Yankee Wife

by Linda Lael Miller

  So great was Lydia's outrage at his effrontery and arrogance—and, heaven help her, the shock of her own arousal—that she was momentarily paralyzed. Even had she been able to speak, she'd never learned an insult scathing enough to suit the occasion.

  When Lydia finally regained her equilibrium, after what seemed like an eternity, she swept off toward the main house with her chin thrust high in the air. Some of the workers made a path for her, whistling and applauding as she passed, heightening her embarrassment to an almost hysterical pitch.

  Not daring even to speculate on how much the men might know about her ill-advised intimacies with Brigham Quade, cocky King of the Mountain, she hurried on, her disturbing thoughts flocking ahead of her like a gaggle of geese.

  As she walked, a light, misty rain began to fall, cooling her anger and the prickly heat that danced on her skin. Reaching the house that was, like everything else in and around that town, Brigham's domain, she sat on the top step.

  The porch roof sheltered her, but just barely. On either side of the walk, lilacs bloomed, their sweet scent more poignant for the added, acrid scent of rain mingling with dust.

  Lydia let her forehead rest on her updrawn knees, concentrating on her breathing until it slowed to a regular pace.

  Then, when she was herself again, she rose and proceeded inside.

  Charlotte and Millie were nowhere in sight, but that didn't trouble Lydia, because it was a big house and the children were used to entertaining themselves. She climbed the main staircase and swept along the hallway to Devon's door.

  After rapping lightly, merely as a matter of good manners, she turned the knob and stepped inside.

  Polly had risen from her nap beside Devon, and she was fully dressed in the fresh clothes Lydia had laid out for her earlier. She stood beside the bed, gently bathing Devon's upper body with a cloth dipped in cool water.

  “How is he?” Lydia asked softly.

  Polly spared her one glance, then concentrated on ministering to Devon. “He's stirred a few times,” she said. “I think he's trying to wake up.”

  Lydia came and stood at the foot of the bed. “Let me sit with him for a while, Polly, while you go out and get some fresh air.”

  It seemed that Polly hadn't heard the suggestion. “Dr. McCauley says Devon has the strongest heartbeat of any man he's ever tended,” she said, in a bright and brittle voice that was painful to hear.

  Lydia stood still, without speaking.

  A sob broke, raw and small, from Polly's throat. “He called out a little while ago. He said, ‘Lydia.’”

  After swallowing, Lydia made herself reply. She just hoped she sounded matter-of-fact and practical. “Devon is confused,” she said. “You mustn't place too much stock in what he says right now. The fact that he's spoken is encouraging in itself.”

  There were tears on Polly's hollow cheeks as she looked at Lydia. “Don't take him from me,” she pleaded starkly, with a strange, desperate dignity. “Promise me you won't make him love you.”

  Lydia went to Polly then, put an arm around the other woman's waist. “I'm not an enchantress,” she said gently. Reasonably. “I couldn't ‘make’ Devon or any other man love me, even if I wanted that. Now, go and have some time to yourself. You'll be stronger for it.”

  Polly hesitated a moment, then nodded once, gave Devon a long look, full of yearning, and left the room.

  “Lydia.” Devon said the name clearly, though in a raw whisper, and there was no mistaking it for any other.

  Something like despair rose up inside Lydia, but then she took herself sternly in hand, told herself not to borrow trouble. “Hello, Devon,” she answered, close to his ear, as she sat down in Polly's chair. She sniffled and then smiled purposefully, even though she knew he couldn't see her. She took his good hand in both of hers. “You're getting to be quite a layabout,” she told him. “I saw that mouse nest Brigham calls a company store today. You've got to recover as fast as you can, and get back to work on your mercantile. Believe me, we need it desperately. Why, there isn't a place between here and Seattle where I could buy a skein of embroidery floss.…”

  The bedroom door opened and closed again, and Lydia glanced up to see her friend, Joseph McCauley. He looked more rested than when she'd seen him last, and he was wearing fresh clothes and carrying a hopelessly battered medical kit. He smiled.

