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The colonel huffed. “It seems Private Hubbard was enjoying a bit of leave aboard the Magnolia Princess last evening, and—well, Hubbard, being a strapping young man—caught Miss Matthews’s attention. She invited him to her room after her performance.”
Gabriel kept his tone cold and incredulous. “I think I have the picture, Colonel. The scarlet woman seduced your innocent young enlisted man, plied him with liquor to loosen his tongue and proceeded to pull information out of him in order to sell it to the enemy.” The accusation sounded melodramatic and silly—the plot of a riverboat play.
“That’s about it.” Abernathy ran a finger around his collar. “Unless you have some other explanation.”
Gabriel straightened. “I don’t have to explain anything to you. The word of my clerical office should be enough to proclaim my misguided young relative’s innocence.” The colonel took a breath, but Gabriel forestalled him with a raised palm. “My family history may shed some light on our current dilemma.”
Abernathy nodded stiffly.
“Miss Matthews—Delia—is the daughter of my father’s brother, the product of his marriage late in life to a serving woman with designs on his pocketbook. When the little girl was barely walking her mother took off with a man of heftier income.” Gabriel paused to let this pathetic picture settle in his companion’s mind.
Since the colonel seemed to have forgotten the breakfast tray heaved at his chest, Gabriel embroidered the story. Delia became a misunderstood soul looking for love in a callous world. She had run away to join a traveling theater troupe, and Gabriel, as her closest male relative—her father having long since expired of a broken heart—had been searching for her ever since.
“I’d only last week received a hint of her whereabouts,” he concluded. “My mission is to see her restored to the bosom of her family.”
The colonel looked impressed. “I declare.”
Gabriel coughed delicately. “As I said, I’d nearly caught up with my cousin, and it was a simple matter to follow the trail of…shall we say, smitten officers and gentlemen.”
Abernathy smiled sourly. “The lady has a way of choosing her targets.”
“All the more reason to get her out of your hair, so to speak—” Gabriel eyed the egg yolk “—and return her to her home.”
“I must admit I don’t know quite what to do with her.” The colonel rose and went to the window. “I cannot allow my men to go unpunished when they compromise military information, and yet the lady hardly seems to have the mental discipline to remember what she heard, much less pass it into enemy hands.”
“Have you questioned her?”
“I tried, but with very little intelligible response.”
Gabriel grinned at the colonel’s back. “Perhaps if I spoke to her in your presence I might assuage your fears.”
“Yes, that’s the ticket.” The colonel turned. “Bowden!”
The young officer stuck his damp, sticky head around the door. “Sir?”
“Tell Miss Matthews we require her presence.”
Lieutenant Bowden looked as if he’d just been requested to shave a barracuda. He shifted from one foot to the other. “Yes, sir,” he said unhappily and disappeared.
Gabriel didn’t have to wait long before Delia exploded into the room, followed by Bowden, who muttered a lame “Here she is, sir” and beat a strategic retreat.
Delia Matthews in broad daylight was a sight to behold. She stood seething in the center of the room, onyx eyes snapping, fists planted on her generous hips. The tight trousers and coat she’d worn last night had been replaced by a dress with an equally tight and low-cut bodice. Gabriel was hard put to keep his clerical gaze above her neck. Colonel Abernathy didn’t even try.
She was the sort of woman whose company Gabriel most enjoyed—straightforward, without genteel coyness, secure in the power of her own beauty, yet sturdy and self-reliant. This was no hothouse flower of Southern aristocracy, ready to wilt at the threat of adversity and delighting in drawing blood with unexpected thorns. This woman was a gardenia, blooming in lush flamboyance—in fact, she even smelled like one.
She folded her arms. “Where have you been?”
Gabriel eyed his courier with grim admiration. “If I weren’t so glad to see you I’d turn you over my knee. What kind of trouble are you in now?”
Delia glared at the colonel. “If this nincompoop thinks I give two hoots how many guns come down the pike into this stinking little mud hole, it’s no wonder he’s here, instead of where the action is!”
