Sunrise Surrender--Jarrett Family Sagas--Book Three

  Sunrise Surrender

  Jarrett Family Sagas: Book Three

  Vivian Vaughan

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1993 by Jane Vaughan

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com

  First Diversion Books edition June 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-855-2

  Also by Vivian Vaughan

  A Wish to Build a Dream On

  Storms Never Last

  Sweetheart of the Rodeo

  Branded

  No Place for a Lady

  Reluctant Enemies

  The Texas Star Trilogy

  Texas Gamble

  Texas Dawn

  Texas Gold

  Silver Creek Stories

  Heart’s Desire

  Texas Twilight

  Runaway Passion

  Sweet Texas Nights

  Jarrett Family Sagas

  Sweet Autumn Surrender

  Silver Surrender

  Secret Surrender

  Tremaynes of Apache Wells Series

  Chance of a Lifetime

  Catch a Wild Heart

  To Elaine Raco Chase

  “Words, once my stock, are wanting to commend

  … so good a friend.”

  John Dryden

  “To My Friend Mr. Motteux”

  Chapter One

  St. Louis, Missouri

  June 1879

  The ship tossed on an angry sea, rocking the narrow bunk where two lovers lay locked in a heated embrace.

  “Ah, my love,” he whispered, “you have lost none of your passion with time.”

  “And you, ’tis true, have kept your word. You have had no other woman but me.”

  He belted out a laugh as he plunged again and again into her receptive body. “God’s bones, so I have. And you have been true to yours, no other lovers.”

  The woman stared into his face, most of which was hidden in the dimly lit cabin. His dark hair was but a darker shadow now, and his eyes were black, eyes she knew to be the color of the sky on a cloudless summer day. She wondered whether the wee seed growing inside her womb would have the same blue eyes. She hoped so, as she hoped for a son.

  She had not told him of the coming babe. The idea was yet so new and strange she had difficulty accepting it herself. A child on a pirate’s ship. What right had they to rear a child thus?

  And yet they must. For this life was the life they had chosen. Leaving it now, even if they fancied to, would result in a hangman’s noose for the both of them.

  As he drove his lusty body faster and faster into hers, all thoughts of babes and pirate ships and hangman’s nooses receded, swept to sea on a wave of passion so potent that when it crested she cried out, drawing him to her bosom, holding him protectively in sweat-laved arms, while the crying of a babe echoed in her ears.

  “Delta, are you up?” Ginny Myrick’s voice filtered through the closed bedroom door.

  Awakened by her sister’s call, Delta Jarrett sat up in bed. Then the dream came back, stunning her with its sense of foreboding. She clutched her head, squeezing her temples between the heels of her hands, while the colorful patchwork quilt danced like a whirling rainbow before her dazed vision.

  She knew the truth of the dream. Anne Bonny, one of her own ancestors, had borne the child in her womb, not the son she wished for but a girl. Anne had been scheduled to hang immediately after the delivery. Although the details were uncertain, at best, some claimed she had been released from prison and had disappeared with her child. Jack Rackham, Calico Jack they called him, had been hanged for piracy on the high seas without ever learning of the child Anne was to bear him.

  Ginny stuck her head through the doorway to Delta’s room. “Hurry and get dressed, Delta. The boat leaves before noon.”

  When Delta didn’t move, Ginny crossed the room to sit beside her. “Whatever is the matter? You haven’t changed your mind about this journey to New Orleans, have you?”

  Delta lowered her hands. “That dreadful nightmare. I dreamt it again.”

  “Oh, baby.” Ginny folded her arms around her younger sister’s shoulders, drawing her near. From the other room children’s voices clamored for breakfast. Ignoring them, Ginny patted Delta’s back. “That’s what this trip is all about, ridding you of that needling dream. Get dressed and come eat breakfast. By the time you reach New Orleans you’ll be in fine spirits again.”

  Delta shook her head. “The dream is so depressing, Ginny. And repetitive. It’s as if our ancestors are trying to tell me something—to warn me of something—but I don’t understand what.” She raised stricken blue eyes to seek reassurance. Ginny, eleven years her senior, had been more mother than sister to Delta, having taken her in as a youngster even before their mother died three years back.

  “Why do I dream of intimacies between my ancestors?” Delta wailed. “Why, Ginny?”

  Ginny smoothed Delta’s mass of brown wavy hair back from her eyes. “Could be you’re right,” she sighed. “Perhaps our ancestors are trying to tell you something. At twenty-five a girl’s body is ready for marriage and a family. It’s no wonder your brain is barraging you with such things, considering all the offers you’ve refused.”

  “You mean prissy Tommie Babcock?”

  “Among others,” Ginny acknowledged. “If Tommie is too dandified to suit your taste, what about Karl Horner? He’s a farmer, and a successful one, at that.”

  Delta sidestepped the familiar argument. “If I’m dreaming about marriage, why don’t I dream about a respectable marriage? Yours and Hollis’s, for instance.”

  Ginny’s face reddened.

  “I don’t mean about your love—” Delta pulled away, running fingers through sleep-tangled hair. Desperation replaced her embarrassment. “Why do I dream about people who lived a hundred years ago, who led terrible lives? Why do I dream about pirates?”

