Teresa Medeiros - Nobody’s Darling

Shooting her brother a baffled glance, Anne dove for the hearth, rescuing her niece’s letter with shaking hands. She scanned it, the rapid movement of her lips betraying her agitation.

As she reached the end, her knees gave way. She sank down on a brocaded ottoman before the fire, gazing blindly into the dancing flames. “Dear God. What must she be thinking? To travel across an entire continent, alone and unchaperoned, in pursuit of this… this”—she reread the last paragraph of the letter, shuddering violently— “desperado.”

Reginald stomped his slippered foot. “She’s not thinking at all! The chit’s just like her mother. Weak, willful, and at the mercy of every ridiculous feminine whim that drifts through her empty little head.”

Anne felt compelled to defend the niece she’d never met. “Esmerelda has always struck me as such a practical little creature. She survived her parents’ death. She established a music school in her own home and tended her brother when she was little more than a child herself.”

Reginald shook a finger at her. “It’s that wretched boy who’s to blame. The father cost me my Lisbeth and now the son is imperiling Esmerelda.” He faltered as they both realized it was the first time he’d ever spoken his granddaughter’s name aloud.

“This letter is dated over two months ago,” Anne noted softly. “She might already be…”

Their eyes met. This time, neither of them was able to complete the grim thought. Reginald’s gaze strayed back to his lap. With a gentleness utterly foreign to his nature, he pried open the silver locket.

Anne knew what he would find there. A faded daguerreotype of a young girl with a plump toddler cradled in her arms. The little boy with the dimpled cheeks and nest of dark curls had been unable to resist smiling at the photographer, but the girl, striking despite her severe braids and starched pinafore, stared dutifully ahead, her solemn eyes betraying the faintest hint of wistfulness.

The duke studied the locket for several minutes before snapping it shut. “Potter, my cane.”

“Yes, sir.” The butler emerged from his corner to retrieve his master’s cane.

Anne fully expected her brother to resume brandishing it like a rapier, but to her surprise, he planted its brass tip firmly on the rug. Her surprise deepened to shock when he staggered to his feet. An alarmed Potter rushed at him, but Reginald waved him away, growling a warning.

Anne backed away from him as well, clutching her throat. “What in God’s name are you doing?”

She held her breath without realizing it as her brother straightened his hunched back with an almost audible creak. Beneath their gray-fringed brows, his dark eyes glowed with determination.

Standing fully erect for the first time in thirteen years, he pounded his cane on the floor once for emphasis and said, “I, my dear sister, am going to America to rescue my granddaughter from that… that…”

“Outlaw?” Anne whispered. “Renegade?”

Reginald’s upper lip curled in a regal sneer, warning that only the vilest of epithets was to follow. “Cowboy.”

Calamity, New Mexico

Esmerelda Fine eyed the Wanted poster nailed to the porch post of the stagecoach station with a jaded eye. “Billy Darling,” she murmured. “A rather harmless name for such a wicked man, isn’t it?”

“Beggin‘ your pardon, ma’am, but Billy ain’t wicked. He’s just a man that does what needs to be done. If someone needs killin’, he kills ‘em.” The grizzled cowhand who had overheard her musing spat a fat wad of tobacco on the plank sidewalk, barely missing the pleated hem of her skirt. “You cain’t fault a man who enjoys his job. Why, Billy’s the only Darlin’ since the war to turn his hand to good honest work.”

Drawing her skirts close to her legs, Esmerelda cast the man a withering glance. “Which means he kills for profit instead of amusement?”

She turned her attention back to the image of the hired killer glowering down at her from the Wanted poster. The handbill was a weathered twin of the one she’d kept neatly folded in her silk reticule during the long, arduous train and stagecoach journey from Boston. Seeing his ignoble image displayed before all the world gave her some small measure of comfort, reassured her that he wasn’t some imaginary devil woven from the fabric of her darkest fears and fantasies.

A thick growth of whiskers obscured the outlaw’s features, but the menace in his eyes was palpable. How many men had gazed into those steely eyes over the barrel of a pistol and known them to be the last sight they would see on this earth? An invisible cloud shadowed the sun as Esmerelda remembered that her brother had been one of them.

Bitterness tightened her lips as she shifted her gaze from the poster to the cowhand. “So how did such a paragon of industry end up with a price on his own head?”

“Aw, them U.S. marshals got all riled up when Billy brought one in dead that was wanted alive. Seems they needed the feller to testify against a band o‘ bootleggers that’d been sellin’ whiskey to the Comanche.”

“But your Mr. Darling saw fit to administer justice himself. How terribly noble of him.”

Her sarcasm did not escape the old man. “From what I heard tell, miss, Billy had every right to be riled. The feller shot him in the back. If he hadn’t been so all-fired contrary, Billy wouldn’t have had to blow his damn fool head off.”

Esmerelda felt herself blanch. Alarmed by her fading color, the cowhand jerked off her bonnet and began to fan her with it. “Now, miss, you ain’t goin‘ to swoon on me, are you?” He reached for her reticule. “You got any smelling salts in that there fancy bag?”

Shocked by the stranger’s familiarity, Esmerelda clutched the reticule to her bosom, comforted by its solid weight. “I should say not, sir. It’s simply the heat. I’m not accustomed to such a brutal climate.”

That much was true. The brave little bonnet that had elicited such a pang of yearning when she’d seen it displayed in the window of Miss Adelaide’s Millinery Shoppe had done little to deflect the ruthless rays of the sun. The saucy pair of bluebirds affixed to its brim had wilted just west of St. Louis. Esmerelda breathed a sigh of relief at being freed from the bonnet’s sweltering confines. A whisper of a breeze, arid yet sweet, teased the damp tendrils of hair at her temples.

