Christmas in the Lone Star State Read online

  Even if they made it to the wild country, they would not be leading a life of ease, but then Mal wasn’t deterred by the prospect of hardship. He and his brother had grown up in one of Whitehall’s workhouses and there were few greater hardships than that fate. The Poor Law provided London’s underclass with food, clothing, and shelter. In return, the destitute were put to work. In theory this seemed a compassionate response to the plight of the poor in England. In reality, it punished them. They were worked hard, for long hours, and in return got to live in a small room in a rat-infested hovel and were given rations that barely kept them alive. A cup of gruel and a piece of bread with a dab of butter morning and evening was the usual food allowance. There might be a little meat once or twice a week. A cup of tea was a rare treat. Their mother had been abandoned by their seafaring father before Mal was old enough to remember him, and life in the workhouse had taken their mother fifteen years later. Languishing on her deathbed, she had made Mal promise to always watch out for his brother. Mal had been eighteen years old at the time, his brother two years younger.

  But for that promise, Mal was certain he would have followed in his father’s footsteps and gone to sea. Instead, he and Lute turned to a life of crime, which seemed a better choice than spending their years in a workhouse. They began with petty theft but quickly graduated to more serious crimes—mugging and armed robbery. A phenomenon that came to be called slumming worked in their favor. Middle-and upper-class people began to frequent the East End. Some of them were artists, writers, missionaries, and social workers. Others were just tourists, curious to see how the poor lived. Mal concluded that this made those who were better off feel superior to the denizens of Whitehall, Spitalfield, and Bethnal Green. It became commonplace for gentlemen and their ladies to don coarse clothes and venture into these districts. Many gentlemen, married and single, also went there seeking sexual pleasure, as the East End was full of young women who sold their bodies for money enough to buy food, drink, and opium.

  These gentlemen, and sometimes their ladies, became the targets of the Litchfield brothers. Mal devised a number of schemes to coerce them into parting with their coin. One such caper involved an association with a prostitute—a ladybird, as women of ill repute were called in the East End. There were thousands of such women, many of them concentrated on Flower and Dean Streets, either in brothels or working out of rented rooms. A pretty French girl named Sylvie became a willing accomplice in the extortion of dozens of her well-to-do customers, with Mal and Lute taking care of the blackmailing details. This turned out to be profitable for all three of them. But then Lute’s prodigious sexual appetites ruined everything. Disregarding Mal’s orders to leave her alone, Lute turned his attentions to Sylvie, who was quite a toffer, but who soon balked and ended her partnership in crime with the Litchfields. A few days later she was found knifed to death in an alley. Lute swore to Mal on their mother’s grave that he had not done the dirty deed. Mal didn’t believe him. He had been more than a little fond of Sylvie himself, but had never touched her. Her murder turned out to be a harbinger of things to come.

  Lute’s skill as a cardsharp inspired Mal’s next scheme. Cheating at cards was problematic when trick-taking games like whist and hearts were in vogue. But the growing popularity of poker—first stud, then draw—changed that. It wasn’t that Lute had to cheat, since he was one of the most astute card players Mal knew. But when cheating was called for, few excelled at it like Lute Litchfield. Best of all, this new enterprise took them out of the slums and into better society. They had become known to the constabulary that tried to keep the law in the East End, which made plying their trade there ever more difficult, since the bobbies never hesitated to roust them or even throw them in jail for “cooling off.” Putting Whitechapel behind them, the brothers became accomplished at passing themselves off as gentlemen of means. Mal took the role of shill, and for over a year they did quite well for themselves.

  Then they sat down to a game of stud poker with one Sir Charles Badham, a prominent member of the Tory Party and illustrious member of Parliament. Badham fancied himself a good card player while in truth he was atrociously bad. But the brothers let him win—just not quite as often as he lost. They played regularly and in the process Lute made the acquaintance of Sir Charles’s beautiful raven-haired daughter, Barbara, nicknamed Babs. Convinced that Babs was as innocent and naive as she was pretty, Lute relished seducing her. This went so well that he came up with the notion of marrying the girl, thereby gaining access to the incalculable wealth of her father.

