Yankee Wife

by Linda Lael Miller

  “Hey!” a voice shouted. “You! What are you doing up there?”

  Charlotte looked down, and that was her mistake. She might as well have been on a mountaintop, so far away did the deck seem to be. There was a young man standing down there, with longish dark hair, fitted britches, and a flowing seaman's shirt.

  She gulped, and her hands froze on the ropes. She had the terrifying feeling that no matter how tightly she held on, it wouldn't be tight enough to keep her from plunging to her death.

  “Help me,” she said, but the words were only a whisper, and the man on the deck couldn't possibly have heard them.

  Still, Charlotte felt motion in the ropes, and when she could bring herself to look again, she saw that he was climbing toward her as nimbly as a spider on a web. She slipped her arms through the spaces in the net and hugged herself.

  Soon he was beside her. “Come on, little girl,” he said, with exasperated gentleness. “I'll get you down.”

  Charlotte ran her tongue over dry lips. “Are you the captain of this ship?” she asked, her voice shaking. It was that or give in to panic and start screaming like a saw tearing into gnarled wood.

  He did look like a pirate, with his dark hair tied back at his nape. His eyes were so blue that Charlotte thought for a moment that she'd tumble into them, instead of downward to the hard wooden deck, and his straight white teeth made a jolting contrast to his tanned skin when he grinned. He looked to be twenty-two or so.

  “No, lass,” he said, putting one arm firmly around her waist. “But the Enchantress will be mine someday, when my uncle is satisfied that I can handle her. Come on, now. Let's go down.”

  Charlotte started to tremble. “I'm scared.”

  “Too bad you didn't have sense enough to get scared sooner,” he observed impatiently. “What's your name, anyway?”

  “Ch-Charlotte,” she stammered. “Charlotte Quade.”

  Again the grin, blinding and bright. “Hello, Charlotte. I'm Patrick Trevarren. May I have this dance?”

  She stared at him, baffled, then realized he was trying to make things easier by jesting. She held onto the ropes as she would the rungs of the ladder and took a faltering step downward, thankful to the core of her spirit for the hard strength of Patrick's arm around her waist. “I d-don't know how to dance,” she answered, and instantly hated herself for sounding like a stupid child.

  They were about midway from their goal when Charlotte looked down again. The deck and the sea and the timer and the sky began to move, like the colored pieces in a kaleidoscope, and Charlotte was sure she was about to disgrace herself by throwing up.

  “I can't do this,” she said.

  “Yes, you can,” Patrick replied firmly. “Here, put your arms around my neck and I'll carry you the rest of the way.”

  Letting go of that rope took all the strength of character Charlotte possessed, but she did it. She flung both arms around Mr. Trevarren's neck and held on with a grip tight enough to choke him.

  He secured her close to his side with one arm and used the other to manage the rigging, and he moved as deftly as a monkey in the jungle. The instant they reached the deck, his polite manner disappeared, and he set Charlotte on her feet with a jarring thunk.

  “Somebody ought to take you over their knee!” he growled, his hands resting on his hips. “What kind of damn-fool trick was that, climbing up in the rigging that way?”

  Humiliation throbbed in Charlotte's cheeks. There was something wounding in Patrick Trevarren's angry contempt, and she wasn't used to being belittled. “If you touch me, my papa will horsewhip you within this far of your life!” she warned, making an infinitesimal space between her thumb and index finger. Her outburst was mostly bravado, since she had no real way to justify what she'd done. “And don't you swear at me, either, you—you sea monkey!”

  Patrick stared at her for a long, threatening moment, his brows drawn together in an ominous frown, but then he burst out laughing. “You're a bold one, you are. Go home, Charlotte Quade, and play with your china tea sets and your dolls. A seagoing vessel like the Enchantress is no place for little girls!”

  If there was one thing Charlotte hated, it was being treated like a child. She was thirteen, old enough to marry and have babies in some cultures. Without another word she turned on her heel and strode away toward the ramp.

  “You're welcome!” Patrick shouted after her.

