by Susan Wiggs
“Never is a long time,” he said.
“So is forever.”
“And what do you want to do with your forever, Miss Tabula Rasa? Will you rewrite history, become someone new?”
“I think I would like that.” She ran her hands over the quilt in her lap. Given a choice, who would she become? “I was always Arthur Sinclair’s daughter, and then Philip Ascot’s fiancée. But never actually my own person.”
“Maybe you’d best figure out who she is.”
“I am,” she said softly, the pattern of the quilt slipping beneath her fingers. “I am figuring that out.”
* * *
It was an hour past dawn, and Tom had already caught a whitefish through a hole he had chopped in the ice. His fingers and toes still bothered him, lingering effects of the frostbite. He stood warming himself by the fire, waiting for Deborah, who had gone outside to the privy. When she came back in and took a seat at the table, she looked paler than ever, as if she were fading into the winter whiteness. He guessed, from the way she dabbed at her lips with a corner of her apron, that she’d taken ill. He wanted to say something, but felt awkward asking after her health. She probably wouldn’t tell him if she was ill anyway.
But this was not the first time she’d been sick after breakfast. He couldn’t stop thinking about his disturbing conversation with Lightning Jack the day of the evacuation. Lightning was rarely wrong about people, and he had noticed her habit of going green around the gills.
A pointed icicle touched the base of Tom’s spine. Pregnant. Not Deborah. How could that be? She was so sheltered, so innocent. Ignorant, even. And skittish as hell. She could barely tolerate even a casual touch. She couldn’t possibly be…
But she had been engaged to be married and it clearly wasn’t a love match. When Sinclair’s wire had accused her of being unmarriageable, she had readily called herself “ruined.” Could this be what she’d meant?
Those symptoms were so telling. He wracked his brain, trying to recall if he’d noticed her tending to her monthly laundry. For the life of him, he could not remember.
Damn it. If Deborah Sinclair was pregnant, the prospect of spending the winter with her on the island would be a nightmare. He rubbed his hands together, pretending to be totally preoccupied with the fire. In reality, he didn’t even see the fire. Deborah? he kept asking himself. Pregnant?
“I need to ask you something,” he blurted out, swinging around to face her.
She glanced up, her brow puckering at his gruff tone. Already he felt stupid for bringing up such an absurd matter. He regarded her gentle doe eyes, the mouth he had dared to kiss just once, in pretense. There had been no experience in her kiss. Just shock, anger, fear. And a softness and sweetness he had never forgotten.
“Yes?” she prompted.
There was nothing to do but simply come right out with it. “Are you in the family way?” he demanded bluntly.
Deborah gasped, clutching the edge of the table with white-knuckled hands. Then she stood up from the table. She looked as if she had swallowed a live toad. Her eyes opened wide and her jaw dropped, and the sickness that had claimed her earlier seemed as if it might erupt again. Then her color changed once more, to a vivid purplish red, as if she were choking on that toad.
“What?” There was no voice behind the agonized query. It was an empty rasp shaped by her too-pretty, disbelieving mouth.
“It’s no idle question, so don’t go all prim and proper on me. I have to know. Are you pregnant?”
Her hands dropped to her middle and trembled against her apron. She moved toward the door as if she might flee like a wild thing. “P…preg…?” Again, no voice behind the word, just a horrified breath.
“I know it’s probably against your religion to say the word aloud, but we’re stuck here, so I need to know what I’m dealing with. Are you?”
Like a blind person, she groped her way to the door and clutched at the handle. She stood as still as a statue of ice.
Say no. Tom willed her to set his mind at ease on the matter. But she stayed mute, her face blank and battle-shocked.
“Well?” he prodded. “It’s a simple question.”
Say no. He waited, holding his breath.
“I…I don’t know,” she said at last.
Grim amazement gripped him. He clenched his jaw to keep from swearing. She hated it when he swore. Then he forced himself to speak softly, gently. He realized the implication—the accusation—of what he was about to say but he said it anyway. “So it’s a possibility.”
She exploded. He had never seen anything like it. One moment she was a stone icon, standing by the door like a trading post Indian, the next she was a sobbing mass of misery. She wept with the force of a hurricane. Great, gusting sobs shook her entire frame and bent her like a wind-torn tree.
