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  Their twenty-five years together had been as blissful for them as it had been chaotic for my blue-blood minded family when she ruled the roost as Lady Camden after marrying him.

  When my uncle passed—killed in the same train crash that took my parents from me—it was Aunt Mini who raised me, sometimes in ways that were the horror of my relatives.

  “I think you got that right, Mini,” I said. “No one seemed the least surprised that the girl was out there or that the two of us were in the carriage.”

  “Nice to see you all in the saddle again, nephew,” Mini said.

  “What do you mean?”

  She made that horse-whinny sound she does when she is annoyed at me. “I’ve watched you shuffle around like a spring-sick prairie chicken since you came back from the Crimea, nephew. “

  She had me there. Almost from the day I was in mufti I had felt a singular sense of emptiness, after my time in India and then serving on a frontline unit in the second Crimean conflict. In service I had purpose and excitement but in civilian life, with my pension and family holdings I had no wants. Few needs. And had wandered around drinking too much, gaming too much and generally wasting time. I had realized on the way over the Atlantic that the reason Mini had ‘asked’ me to come to America with her was to keep an eye on me.

  “And now?”

  “I seen the glint in your eyes when you picked up that little piece of baggage; there is danger here, a real mystery and it is holding your interest.”

  “I’m just doing what any gentleman would do, helping a damsel in distress.”

  She snorted so loud I almost jumped. “I didn’t raise no gentleman, Athelstan,” she said. “Your Uncle Tolley was raised as one of them gentlemen and got hisself past it to be somethin’ to behold.” She got the dreamy look in her eye she always did when talking about her dead husband. “I made sure I raised you as a red-blooded man; and for a bit there I was thinking the blood was thinning.”

  “Aww, Mini.”

  “In any case, I think we better keep a look out for ambush, nephew,” she said. “And not be taken in by crocodile smiles.”

  “Well,” I said with a shrug. “We are in the bayou!”

  Chapter Three

  In the Lair

  “It sounds like the souls in hell are displeased tonight, eh, Baronet Grey,” my host said to me as the hurricane winds clawed at the shutters of his mansion like a beast at bay. It was an hour after our arrival and we were dressed in our own change of clothes, seated in the drawing room on the main floor of the mansion. Monsieur Mourant and two silent servants were in attendance. Our rescued damsel was nowhere to be seen.

  “It is a howler,” I said. “Equal or worse than any Highland storm.”

  “The very winds themselves here are named for a god of my people, the Caribes, whom your British slavers all but destroyed; so perhaps Huracan is in sympathy with these winds.”

  “I feel compelled to point out that that was all before my time, Monsieur,” I said as I sipped an excellent claret. I felt a tingle of excitement I had not felt for a long while, an awareness of danger that I had not realized I missed.

  My aunt and I were dry but still felt like the castaways we were and nothing our host had said or done was all that much reassuring. “The Albion Empire,” I continued, “under the leadership of our good Queen Guinevere-Victoria abolished slavery more than thirty years before your United States did which, I might add, was before I was born.”

  I caught my Aunt Minerva ’s eye then, her arched eyebrow all but yelling at me to “don’t be rude, Athelstan!” And she was right; we’d been given refuge, regardless of any misgivings we had, so I simply said, “Though I completely agree with you, it was a horrible, demeaning institution.”

  Monsieur Mourant nodded in acceptance of my olive branch and held out his own glass for one of the empty-eyed servants to refill. The two of them in the room both had the same glassy look to their stares and a certain quality about them that reminded me of the two who had appeared on the road to lead our coach. It was disquieting.

  “I noticed your accent is different than your nephew’s, Lady Camden,” our host said. “Might I inquire how that is so?”

  “Sharp fella,” Mini said with a full and charming smile. “I married Althelstan’s uncle and became Lady Camden but I was born and raised in Arkansas. And yes, I was here during the very uncivilness of that war. My brother fought for the north against slavery.”

  “So you are an American citizen?”

