by Susan Wiggs
“I’m not refusing to answer them.”
“Then why don’t you answer?”
“Answer what?”
“My questions. I can’t believe this is difficult for you. Or did they forget to teach you simple question and answer techniques at Miss Boiler—”
“Miss Boylan’s, and I have no idea why it matters to you whether I answer your questions or not.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he barked. But in a small way, it did. In spite of who she was and why he had taken her, there were things he wanted to know about her. “But only a daft woman could fail to answer such a simple thing as where she belongs in the world. That’s all I asked.”
It was all he asked, but it wasn’t all he wanted to know. He wanted to know what she thought about when she gazed into the heart of the fire. He wanted to know what it felt like to run a hand through her silky blond hair. He wanted to know what her laughter sounded like. He wanted to know why she’d balked at going with Philip Ascot the night of the fire.
“I simply don’t see the point of this conversation,” she said.
“Conversation,” he shot back. “We’re not in Chicago anymore, Princess. There’s no theater, no restaurants, no ballroom on Isle Royale.”
“Then what on earth do you do for entertainment?”
“We talk. To each other.”
“I see. And this is supposed to entertain me?”
“It’s not a night at the opera, but—” He broke off and stared at her. She had turned white as a sheet. “Are you ill?” he asked.
She said nothing. Even from across the room he could see a sheen of sweat on her upper lip and forehead. She swayed a little. He went to her and took hold of her elbow to steady her, because she looked as if she was about to fall.
The instant he touched her, she jerked violently away. The hem of her skirt wafted dangerously close to the fire.
Tom took a step back, holding his hands palm out. He reminded himself that she was a weak and delicate lady. “Don’t get your bloomers in a twist. You suddenly looked peaked.”
She blinked with the disoriented look of an awakening dreamer. “I beg your pardon?” she asked vaguely.
Tom took another step back. He had never seen cabin fever strike a person so fast. Or maybe this was another symptom of her battle fatigue. “I thought you might be getting sick all of a sudden.”
“I’m…fine.” She edged over to the settle and sank down.
He went to the kitchen and took out a jug of cider, freshly pressed by the Kreidbergs up island at Rock Harbor. He poured some into a glass jar and brought it to her. “You’d better drink something.”
She hesitated, then reached for the glass and sipped at the cider. “It’s delicious. I meant to tell you that at supper. Mr. Silver?”
He was always disconcerted when she addressed him so formally. “Yeah?”
“What will my staying under the same roof as you do to my reputation among the settlers?”
He shook his head. She simply didn’t get it. Arthur Sinclair’s daughter was a pariah—that was what she should worry about. But he didn’t want to bring that up again, so he said, “Folks here are down-to-earth and practical. Someone needs a bed for the night, people don’t pay much mind where that bed is.”
She had picked at her meal, eating no more than she had on shipboard. Tom didn’t want to admit it to himself, but he was starting to worry about her. What if Sinclair came for his daughter only to find she was ill or worse—insane?
* * *
Deborah stood watching out the window. The town was stirring to life in the morning. A child toddled out onto the stoop of the house across the way. A woman in a nightgown and kerchief grabbed him and took him inside. At the end of the street, a girl carried a milking pail into a house. The man with the long white hair walked along the roadway, his breath making frozen clouds in the morning air.
She had dressed this morning without a mirror, washing her face in the chilly water at the washstand and brushing her hair in the dark. She emerged from the room to find a lively fire in the grate and Tom Silver fixing breakfast. Today, after their first night in the house behind the shop, he looked…different. He had bathed for a very long time the night before. She’d lain in bed and listened to him filling the big zinc tub in the next room, trying not to picture him. But she had anyway, and in her mind’s eye that big body didn’t in any way resemble the smooth marble nude sculptures she had viewed in Florence last summer.
He looked alarmingly real, not a statue at all. His hair, though still savagely long, shone with bluish glints and the small braid with the eagle feather flashed in and out of the dark locks. He wore Levi’s trousers, boots and a clean broadcloth shirt. As he boiled the morning coffee, he seemed entirely at ease.
