by Susan Wiggs
She picked up a few faded floral fabric scraps and set them against the muslin. Birds, she thought suddenly, her mind forming an image of the waterbirds rising from the mist on the lake. If she ever learned to make a quilt, she would want it to depict birds in flight.
“How do we know you’re not just saying that?” Celia asked. “You’ll probably get back to your father and ignore all the promises you made. People like you don’t care about poor folks.”
“That’s not true,” Deborah objected. “I saw the mining pit. I see what the loss did to the families around here. For pity’s sake, I sleep in the bed of a boy who was killed. Do you honestly think I would ever forget? Or fail to keep my promise?”
Celia’s handsome, square face sharpened with suspicion. “We don’t know anything about you.”
“She grew up without a mother,” Ilsa pointed out. “She survived the burning of Chicago.”
Deborah sensed an ally in the pastor’s wife. “I will take up this matter with my father,” she said. “But I can’t do a thing unless I get back to Chicago.”
“Tom Silver is a man of his own mind,” Ilsa said. “I don’t know that there’s anything you can do or say to make him release you.”
“Couldn’t you talk to him? Convince him that releasing me is the right thing to do?”
“You don’t ‘release’ a person up here. It’s not as if you can simply swim away like an undersized fish.”
A terrible, closed-in feeling squeezed at her. “Surely there are boats coming and going.”
“Occasionally,” Celia admitted. “Mail boat’s due in today or tomorrow.”
“And where does it go from here?”
“Stops at the other settlements, then goes on down to Copper Harbor.”
She looked from one woman to the other. “Will you help me? Will you speak to Tom Silver on my behalf?”
“It won’t do any good,” Celia said. “No one tells Tom Silver what to do.”
Ilsa placed the scraps in a drawstring bag. “Take these with you. It’ll help to pass the time.”
“I’d best run along.” Celia went to the door. “I promised Mr. Sivertsen a game of checkers, poor old thing.” As she left, a large man with a ruddy, wind-burned face strode into the kitchen. “Where is my beautiful wife?” he bellowed, then snatched Ilsa into his arms and planted a loud kiss on her mouth.
“Peter,” Ilsa said, suppressing a giggle, “we have a guest.”
The pastor greeted Deborah with a reserved warmth, but clearly he had come to see his wife. “We filled the nets by ten o’clock,” he said. “I told the Wicks I would help them in the fish house, since they’re shorthanded.”
Deborah knew without asking that the shortage of workers had something to do with the mining accident. Pastor Ibbotsen helped himself to a big piece of pie and another kiss from his wife and then he was gone.
Deborah had the feeling a tornado had blown through. The air seemed to hum in his wake. A smile of quiet joy lingered on Ilsa’s mouth. “For a churchman,” she said, “he is a very informal man,” she said.
Deborah knew she meant the kiss. It appeared that Ilsa deeply loved her husband, that she enjoyed being married. Deborah could not imagine such a thing.
“Do you have a sweetheart back in Chicago?” Ilsa asked.
Caught off guard, Deborah nodded. “I was supposed to marry a man named Philip Ascot,” she said. “But I don’t think I shall now. Do you know, when he first asked for my hand in marriage, I thought it was because he loved me.”
“An understandable notion,” Ilsa said. “Some folks do, you know.”
“Do what?”
“Marry for love.”
Deborah had never seen it. All the marriages between her friends and acquaintances had the flavor of dynastic mergers. It was the way of the world. Two families merged by marriage and often—often enough for her to dream it could happen to her—the love happened afterward, forged by years of living together, raising a family. She was certain it was supposed to happen that way. If it didn’t, what was the point of anything?
But she knew there was a darker side to marriage, something women never spoke of. Or perhaps, she conceded, there was simply something wrong with her. She lacked some fundamental quality that would make her the sort of happy wife Ilsa appeared to be. Maybe it was because she had grown up without a mother. Maybe it was because her father was so hard to please. She was no longer certain what happiness was, or how to find it.
“I might never marry at all,” Deborah said. “I think I would like that.” A while later, a distant whistle sounded. She felt a clutch of hope in her chest. “The mail boat?”
Ilsa nodded. Deborah rushed outside and headed down to the landing. Finally, a way out of her dilemma.
FIFTEEN
The first person Deborah encountered on her way to the landing was Tom Silver. In his jeans, broadcloth shirt and tall boots, with the breeze in his hair, he looked more like Paul Bunyan than ever. Her chest caught at the sight of him, and she had a strange, unexpected reaction—a warmth, a tightening inside her. When he saw her, he lifted one eyebrow inquiringly. She thought about what Celia and Ilsa had warned her about—that Tom Silver didn’t take orders from anyone.
She sniffed and stuck her nose in the air. She was not about to explain herself to him.
She would have carried on with her dignified progress if she hadn’t stepped in the puddle. Her right foot struck chilly water and sticky mud. With a cry of dismay, she brushed back her skirts and extracted her foot from the puddle.
Tom Silver kept walking as if nothing had happened. Her foot sloshed as she walked, and she wished in that moment that she knew an oath or two, for surely if ever there was a time for oaths, this was it.