  Ginny stood, shaking her head.

  “It’s a warning,” Delta persisted, pressing both hands to her heart. “I know it. I feel a heavy, awful sense of foreboding, as if something terrible is about to happen and I’m supposed to prevent it, but—”

  “I don’t believe in such things.” Ginny crossed to the doorway. “For my money your nightmare is a combination of things. First, you’ve had this dream ever since we returned from Summer Valley. Seeing Kale and Ellie so much in love stirred tender yearnings inside you. Word about Carson’s unexpected marriage in Mexico added fuel to the fire. Then there’s the winter. Winters always depress folks, and this one was especially harsh. By the time you reach New Orleans, magnolias will be in bloom, mockingbirds will be singing, and you will be yourself again. You’ll have a fine time with Cousin Brady, and when you return, you’ll be ready to consider an offer from one of the young men who have been pestering Hollis for your hand.”

  Two little faces pushed through Ginny’s skirts, their dark eyes shining.

  “Mama, I’m hungry.”

  “Mama, the bacon’s burning.”

  “Mama, is Delta gonna meet a pirate on the Mississippi River? Can I come too? I want to meet a
pirate.”

  Ginny rested a hand on each twin’s head. “No, Joey, you know pirates don’t travel the Mississippi. You’ve lived in St. Louis all your life. Have you ever seen a pirate set foot on our docks?”

  “No, but I want to.”

  “Me, too,” echoed his twin, Jimmy.

  Delta shook her head to clear it of premonitions and went to kneel before the children. “I’ll make you a deal. Help your mother with breakfast while I dress, and if I meet a pirate on the Mississippi River, you’ll be the first to know.”

  Joey’s little face brightened. “Oh, boy, a scoop for Papa’s paper. We get a scoop.”

  “A scoop,” Jimmy repeated.

  Delta dressed carefully in a gray faille traveling suit, its long fitted jacket and draped skirt liberally flounced with claret. In the months since the dream of her ancestors, pirates Anne Bonny and Calico Jack, began to plague her she had tried every method she could find to deal with the debilitating emotional pall the nightmare cast over her. To keep her mind in the present and away from dreams, she focused on the smallest details of daily life, such as the scent of violets when she powdered her body, the feel of filigree buttons when she did up her jacket.

  Her eyes fell on the open steamer trunk she had packed the night before—snatches of blue cashmere, of yellow watered silk, of delicate white lace peeked from hangers and drawers. Mama Rachael had worked for weeks sewing her wardrobe for this journey, a wardrobe that closely resembled a trousseau.

  Ginny had all but said she wished it were.

  The trip had been Ginny and Hollis’s idea jointly, Delta knew. Ginny thought this voyage aboard the Mississippi Princess would provide the sort of respite Delta needed to shake the burdensome nightmare. Victor Kaney, captain of the fancy new showboat, had offered his vessel to serve as St. Louis’s flagship in a procession to honor the opening of South Pass at the mouth of the Mississippi below New Orleans sometime in July, the exact date to be determined by the completion of the jetties and their subsequent success in removing the sandbar that had blocked river traffic for the last forty years.

  The St. Louis city fathers had gladly accepted Captain Kaney’s offer. Not only was James Eads, the embattled engineer of this project to restore commercial river traffic to the entire Mississippi Valley, one of St. Louis’s most prominent citizens, but many of the major stockholders in Eads’s South Pass Jetty Company were also citizens of St. Louis and had agreed to travel to the festivities aboard the Mississippi Princess.

  Hollis Myrick, publisher of the St. Louis Sun, had been delighted with his wife’s idea. “You can serve as the Sun’s official reporter for this momentous event,” he had told Delta, adding, “and send us travel and human-interest stories from every port along the way.”

  Ginny’s only hesitation had been for want of a chaperon. She certainly couldn’t leave her duties at the paper and the constant job of mothering four young children. Then Hollis had hit upon the solution. His mother, known to all as Mama Rachael, could accompany Delta as far as Memphis, where she had been longing to visit an old friend, Maud Wadkins and her spinster daughter, Hattie Louise. The Wadkins women had fled to St. Louis to escape the yellow fever epidemics that hit Memphis a while back and had insisted on Mama Rachael visiting them as soon as it was safe to travel to their beleaguered city.

  Hollis convinced Ginny that by the time the boat reached Memphis, Delta would have become acquainted with the crew and could travel under their protection the rest of the way to New Orleans.

  If not, he reasoned, Cousin Cameron Jarrett, who worked for the Pinkertons and was stationed in Memphis where the boat was to remain in dock for three days, would note the situation and find a suitable replacement for Mama Rachael.

  Delta agreed to the trip, although the prospect of dealing with her nightmare away from the security of home and Ginny’s support terrified her. It had been a harsh winter, she acknowledged, and she would like a change of scenery. Her brother Kale Jarrett and his wife Ellie were supposed to travel to New Orleans in July, as were another brother Carson and his new bride, Aurelia, whom Delta had yet to meet.

