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Then—search and destroy.
Some two hours later, he was still sitting on a barrel that smelled of sorghum molasses, his head clearing the overhead planks by a scant quarter of an inch. The hold ran the length and breadth of the boat, but it seemed to have been designed for the undernourished roustabouts who spent sixteen of every twenty-four hours loading and unloading bales, hogsheads, sacks and crates, and firewood for the ravenous jaws of the furnace.
He had been containing his temper by reciting the human bone and muscle systems. Which made him think of Harry Martin, who never could keep straight which was the fibia and which was the tibia. Last he’d heard, Martin was serving as a field surgeon with Grant. Probably hacking off limbs right and left.
He shifted his position and began on the muscles again. Delia Matthews had better have a good explanation for her tardiness. Admiral Farragut, who had recruited and trained him, insisted that intelligence work was five percent action, twenty percent listening and seventy-five percent waiting. Most times Gabriel did it by sheer force of will. And he didn’t mind when the objective was in sight. But endlessly waiting for a courier who should be right here on the boat—
A light tap of boots overhead interrupted his seething thoughts. Someone removed the square hatch cover, relieving the pitch-darkness. A pair of scratched and broken boots descended the ladder, then hesitated midway.
Gabriel slid off the barrel.
“Now where in creation is he?” The voice was lighter than he’d remembered it onstage. She was a cool one. Serve her right if he scared her.
He opened his mouth to utter the pass code, but a shadow loomed in the hatch.
“Who left the hatch open?” grumbled an unseen male voice. “Harley, I told you—”
The thumping of heavy boots, and Gabriel saw the woman’s panic in the tremor of her body. She was about to scream. He reached her in one silent lunge. Clapping one hand over her mouth, the other arm clamping her arms at her waist, he snatched her into the corner under the stairs. Sliding to the floor with the actress’s shaking body held close, he waited for disaster to strike.
But the mate stood at the top of the stairs, peering down into the murky darkness and muttering. Finally he turned and stomped back up the stairway. The hatch cover clanged into place, submerging Gabriel and his captive in darkness and silence.
The slim, lithe form in his arms continued to tremble. Fearing the return of the mate, Gabriel kept his hand over Delia’s mouth, his hold gentling as she relaxed. Her clothes smelled of turpentine and fish, and the small head was covered with a ragged knit cap that scratched his jaw. A good idea, as the luxuriant mass of hair would have given her away if she were seen away from the cabin area.
Squirming, she expelled a little sigh that tickled his hand.
He tightened his hold. “Oh, no, you don’t,” he whispered. “I’m not uncovering your pretty mouth until I’m sure you can keep it quiet.”
She nipped the palm of his hand.
He released her mouth, barely containing a yelp. “Why you little—” He lowered his voice. “Are you trying to get us both hanged?”
“Who are you?”
Good, she was careful. “Joshua.”
The boat breathed around them: creak of timbers, slosh of water, scent of pine resin drifting with the soft fragrance of lily of the valley. He yanked off Delia’s cap, releasing a tumble of curly hair. He lifted a handful to his face and breathed in, curling his arm more snugly around her.
“Stop pawing me and tell me what you want.”
He chuckled. “Try any more tricks and you’ll be sorry.”
Silence. Then, “I’m listening.”
“Good. I’ve got you a sermon to deliver, and you’d best do whatever it takes to get it in the hands of the man upstairs.” When she moved to get up, he tightened his arm around her. “Stay put. We have any more interruptions, I don’t want to have to dive for cover again.”
“Oh, all right.” She shifted in discomfort.
He reached into his coat for the sermon he’d composed that afternoon, then fumbled at the side of her coat. She stiffened, but allowed him to slide the paper into her pocket. “Too bad you wasted so much time getting down here, Camellia. I’d like to stay and chat, but I’ve got to get ashore before daylight.”
She gasped. Shoving his hand away, she snatched up her cap and crammed it down over her hair. She scrambled to his feet and backed toward the hatch. “I’ve got to go.”
Quietly she climbed the ladder, lifted the hatch cover and peeked out. Apparently finding the coast clear, she disappeared.
