The Scent of Jasmine (Edilean 4)

Adam spoke. “When we were in Charleston, Nate questioned someone who mentioned New Orleans, so he made one of his ‘educated guesses’ as to where she was heading. Our plan was that I’d go to New Orleans and Tally would go into the swamps to find you two. Anyway, Tally was dying to go.”

“I think he’d like being an explorer.”

“Did you?” Adam asked.

“I enjoyed the company,” Alex said with a smile as he remembered times with Cay.

“I think I’ll skip that part, if you don’t mind. After all, we are talking about my little sister. Did you find out why the woman, Megs, chose you to pull this trick on?”

“It was one of the first things I asked her. She said that there were many men in Charleston who looked at her with eyes glazed in lust—those were her exact words: ‘glazed in lust.’ But I was different in that I had no family there, and the only people I knew hadn’t known me for long. She said that after her faked suicide, she figured I’d leave town and never see any of them again.”

“I take it that means she was only thinking about your welfare, not her own.”

“According to her.”

“So what was the story this woman gave you to explain her perfidy?”

Alex sat down. “I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I’ll repeat what she told me. She said her father wanted to prostitute her out. He said her beauty could make them a great deal of money, but Megs had other plans for her life. When she was sixteen, she saw her chance to run away and took it. About twenty miles from where she grew up, she saw a carriage that had overturned, and the driver and the passenger, a young lady, were lying on the side of the road, both of them dead. I have to give it to Megs that she can think fast—and she seems to have no conscience about what she does to people. Anyway, she traded clothes with the dead girl and rolled her corpse into a river. When the bloated body was found weeks later, her father identified it as his daughter.”

“So she got rid of him by faking her own death,” Adam said. “Since it worked that time, I guess that’s why she decided to use the same ploy again years later. What did she do when she was dressed in her fine clothing?”

“She went to the nearest rich estate and presented herself as a young lady who had lost her memory.” Alex grimaced. “When I knew her, she said she couldn’t understand my accent, but today I found out that she’s good at mimicking. She showed me her original, impossible-to-understand London accent, then switched to the sounds of the English aristocracy. She even imitated my Scottish brogue. She should have gone on stage.”

“I give it to her that she has courage.”

“That’s not what I would call it.” Alex lit his cigar. “To make a long story short, a few years later, she married the rich widower who owned the house. He was forty-five and she was nineteen.”

“Were they in love?”

“Megs said they were, but who knows? She used to tell me that she loved me more than life itself.”

“Maybe she wasn’t lying,” Adam said, and Alex gave a guffaw.

“With her, I’ll never know. It seems that her entire life has been a lie.”

“Maybe a necessary one.”

“If that’s supposed to make me have sympathy for her, I ask you to go through what I did and see if you can make yourself care about her unhappy life.”

“But then, she was the reason you met my sister,” Adam added.

Alex smiled. “Even evil sometimes has good inside it.”

“Was the murder what made her come to America?”

“Aye, it was. Her husband’s nephew, who was to inherit, showed up, and he didn’t take kindly to his rich uncle marrying a young, fertile woman. He hired some men to search and found out who she actually was.”

“Ah, blackmail.”

“At first, but she says it became something much worse. When he persisted in trying to blackmail her, molest her, all of it, Megs picked up a candlestick, hit the nephew over the head, and killed him.”

Adam sat there, looking at Alex for a moment. “For her to go back to get a certificate declaring your marriage to be invalid would mean she’d have to stand trial for murder.”

“Aye, she would,” Alex said quietly. “I told her that I hope she can escape that, so I’ve promised to help her in any way that I can, but I’m not going to give up my life for her.”

“And she’s willing to return to England to face this?”

“Not at all. In fact, she threatened to hit me with a candlestick.” Alex looked at Adam. “I don’t trust her. Right now I have those guards Nate hired in the room with her. I know that if she were given half a chance, she’d flee. Any woman who could do what she did to me, I don’t trust. I’m going with her, first to Charleston, then to England. Whatever I have to do to get the proof that an American judge needs, I’ll do it. If she has to stand trial for murder, so be it. I’ve sworn to her that I’ll stay with her out of . . . of respect for another human being, but that’s all. Maybe I’ll change, but right now, I feel that if they hang her, she deserves it.”