But a lady did not march bareheaded into adversity. Snatching the bonnet from the old man’s hands, Esmerelda slapped it back into place and secured it with a fastidious bow. “If you would be so kind as to direct me to the livery stable, sir…? I am in need of a mount and a dependable guide. If I’m to locate this outlaw before he reaches the Mexican border—”

“Well, hell, miss,” the cowpoke drawled, “there’s no need to go to all that trouble just to have a set-down with Billy.” He winked at her. “There weren’t never a Darlin‘ born that weren’t willin’ and eager to oblige a purty lady.”

Esmerelda cringed at both his offhand profanity and his leering implication. Her dealings with the male sex had been limited to the wealthy Boston merchants who hired her to teach music to their pampered daughters, but she could still summon a disturbing, if fuzzy, image of the methods a ruffian like Billy Darling might use to oblige a woman.

Dashing a trickle of sweat from her cheek with a gloved hand, she scooped up her violin case and hefted the battered leather trunk that contained the few meager belongings she hadn’t sold to finance her journey. “I can assure you that your honorable Mr. Darling won’t be quite so eager to have a set-dawn with me.”

“Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

Esmerelda’s gaze flew to the old man’s smirking face. The trunk slid out of her grip and thumped to the sidewalk. She barely managed to catch her precious violin case before it followed suit. “You’ve seen him? Where? When? Was he alone? Was he armed? Which direction did he take?”

The cowpoke pointed across the dusty street.

Esmerelda shaded her eyes against the sun, struggling desperately to gauge its position. “West? South? How long ago did he depart? Hours? Days? What color horse was he riding?”

“He weren’t ridin‘ no horse, miss. He just walked out o’ Miss Mellie’s whorehouse a little after noon and moseyed right on over to the saloon.”

The plank sidewalk seemed to buckle beneath her feet, giving Esmerelda cause to regret that she hadn’t packed a vial of smelling salts. Her stunned gaze drifted to the weathered facade of the saloon across the street. The tinny notes of a poorly tuned piano spilled out of its swinging doors, barely penetrating the roaring in her ears.

He was there. Now that she knew he was there, she could almost feel him. Coiled. Deadly. Waiting for her.

She swallowed in a vain attempt to stifle the flutter of raw excitement in her throat. She had never dreamed her quest for justice would be fulfilled with such ease. Shock made her voice sound distant and quavery, even to her own ears. “You must fetch the sheriff immediately, sir. I shall insist he march over to the saloon and take the renegade into custody.”

The cowpoke scratched his balding head, his expression oddly reticent. “Uh, miss, the sheriff is already at the saloon. Been there since this mornin‘.”

Esmerelda blinked in confusion. “And what, pray tell, is he doing there?”

“Playin‘ poker, most likely. He and Billy’ve had a runnin’ game for almost three months now. Ever since Billy got shot up and moved into the whorehouse.”

Her eyes widened in disbelief. Nearly choking on her outrage, she glanced frantically around, earning nothing but a polite tip of a passing gentleman’s hat for her trouble. “What manner of place is this Calamity? Surely the townsfolk aren’t content to stand idly by while their sheriff consorts with outlaws!”

“Aw, don’t be so hard on Sheriff McGuire. He’d arrest Billy if he thought it’d do any good. But our jail cain’t hold him. Before the marshal could come to take him to Santa Fe for trial, his brothers would just bring a bunch o‘ dynamite and blast him out. You see, miss, Billy’s brothers is outlaws to the last man. They come from Missoura after the war and there’s some that says they even rode with Quantrill’s Raiders and Bloody Bill Anderson, just like them James and Younger boys.”

Esmerelda shivered. The exploits of those Confederate desperados who had refused to accept that their cause was lost had reached as far north as Boston. The wild-eyed boys and their ruthless leaders had struck terror in the heart of a nation already ravaged by four years of war.

The cowpoke shook his head. “You don’t want to mess with them Darlin‘ boys. They set a high store by Billy, him bein’ the baby o‘ the family and all.”

Esmerelda clenched her teeth against a frisson of rage. How could a cold-blooded killer like Billy Darling be anybody’s baby? Her brother’s face drifted through her memory as it had so many times in the months since his disappearance—his plump, rosy cheeks pale and sunken, his sable hair dulled by blood, the spark of mischief in his eyes doused by the icy, black waters of death.

Beset by a strange and dangerous calm, Esmerelda gently placed her violin case on top of her trunk and dipped a hand into her reticule to caress its sleek contents.

As she stepped off the sidewalk into the dusty street, the cowhand called after her. “Miss! Oh, miss, you forgot your fiddle and trunk.”

“Watch them for me, won’t you?” she replied, studying the beckoning doors of the saloon through narrowed eyes. “I won’t be long.”

Esmerelda Fine’s arrival in Calamity on that lazy Wednesday afternoon had garnered more attention than she realized. While the townsfolk had grown accustomed to having the stagecoach pass through, they were not accustomed to seeing anyone actually disembark from it. Especially not a slender wren of a lady garbed in a bustle and bonnet the provincial folk of Calamity assumed was the very pinnacle of city fashion.

When Esmerelda plunged into the dusty street without a visible care for her high-heeled kid leather boots, curtains twitched and children came creeping out of alleyways. When it appeared her destination was to be none other than the Tumbleweed Saloon, shopkeepers emerged from their deserted stores to sweep the sidewalks, trading curious and wary looks.