by Martha Hix
Damned shame that was.
“Mmm-mmm. I declare, Mr. Burke, you’ve done yourself proud with these ear bobs.” Zinnia, never at a loss for a barbed comment, added, “You gonna buy into the poorhouse one of these days.” She smirked. “Been investing heavy in rubber here lately too, couldn’t help but notice.”
Burke glared in good humor. “Watch out, Zinn. You get smart, I’ll send you packing.”
“Hmmph. Who gonna look out for your pretty self if you send Zinnia packing, hmm?”
“I’ve got a missus now.”
“Where are your rubber interests?” Susan asked innocently. “South America?”
Zinnia tsked. “Girl, you got lots to learn.”
A door then slammed shut downstairs; Pippin returned from Chalmette. Zinnia bustled off to fetch bathwater for the boy. And Burke picked up a bottle of perfume and dabbed it in the cleft of Susan’s breasts before rubbing drops on her nipples.
His groin let him know that it hadn’t had enough of her. He couldn’t get enough of her. Susan close like this, that ever-dwindling pile of condoms in the bedroom drawer just waiting to be used. What he wanted, though, was another time without one. He hated those sheaths. To feel nothing between her flesh and his as they both reached satisfaction, that was what he hungered for. At least once more. Or always.
She was a prize, his Susan. An earth mother, and sensuous wife. He regretted missing those meals created by her hands. He enjoyed the small things she’d done around the house to stamp it as hers. Thank God, Zinnia hadn’t pitched a fit at having her authority usurped, as many housekeepers might. But then, Zinnia was a prize in her own way. Burke was a lucky man. Basically.
“What did Zinnia mean?” Susan laced her wrists behind his neck to fiddle with the hair that brushed his collar.
“Well, uh.” Burke caressed his wife’s cheek and fingered one of the new baubles. “It’s hard to keep secrets when you’ve got help in the house.”
“What kind of secrets?”
“The, uh, pro—The, uh . . .”
“You’re blushing. Are you going shy on me?”
“ ’Fraid so.”
She smirked into the mirror. “Speaking of shy, I had a dose of it. I had a caller today. A young lady by the name of Fabienne Laure. Said you’d commissioned her to paint my portrait. She brought along a bolt of silk. I am told you want me to drape my nude body in it for the sitting. I was shocked.”
“Humor me, honey. I want to have your portrait where I can see it each morning.” In case you leave me.
“Wh-what will your next wife think?”
If he couldn’t have Susan, he wouldn’t have anyone. But he saw an opening. Why not start her to thinking about 1869 and thereafter? “Don’t know. Haven’t asked her.”
Susan’s eyes got so big that he could have sworn they were about to pop out of their sockets. “You have someone picked out?”
“Honey, New Orleans is full of beautiful women. But, no, I don’t have a candidate in mind. Yet. That’s for next year. This is this year.”
“Wh-what is the rush?”
“I’m thirty. I’ll be getting gray and lax, could be any day. Especially the way you work me out in bed.”
“You’ve already got crow’s-feet,” she came back.
“True. Can’t wait too long to start a family.” With you. If she wanted, which he couldn’t imagine her not. With someone. “You have any ideas to get Pip a brother or sister? Once you find your English coxcomb, that is.”
“I never said I wanted a—Of course I want children. At least six.”
“Why so many?”
“I’m an only child. I don’t want to do that to Pippin.”
An expected reply. His mind’s eye drew a picture of youngsters gathered around her. But Burke would be damned before another man swelled her belly with foreign seed. No one but an American at 21 rue Royale would plow her row.
His hands kneaded her shoulders, his lips tasting the rise of her breasts above the satin dress’s low bodice. Strangely, he recalled that night on the Yankee Princess, when she’d baked that cake.
Ah, Susan. What a paradox. Earth, fire. England, New Orleans. St. Charles and St. Ann streets. A wanton yet naive. A pagan. How naive he’d been, at midnight on July tenth, to think her passionless. She had passion all right. It had her enthralled. For now it was his only hold on her.
A growl set his voice as he said, “I’d still like to find out just how good you are in a kitchen.”
She grinned. “Cease. Or we won’t make dinner.”
