CHAPTER EIGHTEEN #2
A bounty jumper, then. Some of the gangs took money from rich boys so they wouldn’t have to go to war, then went absent without leave to return home and do it all over again. It made her blood boil to think about it.
“Leona was a nurse during the war,” her grandfather said. “She can tend to this man’s wound.” He glanced at her, a warning. She believed he meant to soften their hardness to her. Her scalp still burned where the leader had yanked her out of the carriage.
“Don’t you come near me, you bitch,” the wounded man snarled.
The proximity of the water and the knives in their hands played havoc with her mind.
The man with the sack continued to stare at her, his eyes lustful.
She had her grandfather to worry about, too.
Who was it who’d mistakenly told these men she and her grandfather were unarmed?
She’d beat Tom Purley and Red Stone, but not in this fashionably expensive dress and with no weapon, not even a hatpin.
I’m coming home, Gil, come hell or high water.
She said, “You have what you want now, so let us go. Your disguises are very good. We couldn’t identify you at all to the police.” Words. That’s all she had, but the leader shook his head.
Had the man behind this attack targeted them ahead of time? It might explain why the cab had pulled up so fast when they left Geneva’s. There had to be wealthier folks attending the dinner wearing far more jewelry than themselves. The gang’s random choice hadn’t yielded them much. It bothered her.
“Let her go,” Grandfather said. “Let her go and keep me. My agents will pay you very well in a ransom exchange for my safe return.”
“No!” she cried. “Take both of us then and double your money.”
“That’s not what he wants, not the job we’re already getting paid for,” the wounded man protested. “He’ll do worse to us. Ennis, kill ‘em, and get it over with.”
The leader turned on the wounded man and gave him a hearty kick. “I told you not to use my name, you—”
A shot rang out from her left. Ennis dropped, falling onto the wounded man who cried out, trying to push him off and get to his feet at the same time.
His friends came to his rescue, grabbing him under the armpits to haul him up.
Another shot struck one of them in the arm, and they ran off into the night screaming threats.
Ennis lay dead or unconscious on the ground.
From the night-dark depths surrounding the nearest warehouse, a shadow detached itself and walked toward them. Leona reached down, picked up the forgotten lantern, and held it up. Her grandfather hunted around until he found a dropped Colt, but only one. He cocked it.
“No need of that,” a voice called out. The shadow raised his hands above his head in the moonlight as he drew closer to the circle of her lantern. “Not here to harm you. Think you’ve had enough o’ that already.”
“Who are you, sir?” Grandfather asked.
She could barely make out his face.
“Name’s Archie.” He lowered his hands and pointed back toward the warehouse. “My job is watching the warehouse at night. I heard the shot.”
The full moon’s light fell on the water, the ice and snow, and the horse and carriage nearby. She shivered. They would have died here if not for this man.
Her grandfather said, “Well, we thank you very much, sir. You’ll be here if the police want to question you about what happened?”
“I’m here most nights. Best you get yourselves home, now, before those cockroaches return with reinforcements. I gotta get back to my rounds.” He tapped the brim of his cap and walked away, back to the shadows.
Grandfather’s grip on her arm tightened. “Now I need to take the carriage and the horse to the police and report this robbery, but I’ll bring you home first. Hopefully, they didn’t murder the poor man who drove it.”
“Yes, Gil will be worrying.” The receding fear and excitement left her shivering and nauseous in their wake. “And there’s whiskey waiting.”
“Whiskey,” Grandfather agreed, “is just what we need.” He bent and picked up the sack with a deep sigh. “We were very lucky tonight. What a thing to happen. People get desperate, especially in the winter.”
Remembering the lustful eyes of the man who’d taken her jewelry, and Ennis the bounty jumper, she shook her head. “You are quicker to forgive than me.”
“Come on, my girl.” He held out his hand for her. “Let’s go home.”
***
“L EONA.”
The hand gripping her shoulder shook her gently awake.
She looked up into her grandfather’s face.
She’d gone up to check on Gil and to change into her nightclothes and found him snoring peacefully.
Not wanting to disturb him, she’d settled in the parlor by the fire to wait for Grandfather, believing the thrumming energy coursing through her would keep her awake for the rest of the night.
“I dreamed of—” She thought back, the dream fragments wisping away from her.