  And Mama Rachael would make an agreeable traveling companion. Having lived with the Myricks almost as long as Delta had herself, the squat little woman with her snow-white topknot was as much grandmother to Delta as to the young Myrick children.

  Pulling her hair well back from her face, Delta wrapped the length of it into a loose twist at her nape. No topknot for her. With her height, inherited from the lanky Jarretts, she didn’t need extra inches. She added a low-crowned straw bonnet decorated with sprigs of silk thistles that complimented the red highlights in her hair, securing it to her mass of hair with several steel hairpins.

  Examining herself in the looking glass, she adjusted the prim white collar that peeked above the gray collar of her jacket, added a pair of small pearl loops to her ears, and pronounced herself ready for the adventure ahead.

  But when she caught her own eye, she realized that more than their color was blue. The melancholy inside her tainted her mood, bringing grave doubts that a simple journey down the Mississippi River, even if it were on a grand new showboat, could chase the demons from her head.

  Ginny believed it was possible, though, and Delta prayed her sister was right. She knew Ginny was not right about the other—she would not return to St. Louis and agree to marry any of the men who had offered for her hand.

  She would rather remain a maiden aunt than become some tiresome man’s miserable wife.

  They heard the steamboat’s calliope before they finished packing the wagon. Hollis loaded the last trunk—Delta had two, Mama Rachael only one—and took the valises and bandboxes the children clamored to hand him. He had returned home from the newspaper office in time to drive the family to the docks to see his mother and Delta safely aboard the Mississippi Princess.

  “Hurry, Hollis,” Mama Rachael encouraged her son. “Whip up this old nag and let’s get on the road. Don’t make us miss the boat.”

  Unlike Delta, Mama Rachael had no misgivings about the trip. She had been packed and ready to go for over a week, and had talked incessantly about the voyage, to the end that the family had given up conducting a conversation on any other topic.

  Today, however, Hollis had other things on his mind. He assisted the women onto the two-seated wagon, then stepped up beside Ginny. For once the children did not have to be prodded to climb aboard.

  Hollis pulled the team into the road and headed for the Market Street docks. Above the clatter of horses’ hooves, the creaking of the wagon, the chatter of the children, and the beckoning tones of the distant calliope, he proceeded to issue last-minute instructions to Delta.

  “Your first stop will be tomorrow at Cape Girardeau.” He spoke with one eye on the road, his head cocked around toward Delta. “You should be able to write an article on the theatrical troupe in time to post it upon your arrival. I’ve already spoken with Captain Kaney. He’s working up an itinerary you can use to set up interviews at each stop down the river.”

  “For shame, Hollis,” Ginny scolded. “You make this voyage sound like a dull business trip. Delta’s supposed to relax and enjoy herself.”

  Delta grinned at her brother-in-law who had served as her surrogate father the last few years. Like Ginny, Hollis had trouble accepting the fact that Delta had grown up. “Don’t worry, Ginny. I know what Hollis is up to. He thinks if I post an article from each stop, he can keep track of my whereabouts.”

  “Delta—” Hollis objected.

  “I don’t mind, Hollis,” she conceded with a feigned grimace. “But as long as I stay on the boat and the boat stays on the river, I doubt there’s much chance I can get lost.”

  When the sternwheeler, Mississippi Princess, came in view, all tongues ceased to wag. Ginny found her voice first.

  “It looks like a wedding cake.”

  Delta gave her a disgusted shrug.

  “It doesn’t look like a pirate ship,” Joey wailed.

&
nbsp; “No, it doesn’t,” Jimmy agreed.

  “It isn’t a pirate ship, stupid,” ten-year-old Katie retorted. “Mama told you there are no pirates on the Mississippi River.”

  “Delta said she’d find us one,” Joey returned.

  “Both of us,” Jimmy added.

  While the family babbled in animated abandon around her, uneasiness stirred inside Delta. She strove to concentrate on the magnificent steamer. It did look like a wedding cake—five tiers of glistening white, each wrapped in a confection of fanciful grillwork, draped in red, white, and blue bunting, and topped by two bright red smokestacks and the largest American flag she had ever seen. A banner strung between the two stacks proclaimed, “Jas. B. Eads, Pride of St. Louis.” The boat’s name, Mississippi Princess, was painted in red and gold on a sign above the giant red paddlewheel at the stern.

  In keeping with the boat’s festive attire, the scene around Pier Fourteen where she was docked resembled a Fourth of July celebration. Hundreds of people milled about, the men in polished silk hats and patent leather boots, the ladies in the latest fashions, their parasols creating a rainbow of color up and down the usually drab wharf.

  Day-to-day activity at the St. Louis wharves, as old-timers were fond of reminding everyone, did not compare with the bustle before the war. The scant five or six boats lined up at the mile-long wharf on any given day generally served as a bleak reminder of the dozens of boats that had vied for berth space in years past.

  But pessimism was not the spirit of the day. Revelry infected the area around the Mississippi Princess and all who had come to see her off. The calliope had given way to a brass band that blared from the top deck. Below, near the gangplank, a fiddler, a small man close to Delta’s own size, feverishly produced a feisty tune she did not recognize, but one that set her feet to tapping, nonetheless. Loose bow strings flew about his swarthy, angular face.