River Magic (26 page)

Three nights later, in the starlit hours before dawn, the
Delta Star,
all lights extinguished, nosed into a secluded cove on the northern edge of Pleasant Hill. Those who'd make this their final destination had to debark briskly, and a reluctant Burke had to get underway forthwith, else Federal patrol boats might get suspicious.

Ashore, Intrepid shook his mane, snorted, then lowered his head to crop grasses, clearly gratified to have his hooves on land for the first time in weeks.

India gazed back at the
Delta Star.
She, along with Connor and Matt, watched the great freighter back-paddle from the cove, her captain on the bridge.

“It's better that Burke goes.” Connor glanced over to the litter holding Antoinette. “She was lost to him, even before she lost her mind. He needs to get on with his life.”

India suspected it would be a long, long time, perhaps forever, before Burke O'Brien would recover a broken heart. This, she knew, was not what her man needed to hear. She called up a cheerful tone. “Don't forget he's fated to meet his true bride on his thirtieth birthday.”

“That's four more years to suffer.”

“At least it's not a lifetime.”

“Hey, y'all. Stop yammering.” Matt positioned himself at one end of the litter. “We need to get Antoinette abed. And I'm way overdue to cuddle my wife and boy.”

“Put Antoinette in the kitchen house.” India smiled. “I'll tend her there until the household awakens.”

Matt agreed. “Heave ho, Major.”

Connor handed Intrepid's reins to India, but dawdled. “Remember back in Rock Island?” he whispered to her, teasing, his breath making the hair stand up at her nape. “You vowed that I'd be the last man you'd bring home to Pleasant Hill.”

“You would bring that up.”

“I would. You were right. I'm the very last man you'll introduce to Granny.” His tongue darted to an earlobe; she shivered, happy. “I am the first, and I'll be the last.”

“You can bank on that.”

Matt said, “Stop! You're torturing a love-hungry man.”

Connor ran a fingertip across her lip. “Duty calls.”

The men picked up the litter, began to climb the footpath leading up the hill where the plantation dwellings were situated. India, holding Intrepid's reins loosely, lagged back.

She inhaled the scents of river, magnolias, grasses. Such richness filled her with both joy and sadness. Home, at last. Soon she'd reunite with Granny Mabel, Persia, America, Catfish, Honoré, wee Stonewall . . . and sweet Zeke.

But for the moment, and with even grander appreciation than Intrepid showed, she wanted simply to revel in the comfort of having her feet on the ground. Marshall ground

So much had happened since leaving. Ohio, Illinois, afterward. Never would she have imagined returning home with a man to call her own. “Imagine, a Yankee from Dixie,” she said to Intrepid. “Who'd've ever thought? Then, I never figured on being wanted by the Union. But I might never've made it home. My neck could've dangled from several ropes. All in all, I'm one lucky gal. Tessa's magic may've done Antoinette and Burke ill, but she had her chances, and he'll have his. Now I've got mine.”

Grinning, she hastened Intrepid along the path, eager to catch up with the Tennessean who'd become her very own Aladdin.

 

 

Over these past months, Connor O'Brien had visualized many images of Pleasant Hill Plantation. He'd settled on a grim picture. A plantation house of perhaps eight or ten rooms, all falling to disgrace. He'd presumed remnants of Marshalls would be digging through abandoned slave gardens, seeking nourishment from a sprout or two of turnips and their greens.

Leaning a shoulder against the wall outside the kitchen, India inside tending to Antoinette's womanly needs and fingers of dawn helping him along, Connor eyed reality.

Back in the boxcar, India had been right. It would take lots of money to keep this place afloat.

Connor ambled away to study the grounds of the “farm” where India had been born and reared. “Pleasant hill” didn't begin to describe it.

Moss-draped live oaks, long mature and spreading wide, were in abundance. Magnolias, crape myrtles, oleanders, and azaleas banked the grand lawn—wider than Old Man River itself—that wove down the hill to the river. The land approach, from St. Francisville to the north, gave a splendid view of the shaded, cobbled lane. It didn't take much to picture liveried, gilt carriages rolling up to the Marshall family seat.

Connor swallowed. Three floors of red brick in height, with wings extending eastward, that wasn't merely a home sitting on a ridge overlooking the Mississippi River. It was a palace.

Fifteen marble steps led up to the main entrance and its deep, recessed portico. A dozen Corinthian columns supported a cornice, with a turreted widow's walk capping the slate roof. Below the cornice, verandas extended across the structure on each floor. Pleasant Hill was not in disrepair.

Surely India hadn't lied about the family's financial situation, but looks told a different story, even though neither fancy coaches lined the carriageway nor schools of slaves busied about. The war had touched Pleasant Hill, no doubt about that. Yet . . . somehow, through diligent effort on someone's part, this place was surviving.

Connor O'Brien was not a man to smoke or drink, not because of a puritan bent, but because it simply never appealed to him, habits that would get in the way of his attention to military duty. Right now, he'd have taken a big slug of some of Burke's best bourbon whiskey, morning or not.

India Marshall came from big money.

Southern money.

How would her family react to the man she'd brought home? A Southerner in the Union Army. Old Zeke could be paving the way for a Yankee invasion, but this Yankee had arrived poor and certain to stay that way.

Connor centered on the kitchen. Behind those walls, his sweetheart tended the injured, just as she'd tended the misfortunates at Rock Island. Without complaint. As if she didn't know the difference. Never once did she complain about privation—except for a little grousing in the boxcar.

Her brother wasn't the sort to compare his situation to the one he'd once known, either. Connor couldn't recall hearing a word of brag out of either Marshall, which was the sort of attitude that came from several generations of big money.