There was an intimate domesticity to the situation that discomfited her. She had never been terribly interested in the way other people started their day, had never given the matter much thought. It was unbearably strange, this settled state of affairs.
He glanced up. “Coffee’s almost ready.”
“Um, thank you.” She sat down at the table, and seeing no napkin, wasn’t sure what to do with her hands. So she simply folded them in her lap.
Tom poured himself a mug and sat down to eat a piece of cornbread. She chafed beneath his gaze. “Shall I help myself?”
“I reckon the breakfast isn’t going to walk over here on its own.”
“You needn’t be sarcastic.” She took down the other mug from a peg. “Forgive me if I’m unclear on the protocol of being a prisoner.”
He laughed briefly. “Very dramatic. Did you learn that by going to the theater?”
She sniffed and reached for the black enamel coffeepot. Tom spoke sharply, but her yelp of surprise and pain drowned him out. She leaped back, holding her burned hand. At the same moment, Tom jumped up. Grabbing her wrist, he pulled her over to the sink and pumped a cascade of water over her burned hand. The icy water soothed and then numbed her hand.
“Didn’t you know that was hot?” he asked, pumping the water with one hand and holding her with the other.
She didn’t answer. Surely he knew full well she had never poured coffee from a stove pot. More astonishing to her was the fact that he was holding her and she didn’t feel like screaming or fainting.
He lifted her hand from the stream of water and inspected it. An angry red welt cut across her palm. “You’ll probably get a blister,” he said. He grabbed a frayed cloth from a peg and carefully blotted at her hand.
“Wait here,” he said. “I’ve got some ointment for this.” He fetched a tin of something that smelled faintly of maple. “Hold out your hand.” She turned it palm up and he used his large, blunt finger to smooth on the ointment. Then he wound the cloth and loosely tied it.
“You must think me such a bungler,” she said. Her hand stung, but that wasn’t what hurt.
Instead of releasing her, he steered her toward the table and bench. “No,” he said. “Just never met a woman who didn’t know how to tie her own shoes or pour coffee.”
He set a full mug in front of her, then a small tin plate with a square of cornbread on it. She briefly considered another hunger strike, but she already knew that mutiny did not work with this man. He had no heart, no sympathy when it came to her.
With her uninjured hand she picked up the bread and took a bite. As she ate, she felt sheepishness creep like a rash over her. What a foolish thing to do, grabbing a pot from a hot stove with her bare hand. And Tom Silver, of all people, had been there to see her do it.
All her life she had been surrounded by men who had made her feel inadequate. Her father did not deem it necessary or proper for a woman to study and learn matters of business and commerce. Philip’s sophisticated knowledge of vintage wines and fine arts had been impressive, and he had made a point of correcting her ignorance in such matters—and many others. Now Tom Silver, taking her against her will to this strange new world, had dealt her another blow. She wa
s a useless ornament. Not needed. Not wanted. Barely tolerated.
“It must amuse you to see me helpless,” she said at last.
“You’re a lot of things, lady, but you’re not funny,” he said.
“I wonder how you would fare in my world,” she challenged. “You would be as out of place there as I am here.”
“Which is why we’re here,” he said simply. “Believe me, if this was a permanent arrangement, I’d shoot myself. Or you.”
“Then end it now,” she said, leaning forward. “Take me back to Chicago. If it’s money you want from my father, I’ll see that you get it. I saw the scene of the tragedy. And if it happened as you say—”
“It did.”
“—then he was wrong, very wrong, and must be made to pay. I shall make my father listen to me. You needn’t break the law.”
He laughed. “You think that’s important to me?”
“I suppose nothing is important to you—nothing but revenge.”
“Give me a reason to feel otherwise,” he snapped.
