brien yanked the shelve of his uncle’s yoked shirt. “You’re making me and Great-granddaddy real sad, Uncle Jon Marc. That’s what you’re doing.”

  From the corner of his eye Jon Marc spied a man leaning on a cane, an aged bloodhound, tethered by a lead, at his heel. Fitz O’Brien, looking every day and more of ninety years, watched the exchange between Pippin and the last chance for Fitz & Sons, Factors to fall into an O’Brien brother’s hands: Jon Marc.

  Without doubt Fitz brought his adopted great-grandson to the hotel as a ploy to keep Jon Marc on the Mississippi River.

  The patriarch intended his establishment—upriver in Memphis—to stay in O’Brien keep, didn’t have time to see the newest generation grow into it, and would settle for handing it over to an O’Brien he’d tossed out of the family home, in 1860.

  On the night he’d given Jon Marc such a miserable present to celebrate his eighteenth birthday, Fitz had assumed Connor and Burke as heirs presumptive to the damned old warehouse that had sown the seeds of fortune.

  Fooled you, didn’t they, old man?

  Neither Connor or Burke would touch it.

  Facing his mortality, Fitz was now desperate.

  “Uncle Jon Marc?”

  As a street vendor pushed a cart down St. Charles Street and a carriage rolled by, Jon Marc pinched the bridge of his too-big nose and momentarily closed his scratchy eyes. “Pippin, you know more rope tricks than any other boy in Louisiana, I reckon.”

  “But I don’t want you to leave.”

  It had been a mistake, this trip. Loco, that was what it had been, to leave brush country at the urging of Connor’s wife.

  India Marshall O’Brien had sought to bring Jon Marc into their family fold. Loneliness and the prospect of reconciliation with Connor and his family lured Jon Marc to the Mississippi. Then he’d gotten hogtied to Burke’s problems.

  Those worsened when Jon Marc picked off a villain, one Burke had sworn vengeance on.

  Captain Burke O’Brien saw the light with Susan Seymour, then reclaimed the helm at O’Brien Steamship Company. But he still felt undercut, and resented Jon Marc’s interference.

  No good deed goes unpunished.

  No doubt about it, Jon Marc was worse off for this trip.

  “Stay, Uncle Jon Marc! Please, please.” Pippin’s freckles became even more prominent in his ardor, his cowlick waving. “How can we be a family if you keep running away?”

  Pippin had a habit of parroting remarks made by others. Simon-sure, “running away” came straight from the crimped lips of Fitz O’Brien, the old goat now inching closer and closer.

  “Been away,” Jon Marc replied. “Always been like that. Always will be. You folks are the river.” He glanced at the man who used to be his grandfather. If he’d had any idea of running smack into Fitz O’Brien, he would have stayed put at the Caliente, where he fit in. The Caliente, the only place he belonged. Or ever had. “I’m the frontier.”

  “You don’t wanna live on a nice plantation, like Uncle Connor does? You don’t like the river, like Dad does? You don’t want a family?”

  Once Jon Marc got offspring, they would never know what it was like to be an outsider, always looking in. Sometimes at things no child should ever see.

  “I’ll get me a wife,” he replied. “Once I reach thirty.”

  “Aye,” Pippin said, sounding so much like Burke O’Brien. “Aunt Tessa’s magic lamp will send you a bride.”

  Jon Marc patted the boy’s shoulder, tugged on Sham II’s ear, then scooted around the two.

  “Ain’t a family more than just your wife and kids?” Pippin shouted. “It’s us, too.”

  “Gotta go, Pippin.”

  “Can I come visit? I wanna rope cattle and brand ’em, and sleep under the stars, and eat beans and cornbread.”

  An affirmative answer might bring a host of O’Briens to the one place where Jon Marc had found peace. “Pippin, what about joining your dad at the steamship company?”

  “A fellow’s gotta learn all kinds of good stuff, before he settles into a family business.”

  “You get grown, Pippin, you can visit. Not till then. When you do, come on your own. Alone.”

  “Great-granddaddy said you’d say that. Why don’t you like us, Uncle Jon Marc?”

  That wasn’t the point. It had to do with bastardy. While Jon Marc carried the O’Brien name, he had no right to it. He’d sprung from an adulterous affair between Fitz O’Brien’s daughter-in-law and a redheaded interloper, Marcus Johnson.

  Their liaison had ended in Georgia’s murder and her husband’s suicide, although some O’Briens disputed whether Daniel put a gun to his own head, or if her lover spared him the trouble.

  His red hair was branding him the interloper’s get, and his corruption of given names was tying him to scandal as well. Jon Marc bent down to rearrange newly purchased poetry books in his favorite mount’s saddlebags, then threw them over a shoulder. He caught sight of a livery hand leading the dun geld
ing León toward the banquette.

  And his gaze locked on the original Shamrock, still hovering at Fitz O’Brien’s heel. Sentiment yanked in his chest.

  Shamrock had been his dog, his pal, when no O’Brien understood a youth’s pain at being the ugly-duckling bastard child amid a family of handsome, legitimate brothers.

  Jon Marc turned his back on the old man hobbling forward. “Gotta hurry, else León and I’ll miss the steamship for Texas.”

  Jon Marc swung into the saddle. Just as he started to head in the wharf’s direction, a cane handle grappled onto the reins, yanking them out of the rider’s hands.

  “Pippin,” Fitz O’Brien barked, “be getting into the hotel lobby with ye and the pup. Stay there till I come for ye.”

  The child did as he was told. Shamrock the elder tilted his head, his sad eyes watering at his master of past. Fitz O’Brien stood firm, despite his many infirmities of limb.

  Jon Marc clenched his teeth. “Let go those reins.”

  A frown marked a face creviced by four-score-and-ten of trying to make others repent, mostly Jon Marc. “Feeling good are ye? Makin’ me suffer for one mistake, tearin’ out me—”

  “All I ask is to be alone.” Jon Marc tugged the reins out of gnarled hands. “It isn’t becoming of you to ask more.”

  “Ye’ve got aunts and brothers who love ye. I love ye, though I know ye canna see that.”

  “You didn’t love me enough to give me Fitz & Son when I would have taken it.”

  He hadn’t wanted it at eighteen. Never had. He’d offered out of love, had yearned to give peace to the man who brought order to the O’Brien orphans’s lives. Back then, he couldn’t have loved Fitz more, even if they were related.

  “You flew your true colors in 1860, Fitz. Didn’t bother you a whit, tossing me out, not a penny to my name, not a person or a place to turn to.”

  “I was wrong, Jonny. Wrong.” Fitz hoisted his hand as if to touch Jon Marc, but rested his palm on León’s mane instead. “Will ye be making me go t’ a grave with this breach betwixt us?”

  “I bear you no grudge for favoring blood kin. But I can’t forget it.”