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Chapter One
Audrey Magill went into the Third Street antique store looking for a chair and found a man instead. His gaze caught hers within moments of her entering, no easy feat since the place was crowded with Gilded-Age furnishings, Baroque mirrors, Victorian serve ware and Art Deco lamps. He watched her no matter where she moved, with dreamy brown eyes beneath a fall of dark hair that tumbled insouciantly over his forehead. And he smiled at her, too, in a way that was shrewd, sexy and seductive. Without saying a word, he enchanted her. Unable to help herself, she picked her way through the shop’s wares until she stood in front of him and met his gaze full-on. Up close, his eyes were even more eloquent and his smile even more succulent, and she was helpless not to return it.
And when she discovered it would only cost a hundred dollars to take him home with her, she was delighted. Especially since that hundred dollars included the frame.
“Captain Silas Leyton Summerfield,” the woman behind the counter said when she saw Audrey looking at the portrait. She was in her mid-fifties, with chin length salt-and-pepper hair and eyes made large by the thick lenses of her even larger glasses. “He was a riverboat captain,” she added as she came out from behind the counter. “He lived from 1839 to 1932, and when he wasn’t shipping silk and coffee between New Orleans and Philadelphia, he called Louisville home.” She came to a halt beside Audrey to look up at the painting, and judging by the smile on her face, the woman had very much enjoyed having the good captain’s company in her shop. “He owned a house on this very street, in fact. Up near Ormsby.”
“That’s where my house is,” Audrey replied.
The salesclerk turned to look at her. “What a coincidence. Captain Summerfield lived at number three-eighteen. Might he have been your neighbor were he still alive?”
Audrey smiled, shaking her head. “No, he would have been my roommate. Three-eighteen is my address.” She looked at the portrait again, and although she knew it wasn’t possible, his smile seemed to have changed just the tiniest bit, looking even more shrewd and seductive than it had before. Although she knew she had a greater need to spend a hundred dollars on other things, she asked, “Why is he so inexpensive?”
The shopkeeper gave her a funny look. “He’s not. That painting is priced at a thousand dollars.”
Damn, Audrey thought. She must have missed a zero on the sales tag dangling from the frame. She looked at it again, arrowed her black brows downward, then lifted it for the salesclerk to see. “It says a hundred dollars here.”
The salesclerk opened her mouth to say something, but looked at the price tag first. She saw what Audrey did–there were clearly only two zeros after the one and before the decimal point. She closed her mouth and frowned. “I guess Mrs. Tenney marked him down for some reason. That’s definitely her handwriting. A hundred dollars he is.”
Audrey smiled again. “Then I guess I’m just going to have to take Captain Summerfield home with me.”
“Sounds as if it were fated,” the woman agreed. But there was still a note of bewilderment in her voice, and she was still looking at the price tag when she said, “I’ll wrap him up for you.”
“Thank you,” Audrey replied. “But I actually need to look at a few other things, as well. I’m just moving into the neighborhood, but my house is zoned for my business, too, and I need a few things for both.”
She explained to the clerk that she would be opening a hat shop–which she’d dubbed Finery, after her maiden name of Fine–in less than a week, to coincide with the start of the Kentucky Derby Festival. The two weeks preceding the Derby, she hoped, would be enormously lucrative, since every woman who was any woman had to have a hat to wear on race day.
Audrey Fine Magill intended for her name to be the one dripping from everyone’s lips when it came time to buy their Derby headwear, and she hoped to make enough in the next few weeks to sustain her for much of the rest of the year. She’d done reasonably well for herself the last few Derbies, making hats and selling them through local boutiques and on the Internet. Now, she knew, the time was right to open her own place.
At least, she hoped the time was right. Just as a precaution, she’d sold her house in the suburbs and bought a rambling brick Victorian in Old Louisville instead, intending to use the first floor as her business and the upper floors as her home. She’d learned working as an accountant that new businesses were risky ventures under the best of circumstances. But she’d also learned as an accountant that one’s annual income could depend on a short span of time every year. She was, after all–or, rather, had been–a tax accountant.
She swallowed the fear that rose every time she remembered she’d left an extremely rewarding career to pursue what many of her coworkers had thought was a pipe dream. Hats, of all things, they’d said. Who bought hats in this day and age?
In Louisville? In April? Audrey had countered. Plenty of women. And a lot of them didn’t even balk at price tags in excess of three or four hundred dollars, especially if it guaranteed that their chapeaux would be one of a kind and fashioned to match their Derby ensembles perfectly. Her orders alone–which she’d been taking since October–had kept her busy for months.