“See here!” yelped the colonel.
Gabriel choked down laughter. “He’s just doing his job, Cousin Delia. And he said he might let you go, if you promise not to repeat anything Private Hubbard told you.” Gabriel let one eye blink closed.
Delia’s expression of outrage shifted to a blinding smile. “I told them it was a big misunderstanding. The private took me all wrong. I asked him if he was a good shot, and he started off on all this nonsense about guns. I didn’t understand half what he said.” She tripped across the room to take the colonel’s arm. Tears glistened on the ends of yard-long black lashes as she looked over her shoulder. “Cousin Gabriel, you understand why I got just a teensy bit upset when they arrested me? It was too humiliating!”
Abernathy ran a hand around the back of his neck. “Miss, if you want to avoid misunderstandings in the future, you’d best stay away from dens of iniquity like that riverboat.” He backed toward the open window. “Reverend Leland, Miss Matthews is released into your custody.”
Thunderclouds formed on the actress’s alabaster brow. “His custody—”
“Thank you, sir.” Gabriel hustled Delia out of the room.
They made it back to the Battle House as inconspicuously as was possible for a woman of Delia Matthews’s looks and temperament. As he secured a table in a corner of the sunny dining room of the hotel, Gabriel lost patience. “You’d best stop those languishing looks at every man in sight if you expect me to retain any scrap of credibility. We’re not even supposed to meet in public, and now I’ve had to invent a runaway cousin.”
Delia’s eyes blazed with resentment. “Your credibility? I’m the one who’s been under arrest for twelve hours.”
Gabriel froze in the act of hailing a servant. “Twelve hours? When did they arrest you?”
She lifted one milky shoulder. “Not long after the show. Turned out that baby-faced private wasn’t quite so naive as most of them.”
“Less than six hours ago you were not in the hold of the boat.” He said it out loud, hoping it was not true.
Delia spread her hands. “I’ve been under arrest since ten o’clock last night. Reckon there was some other woman running around loose on the boat.” When he found himself incapable of answering, her fingers fluttered to her mouth. “Oh, my. You gave the sermon to the wrong person, didn’t you?”
“Your perfume is gardenia. Not lily of the valley.”
After a strained silence, Delia leaned her head on her hand and regarded him with a quirk to her red mouth. “Fine pair we are, Reverend.”
“This is no laughing matter. What are we going to do?”
“We?” Delia’s fine black brows lifted. “I can’t deliver what I don’t have. You get the sermon back before my troupe moves upriver, and I’ll see it gets to the right hands. You don’t…” She shrugged. “You’re on your own.”
Camilla woke up feeling eighty instead of eighteen. Her head hurt, her feet hurt, and there was an evenly spaced row of bruises under her rib cage where the iron spikes of the fence had jabbed her. She rolled onto her back with a groan.
She’d argued with Portia for thirty minutes about who was going to be responsible for getting that wagonload of whiskey to Colonel Abernathy—Portia said Horace, and Camilla said she’d do it herself. Portia had held her ground and informed Camilla that, once the whiskey was delivered, there would be no more underground railroad for the Beaumont household. The Captain said the whole business had gotten entirely too risky.
The Captain. Portia wouldn’t say who arranged the transfer of slaves—first downriver into Mobile and then upstate by railroad. Probably it was some saintly old preacher who followed the teachings of Jesus and the Constitution: all men are created equal, with certain inalienable rights. Camilla pictured long, flowing white hair, maybe spectacles like Ben Franklin. A black frock covering frail shoulders and a Bible tucked under his arm. He’d preach with thunder and fire, but love everyone black and white the same. A man who’d organized the freedom runs for four years without a slipup would have to be brilliant.
“Camilla!”
Daydreams broken, she sat up. Nobody’s voice but her brother Jamie’s could carry up a carpeted flight of steps, down a hallway and through a thick oak door. He often forgot he wasn’t on the quarter deck of the Lady C.
