Yankee Wife

by Linda Lael Miller

  “Go ahead,” he taunted with gruff ease, “lose your temper, Miss McQuire. Let out all that rage inside you, and deal with it.”

  Lydia's throat closed, and her grip on the doorjamb tightened. She'd thought her private fury well-hidden, and to have the likes of Brigham Quade read so deftly from the pages of her soul only increased it. She wanted to fling herself at him, screaming and clawing, kicking and biting, not because he'd done her any real wrong, but because there were so many violent feelings trapped within her.

  “I'm not angry,” she said, the chatter of the children at the kitchen table seeming far away.

  Brigham ran his eyes over her, insolently, making her flesh leap in secret response beneath her dress and underthings. “Liar,” he replied.

  Rage rocked Lydia. She closed her eyes, struggling against it, afraid as always of what would happen if she ever opened a door on the storm in her spirit. Once let loose, it might never be contained again.

  Brigham continued to stare at her, hair dripping, eyes mocking her. Challenging her. Then he turned away to toss the contents of the basin into the deep grass, and inexplicably some barrier within Lydia gave way.

  She forgot the children, forgot the tenets of civilization. She lunged from the step, landing on Brigham's back like a wildcat, one hand clutching his shirtfront in a choking hold, the other knotted into a fist and pounding at his back. All the while, a low, barely-audible animal sound surged from her throat.

  Brig pressed her down into the grass, bruising it, releasing its sweet green fragrance like a perfume, kneeling astraddle her hips, but he made no effort to restrain her flying fists.

  In those terrifying minutes, he represented war, and pain, and hunger. He was the night screams of wounded children scattered over battlefields, he was injustice and cruelty. He was Lydia's own helplessness in the face of those things.

  Lydia pounded at his chest until she was exhausted, then lay still in the grass, breathless and horrified at what she'd done. Tears slipped over her cheekbones, to fall away into her hair and trickle into her ears.

  Brig backed away slightly, drew her up gently into his arms and held her. She knotted her fingers in his shirtfront, unable to let go.

  “Poor little Yankee,” he said, his lips warm at her damp temple. “The war's over now. There's no need to be afraid.”

  Lydia came back to herself then, realized what a spectacle she'd made, leaping on Brigham like a she-wolf from a high rock, carrying on like someone who should be wrapped tightly in a wet sheet and calmed with tincture of opium. Charlotte and Millie were standing in the doorway of the kitchen, watching the scene with unreadable expressions.

  “Oh, dear God,” Lydia whispered, trying to push Brigham away even though she felt faint.

  He rose to his feet, drawing her with him, holding her against his chest. The scent of his hair and skin weakened her further. “It's all right, Lydia,” he said sternly.

  She wanted him to lift her into his arms, carry her up the stairs to his bed and take complete control of her mind and body, at least for a little while, and that wanting was the most frightening thing of all. She pulled free, backed away, smoothed her hair, which was falling around her shoulders, with shaking hands.

  Brigham gazed at her for a long moment, chest heaving, shoved a hand through his tousled hair, and then passed her to enter the house. Charlotte and Millie moved to let him go by, and Lydia turned away, unable to face them. She had no answers for the questions in their eyes, no answers for the questions in her own heart.

  She sat on the bottom step of the porch, hugging herself, and waited until her composure crept back on cautious feet. Then she went inside.

  Mercifully, there was no sign of Brigham, and Charlotte too had wandered off, probably to refuel her imagination from a favorite book. Millie, Anna, and Rolf all looked up at Lydia with worried eyes, though, and she fumbled for an explanation.

  And, of course, there was none. She could think of no earthly way to rationalize an irrational action.

  Devon drove the final nail into the last of the boards forming the roof of his store. The shingles still had to be put on, but at least the inevitable summer rains would be partially deflected from the floors and roughed-in walls beneath. He looked up at the pristine blue sky, knowing well enough not to trust it, and then, in a burst of grief and frustration, flung his hammer off into the trees.