  Being an astute judge of character, Mal was skeptical. He saw Babs in an entirely different light than did his brother. He suspected that she was playing Lute every bit as skillfully as his brother was trying to play her. Why was easy to guess. Though hardly more than twenty years old, Lute Litchfield had established a reputation for sexual prowess. Mal was convinced that Babs was playing the innocent to keep Lute interested. Their trysts occurred in an abandoned cottage tucked discreetly away in a forest near the Badham estate. This went on for a couple of months and Mal saw no harm in it. That changed when Lute informed his brother of his plan to marry Babs. He was going to propose. Then he and Mal would be set for life. Mal failed to talk him out of it, since Lute was convinced that Babs was madly in love with him, and Sir Charles liked him immensely.

  Mal turned out to be right about Babs, as Lute discovered when he proposed marriage. Babs spurned him, having known instinctively that he was not highborn despite his acting skills. She had been meeting him for one thing and one thing only, and love had nothing to do with it. Lute was stunned. She haughtily informed him that while he was good for a roll in the hay he would not share her marriage bed. No, that honor would be reserved to a young man of means, no doubt the scion of a well-to-do and important family. Lute was angry but he let Babs go that time, then talked her into meeting at the cottage just once more, telling her that he and Mal were leaving Britain forever. Mal could only assume that she couldn’t resist the idea of Lute dabbing her once more, but carnal desire proved to be the end of her. Barbara Badham’s body was found the next day, her father having mobilized a small army of constables and citizens to scour the countryside. For those accustomed to reading between the lines when it came to Victorian news accounts of violent crimes, it was clear she had engaged in sexual intercourse before being brutally murdered, stabbed multiple times in the heart.

  This time Lute did not proclaim his innocence. He quite calmly informed Mal that if he couldn’t have Babs, no one would. It was at that moment that Mal realized his kid brother was insane. Lute had always had a mercurial temper and been prone to violence, but now it was clear that the life of any woman Lute took a fancy to was at risk. Other men might have walked away, brother or not. But Lute was the only family Mal had left. And there was that solemn promise he had sworn to his mother on her deathbed. He suspected that Mother had long feared Lute would come to a bad end and that only Mal could save him. Mal had been trying to do so ever since.

  Lord Badham was a man of tremendous wealth and influence, so remaining in England was not even an option for the Litchfield brothers. Mal managed to get them on a ship even though, as luck would have it, Babs had confided to one of the chambermaids in the Badham house all about her trysts with Lute Litchfield. The two young women had enjoyed sharing details of their sexual adventures, whispering and giggling with heads together, eyes bright and cheeks flushed, which the distraught chambermaid divulged following her friend’s horrific death. That Lord Badham’s reach extended to the Americas didn’t surprise Mal—the wanted posters he carried in a pocket were proof. The only place he could think of where they might be able to disappear was the wild frontier. The sooner they put the Brazos behind them, and the fewer the people who saw them, the better.

  Day Four

  CHAPTER TEN

  Mal dozed off shortly before daybreak. When he woke it was impossible to tell the time of day with any degree of certainty. Last night’s fire was d
ead, coated with a layer of snow, but it was beyond him to calculate how much time had to pass before the embers of a fire like the one he had built were cooled enough to allow snow to collect on them. None of that mattered once he realized Lute was nowhere to be seen. At first he thought his brother might be in the brush relieving himself, but privacy wasn’t normally a factor between brothers when it came to pissing and shitting. The horse was present and it whickered softly when it saw Mal get up, so wherever Lute had gotten off to it had been afoot.

  “Lute?” He spoke loudly but didn’t shout. The air was quite still. The snow had stopped falling. There was no wind. The only sounds he heard were made by him and the horse. When no reply came he tugged furiously at his bushy auburn side whiskers, rasped an exasperated “Mary Mother of God,” and told the horse, as he shook a fist, “I swear I’m going to give him a bunch of fives when I see him.” The horse whickered in response.