“What about afterward? Say, at the midnight hour. You interested in a tour of the kitchen?”
“You’re wanting me to bake another cake?” she teased. “After I baked a nice blackberry-jam one this afternoon?”
“I’m wanting to put something else in the oven.”
Twenty
Keep Smile rang the dinner bell promptly at eight.
Already the guest had arrived and was draining the last in a snifter of sherry; he puffed on a cherrywood pipe. Susan observed a handsome man in the English slant. Ancestry from the displaced clans of Scotland more to her favor, she’d be glad to have the evening behind her, and she and Burke could take that promised tour of the kitchen.
Especially since Sir Joshua Tate, whose amber eyes matched his whiskers, kept ogling her neck. She should have changed dresses. No. Her husband’s love bite didn’t shame her. Love bite? She wouldn’t mistake lust for love, although it was a start. At least she held his interest.
“Let’s go in for dinner,” she suggested.
They left the drawing room, crossed the courtyard, and entered the candlelit dining salon set with fine china surrounded by sparkling crystal and silver. Susan took the hostess’s chair, her husband sitting at the Chippendale table’s opposite end, the guest and Pippin flanking them.
Her washed and shined son behaved superbly. Never once during the soup or the escargots did he run his jacketed forearm under his nose, nor did he make an inappropriate comment, as if he were a true English gentleman in training—which he might never become if his heart mother had her way.
During the salad course the true Pippin surfaced. “Did I tell you, sir, I have a new snake? Throck didn’t even hafta get the zombi from that square where all the ladies and gentlemen dance nek—” A stern look from Burke clamped his mouth.
Sir Joshua’s brows rose. “Snake? By Jove, what a novel pet! I’d be delighted to have a look at it.”
“Go get him, willya, Keep Smile?” Pippin asked the serving man standing beside the buffet. “Please, please, please.”
“I think not.” Susan next asked their guest, “What do you think of America, sir?”
“I daresay I don’t know how you stand the blessed heat, Mrs. O’Brien.” He fluttered a shrimpish hand with little pointed fingers. “Ever pine for the climes of our pastoral England?”
Burke watched her closely; Pippin piped up with an answer. “She don’t like it when it’s hot like this, sir. That’s why she wears Zinnia’s clothes when Dad ain’t home.”
“Pippin, do finish your salad.” Susan, having flushed, hadn’t told her husband of those borrowed skirts and blouses, nor about her sewing projects. The fine shops and dressmakers she’d been steered to carried nothing but finery. Burke didn’t seemed shocked by Pippin’s announcement, which eased her mind. She wouldn’t have him thinking her ungrateful for elegant trappings.
“Can’t say I blame you for dressing down, Mrs. O’Brien. Have thought of giving up starched shirts myself. Too bloody hot hereabouts for anything else.” Sir Joshua sniggered. “By the bye, you must present quite a picture, a nymph to be sure. Would you think me rude if I say you look much too young to be this forthright young man’s mother?”
“I’m his stepmother,” she replied before Master Forthright put his own pitch on it.
“Tate, I told you the first time we met, my wife came to me a widow with a son. You know who she is. And was.”
“Right. T
he Honorable Horace Seymour’s daughter. Interesting chap, that Seymour. Deals in explosives and other whatnots, I’m told. What a pity Seymour couldn’t attend your quaint little nuptials.”
An ache settled in Susan’s heart. For Father. And for the wedding not blessed by the true God.
“Let’s have the next course,” Burke barked to Keep Smile. “Get the fish.”
As pompano was being washed down with imported Chablis by two of the diners, Sir Joshua said to Burke, “Rumor has it you accuse a chap named West of downing your ships.”
West? Rufus West? Susan glanced at her husband, who adjusted his neckcloth as if it had suddenly gotten tight. Thank you for telling me, your own wife. His cautious warning didn’t come close to sheer honesty.
Burke took a swallow of iced tea. “Tate, let’s leave business for another time.”
“I’d love to hear all about it,” Susan said.
Pippin nodded. “Me too.”
She said, “Do tell about Mr. West.”