  He climbed down the ladder at the side of the structure, half tempted to lean back on the rungs and let himself go tumbling over the steep, rocky embankment to the place where the tide washed the edges of sharp boulders. All that stopped him, in fact, was the possibility that he might not die from the fall, but only be injured to the point of helplessness. He couldn't bear the thought of lying in bed for the rest of his life, pissing in bottles, unable even to shave himself.

  Devon had seen men hurt just that badly in the woods, and he knew most of them would have chosen death over such a fate. So he took care climbing the rest of the way down the ladder, and then he stood for a long while looking over the edge of the cliff.

  Maybe he'd built too close to the precipice, he reflected. There was at least a thirty-foot drop to the rocks, and the sweet-scented grass was suck under the soles of his boots.

  He sighed, lifted his head and looked outward, beyond the water to the mountains. And even in his angry sorrow he was comforted by the sight of the snowy, rugged mountains out on the peninsula.

  “Devon?”

  His heart thudded at the sound of a soft, feminine voice. For a moment he thought Polly had come back, and he was more than prepared to welcome her magnanimously, but when he turned, he saw Lydia standing there. She looked as beleaguered as he felt, and she was holding a napkin-covered basket and a jug of coffee.

  “I thought you might want something to eat,” she said, speaking with a touch of quiet defiance, as though she expected to be sent away.

  Devon smiled and rubbed his stubbled chin, but he made no move to reach for the food. It held no appeal for him. “Are you still in the market for a husband, Miss McQuire?” he asked.

  Color flared in her cheeks, heartening Devon for a moment, almost turning his wan smile to a laugh. “I don't know what you mean,” she said, but he could see that she did know, and very well, too.

  “You were prepared to marry me in San Francisco,” he reminded her. He didn't love Lydia, but he liked her, and maybe that was better. After all, he'd fallen hard and fast for Polly, and he'd been devastated because of it. “Have you changed your mind?”

  “Yes,” Lydia said firmly, fussing with the napkin covering the food in her basket. “I was desperate then.”

  This time, Devon did laugh. Oh, it was a raw and raucous sound, lacking the force it might otherwise have had, but he felt better for it all the same.

  Lydia reddened prettily. “I didn't mean exactly—well, I'm not saying, mind you, that a woman would have to be desperate to marry you, Devon—”

  He raised one eyebrow. “Oh?”

  She drew a deep breath and let it out in an anxious burst, making pale tendrils of hair dance around her forehead. “We're all wrong for each other, you and I. You need a silk-stocking sort of woman, not a woolen work sock.”

  Devon leaned slightly toward her, his arms folded, looking deliberately pensive. “A woolen work sock? Come now, Lydia. Why would you think of yourself in such a homely way?”

  “I didn't say I was homely,” she pointed out, her pride obviously stung. “I meant that I'm practical and warm and—and durable.” Lydia's whole face was flushed now, along with her neck and ears, and she looked poised to drop the lunch basket and run. “Whereas, you would require a soft and delicate woman.” She took another deep breath. “Like Polly.”

  For a few glorious minutes Devon had been distracted from the pain of his fractured heart, but Polly's name brought back all the old melancholy feelings and some new ones besides. He started to turn away, having no destination in mind, just needing to be alone again.

&n
bsp; “Devon,” Lydia said softly. Gently. “Go to Seattle and bring her back. Polly belongs here with you.”

  Devon swallowed. He wanted to make a case for himself, but when he sorted through the words clustered in his mind, he couldn't find any that were presentable. He stiffened his back and walked away without answering at all.

  That night, he moved the most essential of his belongings up the hill to the cabin that had been his original home. In those simple and incredibly difficult days, he'd shared the place with Brigham and Isabel, sleeping in the loft.

  He was outside, chopping wood by the light of a single lantern, when he heard a rustling sound on the path below and Brig appeared, seeming to take his shape from the darkness itself.

  Brig struck a match against the trunk of a fir tree and lit the thin cheroot clamped between his teeth. “Is the big house getting too crowded for you?” he asked after a long time.

  Devon went right on chopping wood. He didn't want to sleep in his room because everything in it seemed to exude the clean, subtle scent of Polly's skin, because the place was haunted by her tender words and soft cries of pleasure. But of course he couldn't explain those things, not even to Brigham.