Gabriel rubbed his eyes and relaxed against the rough wall. He’d give it a few minutes before he risked his own exit from the hold.
The cipher was delivered.
Camilla scrambled over the wrought-iron fence bordering the rear of the Beaumont property. Chest heaving, she tumbled spread-eagle onto the grass and stared up at the still-black sky. She’d covered the distance from the riverboat to Dauphin at Ann Street at a flat-out run.
In four years they’d never come close to getting caught. Now they’d have to find a way to supply whiskey to Colonel Abernathy as well as that dratted sentry. She threw her arm across her eyes. When the paper in her pocket crackled, she shuddered and sat up. The man had called her by name, although he’d said it kind of funny. The message had to be from Harry, who was presently in North Mississippi, as far as she knew.
After leaving Mobile at the declaration of hostilities, Harry had chosen a different way to communicate with her each time. Once he’d placed a note in the spine of a book and sent it to Jamie. Her brother approved of Harry, even if her grandmother did not.
She staggered to her feet. Harry’s latest messenger boy was sorely lacking in manners. Yet she would endure the fright and indignity again to have a letter to read and dream over, to help her remember Harry’s face.
She glanced up as she crept toward the house. The night seemed to have lightened a bit. Thank God for the open sky. When she’d gone back into the hold of the boat to retrieve the bag, the darkness had seemed to reach for her ankles. No wonder that deckhand nearly caught her. If the ruffian who called himself Joshua hadn’t grabbed her and covered her mouth, she might’ve screamed.
At the edge of the porch she paused. Male voices murmured through the open windows. Papa was up late. That wasn’t unusual, but the summer draperies had been closely drawn, dimming the light from the room.
She pulled back into the shadows beside the porch and peered through the lace. Her father was as attached to open windows as she was. Why would he pull the curtains on a muggy spring night?
Her father spoke again, answered by another man. Gradually the conversation began to make sense. They were discussing boats, or maybe a boat. Transportation was the family business. Nothing to linger over.
Then Papa’s voice dropped so low she had to strain to hear. “You’re sure the Yanks don’t know about it?”
“I’m sure of it. We scuttled it hours before Butler followed Farragut into New Orleans.”
Papa grunted. “You have the plans?”
“Hidden in the machine shop. But remember the original model wasn’t fully operational. The propellers tended to lock without warning, and we hadn’t tested her with a full crew.” The man cleared his throat. “Finding men willing to go under water deep enough to test her distance—well, I’m not sure I’d try it myself.”
“Oh, balderdash! I’d get in the thing tomorrow, if I weren’t a foot too tall and twice that too wide.”
“I’m sure you would, Zeke.” The man sounded amused. “But even if we start building tomorrow, it’ll be a month before it’s ready to test again.”
“You will start tomorrow,” Papa said. “And I want it completed in three weeks. Money’s no object when we’ve got the chance to sink Yankee gunboats without risking our own men.”
“I suppose it could be done.” The other man paused. “Laniere thinks he can correct the problem with the propeller. If nothing else goes wrong, we could break the blockade.”
Papa chuckled. “Excellent. I intend to be situated in a place of influence when we send the Yankees back north where they belong.” There was a scrape of chairs, a mutter of goodbyes, and the light was extinguished.
Camilla leaned against the house. Her father was setting himself up to make pots of money off a vessel so secret that it had to be scuttled before the Yanks could get their hands on it. It was one thing for her father to comply with the Confederate army’s demands that he provide transportation for the troops—strictly a defensive service. But to invest family money in a deadly weapon…
Maybe she’d misunderstood.
On shaky legs she crept around the side of the house and climbed the wisteria. She pulled herself through the open window and collapsed onto the floor. Sitting against the window seat, she removed her filthy clothes and tossed them under the bed. The room reeked of turpentine.
She hoped Lady wouldn’t take a notion to visit. Her grandmother never let a thing go by, which was how she kept the household under control, but so far she didn’t know about the underground railroad. And she didn’t know about Camilla’s communication with Harry.
Camilla rose to light the lamp, then unbuttoned her shirt and yanked it off. With a little grunt of frustration, she picked the knots free and unwound the linen strips that bound her bosom. Gradually she could breathe more freely. She heaved a sigh of relief as the last strip fell into her lap. Then she remembered the folded paper in her pocket. Rummaging under the bed, she found it and eagerly unfolded it.