“Sitting by the campfire with the boys—Jack, Hank, Victor. After a battle, I think.” All laughing with great, nervous hilarity, exhausted and elated.
Unlike most of her dreams, which so often brought her awake with a scream.
“We had quite a battle tonight,” Grandfather replied, understanding in his eyes.
“Yes, it was—like that. The relief—” Leona yawned without finishing the thought. He knew. The relief at having survived another day, even in civilized Brooklyn Heights.
Her grandfather handed her a glass half-filled with amber liquid and sat with his own glass in hand opposite her. He stretched his feet toward the fire with a sigh.
“What did the police say?” she asked.
“There have been a few robberies around the Heights of late. A cabman did report his horse and carriage stolen earlier today, so he’ll be happy to have it returned.
And unfortunately, as we can’t identify them, they’ll get away with tonight’s escapade, though they have paid for it.
” He sipped at the whiskey with grim satisfaction.
“Did you see Benedict Van Wyn there? Has he posted bail?”
He sighed heavily and put his glass down on the table beside him.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with us, does it?
You did what you could for the Van Wyns, and it has cost you.
Now, it’s time to direct your energies to putting things back together, my girl.
” Deep unhappiness rose in his eyes as he gazed at her. “You’ve been taking laudanum again.”
Leona made sure her hand was steady before she brought the glass to her mouth and drank. “I did, but I’m done with it.”
He continued to gaze at her until she grew uneasy.
The doctor in Boston had prescribed it after Jack died and kept her well supplied.
She’d lost the baby not long after this; she believed the baby poisoned by her grief and the doctor’s remedy.
It had been sheer hell the first time she stopped taking it, to face her life without laudanum’s dark gift for softening the hard edges and sharp truths of her life.
The unrelenting waking dreams of unending battle, Jack’s death, and the subsequent deaths of the baby and cousin Ada.
The long, awful road ahead of her without them.
By the doubt and disappointment in his eyes, Grandfather didn’t appear to believe her.
“I—I might be with child, grandfather,” she said in a low voice. “I swear, I emptied out every bottle I could find.”
“Leona! My dear!”
She whispered, “Hush, now. I don’t know for sure.
” She couldn’t help but smile at his joy.
“You mustn’t say anything.” She was more than a week late but hadn’t been sick to her stomach as she had been before and couldn’t be sure what this meant.
Perhaps only that it was too early to tell.
“I don’t want to get Gil’s hopes up yet. I only told you so you’d believe me.”
“I believe you, my dear. How happy you’ve made me! Well, Merry Christmas to us.”
She laughed as they clinked their glasses together, daring to hope they’d finally turned a corner into better times.
“What are you doing?” Gil sputtered from the doorway of the parlor. “What’s going on here?”
“Did we wake you, darling?” She rose and moved toward him. “Are you feeling better?”
He held up his hands to ward her off. “Yes, yes, you woke me. How—” He covered his eyes with one hand for a moment, taking deep breaths as if calming himself. “How was the party?”
He appeared disoriented, gaze wavering between herself and Grandfather, and she worried his illness had worsened. “Did the doctor come?”
“He was here. I’m feeling better.” He searched through the pockets of his dressing gown, pulled out a scrap of paper, and waved it at her. “Some remedies he suggested.”
“Is there something I can get you, Gil? Let me see what he’s written—”
“No, not right now, Leona.” He frowned deeply at her, then at her grandfather. Fever glinted in his eyes, and he’d broken out in a sweat.
“I don’t mean to upset you. Let’s go upstairs now, back to bed.” She took his arm.
He shook her off with a glare.
“There’s the devil, right there,” Grandfather muttered and sipped from his glass.
Gil turned to her grandfather. “Drink my whiskey and insult me, old man?”
“Oh, Gil—Grandfather, he’s ill, I’m sorry. Help me get him back to bed.”
“I’m—I can get upstairs on my own,” Gil snapped, turning away to return to their bedroom. Above their heads he paced back and forth and when the steady creak of floorboards finally stopped, she sighed.
“He’ll be fine,” Grandfather assured her. “Besides, it’s my whiskey.”
They were tearing her apart. How would she survive Christmas? “Did you ever care for Gil, Grandfather?”
“No,” he returned bluntly. “Never as much as I cared for Jack Davenport, God rest his soul.”