  He noticed then that the greatcoat was gone. Circling the camp, he found boot prints in the snow. Struggling through the thicket, he picked up the sign again once he broke out into the open. He caught a whiff of wood smoke then, and spotted a dark-gray plume rising above the trees on the other side of a large meadow. It seemed to him that his brother’s boot prints were aimed directly at it.

  “Ah, Lute,” he muttered. “New trouble for a new day, no doubt.”

  He went back to the camp to collect the blanket and horse. He was in a hurry and didn’t waste time rolling the blanket and securing it to the saddle, but tossed it across the horse’s withers and then led the animal out of the thicket on foot, climbing into the saddle once they had emerged into the open.

  He kept the horse to a walk and his hand in the pocket of his coat, the one that contained the revolver, as the footprints in the snow led him across the meadow. Beyond was a narrow strip of timber, and once through that he emerged into another, larger meadow and saw the cabin. Mal checked his horse, curbed his impatience, and surveyed the scene. The plume of smoke he had spotted earlier rose from the cabin’s stone chimney. Nearby was a small barn, and between this and the cabin, a corral. One of the barn doors was open, presumably to allow the animals housed within to venture out into the corral, and there were two mules visible within the confines of the latter. On the other side of the cabin was what Mal took to be an outhouse and another small structure made of stone, which he surmised might be either a springhouse or an icehouse. No one was in view but he noticed that the door of the cabin was ajar, which seemed odd considering the bitter cold of the morning. Even more curious was the chestnut horse standing some distance from the buildings, a lead rope dangling from its bridle. It pawed at the new snow, seeking something edible beneath.

  It was quiet. Almost too quiet, and Mal’s concern for his brother quickly trumped his innate caution. Pulling the revolver from his coat pocket, he thumbed back the hammer and held it on his thigh as he kicked his mount into motion and rode up past the loose horse and on to the corral, keeping his eyes on the cabin door and the single shuttered window. Dismounting, he tied his horse to one of the corral posts. Approaching the door warily, he used his foot to push it open wider. Rusty hinges creaked and then the door thumped against something and began to swing closed. Mal tried pushing it open but an obstacle of some sort prevented it from opening enough for him to pass through, so he put his shoulder against the door and pushed harder, budging the obstacle just enough to make an aperture for him to slip through.

  His heart lurched when he saw the dead man on the floor, even though it only took him a split second to realize it wasn’t his brother. It was the corpse that had blocked the cabin door. To his left a curtain moved—he caught the movement out of an eye corner and whirled, bringing the Gasser around at shoulder level. Lute was standing there, shirtless and bootless, an arm hooked around the throat of a woman and aiming the gun taken from the lawman he had killed aboard the Mustang at Mal. There were specks of dried blood on one side of his face and neck. The woman clutched a tattered old quilt to cover herself, as though modesty was still a priority in a situation where two men were aiming pistols at each other.

  The brothers lowered those pistols simultaneously. Mal started breathing again as he glanced at the man lying facedown in a pool of blood, then at the frightened woman, and finally at Lute and muttered, “What the bloody hell have you done this time?”

  The centerpiece of the cabin was a rough-hewn table with a bench on one side, and Lute made the woman sit on it. She was staring at the dead man, silent tears running down her cheeks. Lute seemed not to notice the tears. He cupped her chin and turned her face toward Mal. “Isn’t she a pretty one, Mal? So sweet and wholesome.”

  Mal thought she was rather plain. It was sometimes hard to gauge the age of woman who had lived a hard life, but he guessed she was closing in on thirty. Her skin was very white, her long tangled hair a nutmeg brown, and her eyes—her most striking feature—an emerald green. Perhaps, he thought, she might be pretty under better circumstances, but it seemed unlikely she would ever luck into those.