She frowned. This wasn’t a letter. It was a sermon. She skimmed to the bottom. Harry always signed his name, but there was no signature here.
She read the sermon again. It was taken from the biblical account of the Israelite spies Moses sent to infiltrate the land of Canaan.
Mystified, she slipped on her nightgown and tucked the paper into the lacy ruffle of her sleeve. The stranger on the boat had said her name. And she’d never forget that voice. Smooth and deep, like the cough syrup Portia poured down her throat when she had the croup.
The familiar way he had touched her mouth and her hair had been abominable, but he’d kept her from being discovered by the deckhand. His arms had held her gently.
Cross-legged on the cushion at the open window, she touched her lips. She could still taste a faint saltiness from his hand. He’d said she had a pretty mouth. How would he know that? It had been pitch-dark almost the whole time. Maybe Harry had described her.
What did he mean by asking her to deliver the sermon to the “Man Upstairs”? The whole scene had been so bizarre and confusing. She’d forgotten all about looking for Virgil’s bag. Maybe she could make him a new one. Sighing, she rose to blow out the lamp.
The doorknob rattled.
She nearly dropped the candle snuffer. She’d nearly forgotten Portia, who always brought her bathwater and something to eat after a running. She hurried to unlock the door.
Portia stomped in with a brass can of steaming water under one arm and a stack of clean linen under the other. “If ever I saw such a mess of idiots in all my born days!” She thunked the can down on the washstand and faced Camilla with a righteous glare.
Camilla shut the door, a finger to her lips. “You’ll wake up Lady—you know what a light sleeper she is!”
“You two hours late, missy.” Portia tossed the linen on the bed, reached for Camilla and yanked the nightgown off over her head. “Horace says you all nearly get caught by the graycoats, then by the grace of God you get the delivery to the station—then Miss Camilla ups and takes off again without a word of explanation!” Portia’s nostrils flared. “Bathe quick, before that smell sticks to you permanent. Then you can eat while you tell me where you been.”
“I’m sorry, Portia.” Camilla meekly began to wash.
“Hmph.” Portia dug under the bed and came up with Camilla’s stinking clothes. “You fall in a pigpen on the way home?”
“It’s the pitch from the boat.” Camilla completed her bath, hung her towel on a brass rack beside the washstand and picked up her hairbrush. It was going to take hours to get the tangles out of her hair.
Having already bundled the offending clothes into a canvas bag and tossed the whole thing down a laundry chute, Portia snatched the brush. “Lucky you didn’t get the stuff in your hair—we’d be cuttin’ it off right about now.”
A haircut would be less painful than Portia’s brisk strokes with the brush, but Camilla closed her eyes and endured. She deserved a certain amount of pain for her stupidity.
“You gonna tell Portia where you been for the past two hours?” The brushstrokes slowed and gentled. “I been just about out of my mind, worrying.”
Camilla rested her head back against the cushion of Portia’s bosom. “I had to go back to fetch something I left on the boat.”
“It better been something almighty important.”
“It was Virgil’s news bag.” Camilla waited for the explosion that didn’t come. Feeling a tremor under the back of her head, she opened her eyes.
Portia’s dark face was perfectly bland, though there was an amused spark in the back of her eyes. “Girl-child, you’re gonna put yourself out one too many times for that cockeyed old man. I sure hope the Lord makes good on that promise about ‘doing it unto the least of these.’” She snorted and began to brush again. “Virgil Byrd’s about the least of anything I ever seen!”
Chapter Two
Gabriel woke to the sound of a timid scratching at his door. Having long ago trained himself to sleep with one foot on the floor, he moved in one fluid step to the door, his derringer cocked and ready to fire. “Who is it?”
“Reverend Leland, it’s S-Sally. Sir.”
Reminded of his ministerial alter ego, he relaxed and lowered the gun. Opening the door, he found the young maid who had escorted him to his room yesterday twisting her apron into a white corkscrew. “A bit early in the day for spiritual counseling, my dear,” he said dryly.