Connor chuckled, amazed. India had talked about Arabic lineage. Someone in the Marshall family must have rubbed a magic lamp and asked for pots of gold. Maybe that was where the inheritance falling to Winston Marshall, senior, had sprung.

Continuing his reconnaissance tour, Connor set a course for the slave quarters. Nearing them, he saw a round black woman exit the overseer's house.

Humming, she wore a white turban on her head and a generous apron to protect her red-plaid dress. Under an arm she toted a whole ham; in a hand, a basket of eggs. Hers was a friendly voice as she asked, “Hey, massa, who you?”

“Major Connor O'Brien.” He tipped his hat and stopped abreast of her. “What are you doing here, Mammy?” he asked, getting an idea of how Pleasant Hill had survived. The Marshalls had somehow held on to their slaves, which had a sickening quality to it. “Don't you know you've been freed?”

She set the basket down, placed the chicken atop it, then gave him what-for. “Firstly, I ain't yo' mammy. I's Dahlia.”

No one could put someone in their place quicker than a confident black woman in the South, and Dahlia was no exception. No doubt she'd blistered the butts of many misbehaving white children and a half dozen of her own. “I's the cook. And I ain't no slave. I's hired right after you Yankees rode up to steal us blind.”

Hired with what? he wondered.

“ 'Sides,” she went on, “what dat, slav'ry? Ever'body a slave, even you. Doan you look at me like dat, Yankee. You's serving Massa Lincoln, I's fixing to serve breakfast for a fine gal doan come home. We's all gots to eat. We's all gots to work. We's all slave to it.”

“You have a point, Miss Dahlia. But slavery takes away freedom of choice.”

“Where'm I goan go? You goan take Dahlia up North, set her free in the middle of nowhere, where she gots nobody?” Her big black eyes flashed. “I chooses not to live un'er some box up town. Miz India, she choosed to sell her purty pearls and the diamond rings her mammy left her. She sold 'em to a hateful Yankee massa to pay my sal'ry, but dat what she choosed. Just like dem Yankees choosed to go through the house and fill empty pockets, back last year.”

Dahlia bent from the waist. “Iffen you's here to start trouble, I's goan scream. Miz India, she goan come after you with her gran'mammy's butcher knife. Iffen I doan do it myse'f.”

He patted the air. “There'll be no need for that, ma'am. And I apologize for my mistake. I'm new around here.”

“You a thief? Turn out dem pockets.”

He did as ordered, and the emptiness gave evidence to his financial fix—chasing a woman didn't come cheap. “Actually, Miss Dahlia, I'm affianced to your Miss India.”

“You's pullin' Dahlia's leg.”

“I'm not.”

“Humph. You may be purty, but—what you doin', snoopin' around here like a hungry dog?”

“I had ideas to get at the truth. I've got it now. Thank you very much.”

“Humph.” Lifting her nose and giving him a cold shoulder, the cook picked up her goods and sashayed by him.

Connor had the truth, all right. That big beautiful palace wasn't in disrepair because the residents had learned how to make the best of their situation. India was a master at it.

“Is that ye, ye whelp? What tookened ye so long?”

There was no mistaking that voice. Connor changed directions again. He strode toward the elderly man and the petite elderly woman who approached him. Zeke Pays had trimmed his ragged beard, had even put a curling iron to the ends. What a dandy! He had his arm lifted at a gallant angle, and his lady's palm lay across it. She had to be Granny Mabel.

She wore neither crinolines nor lace. She was dressed for work, wearing britches and a cotton shirt, making the best of it.

“Mabel honey, I suspect yer grand-girl be home. This be her man, Major Connor O'Brien of the Union Army.”

“Welcome, sir.”

Connor took relief in her genuine greeting.

And he got a glimpse of what India would look like, a decade or so after 1900. Mabel Mathews Marshall, angular-faced and blue-eyed, was a fair-complected archetype of her granddaughter. Growing old with India would be a visual delight.

Yet Connor couldn't quell a worry. Where did he, a penniless soldier, fit into Pleasant Hill?

 

 

India delighted in being home. After making certain of Antoinette's comfort, and after feeding the patient a bowl of gruel that she'd swallowed mechanically, India reunited with her beautiful-as-ever little sister.

She told Persia as much as could be told about her adventures in the space of a few minutes, most of that time being spent talking about Connor, though she did thank Persia for the inspiration that got her through a few close calls.

As for closer calls, India decided not to mention Port Hudson. There would be time enough for it, and she wanted nothing to spoil today.

“It's marvelous having you home.” Persia's ivory-toned face eased into a beatific smile. “Life is wonderful right now. You and a fiance here, and I've just received word from Tim.”

“How is he?” India asked, barely recalling that the poetry reader had once been her ideal.

“Tim is fine. But he fears the war is lost to the South.”

“What will be, will be. Too bad it's not over now.”

India and Persia hugged, agreeing.

Dahlia arrived. In no uncertain terms she shooed the sisters out of her kitchen. They fetched an invalid chair, got Antoinette into it, then wheeled her to a ground-floor room in the big house adjacent to the suite America never left. Her nurse took over. India went to her still-lovely older sister, tried to make conversation, but America didn't understand.

“Where's Kirby? Where's my man?” she asked over and over.

“We've told her time and again Kirby's dead. It doesn't sink in.” Persia pulled India aside. “Let's go. I'm hungry. Dahlia's scraped together a fine breakfast.”

“First, I want you to meet
my
man.”

Persia being Persia, she patted her thick coil of raven-black hair and pinched her cheeks to make herself presentable. “How do I look?”

“Like Persia.”