  “Get dressed, Lute,” snapped Mal. His tone was brusque, and Lute could see the cold rage in his brother’s expression. He looked rather petulant as he turned and swept aside the curtain and Mal glimpsed a space barely large enough for the bed it contained. Once he had his shirt on he came back to sit on the bench beside the woman and pull on his boots. She had wrapped the worn quilt around her like a makeshift sarong. Mal took a wary look outside then shut the door and leaned against it to glare at Lute.

  “I guess I didn’t make myself clear. We’re trying to get out of this part of the country without anyone else seeing us.”

  Lute could tell his brother was agitated, and he adopted a supplicant’s tone. “I couldn’t sleep much. It was too cold. At daybreak I smelled wood smoke. When I spotted this place I saw the horse in the corral. I decided we needed it worse than he did.” He glanced at the dead man sprawled on the blood-splattered puncheon floor. “I was going to just slip away with it but one of the donkeys started braying as I began to lead the horse away. Then I heard noise from inside the cabin. It’s so quiet out here compared with London, you know? You can hear the smallest of sounds. Anyway, I couldn’t run for it, Mal. I knew if he had a rifle and was any kind of marksman he would have me dead to rights before I reached the bushes. So I rushed the door and got there right when he started out. He had a pistol in his hand, so I stabbed him in the neck a few times “The woman sitting beside him covered her face with her hands and sobbed quietly. Lute patted her on the shoulder. “Then this lovely girl came out from behind the curtain and, well…” He glanced apologetically at his brother and shrugged. “… you know me, Mal. I felt like I should comfort her.”

  Mal was silent for a moment, mulling things over and considering options. For one, Lute had mentioned his name not once but twice, so if they left the woman behind, the death of the man on the floor would certainly be laid at their door. Even if they silenced the woman permanently, once the bodies were discovered assumptions would eventually be made that the men who were responsible for the killing of two lawmen on the Brazos were in all likelihood the ones who had killed two more people a half day’s ride away. His goal of putting the Brazos far behind them without leaving any sign as to the direction they were taking had just been made more difficult, if not impossible, thanks to Lute.

  “Stay put,” he told Lute curtly. He started to go out the door then turned back and added, “Don’t let her out of here.” He left the cabin, shutting the door behind him and walking out to retrieve the chestnut, who stood right where he had first spotted it. He counted it a much-needed stroke of luck that he was able to walk right up to the horse without it bolting. It looked to be a nag, rather old and swaybacked, so he assumed it was so accustomed to humans that running away from one was too great an effort.

  Taking the lead rope, Mal walked it back to the corral, where he tied the rope to the top pole and went into the barn, emerging a moment later with a worn-out old
hull. He had never put a saddle on a horse before, but he had seen horses put into the traces of various conveyances so he was able to figure it out. Back inside the cabin he found the woman hadn’t moved. She sat there staring at the dead man as though under some sort of spell, a stunned expression on her tear-streaked face. Lute was transferring cans of food from a wooden crate nailed to a wall to a burlap sack. Mal went to the fire to stand with his back to it, looking at the woman so intently that something primal, perhaps nape hairs rising, made her glance apprehensively at him.

  “You going to kill me too?” she whispered.

  Lute stopped looting and looked at his brother in time to see Mal shake his head. “What’s your name?”

  “Alise. Alise Graham.”

  “Is that your husband?”

  Alise nodded. “He wasn’t much of nothing, But he was mine.” She covered her mouth with a hand as she strove to hold back another rush of tears.

  “How far to the nearest village?”

  “Village?” She blinked, perplexed, like she didn’t know the word. “Oh … I guess the nearest town would be Cameron, about a half day’s ride west.”

  Mal nodded and made up his mind. “Get dressed. You’re coming with us.”

  “Coming with you?” she whispered. “Where?”

  “Do what I say.”

  She rose and walked unsteadily toward the sleeping area. When she got there she started to close the curtain but Mal told her not to. Turning her back, she let the quilt drop around her ankles and rushed to put on a dress of faded brown gingham. Mal looked at Lute, who stared at Alise for a moment before joining his brother by the fireplace.