Sally’s blood climbed to the ruffle of her mobcap. “Sir, I got an urgent message.”
Gabriel pulled his galluses up over his shoulders. “What is it?”
“They’s a lieutenant downstairs, told me to come get you on the double. Said tell you there’s a lady been took by Colonel Abernathy, and she needs you right away.”
Gabriel’s blood froze. The only lady he knew here was Delia Matthews. “Tell the lieutenant I’m on my way, and ask him to make my—ah, cousin as comfortable as possible.”
The mobcap bobbed and disappeared.
Gabriel dressed and shaved, managing to nick his chin with the razor in his haste. Irritated, he examined the cut in the mirror. Beards and mustaches were in fashion these days, but yesterday’s trip to the barber was essential to his disguise. He hadn’t been clean shaven since his sixteenth birthday; he hardly recognized himself. In fact, he’d forgotten about that arrow-shaped scar his brother, Johnny, had put on his upper lip when they were kids. He touched the scar. Johnny was probably dead by now. Ma always said the good died young.
Gabriel had every intention of living to be an old man.
Escorted by the young lieutenant, he fumed all the way downtown to Confederate headquarters. Delia should have been headed upriver with her troupe by now. If they’d left without her, he had no way to get the cipher into Union hands with any expediency. And what if she’d been searched?
His wait in the luxurious parlor of the Rice mansion, which housed Colonel Abernathy’s staff, did nothing to cool his temper. His only consolation was the proximity of his understuffed horsehair chair to the two yawning sentries lounging on either side of the front hall. He couldn’t help wondering why this war was taking so long. Grant or Sherman ought to stroll down here tomorrow and round this bunch up like so many hound dogs snoozing in the shade.
He was beginning to lose interest when the secretive note in the voice of one of the sentries brought him fully awake.
“You hear about the delivery coming in tonight?”
“Yeah. About time, too. If I’d known there wasn’t gonna be no whiskey allowed, I’d thought twice before joining up. Where’s it coming from?”
“Somebody caught a couple darkies with the Birdman last night. First time anybody’s actually seen ’em. Promised if they’d let ’em go they’d pass the next shipment our way.”
The first sentry chortled. “The Birdman may be crackers, but he knows his blackstrap.”
Hat over his face, Gabriel settled his head on the carved rosewood frame of the chair. So the Rebel army wasn’t above dealing in contraband whiskey. Idly he wondered about the identity of the Birdman, but a sudden series of piercing shrieks from the upper floor of the house brought his head off the back of the chair. The sentries jumped.
The shrieks escalated in volume as a door opened and a harried-looking junior officer appeared at the bend of the stairs. He mopped at some beige-colored liquid dripping from his eyebrows and mustache. “Is there a Reverend Leland down here somewhere?”
The shrieks ceased as Gabriel stood. He had his story planned out. “I’m Reverend Leland. I see you’ve made my cousin’s acquaintance.”
The young man glanced over his shoulder. “That woman don’t act like nobody’s cousin—except maybe Old Nick’s. I’m pretty sure she sprung straight from the gates of Hades. Colonel Abernathy wants to see you. Right this way, sir.”
They found the colonel in an upstairs bedroom, which had been converted into an office with the addition of a desk and a couple of bookcases. The colonel’s lank brown hair stood on end, a bit of egg yolk adorned his left sideburn, and grease stains marred the military perfection of his gray coat. He rose with an agitated scrape of his chair. “Reverend! Last night my men apprehended a young woman, and she—well, she’s what you might call a bit of a handful.” The colonel blushed. “She claims to be a gentlewoman, but we know she’s been traveling up and down the river as an actress.”
Raising a sardonic eyebrow, Gabriel took the proffered chair. “Working as an actress might not be the most respectable occupation for a woman, but it isn’t illegal.”
“Of course it isn’t, but one of my men claims Miss Matthews was pumping him for information.”
“And your man was completely sober?”
The colonel picked up a perfectly pointed quill in his inkstand and began to sharpen it. “You know as well as I do it’s against army regulations to sell whiskey to military personnel.”
“Of course.” Gabriel sat back. “Would you mind filling me in on the circumstances of my cousin’s arrest?”