Before leaving Tenney’s Antiques, Audrey found not only a chair, but a pair of lamps and a mirror, too, in addition to the delectable Captain Summerfield. She had no idea where she’d hang the good captain, since the business part of her house had deliberately been decorated in an impossibly feminine décor that his overwhelming testosterone–even if was oil on canvas–would in no way complement. But she’d figure out something. The coincidence of his having once owned the place, coupled with his very affordable price, had just made him too good to leave behind.
If there was one thing Audrey Fine Magill had learned in life, it was that good men were few and far between. She’d been married to one of them, once upon a time–the best, in fact, Sean Magill–and had lost him. Captain Summerfield would be the perfect companion for her–handsome, gentle and easy to talk to, just as Sean had been. The three years since his death had been the loneliest Audrey had ever known. It would be nice to have a man around the house again. Even a painted one. That was preferable, in fact.
“Since you’re right up the street, I can have everything delivered this afternoon, if that will be all right,” the salesclerk told Audrey.
“That will be perfect,” she replied. And with a little wave to Captain Summerfield, she paid her bill and went home.
#
She wasn’t quite as beautiful as he’d first thought. Oh, certainly, she was a handsome woman, with ebony hair that spilled like a curtain of silk to the middle of her back, and blue eyes that proclaimed her every emotion. But her mouth was a bit too full, and her nose not quite delicate. Her eyes, too, as clear and intelligent as they were, were almost too large for the rest of her. But her figure was exquisite, full where a man liked to see fullness and trim where he preferred a woman be small. And her smile… Well. That made up for much, for it, too, was larger than most women claimed. Mrs. Magill had a very good smile indeed.
She would do, he decided. Yes, she would do nicely.
Captain Silas Leyton Summerfield watched with much interest his houseguest–or, rather, his hostess, he supposed, since it was she, not he, who owned the house now–noting with masculine appreciation her poetic motion and economy of movement. And he marveled that she could manage both. Most women, he had observed on many occasions, were either poetic or economical, but rarely–if ever–both. They existed either to look beautiful or to work hard, and neither the twain should meet. Audrey Fine Magill, however, seemed to exist for both.
Intriguing.
Styles had much changed since last he was home, he further noted. Though he recalled seeing dungarees similar to those she wore on stevedores and crewmen in his time, he’d never known women to don them, even for cleaning and moving things into an attic, as Mrs. Magill was doing now. And the white shirt she wore–at least it had been white when she started working, even if it was streaked with dirt now–was strangely free of any sort of closures like buttons or laces, and it clung to her body like a second skin.
Very intriguing indeed.
What was less intriguing–and more than irritating–was the wall she had chosen for his portrait. A man of his stature and character should not be relegated to the third floor landing. The painting belonged in the main room downstairs, over the fireplace, where it had hung for more than four decades when Silas was alive. Ah, well. He could fix that soon enough. After she went to sleep tonight. In fact, he’d be fixing quite a few things once Audrey Magill was asleep tonight. The portrait was actually the least of his concerns.
He did, after all, have a soul to save.
#
Audrey dreamed of Captain Summerfield the night after she hung his portrait in her home. In her dream, she awoke in one of the bedrooms downstairs, but it wasn’t furnished the way she currently had it furnished–in Contemporary Living Out of Boxes. Instead, the room looked like something from a nineteenth century novel. Written by Melville. During a testosterone surge. From using steroids. Abusively.
The bed was the only thing in the room that could be remotely called modest. But even it was a black, wrought-iron monstrosity piled high with pillows atop goose down, instead of the low-slung platform bed with memory foam that she owned and had set up in the attic room on the topmost floor that she’d decided would be her bedroom. The rest of the furnishings were massive, aggressively hewn mahogany, from the oversized armoire to a highboy tall enough that Audrey, at five-four, could barely see over its surface. Hanging above the windows, where she had at least managed to get up some iridescent sheers, were instead heavy drapes of dark blue velvet that were held back with thick gold braid. And instead of the antique floor lamp with the embroidered, beaded shade she’d placed in that room, an oil-burning lamp whose fuse was turned low burned at the side of the bed. She wrinkled her nose at the unpleasant odor, thinking it odd, because she’d never smelled things in her dreams before.
As she sat up on the side of the bed and looked down at herself, she half expected to find herself clothed in an old-fashioned, white cotton chemise. But she was wearing what she’d had on when she went to bed, striped pajama bottoms and a Louisville River Bats T-shirt.