  “Never gave it up,” she said. She was drinking ‘straight up’ whiskey, never having acquired a taste for wine in all her time in England. “But you don’t sound like you’re from around these here parts either, Monsieur.”

  “Not exactly true in all particulars, Lady,” Mourant said. “My mother was born in Haiti and coming here was not her choice, it was her owner’s. I was, however, born on American soil in one of those squalid huts in the rear portions of this very plantation.” His tone was even but his body posture signalled so much anger beneath the words, so much vitriol that my Aunt and I exchanged a guarded look.

  I was about to ask about the rescued girl to deflect him from darker thoughts when the doors to the drawing room opened and she entered.

  The girl was dressed in a green gown that set off her pale skin and flame-red hair. From the way the dress fit her it was obviously her own. She walked with a graceful, dancelike step, gliding across the room directly to stand before me. She barely came to my shoulder.

  “Thank you for saving me, Baronet Grey,” she said as she inclined her head in an almost regal bow toward me where I had stood on her entrance. Her voice was as delicate as she, with a deep southern American drawl to it but with some tension under the smooth tone as she added, “Monsieur Mourant says you found me when I…uh…wandered away, quite out of my head.”

  “Antoinette is prone to walk in her sleep,” our host said, a bit too insistently, accompanying the words with a sharp look to the girl. “A nervous disorder. And apparently tonight even the fury of the storm could not stop her.”

  “Stop me,” she said with a strange hollow echo of his words, “yes, even that could not.”

  “It was you who saved us, pumpkin,” Aunt Mini said to the girl with no indication that she thought the tone strange, “I’m afraid we would have wandered into a swamp or worse in the storm if you hadn’t taken your little stroll and stopped us when you did.”

  The girl gave a hint of a smile at Mini’s comment and Mourant nodded. I noted that the girl’s green eyes seemed slightly unfocused, or perhaps more correctly, focused on something other than her current surroundings. They seemed to avoid looking directly at Mourant.

  “You see some good can come from even the worst circumstance, eh?” the Creole man said. He fingered the unusual beads at his neck and added, “I have, in a way, made it the pattern of my life.” He looked at the girl he called Antoinette but she kept her gaze on me. After a long pause he smiled and said, “But now that we are all here, let us take to table and eat.”

  A sleepy-eyed servant opened a connecting door to a dining room and our host led us through to a well-set table. It was as full a feast as one might expect at an elegant eatery in New Orleans or even Paris, with full courses of fruit, meat, vegetables and local delicacies. It was all terribly civilized and pleasant. Aunt Mini handled most of the conversation with our host with a skill at keeping it light and moving along that she had learned fielding the nobility of my homeland at formal dinners.

  I said little, confining myself to mostly watching Antoinette. The girl was charming, though reserved in her few comments during the meal, now laughing softly at one of our host’s jokes or blushing at Aunt Mini’s sometimes ribald ones, but always with some reserve.

  In between what to my eye were carefully calculated interjections, she seemed focused on some inner turmoil that mirrored the storm outside, occasionally stealing a look at Mourant through lowered lashes. I watched the girl’s eyes, as she wa
tched him, trying to decide what I saw in the look. They were not the same open, pleading eyes I had seen in the moment on the road.

  It was hard to say what was in that stare. Fear? Anger? Certainly pain.

  When she did glance my way there was something else in her emerald gaze, but it was fleeting, like a thought suppressed or a dream that disappears moments after you wake from sleep.

  All the while the howling of the storm continued unabated outside the French windows, rattling the glass and even causing the floor-to-ceiling drapes to dance like ghost sentinels at the portals. It was so steady a rage that it was almost soothing.

  The servers at our meal were of mixed races and appearances yet all of a kind, with an almost vacant stare as they went about their duties.

  Mourant saw me noticing and said, “You seem fascinated with my servants, Baronet.”

  “They seem unusually calm, I dare say almost sleepy,” I said, ignoring another stare of “don’t you dare,” from my aunt. Much of the time when we were out in public was spent warning each other to not go too far in some interaction or other with the world; it kept life interesting.

