Free Midnight Star by Catherine Coulter

at the horses as his whip flailed their backs.
    I am going to die! Crushed beneath the horses’ hooves and the carriage wheels!
    She smelled the thick steaming air blowing from the horses’ nostrils, saw the flecks of foamdotting their necks. She could feel their bodies hurtling against her, crushing her . . .
    “No!”
    Chauncey jerked upright in her bunk, trembling with the crushing fear of the nightmare.
    “Miss Chauncey! Are you all right?”
    She raised dazed eyes to Mary’s concerned face, shadowed in the early-morning light. “I’m all right,” she said, her voice quivering as violently as her body.
    “You dreamed about it again, didn’t you?”
    Chauncey nodded as she ran her hands distractedly through her disheveled hair. “It was an accident,” she said. The words were becoming a litany after each recurrence of the awful dream.
    “Yes it was, in a sense anyway,” Mary said, handing Chauncey a dampened cloth to wipe the perspiration from her forehead. “But it happened in England. Whatever madman it was who tried to run you down is many miles behind us. Lawks, miss, two oceans behind us, now that we’re in the Pacific! There’s no more need for you to fret about it.”
    “But why?” Chauncey asked in a thin voice, like a child who wants reassurance from her parent. “I’ve done nothing to anyone. Who would try to kill me? Not even Aunt Augusta or Uncle Alfred—”
    “Now, you listen to me, Miss Chauncey,” Mary interrupted in her no-nonsense voice, sitting herself beside her mistress on the narrow ship bunk. “That nice sailor saved you, and although he was just in the nick of time, you are alive and unharmed. It was a lunatic who drove that carriage.We know those kinds of folk don’t need reasons. Now, you will think no more about it.”
    But why would a madman be driving such a fine carriage? Why would a madman have his face hidden by a black handkerchief? Why would a madman, driven by insane, inexplicable forces, keep whipping the horses forward, leaving her in the gutter, held up by the sailor who had thrown his body against hers?
    “I just wish it would stop.” She sighed, lying back against the narrow pillow. She did not repeat her thoughts again, for Mary had no answers to the questions that haunted her.
    “It will if you’ll but let it,” Mary said sharply. “Lord knows I’ve nearly forgotten it. Thank the Lord Captain Markham stopped in Los Angeles to bring aboard fresh supplies. If I never eat another fish again it will be too soon!”
    Chauncey forced herself to clear her mind of the memory and swallowed the retort that Mary could well forget it. It wasn’t she who had been nearly killed. She forced a smile to curve up the corners of her mouth. “I fancy the supplies he brought aboard from Valparaiso will bring him more of a profit.”
    Mary’s full lips pursed into a thin line. “What an awful, depressing city that was! At least those trollops keep to themselves! It’s a disgrace that women would willingly accept such conditions! The good Lord knows . . .”
    Chauncey stopped listening, for Mary’s outrage about the young women bound for prostitution in San Francisco was a theme with few variations. “Perhaps their lives will be better,”she said mildly when Mary stopped her diatribe to take a breath.
    “Harrumph,” said Mary. “At least Captain Markham has the decency to keep them away from you.”
    “I am, after all, a paying passenger,” Chauncey said.
    “And a lady! I hope you’ve been paying attention to all Captain Markham’s been telling you. Not all that many proper ladies in this so-called city we’re traveling to. And another thing, Miss Chauncey. All your subtle questions about the wealthy men in San Francisco, Mr. Delaney Saxton in particular—well, I think you should go easy. He might begin to think that you have some sort of unhealthy interest in the man.”
    “I’ve learned all I need to about Mr. Saxton,” Chauncey said. “At