Johanna Lindsey - Once a Princess

Up a narrow flight of stairs and down an even narrower hallway, Wilbert Dobbs' voice, raised in complaint about the tardiness of his breakfast, drew them directly to him. He did not sound like a sick man. He sounded like an irate, hungry man.

Lazar was still finding this part of their quest very entertaining, likely because Vasili was not. Close to laughter again, he wondered aloud, "Do you suppose that green-eyed dragon below is the lazy slut he's calling for?"

"Slut maybe, but lazy?" Serge replied. "She's working herself into the grave, if you ask me. She looks about two steps from it."

Serge could be even more blunt than Vasili in speaking the obvious, and having the obvious pointed out so blaringly stirred Stefan's guilt for his sharpness with the girl just now. She did look overworked, cruelly so, and that could be the cause of her bad temper, rather than what had happened last night. At any rate, he shouldn't have let her prod his own temper.

"What is this?" Vasili demanded impatiently. "That impudent bitch isn't worth our curiosity, particularly when the whereabouts of the princess could be revealed in a matter of moments."

"Or not," Serge pointed out, though he reached for the door handle. "And I would just as soon have delayed another 'not'."

"Damn you, Tanya!" they were greeted before the door finished its inward swing. "What excuse..."

The words died off as the four men filed into the small room, crowding it with their size. Wilbert Dobbs jerked up in his bed, no easy feat with his bloated body.

"Here, now, how'd you get in here?" he blustered, though there was a marked improvement in his tone of voice, a deference for his betters, which they personified in the richness of their dress as well as their bearing. "Tanya knows I don't want no visitors."

"If you refer to the wench below, then you may absolve her, for she did her best to turn us away," Lazar volunteered.

"Not good enough," Dobbs snorted. "All right, then, let's hear it. What do the likes of you fine gentlemen want with me?"

"We are here on a matter concerning your deceased wife," Lazar answered.

"Iris? What, has she been bequeathed something by that fine family that disowned her for marrying me?"

Dobbs laughed at the thought that something might finally have come out of that mistake. Iris had married him in desperation because her rich lover wouldn't have her after she got with child. Dobbs had thought she'd add a little class to the tavern he'd just opened in Natchez, so he'd jumped at the chance to offer his name. But she'd lost the brat and got slovenly after that, so they'd both lost out on the bargain.

His hope of a belated inheritance was quickly dashed, however. "We know nothing of your wife's family, Mr. Dobbs," he was told by the same man. "Our interest is in the woman with whom she departed New Orleans nearly twenty years ago."

"The crazy foreigner?"

"Your wife mentioned her to you, then?" Lazar asked.

"I met her myself when I caught up with Iris."

He didn't like being reminded of that time his wife had run away from him, going home to New Orleans to beg her folks to take her back, futilely as it turned out. He'd had every intention of beating her senseless, despite the fact that she was returning to him. But she'd had that foreign woman with her who'd died of the fever within hours of his finding them, and the woman's baby. It had galled him to forgo beating her, but Iris had needed her faculties intact to care for the baby. And the baby had been more important at the time, for he'd already decided to keep it. In a few years she'd be as good as any slave, and she'd cost him nothing.

As he recalled how he'd come by Tanya, his expression turned wary and his tone became belligerent. "There's not much to tell about that woman. She didn't have a penny to her name, but she managed to talk Iris into taking her along with her, even though the going wouldn't be easy traveling by wagon. But Iris always was softhearted. "

"With a direct river route between New Orleans and Natchez, why was your wife traveling by land and without escort?" Lazar asked.

"She didn't have the fare for no riverboat either, not that it's any of your business. But she'd gone down there with the wagon, my wagon. She's damn lucky she didn't sell it—" Dobbs fell silent with a scowl, aware that he was saying more than they needed to know, but having already blurted out so much, he confessed, "The wife thought to run off from me, but realized she had nowhere to go. She was coming back when I found her camped along the river road, trying to nurse the woman. But she was burned up with fever, and shouting all kinds of nonsense about assassins and kings, mostly in languages we'd never heard before, and mostly about failing her duty, whatever that was. She died in her sleep that night, and that's all there is to tell."

"I think not, Mr. Dobbs," said the clipped voice of the dark man with the devil's eyes. "You forget to mention the child."

More than the others, who were all too serious-looking by half, this man unnerved Dobbs with his strange, piercing eyes. He seemed to be in the grip of some powerful emotion, tightly controlled, but frightening just the same. The same intense emotion was apparent in all of them, really, just more obvious in this one, but it made Dobbs wonder what was so important about the information they sought and why, after all these years, they were even seeking it.

His expression still wary, but his tone more affable, he said, "I didn't forget. It's just a sad thing to remember, is all. There was a baby, yes, but it caught the fever from its mother. There just weren't nothing me or Iris could do to save it, much as we tried. "

"Dead!?"

The incredulous exclamations came at Dobbs from two different directions at once. He didn't know whether to elaborate on what he'd said or demand some answers of his own. But his hands had begun to sweat, his brow, too, not because he was lying, but because those devil's eyes were trying to see right inside his head. He was sure of it.

He cleared his throat, surreptitiously wiping his palms on his blanket. "What's your interest in that baby? You're all kind of young to be the father, ain't you?" No answer came, which unnerved him even more.

And then the blond one, whom he'd barely noticed because his handsomeness made him seem less dangerous than the others, flung a retort at him. "There was only one grave found, the woman's. A mere pile of stones, guaranteed to crumble. "

The contempt in that voice, making it sound as if Dobbs had been deliberately inept, got his dander up.

"What was I supposed to do, dump her in the river?" Dobbs demanded. "When you don't have no shovel, you make do in these parts."

"There was still only the one grave, Mr. Dobbs," observed the one with blue eyes.

"The baby didn't die the same day. We'd already moved on."

The questions came at him from all of them then, and he had barely enough time to answer one before the next was shot at him.

"How many days later?"

"A few."

"Exactly?"

"Two, dammit!"

"What time of day?"

"How the hell should I remember?"

"What time did he die, Mr. Dobbs?"

"He? What he? She's a girl."

"She is? Or was?"

"Was! Was! What the hell is this? It don't make a peck of difference what she was, or what time she died. She's dead — that's all you need to know!"

"I'm afraid not, Mr. Dobbs. We require proof."

"Proof that you will have to supply, Mr. Dobbs, since you claim to have buried her."

"In other words, Mr. Dobbs, you will have to lead us to her grave."

Dobbs stared at the three who had just spoken as if they were crazy. But they were serious, dead serious. The dark one with the unholy eyes hadn't said a word during the interrogation, nor did he now. He just watched, and listened, and made Dobbs even more uneasy with his silence.