  “Go to blazes, Mr. Trevarren!” Charlotte yelled back. As soon as she reached the wharf, she began to run, reasoning that her arrogant rescuer was probably ready to drag her back up into the rigging and drop her on her head.

  When she reached the shore and dared to turn and look back, however, Patrick was standing at the railing, high above her, an aura of sunshine outlining his leanly magnificent frame. Relief swept over Charlotte, immediately followed by disappointment.

  On some level, she realized, she'd wanted him to chase her.

  She stood on the bank for a long interval, staring up at him, finally recognizing him as the prince in every fairy tale she'd ever heard or read. Knowing she couldn't have Patrick Trevarren because she was too young.

  With tears stinging her eyes, Charlotte lifted her skirts and ran for Yesler's Hall.

  As Brigham watched Lydia watching the bear, a peculiar thickness rose in his throat. He wanted her, stubborn and opinionated little Yankee that she was, as he'd never wanted any woman before her.

  A pulse leaped visibly under Lydia's left ear; the place looked vulnerable and Brigham was possessed with a most inappropriate desire to kiss it. Not that he gave a damn what was proper, but there were other people around, including his ten-year-old daughter.

  He shifted restlessly on the hard bench. He might have spirited another woman to his bed, but Lydia was different.

  Brigham sighed. Not that he had tender feelings for her or anything. He didn't believe in romantic love, and he'd seen what sappy infatuation had done to Devon, but he'd been sincere all the same when he'd asked Lydia to marry him the night before.

  He folded his arms, cleared his throat, then leaned forward with his elbows braced on his thighs. Damnation, he hated just sitting there, like a schoolboy listening to a lesson, and he wanted to go outside and smoke. That would mean leaving Lydia, however, and he wasn't about to do that. Most of the lumberjacks, miners, and mill workers crowding the hall that day were looking at Lydia instead of the bear. Since there was no gold band on her finger, half of them would commence to courting her the minute he turned his back.

  Brigham scowled, directed his gaze to Millie, who was watching the show with wide, shining eyes. His scowl faded and his heart gave an extra thud, then fell a little. Now that Aunt Persephone was gone, it flat wasn't proper for him to have an unmarried woman in the house. It was a bad influence on the girls, and God only knew what kind of ideas those two might get in their heads as a result.

  At last the show ended, and Brigham cupped one hand under Lydia's elbow, somewhat possessively if the truth were known, and hoisted her to her feet.

  “Mail boat should be in,” he said gruffly. For the first time in his life he wished he could spout poetry the way Devon did, but plain words were all Brigham knew. “Time to go home.”

  Home.

  The word conjured no images of Fall River for Lydia, and certainly none of Washington City or Gettysburg, either. No, it brought pictures of Quade's Harbor instead, with its hopeful row of saltbox houses, its noisy mill, its grand view of mountains and water and more trees than God had angels.

  She blushed. Home was the big house on the hill, looking down on the beginnings of a town, even though she had no justifiable claim to it.

  Outside the hall, Charlotte was sitting on a barrel, swinging her legs and looking guilty. Millie ran to her, chattering an accounting of every trick the bear had performed and a few she thought it could learn with proper instruction.

  Lydia's heart constricted. When had she come to love another woman's children, just as if they were born of her
own flesh?

  Brigham was still holding her arm, and his touch filled Lydia with sweet misery. She almost wished she'd agreed to his proposal, just so she could find out what it was that her body so desperately wanted from his.

  The baggage had been brought down to the wharf by wagon, and Brigham didn't give it a second look as he squired Lydia onto the mail boat, Charlotte and Millie scrambling along behind.

  “I guess you'll miss your Aunt Persephone,” she said when they were standing at the railing watching the first mate and several other men loading freight. It wasn't at all what Lydia had wanted to say, but she knew no words to explain her true feelings, even to herself.

  Brigham smiled sadly, without looking at Lydia, and she felt the poorer for it. “Yes, I'll miss her,” he said. “But it's time she had a good long visit with Aunt Cordelia, and that grand tour of Europe she's been talking about for five years.”

  Lydia started to touch his arm, drew her fingers back just short of contact with the tanned, muscle-corded flesh protruding from his rolled shirtsleeves. Her voice came out sounding like it did when she needed to clear her throat.