His angry grief touched her in unexpected ways. She carefully unwrapped the cloth from her hand. The red welts were becoming more defined. “I’ve never experienced a loss like yours. I can’t begin to know how you feel.” She held his gaze. “What I do know is that nothing you’ve done so far is helping.”
He broke the stare and shoved back from the table. “And you think going begging to your father will help.”
“I wasn’t suggesting begging. I never beg.” She flushed scarlet, knowing it was a lie. She was lost then, locked in painful remembrances. It was the strangest sensation. She was aware of Tom Silver in the room with her, aware of the smell of coffee and the sound of the wind off the lake, yet she felt detached, unconnected to the rest of the world. She felt like a small boat unmoored, adrift in fog-shrouded waters.
She was going mad, she truly was.
“…hear what I said?” Tom Silver’s voice interrupted her dark thoughts.
“I’m sorry?”
“I’ll be in the shop.” He pushed away from the table.
“What shall I do?” she demanded, looking around wildly. “You haven’t answered my question. Why won’t you let me go to my father, convince him to make a settlement to these families?”
He stopped in the doorway. “You’re on an island in the north woods. No one’s going to take you to see your father.”
“Very well. Take me to the mainland and I’ll go by stagecoach or train.” She had never taken the train alone. Her father had his own salon car, lavishly made by George Pullman’s company, but when she traveled, she was never alone. “I shall see to it that justice is served. You have my word of honor.”
“Forgive me for being skeptical of a Sinclair’s word of honor.”
“He doesn’t realize what happened here,” she insisted. “He was obviously misled by his subordinates.”
“He knew what he was doing. He knew what was at risk. He just didn’t care.”
“No.” She refused to believe it. Her father was ambitious, yes. Of course. But not ruthless or heartless. “Hundreds of men work for my father. He does his best to employ men of skill and principle. Most are upstanding men of affairs, but perhaps this mining supervisor was unscrupulous. I shall simply tell my father exactly what you have told me. I’ll explain what happened. He will dismiss the man responsible and make restitution to the families.” She glared at him. “You would have executed him in cold blood with no regard for the law, without hearing his side of the story. Providence alone stopped you.”
“As I recall, a crazy woman sliding down the banister stopped me.”
She was still amazed at herself for actually having done something resourceful.
“The answer to your question is no,” he concluded. “You’ll stay here until he comes for you.”
“What if he doesn’t get your messages?” she demanded.
“He will,” said Tom Silver. “He needs you, remember?”
“To marry Philip Ascot,” she said, feeling a thump of panic in her chest.
“So his grandkids can join the Porcellian Club.”
She gaped at him. “How on earth would you know about that?” It was the most exclusive private club at Harvard, open only to indisputably old-money students.
“Even a troglodyte can read Judge Lowell’s memoirs,” he said. “I once won a copy in a card game. If your father’s not here by ice-up, you’ll have to go to Fraser. That’s where most islanders spend the winter.”
“What is ice-up?”
“Just what it sounds like. When the lake freezes over and you can’t navigate it, the island’s cut off for the winter. Some folks’ve been known to dogsled across the ice, but it’s dangerous. The islanders come back in March or April when the ice breakers can get through.”
“And when does this ice-up happen?”
“November, December.”
“And the island is evacuated.”
“Yep. Being left behind’s a death sentence, so folks generally leave by December.”
“That’s five weeks away.”
He dismantled the coffeepot in the sink. “I have work to do.”
“What of me?”
“Princess,” he said, “I don’t much care.”
She felt herself spiraling away as she sometimes did, down into that shadowy place where fearsome memories lived. Trying to avoid such thoughts, she went to the window and studied the rutted track that comprised the main street. “Do they all know who I am?” she asked, regarding two women who stood in a yard, talking as they pegged out laundry.
“Reckon so, by now,” he said.
“They’ll all hate me.”
He didn’t deny it. “Just don’t wander away anywhere. It’s easy to get lost on the island. Hard to be found.” He walked out of the house leaving a curious emptiness heavy in the air. She stared at the space where he had stood, and a shiver blew through her. Winter was coming on.
