by Susan Wiggs
Grumbling under his breath, he yanked on his dry, stiff trousers, stuffed his feet into socks, then put on his boots and went outside to relieve himself. When he returned, she was setting out bowls on the table.
“There’s warm water in the basin,” she said without looking up.
He washed at the creaky old washstand, then sat down at the table, suddenly ravenous. She served him some sort of pasty corn porridge drenched in maple syrup. The dish would have turned the stomach of the stoutest of lumberjacks, yet to Tom it was pure ambrosia, and he ate every bit without saying a word.
When he finished, he had his first good look around the place. Her things were everywhere. Female things. Not very many of them, for most had been transported to the mainland, but Deborah Sinclair was the sort of woman who managed to strew bits and pieces of herself in her wake. Like a boat dragging a herring net and drawing a flock of gulls, she left things behind—a stocking, a hair comb, a bit of ribbon or lace, a bottle of some enticing and mysterious fragrant liquid.
Wood was stacked haphazardly by the stove. Foodstuffs from the shop littered the counter—a sack of meal, a jar of syrup, tins of potted meat, smoked fish.
She followed his gaze along the plank sideboard. “I broke into the store,” she said with a sheepish shrug of her shoulders. “I used an ax.” She waited, watching him like a rabbit poised to flee.
“I’m not going to yell at you,” he said. In fact, he was somewhat amazed. Not so very long ago she couldn’t even button her own shoes. She had survived a blizzard alone out here. Some men wouldn’t have been able to manage that.
“So what happened?” he asked into the frozen silence. “How’d you manage to get left behind?”
“How did you manage to leave me behind?”
“You were supposed to be aboard the Koenig.”
“I had to go back for something.” Agitated, she stood up from the table and started cleaning up.
“Back for something. What’d you forget?”
“It was silly, really,” she said without looking at him. “I wanted to collect a bag of agates from the stream. A memento of Isle Royale. I thought I’d never see this place again.” With quick, nervous movements she began putting things up on the pantry shelf.
What an odd bird she was. She had been forced to come here against her will, yet she wanted a memento of her time here. Had she developed a certain fondness for the place?
“You should have told me. We would have waited.”
“Truly, I thought I’d be only a moment, and I didn’t want to keep people waiting. I had a mishap. The night of the fire, I went back for a jewel that once belonged to my mother. That was the moment you broke into my father’s house.” She shook her head in self-disgust. “You would think I’d learn to leave things behind rather than risk keeping them.” As she spoke, she dropped a jar of hazelnut oil, and it shattered on the floor, splattering its contents every which way. “My whole life is a mishap,” she muttered, stooping to pick up the pieces. The dog came to sniff, and she shooed it away from the broken glass.
“That’s a damn fool thing to say.” He pushed back from the table and hunkered down to help. “What the hell do you mean by that?”
“I don’t know. I—I don’t need any help.” Their hands brushed and she snatched hers away. “Truly,” she said.
Irritated by her skittishness, Tom scooped up the dog.
“Poor Smokey,” she said. “The sooner we get out of this fix, the better for all of us.”
“Listen, Princess, there’s no getting out of this fix.”
“Whatever do you mean by that?”
“I mean we’re iced up for the winter. Snowed in. Stranded. We’re not going anywhere until the first thaw.”
She turned pale. “And that would be…?”
“April, I reckon. Maybe March if the thaw comes early.”
Her color changed from chalk to green. “But that…that’s more than three months from now.”
“I can count.”
Her mouth worked soundlessly for a moment; then she got up and staggered outside. He heard a retching sound, followed by a long silence, then the dirgelike rhythm of her footsteps as she trudged back inside.
TWENTY-FOUR
Over the next week, Deborah tried to come to terms with the fact that she and Tom Silver were snowed in for the winter. In the forbidden adventure novels she used to read on the sly at Miss Boylan’s, being snowed in meant thrills and excitement, the crystal wonder of a world gone white. The reality was quite different. Being snowed in meant a biting arctic wind hissing through chinks in the walls, endless dark nights of a silence so deep that it pierced her heart, blinding white snow covering everything and dreaded, painfully cold trips to the woodshed or privy.
She regarded the winter as a long and torturous trail that lay before her. Most days, she could not even imagine reaching the end of it.
One afternoon, she stood staring out the window at the dull gray view of the marshlands leading down to the lake. A thick blanket of white covered everything, obliterating the hummocks of spiky grass, the upended dinghies and fishing gear, the midden pile out beyond the settlement. She propped her elbows on the windowsill, studying the pattern of frost etched around the edges of the glass. Two tiny chickadees landed on the windowsill to peck at the cornbread crumbs she had placed there. They seemed aware of her presence, wary of her, yet they came each day and stayed as long as they dared.
Tom Silver entered the cabin in a swirl of snow and blustering wind, his arms laden with the day’s supply of firewood. Even now that she was accustomed to the sight of him in his full-length coat, he still looked like a bear. No wonder she had shot him.