“He’s a gambler, can barely hold a deck of cards,” Sir Joshua answered. “Used to be a bookkeeper before your husband put his writing hand out of commission with a sledgehammer. Bones were smashed, couldn’t be set.”
Burke brutal? Never! Surely he hadn’t.
“Dad, did you?” Pippin asked.
“Son, he used that hand to steal from me.”
Mama Loa—he maimed my champion!
“That’s awful, Dad. I mean about the stealing. I’d do the same thing if someone stole Zombi.”
“Finish your dinner, Pippin,” Susan suggested, shivering.
Sir Joshua swirled Chablis. “I’ve not found one clue to link West to the riverboat disasters.”
“That Eel,” Keep Smile put in, unable to keep quiet. “He’s mean as a zombi, both hands tied ’hind his back.”
“Interesting place, America. The servants share an opinion.” The Englishman smirked, and Susan wondered why she’d ever considered his genus appealing.
Burke swung troubled eyes to Pippin. “Why don’t you take dessert in the kitchen, son?”
“Do I hafta . . . aye-aye, Dad.”
The moment Pippin reached the courtyard, Sir Joshua asked Susan, “Did you know your husband and Remy Cinglure comb the streets at night, looking for West?”
She didn’t know Remy Cinglure beyond his reputation as a police detective who boarded next door. Most particularly she was ignorant of her husband’s evening activities, over and above that headboard remark of earlier tonight, which now seemed a fabrication. He’s got a second life that he keeps to himself.
But she wouldn’t embarrass Burke. “Of course I know of Mr. West. Must be the heat, fiddling with my memory.”
“The English rose should be tended with care.” Sir Joshua’s avid gaze latched to her love mark. “You should make your husband send you to a cooler climate for the rest of the summer. We English would never leave our ladies in unpleasant surrounds.”
“That so, Tate?” Dislike rampant in his expression, Burke said, “I’ve heard you limeys have ladies slaving in sweatshops that rival the hells of Bombay.”
“Those are women from the lower class.” Sir Joshua motioned for Keep Smile to pour another tot of the host’s wine, and said to Susan, “I’m given to understand you’re Earl Brynwaithe’s daughter.”
“She’s also the wife of a common riverman whose grandfather left Belfast at the point of a bayonet.” Burke took the Chablis from Keep Smile, poised the bottle, and pasted on a give-it-up smile. “More wine, Tate?”
“Jolly good idea. Didn’t mean to be rude. Must be the heat.”
Susan did not like this man at all, which had nothing to do with his mockery. He’d been rude for a purpose. It was as if he enjoyed digging at Burke. Then again, such behavior went along with being an underwriters’ investigator, she supposed.
The main course taken away and dessert presented, Sir Joshua leaned back until the chair joints creaked. “Lovely ear jewelry, Mrs. O’Brien. A wedding present by chance?”
“Yes.” Absently she touched one of the earrings she would always treasure, no matter what happened between now and the end of the year. “My husband is ever so generous with me.”
The knight errant gave one of his sideburns another tug. “He’s run up quite a tab for a gent with money troubles.”
“Nothing I can’t handle,” Burke was quick to point out.
Once again Susan defended him. “He doesn’t depend on shipping alone, sir. He has rubber interests in South America.”
Burke got that look on his face, the one almost making dimples, but a small shake of his head warned her off the subject. Well, he hadn’t confirmed the South American investment.
Was he in financial straits? Why had he spent lavishly, with a pinched purse? Never had Susan dreamed he could be in difficulty. Dear Burke, much too generous for his own good.
“Spoke with an employee of yours, O’Brien. Chap by the name of Throckmorton. Don’t need to remind you he was in your service when both gels went down.”
Burke took a bite of blackberry-jam cake, then put the fork down slowly. “What did Throck have to say?”
“Nothing that goes along with your West theory.”
“Such as?” Burke asked.
“A lad in a raft lobbed a firecracker aboard.”
Throck can’t know what happened, Susan wanted to say.
Sir Joshua motioned for Keep Smile to spoon extra whipped cream on his cake. “Throckmorton also claims you had a snake aboard the Princess. Your stepson’s last pet. Swears the serpent got into places it shouldn’t. Says he found it curled about the storage-tank jets that fed your lighting system. As well, the serpent bit into the main on one occasion.”
