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