The Shield Bride

I was the Beauchamp ward for eighteen years.

The *traiteur* in the Vieux Carré told them I was the only girl whose blood ran hard enough to absorb three killings off the Beauchamp heir.

The first time, I went off the River Road in a runaway carriage. The second time, a holdup man's knife went in under my collarbone on the Mobile road during Mardi Gras. Both times, Silas was holding Pearl Lacroix when I bled out.

The third time I woke, I was sitting at a vanity table three hours before our engagement banquet, in a Worth gown the seamstress had stayed up two nights to finish, with nine albumen photographs and a tenth telegram from Pearl spread across my lap. I threw the diamond ring at his face before he could finish his greeting.

*This engagement, I am returning. This dying — let whoever wants it have it.*

Five years later, I came home through the New Orleans train shed with a five-year-old boy in a sailor suit holding my hand. Cassius Thorne was waiting at the platform, one hand braced on a porter's cart, his face the color of a man who had been awake since the wire came. He pinned me to a column with the boy still between us and laughed against my ear.

*Sweet sister. You played me, and then you ran?*

Silas was behind him. He had thinned to nothing inside a black overcoat. He was looking at the boy in my arms the way a starved man looks at bread through glass.

*You would carry his child. You would not turn your head once for me.*

I held my son closer. The sun caught his open palm, and I saw the crooked life-line that crossed his hand from base to wrist — the same line that ran across mine.