  “Well,” our host said with a sidelong glance to the servant bringing him wine, “I do try to keep them in their place so they know better than to make a fuss, and they have a swamp weed that grows hereabouts that they smoke to…uh…relax themselves.”

  “Cannabis?” I ventured.

  “Possibly,” he said quickly with a shrug. “I do not mind nor care so long as they perform their duties. I do not take pains to inquire.”

  While we talked he continued to finger his necklace with what I assumed was an unconscious gesture. The carved figures on the beads looked to be African deities and animals in crude, but fascinating forms. The central one was a human-imaged fetish carved from some ebony stone. It had the look of some magickal amulet but I could not tell of what stripe.

  Antoinette watched not just Mourant, but specifically his hand on the necklace with a veiled intensity. When she saw that I was watching her she quickly averted her eyes and flushed pink, colour rising on her pale cheeks. It looked attractive on her.

  The meal ended with all of us having full stomachs, but with a phantom unease all around. We chose to forgo after-dinner drinks in favour of rest.

  “We can hope the storm has passed by morning, Baronet, Lady Camden,” Monsieur Mourant said as he escorted us to our suite on the second floor for the night. “Then you may continue your interrupted journey.”

  “It is a pleasant interruption,” Aunt Mini said. She gave Mourant the smile that had charmed most of the crown heads of Europe. “But it will be good to make it back to the city as we got very little chance to explore it when we arrived by airship from England, and we have a dirigible to catch in less than three days.”

  “You will be leaving before Mardi Gras then. It is a shame! It is a fascinating city,” Mourant said, “though I must admit it has been many years since I have left our little world here to partake of its delights; we are very insular here.”

  We reached the door to our rooms. “Well, good night, Monsieur,” Auntie said.

  “Sleep well,” our host said.

  “I’ll just let Huracan sing me to sleep, Monsieur,” I said as I shook his bony hand. “Thank you again for your hospitality, sir, and a very good night.”

  My room was pleasantly warm with a roaring fire in the fireplace that crackled in competition with the wind outside the windows. My clothing from arrival was laid out to dry on a sideboard next to my bags with my belongings had been brought up earlier by servants.

  The house was well insulated so that the gas lamps barely flickered even though the storm raged outside with continued insistence. Droplets of rain slashed against the windowpanes like shotgun pellets.

  I doffed my dinner jacket and donned the robe from earlier, sitting on the cozy looking four-poster bed to remove my boots.

  My eyes were drawn to above the mantel where there was a display of crossed sabres—one of Northern, one of Southern cavalry issue. Both blade edges showed dark stains to ominously remind the viewer of their pedigree in the war between the eighteen states of this new country not so long ago.

  The weapons made me think of my time in Crimea again, and I found myself musing on the difference in my life since then. I had a purpose then, a calling, or so I thought, to defend the Empire against the Russian/Mali Alliance. I had men who relied on me and decisions to make that mattered. Since then, however, my only critical decisions had been whether to wear a top or a slouch hat when heading to Covent Garden.

  Now, however, my brain was engaged again with the whole circumstance of Antoinette and Mourant. I hated to admit my aunt was right—again—but I had needed something to jog my complacency and that red-haired girl seemed to be it.

  Before I could get my boot off there was a knock on the connecting door to Mini’s room.

  “Tarnation, nephew,” my aunt said as I opened the door. She had donned the large borrowed robe again and had to kick the long hem ahead of her as she strode into the room. She had her corn cob pipe and matches in her hands.“You sure seem to be trying to get us tossed out on our bums; why did you antagonize that Mourant fella?”

  “Sorry, Mini,” I said, “but there is something not right here; I can feel it.”

  “I get that itch in the centre of my back as well.” She lit up her corncob pipe—a habit my uncle could never break her of—and said, “I don’t buy those road apples about his staff smoking cannabis.”

  “How do you explain that look they all have?” I sat by the warm fire and Mini joined me, her feet dangling from an over-stuffed chair.