Somehow, she knew she was supposed to go down to the living room for something, so she made her way out of the bedroom and down the stairs, which didn’t creak nearly as much as they did in reality. The rest of the house was furnished much as the bedroom had been. Her own sparsely scattered furnishings and half-empty boxes were gone, and in their place were pieces similar to what she’d seen in the antique shop that day. Only they didn’t look like antiques for some reason, at least not all of them. The house was much darker than she was used to, too. And not nighttime dark. Just…dark. The colors, the furniture, the rugs, all of it. Even so, strangely, although there were no lamps burning in any of the other rooms she passed on her way downstairs, she could see everything very well.
Just as her bare foot connected with the hardwood floor of her living room, she smelled something burning again, but this time it was the more pleasant aroma of pipe smoke. Audrey smiled when she smelled it, because the fragrance reminded her of her father, who had died when she was in college. As a girl, she’d loved watching him fill his pipes, and still remembered the metallic snick of his lighter opening before he lit one. They were comforting smells and sounds still, the same way the aroma of meatloaf and the click of eyeglasses folding reminded her of her late mother. Halfway thinking she would enter the living room to find her father sitting there–and perhaps her mother, too–Audrey kept walking.
There was a fire crackling in the fireplace, even though the evenings lately had been too warm to warrant them, and a row of wooden ships lined the mantelpiece where should have been a display of her hats. Above them, where Audrey had hung the stylized logo for Finery, was the portrait of Captain Summerfield. His face was bathed in dancing amber light, courtesy of another oil lamp that burned atop a ruggedly fashioned antique end table near an overstuffed Queen Anne chair. A book was turned face down in the chair’s seat, and as she drew nearer, Audrey saw its title was Mr. Midshipman Easy by an author named Frederick Marryat.
Not one of her father’s. He’d preferred cop stories over anything else and had never touched historical fiction.
She looked up and was about to walk forward again, toward the dining room, when a shadow in the stairway landing above and to her left seemed to…move. She would have been alarmed had she not been dreaming. But then, had she not been dreaming, she would have been alarmed the moment she woke up and found her bedroom redecorated by HGTV’s latest makeover show, Melville My Room. So instead of running away from the shadow, Audrey turned around and walked back to the stairs.
It was then that the shadow took form and turned into Captain Summerfield. He stood in the second floor landing gazing down at her, looking almost exactly as he did in his portrait. Though in place of the black uniform jacket with brass buttons, he was dressed in a roomy white shirt, open at the throat, and black trousers. His only accessories were black boots and a cut-crystal snifter half-filled with brandy that he cradled in one hand. His dark hair a was tad longer than in the painting, but his smile was every bit as tempting, and his brown eyes were every bit as knowing. He looked to be in his early to mid-forties and was taller than she would have guessed, easily topping six feet. He, she was certain, wouldn’t feel at all minimized by the stalwart furniture with which he had filled the house when it was his.
And how did she know this was the furniture that had filled his house? she immediately asked herself. She was dreaming. All this furniture came from her own imagination, just like the good Captain had.
“Madam,” he said by way of a greeting. His voice was as dark as the rest of him, yet as rich and mellow as the spirits in his glass. “How nice of you to visit.”
She smiled at him, wondering why she didn’t feel intimidated by him. “I’m not visiting. I live here now.”
He smiled back, and something about the gesture made Audrey feel very intimidated indeed. The reaction was only compounded when he began a slow descent down the stairs, his eyes never leaving hers.
“No, I live here now,” he told her certainly. “You won’t live here for more than a hundred years.”
“This is just a dream,” she replied, the words coming out a little shakier than she wanted. Then again, she was a little shakier than she wanted.
So that explained that.
“Yes, it is a dream,” he agreed. “But whose? Mine or yours?”
She opened her mouth to reply, then realized she wasn’t sure how to answer. I must be hers, she wanted to say. Because she wouldn’t be conscious of one of his. She would only be a figment of it.
He came to a halt on the last stair before stepping down into the living room, something that only enhanced his overpowering height–and presence. “Actually, the now is immaterial,” he told her. “Right now, there is no now. There is only this dream. And it doesn’t matter whose it is. Only that both of us be in it.”
“And why is that?” Audrey asked.
“Because I need to speak to you, and I can’t do that outside of a dream. Well, I can,” he immediately corrected himself. “But I much prefer this manner instead.”
Weird dream, Audrey thought. She was going to have to cut back on the Chunky Monkey ice cream before bed.
“What did you want to speak to me about?” she asked.
“About my great-great…” He paused, seemed to think hard about something, ticked off a few numbers on his fingers, then waved a hand in front of his face. “About a descendent of mine.”
She hadn’t thought about him having descendents. But he might very well have family still living in Louisville. People from here tended not to move away very much, so it was likely.
“What about him? Or her?” she added.
“Him,” Captain Summerfield told her. “Nathaniel Summerfield. My great-great… Well, he’s a grandson of some kind.”
“I didn’t realize you were married.”