“Sounds reasonable.” Burke appeared as if he wished the levee to give and the Mississippi to wash over him.
Offended for the deceased cyclagras gigas, Susan boosted her chin. “Snooky was mischievous, I’ll grant. But he couldn’t have set that explosion. He was in the stateroom with me.”
At Sir Joshua’s skeptical look, and in defiance of Burke’s be-quiet glare, she added, “Snooky didn’t have fangs, so he couldn’t have bitten through a gas main. Furthermore, natural gas is treated at the wellhead with mercaptan to give off an odious aroma. I didn’t smell anything out of the ordinary.”
The Lloyds of London sleuth shot up his brows. “Your father trained you well in the laboratory.”
Beeton had told her about the properties of petroleum.
“O’Brien, why didn’t you tell me your wife was aboard the Yankee Princess at the time of the disaster?” Sir Joshua asked.
“You didn’t ask.”
“Curious.” The Englishman took up his pipe and turned to Susan. “Tell me, Mrs. O’Brien. As an eyewitness, to which theory do you subscribe? Mr. Throckmorton’s? Or your husband’s?”
“My husband’s.”
“Was it a firecracker?”
“I don’t believe so, sir,” she replied.
She whipped her eyes to Burke. He was not a happy man. Did he wish to take the easy course and give credence to that preposterous firecracker concept? If he were in dire straits, it would serve him well.
The voice of marital harmony told her not to speak up, but she did. “Mr. Throckmorton was ashore during the explosion. He can’t know what happened.”
“Then he lied.” Pipe smoke curled past a squinted eye. “Why would he lie for you, O’Brien?”
“Throck’s not a liar. He—”
“Then you’re calling your wife a liar?”
“Talk to my attorney, Tate.” Burke straightened. “How about I see you out?”
“Very well. Good night, Mrs. O’Brien.”
The men left the dining salon.
“I—I’ll clear up the table, Keep Smile,” she offered. “These hands need to keep occupied.”
“Yes’m.” He took his leave.
Susan shoved dishes and cutlery onto a serving tray, chipping two saucers in her cl
umsiness. Throck had lied. Why? She knew why. He was the man who’d jumped overboard.
She understood why Burke covered for him. Out of loyalty.
Why did Throck do it? No answer presented itself.
All of a sudden, panic overtook her. Papa Legba, send the spirit of fortune. Our Phoebe is down on the Bay with a pirate!
“Why didn’t you just throw a rope over the rafter and loop the noose around my neck? Why didn’t you just go ahead and say something about dynamite? I’m sure Tate would’ve eaten that up.”
Having just darkened the dining salon by tamping the candlewicks, Susan’s heart stopped at Burke’s question, posed from the dining-salon entry. His neck? Burke’s neck?
Praying for a negative response, she asked, “Did you and Throck conspire to send your flagship to the bottom?”
Burke banged shut the French door, a pane breaking.
Muted moonlight added to her upset. He assumed the same stance Orson used to, that of a predator. She began to shake. Did he have a hammer in his hand? Was his temper so out of control that he would use it?
Don’t be ridiculous.
This was her husband, her trusted husband. Or so she had thought before discovering his dual life.
She gathered courage to ask, “Was Sir Joshua correct when he mentioned your financial state?”
“Aye.”
Scared, she backed away from Burke’s advancing form. He grabbed her arms, but neither shook her nor slapped her against the wall, as Orson would have.
Her husband gripped no weapon but anger. “Dammit, Susan, Seymour showed me and Throck how to set a charge. If I can’t prove West the miscreant, Lloyds could blame me. Or Throck.”
Her father involved, at least as a source, should dynamite prove involved—was there no end to the nightmare? Of course not. She’d been right from the beginning. Burke had warned her off the subject to shroud the truth. “Rufus West did not jump overboard. Have you concealed something? He and Throck may be in collusion. Or you and Throck.”
“And why would we do that?” her husband asked harshly.
“You were in the grip of madness, brought on by the Lawrence affair. You’d spent lavishly on a flagship.” Susan swallowed a choking knot in her throat. “It would have served you to get rid of someone. Me.”