  Lydia felt foolish. “I was just—”

  “I know,” Joseph interrupted, in his kind, quiet way. “He wanders far from us, and you're trying to call him home. I remember hearing your voice sometimes, when I was in that Yankee hospital. It was like a shimmering strand of golden thread; I took it in both hands and followed it back to this side of the shadowy veil.”

  “You talk like a poet,” Lydia remarked. It was a silly sentiment, but she'd already uttered the words before she came to that conclusion.

  Joseph stood on the other side of the bed, opening his bag and taking out his stethoscope. His manner was strangely serene, given all he'd endured in his lifetime of perhaps thirty-five or forty years. “Every man is a poet,” he replied, after listening thoughtfully to Devon's heartbeat for some moments. “When the situation calls for it.”

  Lydia was not a person to make wishes; after the carnage she'd seen, she couldn't make herself believe in good fairies or guardian angels. Still, for the merest fraction of a moment, she wished she could love Joseph McCauley. He would have made a wonderful husband, with his refined and gentle ways.

  She looked away. Few women would have been better suited as the wife and helpmate of a frontier doctor than she herself, with all her training and experience, but it would be a cruel injustice to encourage Joseph when it was Brigham who made her blood heat.

  “Lydia.”

  She raised her eyes at the gentle command in Joseph's voice, met his gaze. “Yes?” she managed, overwhelmed by the variety of emotions filling that room like the notes of some great, thunderous, silent symphony. She was aware not only of her own feelings, confused and fiery, but also of Devon's angry longing to live and Joseph's search for a lasting peace.

  “When I stepped into that kitchen downstairs and saw you there,” Joseph said, putting away his stethoscope, “I thought to myself, ‘Joe McCauley, heaven does take an interest in puny mortals like yourself after all.’ I won't lie to you and say I don't want more, but I could content myself for all the days of my life on an occasional smile or a touch of your hand.”

  Lydia lowered her eyes. “You speak very directly, sir,” she said, and her shyness, uncharacteristic as it was, was quite real.

  He sighed and went to the window to stand looking out toward the mountains and the sea. “These are direct times, Lydia,” he mused, “and the West is a very forthright place.”

  She remembered Elly Collier, announcing to the world in general that she and her man had never gotten around to “saying the words in front of a preacher,” and Polly, who had deluded Devon into thinking of her as his wife. And herself, lying on a narrow bed with Brigham, letting him play her body like a lyre.

  Yes, she thought. The West was indeed a forthright place, with social and moral rules all its own. “I don't love you,” she said, not unkindly.

  Joseph turned his head, gave her a smile that might have awakened ardent feelings in her—before she'd encountered Brigham Quade. “I'm under no illusion that you do,” he said. “If I'd taken that Yankee shrapnel in my eyes, instead of my arm and shoulder, I'd still be able to see that you care for someone else.” He paused, turning his gaze to the scene beyond the window glass again. “Brigham is a fine man, Lydia. But he's hard and he's ruthless, too. First and foremost, before any woman and before his own daughters, he loves that mountain out there. He takes his energy from it the way tree roots draw water from the ground; he's a part of it and it is a part of him. He'll crush you, eventually, with the sheer force of his will, like a wildflower beneath the heel of his boot.”

  Lydia's lips were dry, and she moistened them with the tip of her tongue
. She could not deny Joseph's words, for she knew they held a tragic truth. If she let herself love Brigham, he might well consume her in his own fiery strength. Hadn't he warned her, that very afternoon, that when he made love to her in earnest, her cries of pleasure would echo off the mountainsides?

  She closed her eyes, started a little when she felt Joseph's hand come to rest on her shoulder.

  “There's no hurry, Lydia,” he said.

  She thought she felt Devon's fingers tighten around hers as the door closed behind the doctor she'd once committed treason to help. “Every day,” she said, in a distracted whisper, “women marry men they don't love. After a time, if the husband and wife have some common ground, and an honest liking for each other, true esteem develops.”

  Devon shifted slightly, and made a raspy sound low in his throat.

  Lydia shook off her fanciful thoughts and got up to pour water from a carafe on the bedside table, giving Devon a drink, drop by drop, from a teaspoon.