  “Thank you for taking us to see the bear,” she said.

  At last he turned toward her, and though his tempting mouth was solemn, his eyes were full of humor. “I think you got more attention than he did,” he replied. The boat's whistle sounded and the boarding ramp was raised, but the noises seemed far away, like cries at the far end of a long tunnel. Then, just lightly, Brigham reached out and brushed a tendril of hair from Lydia's cheek.

  His touch made her close her eyes for a moment and grip the railing so tightly that her knuckles ached.

  She looked at him and tried to lighten the moment with a joke. “I guess if I ever decide I want a husband, I know where to get one,” she said, thinking of all the male attention she'd had in Seattle.

  The mirth drained from Brigham's eyes, turning them the slate-gray color of an angry sky. He started to speak, apparently thought better of it, and walked away.

  “What's the matter with him?” Millie asked, talking around a chunk of the rock candy Brigham had bought for her earlier, in the mercantile, when they'd ordered supplies. “He looks really cranky.”

  Lydia bent down and whispered, “He is. And I'd stay away from him if I were you.”

  Millie nodded and scampered off in the opposite direction, as at home on the ship as a galley mouse. Lydia turned to look for Charlotte and saw her gazing toward the harbor with the usual faraway, ethereal expression on her face.

  She waited a moment, trying to discern whether the girl wanted company or not, then took a chance and approached.

  “Charlotte?” Lydia took a wrapped butter-cream candy from her pocket and offered it. “A sweet for your thoughts.”

  Charlotte looked at the candy, took it, and then offered Lydia a faltering smile. “Did you ever think that if you couldn't have a grand adventure straightaway, you'd just go right out of your mind?”

  Lydia looked back on her own girlhood. There hadn't been much time for dreams and fancies, not with her father barely making a living in his practice and drinking to drown his loneliness and disappointment. “Not really,” she replied honestly, “but I think I know how you're feeling—like you can't wait to grow up. Am I right?”

  The girl nodded, and Lydia realized for the first time what a heart-stopping beauty Charlotte would grow up to be, with her large, luminous amber eyes, her high cheekbones, and her golden-brown hair. Again she wondered about the children's mother.

  Brigham's wife.

  “I feel like that bear back there at Yesler's Hall,” Charlotte said, her eyes on the outline of the big clipper ship still in port. Aunt Persephone's steamer had long since rounded a bend and disappeared, but the bay was still full of small fishing boats, canoes, and tugs. “I'm just something to look at, and be ordered about.”

  Lydia slid an arm around the girl's straight shoulders and squeezed lightly. “You're becoming a woman, Charlotte, and that's a wonderful, exciting thing, but it's troubling sometimes, too.”

  Charlotte looked at her gratefully for a moment, then frowned. “I'll probably just marry some lumberjack and live in one of the saltbox houses,” she said.

  The idea of having a home in a peaceful and prosperous place like Quade's Harbor held far more appeal for Lydia, but Charlotte was very young, and restless. Her moods probably fluctuated widely, just because of the changes taking place inside her body. No doubt she remembered her mother, as Millie did not, and missed her.

  “You won't have to marry anyone you don't want to,” Lydia assured the child, even though she wasn't entirely sure. Brigham was an old-fashioned man in many ways, and he might consider it his right to arrange his daughter's marriage when the time came.

  The boat sailed on, and Charlotte wandered off to squat by the grocery boxes from the mercantile, with Millie, and plunder the contents for an orange. Lydia smiled as she watched the girls peel the bright skin from the fruit and squirt each other with the juice.

  There was still a lot of daylight left when the mail boat put in at Quade's Harbor, but Devon wasn't working on his building, high on the bluff, as Lydia had expected. She wondered if Polly had reached home ahead of them somehow, if the lovers were even now resting in each other's arms.

  The boat whistle sounded, and Harrington, Brigham's skinny clerk, came rushing down the hillside, the sunlight catching on the lenses of his spectacles.