Her bare feet hit the floor with a thump. “Can’t a person sleep around here?”
“It’s almost noon!” Jamie barked. “I need your help if I’m going to sail for Cuba this evening.”
She got moving. Caught up in the events of the past twenty-four hours, she’d almost forgotten Jamie’s planned blockade run. He’d been to Cuba before and made it back safely, but it was always a chancy thing. The Yankees took it as a personal affront when a Confederate merchant ship slipped through with arms and supplies.
But people in the South had to eat, she thought as she donned her clothing. And they had to defend themselves.
Dressed in her faded indigo day dress, she plopped down at the dresser. As she pinned her curls into bunches over each ear, she prayed for Jamie. For his safety, for his health, for his wisdom in guiding the ship. He had many men under his command. So much responsibility.
She wondered if Jamie knew about the fish boat. Probably so. Papa confided in him, and he’d always been crazy about anything that moved in the water, from tadpoles to warships.
He wouldn’t like that she knew about it. He was as overprotective as their father. But she was a grown woman now. As soon as Harry could come down south again without being blown to bits figuratively and literally, she was going to marry him and start her own family. She was tired of being under Papa’s thumb. Tired of being bossed around by Portia and restricted by Lady’s ideas of gentility.
She closed her eyes. Please, Lord, end the war quick.
She found Jamie in the foyer directing Horace and Willie in the disposition of several brass-bound leather trunks. He was dressed in a dark naval uniform, his fair hair spiking across his forehead in the humidity, sweat streaking his blond mustache and beard.
He looked up and grinned, swiping his sleeve across his brow. “There you are, Miss Slugabed. Knitting socks and writing letters last night wore you to a frazzle, I guess.”
Camilla straightened the embossed buttons on her brother’s coat. The top one hung by a thread. “Here, let me—” Her eyes widened. “Oh! Don’t move, I’ll be right back!”
She hurried to the parlor, where she’d spent several hours sewing before bedtime, and returned with a thickly quilted rectangle of gold-brocaded taffeta, folded several times and fastened with a frog closure. “I made this for your trip.”
“Thank you. Er—what is it?”
Camilla pulled Jamie down to sit beside her on the bottom step. “Look, I’ll show you.” She unbuttoned the frog. “It’s a housewife.”
Jamie laughed. “Just what I need on a cruiser.”
Camilla unfolded the fabric so he could see the row of five pockets and a flat square piece stuck through with needles and pins. “It’s got everything you need to make small repairs to your uniform. All the girls are making them for their men going off to war.”
At the wobble in her voice, his expression softened. “I’m not exactly going to war. Don’t you want me to send this to Harry?”
“I made it for you.” She gave him a mock frown. “And you’d better come back with it in person!”
“I plan to. No Yankee steamer’s going to catch the Lady C.”
Camilla slanted a glance at him under her lashes. “Suppose the Yankees were able to build a boat that could attack without you seeing it.”
Jamie leaned back on his elbows. “You mean like in the fog? Well, they wouldn’t be able to see us, either. Nobody sails in weather like that.”
“No, I mean—what if a boat could move underwater? Couldn’t they blow you up before you knew they were there?”
He exploded with laughter. “A boat sailing underwater? Oh, Milla, you’ve been reading too many penny novels.” He pulled her into an affectionately rough hug. “Either that or you truly don’t have enough to occupy that fertile imagination. Thanks for the gift.” Releasing Camilla, he refolded the housewife and slipped it into his coat pocket. He stood and offered her a broad, callused hand. “I’ll put it to good use. Now be a good girl and go pack me a lunch. Make it generous, ’cause it’ll be a long time before I get Portia’s sourdough bread again.”
Packing him a lunch was the least she could do. He was always the soul of generosity to her. On the way to the kitchen, she touched one of the little carved coral camellias dangling at her ears—her birthday present. Jamie knew how much she adored camellias, how she waited for their blooming every winter.