  “I don’t know, nephew, I reckon some sort of spell, maybe but just what ain’t no way to tell. You are right there is something not honest Injun with that Monsieur, that is for sure. I think it best to keep our connecting door open and I’m sleeping with Little Ruckus under my pillow.” She brandished a LeMat revolver she produced from her robe pocket; it was a souvenir of her days in the wild west show.

  At that moment there was a gentle, but urgent, knock on my door.

  “Baronet Grey.” A whispered voice competed with the storm for attention. “Open up, it is a matter of life or death!”

  I looked at Mini who hid her pistol in the long sleeves of her robe but maintained a relaxed pose. Then I eased open the door and a breathless Antoinette rushed in and quickly pushed it closed behind her, a look of terror in her eyes.

  Chapter Four

  A Reckoning

  “Baronet,” she said in a quivering voice, “You have to leave here, tonight! Your life may depend on it.”

  Her eyes were full of fear now, as she put her hand on my chest. I sensed her concern was not for herself but for us. Yet I did not feel I could trust her altruism completely.

  She saw Aunt Mini for the first time then and moved to her, kneeling by her chair and taking the older woman’s hand in both of hers. “Lady Camden, you have to leave this house. Tonight, it is imperative.”

  “Why, darlin’,” Mini said. “You sure know how to dance around a problem; how’s about you come at it straight on. What are you trying to say? What is the problem?”

  “I thought I could escape tonight,” the girl sobbed, a hopelessness in her voice. “I’d tried before but Mourant is—”

  At that moment the door to the room burst open and the two hulking fellows we had first seen on the road entered.

  “No!” the red-haired girl gasped.

  “See here,” I protested, “You have no right to—”

  The first of the men walked directly past me with no acknowledgement of my protest and grabbed Antoinette by her left arm, yanking her to her feet.

  “Hold it, fella!” Aunt Mini yelled and all but levitated from the chair, the pistol, Little Ruckus, in her hand.

  I sprang across the room and seized the large ruffian by the collar and belt, spinning him away from the girl so that he stumbled back. This dislodged his grip on her and sh
e dropped back to her knees with a startled squeak.

  The man I had pulled off Antoinette, who was a head taller than me and two stone heavier, swung a clubbing fist at me. It was a slow strike and easy to dodge, but as I did the second intruder struck me a heavy blow on my back that sent me sprawling forward to one knee.

  I sprang back up and blocked a second blow from him but the taller one was upon me now and hit me a hard blow to the gut.

  “Out of the way, nephew!” Mini called. I had no chance to comply as the second thug slammed my jaw with a solid uppercut.

  The strike caught me off balance and sent me stumbling into Aunt Mini so that the two of us, and the chair she stood by, tumbled to the floor.

  The first intruder seized the girl again lifting her bodily. She made a single animal cry of distress but then surrendered to the abduction.

  “Get off me, Athelstan!” Mini yelled as I worked to disentangle myself from her and the chair. By the time I had my wits about me and untangled from her the three were gone from the room.

  “This is not acceptable,” I said sotto voce. “Better get dressed, auntie, we are leaving this madhouse tonight, storm or no storm and that girl is coming with us.”

  “Now you’re talkin’!” Aunt Minerva exclaimed. She threw off her robe to expose her sleeveless evening gown. Then she hiked up her skirt and tied a knot in it to free her legs to move, in the process revealing the cowboy boots she wore beneath. “I’m as dressed as I need to be,” she waved Little Ruckus. “Let’s go!”

  “Keep that gun out of sight, Mini,” I said. I just threw off my robe and went to the door in my shirtsleeves and waistcoat. “We are not sure what we are dealing with and we may need a trump card.”

  “We’re dealing with a two-faced tinhorn sidewinding double-dealer, nephew,” she hissed. “I sure know how to deal with that sort, I’ve ventilated more than a few of them four flushers in my time.”

  “I know, I know, but please, don’t shoot anybody ’till I tell you. I don’t want to start an international incident.”