He was still recovering from his ordeal on the ice. The head wound from the gunshot seemed to be healing well, and he had insisted on removing the bandage to expose the three-inch gash that streaked back from his hairline. His hands and feet had blistered and peeled. Anxiously they watched for signs of gangrene, but none appeared.
The signs of his recovery made her want to sing, but she held her tongue.
By the second day, he had been well enough to remark, teasingly, that she had helped herself to the bed in the loft.
“I wasn’t expecting company,” she’d said.
“Neither was Goldilocks.”
His grin had made her blush. She hadn’t known what else to do. With Tom Silver lying wounded by the stove, she’d simply taken the loft bed for herself. Then a thought had struck her. “With the whole town empty, perhaps we should take separate quarters.”
“Why?” he’d demanded. “Think we’ll offend the snow geese and the marmots?” He had laughed and called her absurd, declaring, “You don’t cling to propriety when your life’s on the line. Keep the bed. I’ll take the loft.”
And so he had, climbing uncomplaining to the loft while she had dragged the mattress back onto the bedstead in the adjacent room. As they had since arriving on the island, they lived at close quarters, yet they seemed miles apart.
She almost smiled now, filled with admiration for his recovery and possibly—just possibly—a sense of accomplishment for her part in it.
“Morning,” he said.
“Good morning.” She turned her gaze back out the window. “You know, I think I’ve figured out why animals hibernate in winter.”
“Yeah?”
“So they don’t have to face this every single day.”
He gave a short, dry laugh and began stacking the wood by the stove with a series of hollow-sounding thunks.
“Although,” Deborah mused aloud, gazing out at the bleak, quiet white day, “the snow does have one virtue. It covers up all the flaws and imperfections and ugliness of the landscape.”
“Never really thought about it.”
That didn’t surprise her. He was such a…literal man.
She turned to see him adding a log to the fire. The bellows wheezed and cinders pinged inside the chimney as he fanned the flames. As captives under the same
roof, they had found, if not true friendship, then at least a calm accord. They set up housekeeping, developed a routine, learned the rhythms of each other’s lives. With no one else around, the atmosphere felt different, and they were coming to know one another in different ways.
He rose early, seeming to have some sixth sense about when the gray thread of first light would appear on the eastern horizon. In the mornings, she would hear the creak of the loft ladder as he lowered himself to the ground floor, followed by splashing sounds at the washstand. Then she would hear the clack of the coffee grinder, and before long, the aroma of brewing coffee would reach her. Always a man of few words, Tom Silver was particularly quiet until he had consumed at least one mug of coffee.
“What’re you staring at?” He wiped his brow with the back of one gloved hand.
“You,” she blurted out.
“Why?”
“I’ve never really observed a man’s daily routines at such close range before.” Realizing what she’d just said, she blushed deeply. “I mean, of course my father and…well, I never really watched the way a man goes through his day.”
“Believe me, I’ve had better days than this.” He closed the stove doors and adjusted the vents. “If every day was like this, I’d go hang myself.”
“Well,” she said, flustered by his pessimism. “Well, I certainly don’t understand you at all. You seem like the sort who would not be in the least troubled by the idea of spending all winter in a cabin.”
“Only if I can choose the company.”
“Ha,” she said triumphantly. “You did choose me. Back in Chicago, you chose to drag me here.”
“That was before I knew what you were like. Damn it, you were reckless as hell, leaving the landing to collect stones, of all things—”
“I’m reckless?” She let out an incredulous laugh. “You’re the one who is reckless. You kidnaped me.”
“If you’d done what you were told, you’d be on your way home,” he stated.
Home. Such a simple word to create such confusion in her. She looked at Tom Silver for a long time, then finally said, “The one thing that can make this situation worse is our being at each other’s throats. If we can’t be friends, we could at least try to be civil.”
“We could try to be friends.” He mumbled the words so quietly she thought she might have imagined them.
But she hadn’t, and an unfamiliar warmth bloomed in her chest. It occurred to Deborah that she had never even had a male friend before. Her relationship with Philip, even before the opera, had not been so much a friendship as an alliance. An association brokered and sanctioned by her father—yet another male she knew only on the surface. It made her melancholy to realize that she didn’t understand her father at all.
She knew more of this big, rough man of the north woods than she did her own father. She knew he could split a day’s worth of wood in mere minutes, and that he whistled through his teeth as he worked. She knew he liked his coffee strong and black, and could eat three bowls of porridge without complaining that he was tired of it. She knew he could read a book swiftly and with deep absorption, and that he was, in his own crude way, a rather thoughtful man. Without being asked, he always made certain there was a kettle of hot water ready when she arose in the morning. When it was her turn to bathe, he managed to stay away a good hour or two, doing Lord knew what. On the nights that he bathed, he waited until she went to bed before dragging out the tub. Lying in the chill dark with the covers pulled up to her chin, she could hear him sloshing and scrubbing, and no matter how hard she tried not to, she kept picturing his large, muscled, hairy body. She had tried not to look when she’d taken off his clothes to warm him, but it had been impossible not to see the way his physique was sculptured by hard work. Impossible not to remember as she lay very still, listening to the scrape of the tub as he dragged it to the door to empty the water.