“So much for mincing around with your nose in the air, eh, Princess?” Tom Silver asked at last.
She felt the now-familiar sting of interest in him. No. She could not have—could not abide—an interest in any man. “You needn’t gloat.”
He glanced at her bandaged hand. “I’m not gloating. So who told you about the mail packet?”
She saw no harm in revealing to him that she had made the acquaintance of Ilsa and Celia. And she took a certain satisfaction in the expression of surprise on his face. “You were certain they would blame me for the sins of my father,” she said.
“I don’t claim to know any woman’s mind,” he said carefully. There seemed to be something he was holding back from her, but she wasn’t certain what it was.
“Not everyone believes that revenge is the way to redemption,” she said.
He narrowed his eyes. “Who said I was looking for redemption?”
She gave a little laugh of disbelief. “Mr. Silver, if ever there was a man in need of redemption, then you are the one.”
“How’s that?”
She aimed her gaze at the roadway ahead. “Never mind. I’ve said too much. Your immortal soul is none of my affair.” She couldn’t believe she had said as much as she had. Perhaps this was part of being a captive. She was developing an unhealthy attachment to her captor. She was better off concentrating on figuring out a way to escape him.
The mail packet turned out to be a little tug, its steam engines seething as it angled for the dock. By the time she and Tom reached the landing, a bearded man with close-set, light eyes was setting crates out on the dock. Tom Silver greeted him. The man peered at Deborah, openly curious, his odd, flat gaze lingering a shade too long for comfort.
Tom didn’t address the unasked questions hanging in the air, but busied himself putting the three crates on a two-wheeled cart. “Can you stay a spell, Silas?” he asked.
“Not today. I’d best get around to Rock Harbor before the weather kicks up.”
Deborah had seen Rock Harbor on one of Lightning Jack’s charts. The settlement lay at the other end of the island, perhaps forty miles away.
“Wait,” she said. “Take me with you.”
The man rubbed his beard. “You want to
go to Rock Harbor?”
“No. I want to go back to the mainland with you.” She didn’t dare look at Tom Silver, though she could feel the bruising intensity of his glare. “I can pay you.”
“Can you then, miss?” The pale man called Silas looked intrigued. He held a cheroot between his fingers, and the smoke and tobacco had stained his hand amber.
“Please.” Deborah clasped her hands together in supplication. “I don’t belong here. Tom Silver forced me to come here against my will. Anyone of honor and decency would help me. There is a reward out for my safe return, I’m sure of it.”
The light eyes drifted over her, lingering too long again. “That a fact?”
Something about the way he was staring chilled her to the bone. She felt a frisson of unease at the prospect of getting on the mail boat with him. The breath locked in her throat, but she swallowed hard, fighting past the fear. “All I want is to get back to the mainland so I can make my way to Chicago.”
“I suppose that could be arranged.” Within the pale hair of the beard, his lips were red and wet. “For a price.”
Deborah told herself to walk out on the dock. She told herself to defy Tom Silver and simply get in the boat with the skipper. But there was something about him that put her off. The twist of fear in her gut reminded her that some men were a danger to women like her. She felt hopelessly torn. Here was someone who could offer a way off the island, and she was too afraid to take the chance.
Frustrated, disgusted with her indecision, she admonished herself not to get weepy. “I…I believe I’ve changed my mind,” she said. Then she turned and marched up the road toward the trading post. By the time she reached the porch of Tom Silver’s house, she wanted to howl with disappointment. She didn’t know what to do, whom she could trust. She sank to the bottom step and looped her arms around her drawn-up knees.
When he arrived in the yard, parking the cart at the side entrance of the shop, she sent a dagger look at him.
“You made the right choice, staying here instead of going with him,” Tom said.
“How would you know what is the right choice for me?”
“He’s a good skipper,” Tom explained. “But he has a reputation for being a little rough when it comes to women.”
Rough. The term conjured images she didn’t want to see.
Tom Silver opened the supply doors at the rear of the post. “I thought you might like to know. A wire came from your father,” he said.
She sat up straight, as if he had poked her in the back. Silver picked up the handles of the cart and steered it around back. Unwilling to shout after him like a fishwife, she hurried to follow him. Thank God, she thought. Thank God, her father now knew where she was. Arthur Sinclair was a problem solver. Let him tackle a situation and he would resolve it. She had seen him do so in everything from settling disputes among the household help to mediating strikes at the Union Stockyards.
Surely he would find a way to rescue his only daughter from this vast wilderness.
“What does he say?” she asked, unable to stay quiet a moment longer. “When will he be here?”
“I reckon we’ll find out.”
“Where did the wire come from?” She tried not to grind her teeth in impatience.
He didn’t look at her but walked up the supply ramp. “Nearest telegraph office is in Copper Harbor.”
As she followed him into the shop, she was already working out in her head how soon she could be back home with her father. True, they had not parted on the best of terms. He had refused to hear her out in the matter of Philip Ascot, but she felt certain that, in time, he would understand that she could not have such a man as her husband regardless of his position and importance in society.