* * *
On the same day, Arthur Sinclair received a social snub and a mysterious package. His social secretary, Mr. Milford Plunkett, sat with him in the study of the Lake View house, his impeccably clean, pale face drawn into lines of sympathy. “So it’s true, then,” Plunkett said with quiet resignation. “The brute Mr. Ascot encountered in Lincoln Park did indeed abduct her.”
Arthur felt an uncomfortable heat in his chest. He stared at the torn-open parcel containing a flaxen curl, and had a strange urge to touch it. But he didn’t. Instead, he picked up the lavaliere and laid it on the table. Many years ago, he had spent a month’s wages on the bauble, and not once had he regretted it. He remembered the way the pendant used to look on his wife when she would wear it to Sunday services. The facets of the blue topaz had seemed dim compared to the sparkle in her eyes. May used to laugh when Deborah, as a baby, would play with the jewel. “You’ll have this when you’re older, my precious,” May used to say, “but only if you are very, very good.”
May would have loved this room, he thought. It was painted her favorite color of blue, with a white marble fireplace, the flames dancing cheerily in the grate, chasing off the autumn chill. But back when May was alive, the only way she’d have seen a room like this would have been with a feather duster in her hand.
“The kidnapers could be bluffing,” Plunkett suggested, though not with much conviction.
Arthur held his silence. The man called Tom Silver wanted money, but he wanted something more. He wanted Arthur himself to go to Isle Royale. He could not imagine that, could not imagine seeing the hole ripped into the earth by men who had died doing his bidding. He would never sleep another night if he let himself dwell on his mistakes. He survived by painting away the past, much like a painter brushes over a bad stroke.
Though he knew it wasn’t reasonable, he aimed his anger at Deborah. Her childish refusal to marry Philip had precipitated all this. If she had gone where she was supposed to go that night, none of this would have happened. And Silver would have shot
me dead, he reminded himself.
“Mr. Pinkerton has advised me not to negotiate with them,” he said at last.
“You should probably trust his experience in these matters, sir.” Plunkett cleared his throat. “About the supper you’re hosting tonight—”
Sinclair detected a rare hesitation in his secretary’s tone. “Yes?” He had been looking forward to the exclusive, elegant supper planned for that evening. It was a time to forget the horror of the fire, to look ahead to the future with the most important people in the city.
“Sir, perhaps you should postpone it. There have been several cancellations.” He indicated the letters and cards in his hand.
“Several?”
“Er, all, sir. Everyone has sent their regrets.”
For a few seconds, Arthur couldn’t breathe. Then he made himself say, “The Ascots as well?”
“Yes, sir.”
The city, even in ruins, was a gossip mill. The disaster had hardly slowed down the wagging tongues and scandalized whispers. People were drawing their own conclusions about the disappearance of Deborah Sinclair.
“You’re my social advisor,” he said to Plunkett. “I pay you handsomely to deal with things like this.”
“Begging your pardon, sir, but I’ve never encountered anything like this.”
“Then be blunt. Tell me what people are saying.”
“Sir, I really—”
“Just tell me, damn it.”
“They seem to dwell upon the fact that a savage abducted her. People’s imaginations run wild at this sort of thing. There’s speculation…”
“About what?”
“She’s unmarriageable.” For the first time, color flooded his smooth face. “Who would have her now? She might give birth to a savage infant.” He stared down at the cards in his hands. “I’m sorry, sir.”
Arthur Sinclair knew of only one way to handle the situation. It was a matter of business, nothing more. He took a sheet of paper and a lead pencil, wrote a brief message in his heavy scrawl and shoved it across the table. “There’s my reply.” He severed the air with a sharp gesture of his hand.
Milford Plunkett didn’t bother to conceal his relief as he hurried out. Arthur took the old lavaliere and put it in his pocket. Then he picked up the parcel with the lock of hair, tossed it into the fire and left the room.