With each passing day, she grew more used to his presence, the sound of his tread on the porch, the rustle of pages as he read a book in the evening, the way the lamplight glinted off his spectacles, the appreciation on his face when her cornbread turned out delicious. Something was happening between them, something she didn’t quite trust. But like the chickadees that came to peck at the windowsill, she couldn’t resist the danger.
TWENTY-FIVE
Simple survival filled their days, but in the evenings, there was little to do but sit by the stove and read a book or sew. Deborah became more and more interested in her quilt, in the intricate tesselations of the patterns emerging as she pieced the bits of fabric. Tom had decided to go fishing through the ice, and he sat at the table making lures. Hooks, bits of wire and tiny feathers lay on a chamois cloth on the table before him, along with scissors and pliers that looked too small for his big, blunt hands. As he worked, he talked of the book he had recently finished reading—Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.
“Did you know my pastor called that book ‘balderdash’ and banned the congregation from reading it?” asked Deborah.
Tom was enormously amused by this. “He thinks by forbidding people to read, he can make the ideas go away?”
“I suppose he does.” She had not thought of Dr. Moody or her life in Chicago in many weeks. The night of the fire, she was supposed to have attended his lecture with Philip. She frowned, wondering how things would have turned out if she had gone with her friends that night.
“You think a man’s got any business telling folks what to read?” Tom persisted. “How to think?”
“I never really thought about it at all. My father always said action was more important than philosophy.” She caught the look on his face. “It disturbs you,” she observed, “to think of my father as a man, not a monster.”
His hand tightened into a fist. “How else can I think of him, knowing the suffering he caused?”
“But you’ve bested him, don’t you see?” She sat down on the bench at the hearth and picked up her needle and hoop again. For all that her father was a mystery to her, she did understand certain things about him—very clearly. “I don’t think you realize how important it was for me to marry Philip Ascot. That would have given my father the one thing his millions could never buy—respectability and acceptance into the highest social circles in the country. The Ascots are acknowledged even by English royalty. My marrying into that family would have been my father’s crowning achievement. He would have seen all his dreams realized. You stole his dream from him. Can’t you be satisfied with that?”
The mention of Philip’s name etched a look of contempt on Tom’s face. “One punch, maybe two as I recall, and I didn’t even break the skin of my knuckles. If you were my betrothed, I would have worked a hell of a lot harder to save you the night of the fire.”
His words created a moment of headiness, which she quickly quelled. “I should have saved myself and escaped you both,” she said. She stopped, catching herself. She had no business discussing private matters with Tom Silver.
He fell silent and she thought he would leave the subject alone. But after a while, he said, “What about you, Princess? What’s your dream? Do women like you live for social conquests as well?”
“I won’t lie to you. Women like me live and die for status.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“My position in society and the way I appear to the people who matter are supposed to be the most important things in the world to me.” Her needle flashed in and out of the fabric.
“Yeah? Are they?”
“They were—until the fire. What’s left, after everything burns away, is all that matters. It was something of a shock to realize that I was living like a figure on a stage, going through the motions and reciting things that were deemed proper. It was never really me.”
He scowled. She wondered if he did that to hide his surprise at her frankness. “So who was it?” he asked.
She ducked her head to hide a tiny smile. He was the most literal person she had ever met. “What I
mean is, I did not act true to myself. I always carried out someone else’s expectations. My father’s. Those ingrained in me at finishing school. Those of Philip Ascot and his family. I never thought for myself. I let others dictate who I was and how I acted.”
“And now?” He took a pair of needle nose pliers and clamped a tiny hook, holding it in place while he threaded fishing line through the eye.
“Now I’m in the middle of nowhere. My father doesn’t want me back because I’m no longer of value to him.” The words burned her throat. The pain of her father’s rejection was as deep and sharp now as it had been the day the telegraph had come through. In a small, hidden place inside her, she had cherished the fantasy that he would have second thoughts, that at any moment she might look up and see the Triumph nosing into the harbor. But it had never happened. She had to swallow several times in order to find her voice again. “I’m of no value to you, either, which means you went to a great deal of trouble all for nothing.”
He took off his eyeglasses and studied her for a long, slow-moving moment. “I wouldn’t say it was all for nothing.”
Something about the way he stared at her made her blush. She went on babbling and sewing. “Everything I was taught simply doesn’t apply to my current circumstances. So perhaps that means I am a tabula rasa. That is the Latin for—”
“Clean slate,” he said, laughing at her surprise. He put his spectacles back on. “Another bit of troglodyte erudition.”
“You will never let me live that down, will you?” She was slightly ashamed of herself for assuming he was ignorant just because he’d had no formal education. The days stuck in the cabin had been a strong lesson in looking beneath the surface. She’d discovered a man who loved reading and learning as much as he loved the mystical beauty of the island. During the long northern winters, Tom had gained as broad and thorough an education as any college man. But with a deeper center, put there by living close to nature as God made it, she suspected.