  “You might as well know,” he said, swinging the ax, splintering a chunk of wood, putting another on the block. “I mean to court Lydia.”

  He thought he saw his elder brother stiffen slightly, decided it was a trick of the moonlight and the flickering lantern. Brigham was content with the expensive whore he patronized in Seattle, and the last thing he wanted was another wife.

  “Why?” Brigham asked presently.

  “Why not?” Devon countered, still chopping. He was soaked with sweat, and he already had more wood than he'd need before the first snowfall, but he felt like he had to keep moving or he'd explode like gunpowder on a pancake griddle. “You don't want her, do you?”

  With no warning, the ax was wrenched from Devon's hands. The blade made an ominous thumping sound as it plunged deep into the trunk of a nearby tree. Brigham gripped his brother's shirtfront and yanked him up onto the balls of his feet.

  “Lydia's no whore,” he breathed. “And by God I won't let you use her like one, Devon.”

  Devon put his hands up between his brother's forearms and freed himself from Brigham's grasp. “I said I plan to court Lydia, not use her for a whore,” he responded evenly. “I want her for a wife.”

  “No.”

  “What the hell gives you the authority to make a decree like that, Brig? Did somebody make you king when I wasn't paying attention?”

  His brother's sigh was deep and raspy, and it told Devon a lot more than Brig had probably wanted to reveal. “If you want Lydia,” he said, “you'll have to get past me to have her.” With that, he ground out the cheroot, turned his back on Devon and strode down the hill.

  “I'll be damned,” Devon said, a grin spreading slowly across his mouth. “I'll be damned, stamped, and painted blue.”

  Lydia was eager for a trip that gloomy afternoon of the Monday following, even though she was sad because Aunt Persephone was leaving for the East. The mail boat was loaded down with so many trunks and bags that Brigham swore it would sink under the weight before they'd even left the harbor.

  Charlotte and Millie were going along to see their great aunt off on the big ship that would carry her around the Horn, and they were excited because Anna Holmetz had told them there was a trained bear performing at Yesler's Hall in Seattle. For all their delight, the prospect of parting with Persephone, even for a few months, put a visible damper on their pleasure.

  Only Devon was staying home, and frankly, Lydia was relieved. Ever since he'd announced his decision to court her, several days before, he'd been filling her chair at the dinner table with lilacs and generally making a fool of himself.

  She tried to be tolerant, well aware that Devon was dealing with the loss of Polly in the only way he knew how, but at the same time she wished he'd just leave her alone. Lydia, as it happened, was trying to sort out some very confusing feelings of her own.

  All of which were directed at Brigham, not his younger brother.

  Ever since that dreadful day when she'd lost all control of her deportment and launched herself at Brigham from the back porch, like a Chinese rocket from a sarsaparilla bottle, and he'd subdued her in the grass, Lydia had been plagued by sinful and unseemly desires.

  Lying in bed at night, for instance, she often imagined Brigham there with her. She felt the weight of his hands on her bare breasts, and even the thought of that made her nipples bud and her breath turn quick and shallow. Sometimes she even went so far as to imagine him settling between her legs, and all the rest, too.

  At least, as much of the rest as she properly understood. She knew what Brigham would do to her, generally speaking, but she hadn't the vaguest idea why she wanted it so much or how giving herself to him that way could possibly satisfy the awesome need yawning inside her. She only knew she'd go insane one of these muggy summer nights if she didn't get some relief.

  Lydia stood at the railing as the mail boat chugged out of port, Millie at her left side, Charlotte at her right. Millie was soon bored with standing still and began to run wildly around the deck, whooping and waving her arms.

  “Why does she act like that?” Charlotte asked, with moderate disdain, tossing her lovely mane of honey-brown hair for emphasis.

  “Because she's ten,” Lydia answered, with a smile. She reasoned that, if Millie wore herself out now, she'd sleep all the more soundly that night at the hotel. “Didn't you like to run and make noise when you were a little girl, Charlotte?”