  Presently, Polly returned, and Lydia took her leave.

  She found Charlotte and Millie squabbling in the kitchen, while poor Jake Feeny tried to cook supper. “Come with me,” she said, crooking a finger.

  Both girls looked at her as though they expected a strict lecture. Instead, Lydia took them to the parlor, where the spinet was, and sat down to run lightly through the scales.

  “This instrument wants tuning,” she said, as Charlotte leaned against one end of the piano and Millie the other. “Still, I think we can make some badly needed harmony, don't you?”

  Millie put her tongue out at Charlotte.

  Charlotte responded in kind.

  Lydia struck a chord and began to sing. “Blest be the ties that bind…our hearts in Christian love…”

  Brigham sat at the head of the table that night at supper, as usual, and of course Joseph was there, too, as well as Lydia herself. Charlotte and Millie had eaten earlier, in the kitchen, and gone to their rooms.

  It was Matthew Prophet, the visiting preacher, who took center stage.

  “Lots of sin in this place,” he blustered, looking at Lydia from beneath his bushy white eyebrows as if to hold her personally responsible for every broken commandment between there and the Canadian border. “Yes, sir, lots of sin.”

  Joseph grinned, but said nothing in Lydia's defense. Brigham was no more chivalrous, as it happened, though he did not let the comment pass unconfronted.

  “Personally, Reverend,” he said, reaching for the bowl of mashed potatoes and scooping out a second helping, “I think Quade's Harbor could do with a little more sin, instead of less. A brothel, say, or maybe a saloon.”

  Joseph made a choking sound that might have been a laugh, and Lydia seethed. Admittedly, the reverend was a tiresome man, but he was also dedicated and sincere, and Brigham had no right to pick on him.

  “Mr. Prophet is a guest here,” she pointed out.

  Brigham skewered her with his laughing gray eyes. “So are you,” he parried.

  The preacher leaned forward in his chair, as if expecting Lydia's hair to turn to hissing snakes, like a modern-day Medusa, and she wished, just for a moment, for the power to turn him to stone.

  “You live here, do you?” the old man inquired. “In this house? Unchaperoned?”

  Brigham smiled down at his mashed potatoes.

  Lydia wanted to upend the whole bowlful onto his head, because he was enjoying her discomfort so much. She made herself smile. “I'm—the governess,” she said.

  “Miss McQuire was actually brought here as a mail-order bride,” Brigham put in, with helpful exuberance. “My brother delivered her to me as a gift, from San Francisco.”

  Prophet's stern and wizened face reddened significantly, and his nose twitched, as if sin had a scent and he'd caught it on the wind. “There are two innocent, impressionable children living in this house, are there not?”

  Lydia shot a furious glance at Brigham, then flung one at Joseph, too, for failing to come to her rescue, as would have befitted a true gentleman.

  “Yes,” she said, awkward in her annoyance. “Charlotte and Millie are children, all right.”

  Joseph chuckled, sipping from his water goblet, and Lydia could feel Brigham's eyes on her, bright with amusement.

  Mr. Prophet was concentrating on Lydia, who suddenly felt wanton, a corrupter of virtue. “If you came here to marry Mr. Quade, why haven't you done so?”

  Lydia drew in a sharp breath, trembling now, not with timidity, but with outrage. “You seem bent on performing the marriage ceremony, Reverend,” she began, not planning the words she said next. “Well, that's fine. You can join Dr. McCauley and I in holy matrimony, right now, tonight.”

  Brigham's fork clattered to his plate, and a sidelong glance showed that all the mirth, along with much of his robust coloring, had drained from his face.

  Joseph smiled. Lydia was ashamed that she'd spoken so rashly, and so thoughtlessly.

  “A fine idea,” he said, with a courtly nod.

  Brigham crashed his fist down on the table, making cutlery and china clatter in reaction. “No!” he yelled. “There will be no wedding in this house, not between Lydia and the good doctor, that is!”

  All eyes were turned to the master of the house.