  “Mr. Quade!” he shouted, as if there could be any doubt who he'd come to see. “Mr. Quade!” Harrington reached the end of the wharf, cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled again, “Mr. Quade!”

  “What is it, Harrington?” Brigham demanded impatiently, vaulting over the ship's rail and onto the dock before the vessel had even been tied up to the piling. He crouched and worked the rope through a rusted iron ring, glaring up at his clerk as he made an able knot. “Well, damn it, what do you want?”

  Poor Harrington was breathless, his thin chest heaving. “It's Mr. Devon Quade, sir,” he got out at last. “He was working in the woods yesterday—search me why he'd want to do such a thing—and he fell.” Maddeningly, Harrington chose then to pause and push his spectacles back up to the bridge of his nose. “I'm afraid he's rather grievously injured.”

  Lydia swayed, there at the ship's railing, and watched helplessly as the color drained from Brigham's face. He grabbed poor Harrington by the lapels of his suit coat and hauled him up onto his toes.

  “Where is he?” he rasped as the ramp thumped onto the wharf from the deck.

  “The house, of course,” the clerk choked out. “They carried him to the house.”

  Brigham cast one desperate look at Lydia, as if accusing her, or imploring her to alter reality by some secret magic, then turned and scrambled up the bank.

  10

  BRIGHAM RACED UP THE EMBANKMENT, ACROSS THE road, along the driveway leading to the house. His throbbing lungs burned as though filled with molten metal, and his heart hammered a single, silent word into his throat with every beat: no.

  He flung the front door open with such force that it clattered against the inside wall. Not Devon, he thought frantically, taking the steps three at a time. Oh, God, please. Not Devon.

  Only when he'd reached the second floor did Brigham stop himself, gripping the jamb of Devon's open door in his hands. In those moments, Brigham was engaged in the most ferocious struggle he'd ever faced—he battled himself, his own panic and a wild need to alter an unalterable reality.

  He took one deep breath, and then another. He thought of Lydia, and her image formed in his mind, sensible and quiet, canning him slightly. He stepped over the threshold into his brother's bedroom.

  At the end of the old hardwood bed—the piece had come down to them from their parents, and both Brigham and Devon had been born in it—he gripped the footboard to steady himself.

  Devon's face was so swollen and bruised that his eye sockets had disappeared entirely. A wide gash stre
tched from his forehead to the crown of his head, and his thick hair was matted with blood. His bare chest looked as though he'd been horsewhipped within a heartbeat of the grave, and his left arm had been placed in a crude sling.

  “I done what I could,” Jake Feeny said, from the shadows next to the bed, and Brigham looked up to see the cook's tormented face. “It's bad, Brig. It's real bad.”

  Brigham shoved one hand through his hair and swayed. He wanted to shout, to rampage, to drink himself crazy and rip the whole town down to its foundations, board by board. He wouldn't, though, he couldn't. He was Brigham, the strong one, the elder brother who always knew what to do.

  “You've sent somebody to Seattle for a doctor?” he rasped, going to Devon's side now, lightly touching his brother's blood-crusted forehead.

  Jake snuffled and wiped his sleeve across his face. “Sam Baker went right away, riding the best horse in the timber camp. We was afraid to wait for the mail boat.”

  Devon stirred slightly beneath his brother's touch, and Brigham pushed up his sleeves and turned to the basin and pitcher on the bedside table. “What happened?” he asked, taking a clean handkerchief from Devon's bureau, dampening it in the basin, beginning to wash the blood from his brother's face with gentle strokes.

  Jake took a moment longer to compose himself. He'd been with the company almost from the first, and if he had a family elsewhere, he was probably estranged from it. The Quades were all he had, when it came to what he called “folks.”

  “The damn fool,” the old man finally sputtered, looking down at Devon with affectionate fury.

  From the corner of his eye Brigham saw Lydia in the doorway, and he was made stronger by her presence.

  “The cuss-headed idiot went up to top a tree,” Jake said, “wouldn't let Immerson do it, even though nobody's better at it than that Swede, and the blasted thing split on him.” A sob escaped Jake, low and rusty, and he ran his cuff under his nose. “He musta fell near to thirty feet, Brig.”