She glanced at Silver, who lifted the hinged counter and moved behind it. With great deliberation, he unfolded the amber-colored piece of paper and spread it out on the counter. He stared down at it, then looked up at Deborah.
He uttered a word she had never heard before, and his tone of voice suggested she did not ever want to learn its meaning. Then he strode out of the room. She could hear him at the back of the building, stacking crates with angry energy.
A chill coursed over her as she took a step toward the plank counter. The message from her father lay there, tantalizing with possibilities.
Her hand shook as she picked it up, turned it toward her.
She had to read the body of the message twice before its meaning registered.
The sound that escaped her was strange, unfamiliar, the cry of a cornered animal. She clutched the telegram in her fist and pressed her hand to her breastbone. She could feel her heart beating hard against her chest, could hear the rhythm of her breathing, but she felt like a stranger to herself. All her life she had been the daughter of Arthur Sinclair. Now, in the space of a moment, she was not. She was no one.
She recalled her fantasy of disappearing in the midst of the fire. Now her wish had come true. She didn’t have to obey her father because she had no father. She had been set adrift by the man who had been her protector. Like a piece of bad business, she had been put aside.
“Oh, Father,” she whispered. “Father, how could you?”
Tom Silver could not have heard her agonized whisper, but he stalked in from the back and inspected her with some concern. But he said nothing. He had said nothing since the oath that had come out of him a few moments ago.
There was only one thing she could do when she saw the expression on his face, and that was laugh. She had to, or else she would melt into a puddle of tears. So she threw back her head and laughed with all that she was, with everything that was in her. She laughed until the tears came, and kept laughing until they dried. Laughing until her chest nearly burst with hurt. Through it all, Tom Silver stood watching her with the sort of wary suspicion of someone observing an inmate in an insane asylum.
Finally, after a very long time, he crossed the room to her and held her by the upper arms. She forgot to fight him, forgot to recoil from his touch, forgot to be afraid when he put his face very close to hers.
“You’ll have to explain the joke, Princess,” he said. “Because I don’t get it.”
The hysteria of her laughter finally subsided. In its wake came a sense of hurt and abandonment so sharp that she flinched. “The joke is on you, Mr. Silver.” She stared at his hand on her arm. Why wasn’t she fighting him? Why didn’t he make her afraid anymore?
She shook back her hair. “You thought you had managed to kidnap the most valuable hostage in Chicago,” she said. “Yet it turns out I’m worthless.” She chuckled, the sound weak, for she had nearly spent herself laughing. “Completely, absolutely worthless.”
Saying the words aloud confirmed it. She realized that she would never, ever be forgiven for refusing to marry Philip Ascot. The planned alliance with the venerated Ascot family had meant everything to her father. She had never quite understood, until this moment, just how much store he had set by the upcoming nuptials.
Arthur Sinclair was a mystery to her—she had only just realized that. When had her father stopped seeing her as a daughter and begun to regard her as a chess piece in his game to capture a foothold in society? Perhaps he had never seen her as a daughter. She was only now realizing her place in the world he had made.
She had no place in his heart. Only in his plans.
While Tom Silver held on to her—she still had no idea why his touch didn’t create panic in her—she forced herself to unfold her hand and reread the telegram.
The words struck into her like hurled rocks. They sounded so like her father, so like Arthur Sinclair.
You took her, you keep her. An unmarriageable daughter is worth nothing to me.
She wondered what Tom Silver was thinking. His face betrayed nothing. At first. Then he let go of her abruptly. She stepped back, waiting. He said that word again, the one whose meaning she didn’t know.
Yet on some level, she did know.
“What the hell does he mea
n, ‘unmarriageable’?”
She had trouble breathing. “Why, exactly what you think it means. I cannot be married.”
His dark eyes narrowed. “Why not? Do you have any idea why he’d respond like this?”
Shame flashed through her, searing hot. “Yes.”
“You mind explaining?”
“Yes,” she said again. Her stomach churned. She clutched at herself, trying to stave off the sickness. She went outside for air, heading away from the settlement. She stopped at a small crystal stream that tumbled down from the rocky heights above the shoreline. Tom Silver came up behind her.
“I’m still waiting for an answer,” he said.
She knew what her father’s message meant. At her center, she managed to find an oasis of numbness and she spoke from that place.
“I—” She could not, would not, explain the secrets of her heart to this cruel stranger. She held her hands low, wringing them together in desperation.
“You sick or something?”
“No, I’m not sick, damn your eyes. I am ruined!” The words burst out of her and hung there, between them, echoing through the silence of the empty day. She wished she could take them back, swallow them, hide them. She had not meant to reveal so much of herself to this man. She walked away, taking a path down to the edge of the lake.
He stared for a long moment at her wringing hands, then at her face. “Ruined,” he said at length. “If you were a horse, I’d reckon it means you’d been ridden rough, bit-spoiled.” He scowled, then raised his eyebrows with dawning comprehension. “Ah, I see what he means. He thinks his perfect, sweet daughter has lost her virginity.”
She buried her face in her hands. It was a word she had never before heard uttered aloud, and in the majestic wilderness, it was a profanity. Whispering through her hands, she said, “I’m quite certain he thinks so.”