  Charlotte was pleased by the implication that she was no longer a child, just as Lydia had intended. “No. Well, yes. Sometimes. But I never smeared blackberry juice on my face to make war paint, and I never got myself stuck twenty feet up in a fir tree, either. Millie did that, you know. Last summer. Papa had to climb up and get her.”

  Lydia smiled at the image, but at the same time she was glad she hadn't been around for the actual incident. She didn't like to think of the work Brigham did on a day-to-day basis, as it was; to see not only him but Millie in such a dangerous predicament would have terrified her.

  As Millie was about to race past him, Brigham gathered Millie up in his arms and swung her up onto one shoulder. Then he came to stand at the rail beside Lydia, who would rather have avoided the encounter. She looked around, hoping Persephone was with him, but the old woman was happily settled in a special deck chair, with Charlotte as lady-in-waiting.

  Brigham said nothing to Lydia; he was engaged in a dialogue with his youngest daughter. Only when Quade's Harbor was out of sight, swallowed up by the crowding trees, and Millie had scrambled down to go and bedevil Charlotte, did he speak to her.

  “Will you be marrying my brother?” he asked, and although he had clearly intended to present the question in a casual manner, it had a different sort of effect on Lydia. Rather like a lamp being lit in a dark room.

  “I'm not sure,” Lydia lied, tugging at the pair of gloves Aunt Persephone had given her just that morning, along with some sachets, a book of poetry, and a few pieces of jewelry she didn't expect to need in Maine. “You must admit Devon can be charming, filling my chair with flowers all the time, and writing poetry the way he does.” She'd made up that last part, but she was having too good a time to retract the statement.

  “Poetry?” Brigham asked in amazement, practically choking on the word.

  It was as Lydia had suspected. The idea of courting a woman in the old-fashioned, romantic way would never occur to Brigham. His method was simply to fling them down in the grass and sit on them, apparently.

  Not that she really thought he wanted to court her.

  Oh, no. She was certain Brigham's intentions weren't at all honorable.

  Any more than hers were, regrettably.

  She changed the subject, for fear Brigham would demand that she quote some of his brother's alleged poetry. That would mean making up a vers
e or two, and she hadn't the required talent. “Millie tells me there's a performing bear appearing at Yesler's Hall,” she said.

  Brigham stared at her for a moment, as though unable to decide whether to kiss her shamelessly or throw her overboard. “If the bear gets tired of putting on a show, they could always bring Devon in as a replacement. Naturally, you would hold the leash.”

  Lydia's cheeks flared. “That was a mean-spirited thing to say!”

  Brigham shrugged. “You pipe the tune and he dances. Don't try to pretend you don't enjoy the attention, because I know you do.”

  “Maybe I do,” Lydia replied, jutting out her chin. “What business is that of yours?”

  “I'll show you,” he said. And then, right there on the deck of the mail boat, in front of God and all His angels, Brigham pulled Lydia against him and kissed her so thoroughly that her straw hat fell off and her hair came unpinned.

  She stood gaping at him, like a fool, when it was over, and he bent to retrieve her hat, handing it to her with a cocky bow of his head.

  “Everything about you is my business,” he said, and then he walked away and left her standing there, holding her straw cap, her hair blowing unbound in the wind.

  8

  AFTER STANDING ON THE DECK IN SHOCK FOR A FEW moments, Brigham's kiss still burning on her mouth, Lydia bent to gather up her scattered hairpins. When she had as many as there was rational hope of finding, she turned away from the small band of spectators over by the wheelhouse—Aunt Persephone, Charlotte, and Millie—and hastily bound her pale gold mane back into a proper knot at the back of her head. Then she put her hat on again and stood drawing slow, deep breaths at the railing until the tempest Brigham had spawned in her senses had ebbed into a cold and quiet fury.

  For two hours they traveled through spectacular scenery, rich green trees crowding the mountains and standing like sentinels along the stony shores, overlooked by whitecapped peaks that gave better testimony to the majesty of God than any preacher could have done. Occasionally Lydia glimpsed squat brown Indians digging clams on the beach or fishing from their sleek canoes.