Portia was up to her dimpled elbows in bread dough and was not best pleased by Camilla’s interruption. “That boy picks the inconvenientest times to go sailing!”
Smiling at the anxiety behind Portia’s grumpy frown, Camilla pulled bread and cheese out of the bin and began to carve thick slices of both.
Portia heaved a sigh as she added an apple tart and some sausage left over from breakfast to the hamper. “I hope those Yankees got poor eyesight tonight.”
“Me, too. God preserve him.”
Jamie wasn’t afraid of anything, especially not a Yankee clipper. He took life exactly as it came, laughing at the worst dangers, even her question about the fish boat. Was his amusement genuine—or did it serve the purpose of hiding his thoughts? Everything with Jamie was usually right on the surface. Maybe her assumption that he knew about the boat was wrong.
She paused in the kitchen doorway, absently swinging the heavy hamper. “Portia, I heard something funny last night on my way in the house.”
Portia’s head whipped around. “Shush, little girl! Mind yourself!” She jerked her head toward the back door. “Come out this way, and we’ll walk around the house.”
As they picked their way through the kitchen vegetable garden, Portia drew close, sharing the handle of the hamper. “Why didn’t you tell me last night?” she whispered.
“I forgot,” Camilla retorted. “I was busy getting scolded!”
“Hmph. And didn’t you deserve it. What’d you hear?”
“Did you know Papa had a man in his office in the middle of the night?”
Portia gave her an enigmatic look. “If he did, it isn’t any of my business.”
“They were discussing an underwater boat. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”
Portia snorted. “In the book of Jonah.”
“It could happen. And Papa’s planning to get rich off it.”
Portia smiled. “He’d have a long way to go before—”
Camilla stamped her foot. “He’s financing this—this fish boat, to sell to the government so they can blow up Yankee ships.” At Portia’s quizzical look, she began to walk again. “I know it sounds incredible. They built it in New Orleans, then sank it when the Yankees took over. Now they’re going to rebuild it right here in Mobile.”
Camilla had half expected Portia to pooh-pooh the idea, much as Jamie had. But the housekeeper’s broad, smooth brow puckered. “Men and their all-fired gadgets,” she muttered. They reached the flagged walkway in Lady’s flower garden. Portia abruptly stopped and handed Camilla the hamper. “Take this to your brother, and tell him I said happy sailin’.”
“But what should I do? You know, about the boat?”
“You ain’t a baby anymore. You heard more than’s good for you, so keep your mouth shut and your eyes and ears open. Don’t you do anything.” Portia’s fierce gaze speared Camilla. “You hear me?”
“S-so you believe me?” Portia’s belief was infinitely more frightening than Jamie’s amusement.
Portia’s shoulders lifted. “I believe you heard your papa gettin’ up to some shenanigans. We’ll see how important it is.”
Numb, Camilla watched Portia head back to the kitchen. Eyes and ears open would be no problem. Mouth shut was another story.
Chapter Three
Gabriel shoved through the swinging doors of Ingersoll’s Oyster Bar and stood in the baking afternoon heat swinging a newspaper-laden canvas bag against his leg. Sooner or later his quarry was bound to surface.
Last night he’d returned to the riverboat with Delia and, while she went to her room to bathe and change, conducted a discreet search of the hold of the boat. This canvas sack—discovered behind the barrel he’d been sitting on as he waited in the dark for his courier—might or might not be a clue to the imposter’s identity, but it was all he had.
Embarking early this morning on a search, he’d put on his overanxious-relative face and questioned the proprietor of every establishment on Water Street. Downtown Mobile abounded in oyster houses, lagerbier and wine shops, and gambling and drinking saloons. Women were plentiful in those places, but no one admitted to harboring one dressed as a man.
He was about to start over on another round of the search when a violent tugging on his coat sleeve caught his attention. He looked down.
A scrawny little man in a red knit cap danced at his feet, beady pink eyes glinting under bristling eyebrows. “N—now—” The man’s head stretched and retracted as he struggled for words. “Now—where’d you get that?”