  He shook a finger at Lydia, as though she were a naughty child who'd repeatedly upset her milk. “I vow this by God's eyeballs,” he swore, in a dangerous, rumbling, thunderstorm voice, “if you carry on with this foolishness, I'll tell these men—I'll tell the whole damned world, Lydia—why you can belong to no man besides me!”

  Lydia swayed in her chair, sick with fury and humiliation. “I hate you,” she whispered finally, pushing back her chair from the table to rise on shaking legs. “I despise you!”

  Brigham got to his feet with disconcerting swiftness, towering over Lydia, breathing hard, as though she'd led him a chase through the thick underbrush that carpeted the woods beyond the walls of that sturdy house. His gray eyes were like steel, glittering under a layer of new frost.

  “Do not challenge me to prove that the truth is otherwise,” he growled, tempering the words with a velvety sweetness that only made them more brutal.

  She stood still, amazed and furious and afraid to do further battle because she knew he would win. With a look, with a touch, with the force of his mind, he could make her want him desperately.

  Showing unexpected mercy, he freed her from the spell. “Go,” he said, on a harsh breath, waving a hand toward the dining room doorway.

  Lydia turned and hurried away, her heart burning behind her collarbone, her emotions in such turmoil that she couldn't even begin to make sense of them. She swept up the stairs, moving as rapidly as she could in her cumbersome skirts, and took refuge in her room, leaning against the door and gasping as though she'd been pursued.

  The room was dark, and Lydia didn't bother to light a lantern. She didn't want to see her flaming face in the bureau mirror, or the proud defeat in her eyes.

  She paced swiftly back and forth, hugging herself and muttering.

  For years she'd been able to keep her emotions under tight control, no matter what horrors presented themselves. Now, after she'd come through a war, after she'd traveled around the Horn and been forced to shift for herself in a strange city, after she'd journeyed on to Seattle, bold as a Viking woman, she'd finally met her nemesis.

  Brigham Quade.

  Lydia moved faster, back and forth, fighting, fighting. Brigham had uncovered all the feelings she'd worked so hard to suppress, bared them to the light, and now they rose within her like the creatures from Pandora's box. The pain was so fierce that it forced her to her knees on the rug, and she began to sob uncontrollably.

  He said her name, kneeling in front of her, cupping her wet face in his work-hardened hands.

  Brigham.

  “Don't touch me,” she wailed, using the last shreds of her will to keep from screaming the words.

  Brigham drew her onto his thighs, held her tightly, hi
s face buried in her hair as it tumbled free of its pins. “Let go,” he said in an urgent voice. “Dear God, Lydia, you can't hold a whole war inside you. Let it go.”

  Her fingers knotted on his shirtfront, which was already wet with her tears. The agony of the battlefields broke through her crumbling reserve like a river. “Babies!” she sobbed. “Brigham, those soldiers were just babies—”

  His lips were warm and firm at her temple, his arms strong around her. “I know, Yankee, I know.”

  She heard the screams, the thunder of cannon fire, the gnawing rasp of saws severing bone. Her own shriek was muffled by Brigham's shoulder.

  He stood, lifting her easily, and carried her to the shadow-strewn bed. She wept in silence now, and would have curled into a tight ball if Brigham had allowed it. Instead, he stretched out beside her, his hard length like a splint securing a fracture, and clasped her close against him. For all his weight, the mattress shook with the force of her grief.

  After a while, when exhaustion had calmed her, Brigham rose and gently removed her shoes, her stockings, her dress. She could not protest, but lay trustingly in her linens, spent by emotion.

  He filled a basin with water, just as she had done for Devon when first tending his wounds, and began to bathe her skin, cooling and soothing her. She was raw and broken inside, as though she'd had some intangible surgery, but she also knew that from now on she would grow stronger with every day that passed. She had turned a corner, entered some new phase of her life, and would never be quite the same again.

  Once Brigham had washed her—and there was something ceremonial about that, just as there had been in her clinging to him in the storm of grief that had swept over her earlier—he lay down with her again.

  They had been bonded together in those moments, for good or ill, and even in her dreamy, disoriented state, Lydia knew that cord could never really be broken.