Not that she’d really given it any thought. After all, she’d just met Silas Summerfield that afternoon.
He took a step to the side, then lowered himself to the floor in front of Audrey, something that crowded his body against hers, even though their bodies weren’t quite touching. Instinctively, she took a step backward. When she did, her foot tangled with the edge of the Oriental rug, making her stumble for a moment, but she grabbed the newel post and righted herself just as the good captain was reaching out to steady her. She was back on solid footing before he would have touched her, and she was suddenly strangely sorry she hadn’t fallen. She would have liked to see what happened when he touched her. Would his hand go right through her arm? Or would she feel the warmth of his fingers curling over her bare flesh?
And why did she even ask herself that? Not only was this just a dream, but so far, everything else in it felt substantial enough. Why wouldn’t Captain Summerfield be substantial, too?
After a small hesitation, he withdrew his hand and strode into the living room. Audrey followed until he came to a halt by the fire. He placed a hand on the mantelpiece and gazed into the flickering flames, lifting the brandy to his mouth for a generous taste before speaking again.
“My marriage only lasted six months,” he said when he finally did. “We were both very young. She was the daughter of one of my father’s business partners, and we…” He sighed deeply and turned to look at Audrey. “Well, as I said, we were very young. And impulsive. And neither knew to take the proper measures against…”
“She got pregnant and the two of you had to get married,” Audrey finished for him.
His expression changed at her assessment, but she wasn’t sure if it was because he was distressed at the mention of his wife’s doubtless unwanted condition or because he was perturbed by Audrey’s frankness. Finally, he said, “Yes. She increased. Unfortunately, she didn’t survive our son’s birth.” Before Audrey had a chance to remark on that, he hurried on, “As her mother was also deceased, my mother took the child and raised him. After Rebecca and I married, I had taken a position on one of the riverboats that traveled between New Orleans and New York, so I was often absent. I barely knew my son, Mrs. Magill. For that matter, I barely knew my wife.” He looked into the fire again. “Even after the boy grew to be a man, married and had children of his own, I saw him only sporadically. I wasn’t suited to family life. I grew too…restless.”
Really weird dream, Audrey thought. Captain Summerfield’s portrait had definitely made an impression, if she was dreaming about exchanging deep, dark secrets with the guy.
“In any event,” he continued, “my son’s sons married and had sons, and then their sons married and had sons, and so on and so forth, and each new generation made the Summerfield name more honorable and more respected than the one before it.” He looked at Audrey again, and the unmistakable, unmitigated fury in his eyes pinned her to the spot. “Until now,” he said. “My great-great…et cetera…grandson Nathaniel Summerfield has been suffering for some time now from a slowly deteriorating sense of duty and obligation. Over the years, he has blurred his personal line between right and wrong to the point where it is nearly indistinct. The boy is in terrible danger from himself, and I need for you to go speak with him.”
“Me?” Audrey echoed. “Why me? I don’t even know your great-great-et-cetera grandson.”
“There will be an article about him in tomorrow’s newspaper,” Captain Summerfield told her. “Read it, and everything will be made clear. You must go speak to him directly after reading about him.”
“And tell him what?” Audrey asked. “That his great-great-et-cetera grandfather visited me in a portentous dream and made me go talk to him about his representation in the media?”
Silas Summerfield sighed heavily. “No, Mrs. Magill. Tell him I visited you in a portentous dream and asked you to tell him that he’s in danger of losing his soul.”
“What?”
“And that once lost,” the captain continued as if she hadn’t spoken–or, rather, yelled–“his soul will be gone forever.”
“Oh, well, in that case,” Audrey said sarcastically, “he’s sure to listen to every word I say. Then call the guys in the white jackets.”
Silas Summerfield’s expression turned confused. “What men in white jackets?”
“It’s a figure of speech,” Audrey told him.
“Translation?”
“They’d haul me off to the loony bin.” Then, in case that particular phraseology hadn’t been around in the captain’s time, she clarified, “An insane asylum. Madhouse. Bedlam. The place where they put people who see and hear things that aren’t really there.”
He smiled at that. “Ah. Then you shall have to phrase your admonition to my grandson about the loss of his soul in a way that sounds logical and credible.”
“Oh, is that all?” Audrey said. “No problemo.”
“Do whatever you have to do, Mrs. Magill,” the captain told her. “Because tomorrow, Nathaniel will enter into a business liaison with a very dangerous man. A criminal. One who surrendered his own soul quite willingly long ago. And the product of this enterprise will completely sever the tenuous hold the boy has left on his soul. You must speak to him, Mrs. Magill, and you must do it tomorrow. Otherwise, the boy will be lost. Forever.”
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