Tom Silver had raced across fields in the heat of battle. He had fled from angry mother bears, battled storms on the lake, survived a deadly blizzard, walked across miles of unstable ice. But as he confronted Deborah Sinclair, it occurred to him that he had discovered the most dangerous and frightening thing in the world—a weeping woman.
He stood watching her, feeling completely helpless. He had no idea what to do, so he crossed the room to her and awkwardly patted her on the shoulder. She lurched away in alarm, nearly stumbling to the floor. He drew back and cast about for something to say. The feeling of helplessness engulfed him until he was awash in it. She cried as if her heart would break, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it.
“Stop,” he said, too quietly. Her tears drowned out his command, so he raised his voice. “Stop. Please, for the love of Christ, quit bawling.”
The harsh command seemed to penetrate her misery. She sucked in a deep breath and said, “I can’t.”
“You just did,” he pointed out.
That made her weep again, but not as explosively as before. Not with that terrible violence she had shown earlier. Now she simply hung her head and stared at the floor as her body convulsed with gusty sobs.
He found a towel and held it out to her. “Mop your face,” he said.
She took the towel and wept into it. But after a while, she blotted at her cheeks and nose, and the sobs subsided to soft hiccups, small echoes in the aftermath of a storm.
Tom wished he were somewhere far away. Instead, he got a chair and held it for her until she inched forward, then gingerly sat down. He took the other chair and turned it around, straddling the back and crossing his arms over the top.
“Stop staring at me as if I were some sort of sideshow freak,” she said.
“I’m not,” he said.
“But you’re staring.”
“Not at a freak, at someone who is going to explain a few things.”
Her chin trembled.
“Without bawling her face off,” he added. When he spoke kindly and tenderly, she wept. For some reason, she seemed stronger when he was harsh with her.
She sucked in a broken breath of air. “How did you know?”
He heard such shame and anguish in her voice, he was almost sorry he’d asked. But having opened that door, he now had to hear the rest. “You haven’t been well, especially in the morning. Happens to most women when they get in the family way.”
“It does?”
He figured it wasn’t one of the things they’d taught her at finishing school. “Lightning Jack noticed, too, and he thought you and I were—that we’d—” He broke off, wondering how it had suddenly turned so hot and stuffy in the cabin. “I told him we hadn’t,” he added quickly. “But then I got to thinking, you were about to be married, so maybe you’d been…like married folks.” He tried to state things as delicately as possible, but it wasn’t working. She looked more horrified than ever.
“Why must I speak of…this?” she asked weakly.
“Because it’s eating at you like a poison, damn it.”
“I have no idea how to explain—”
He laughed rudely, determined to
goad her into an explanation. “Talking is the one thing you do better than anyone else I’ve ever met. So talk. No harm ever came of talking.”
That raised her dander a little, and he didn’t regret angering her. Anything was better than her shattering grief. “This is private,” she said. “You must never—”
“Not a problem,” he assured her. “Trust me on this. Be plain about it. Just start talking.”
TWENTY-SIX
Didn’t he realize she could not speak? Didn’t he know there weren’t any words to tell him what she had hidden from him all these weeks? She felt as though Tom Silver was pushing her through a long dark tunnel, and everything in her resisted going to that murky place. Until now, she had not allowed herself to dwell on it. Each time the memories had assaulted her, she had fled from them. But that had not made the shame and the pain go away.
The dam had been broken open by one simple question. Are you in the family way?
She couldn’t hide from the past because it was a part of her. She had to go back. Back to that night, to that moment, to the incident that had changed the entire landscape of her life. She knew she must speak of it, and soon, but she waved her hand to beg for time to gather her thoughts. Tom Silver simply waited, undemanding, yet clearly unwilling to back down.
She shut her eyes and forced herself to relive the night before the fire. Philip had taken her to the opera, though she had not seen much of the production. She had certainly heard the music, but she’d heard it from the flower-decked salon behind the private Sinclair box. She would never forget watching Don Giovanni sweep Zerlina away to seduce her, but Zerlina had screamed and was rescued.
Deborah had not screamed.
Perhaps she should have called for help, yet all her life she had been taught to be quiet, polite. Submissive. Even when terror and panic ripped through her. This was Philip, after all. The man she had promised to marry. She had no call to fear him.
He took her hand and, ignoring her hissed protests, brought her to the lavish salon behind the box. Among the well-born of Chicago, decorating one’s salon was a competitive art form, and Arthur Sinclair had made certain no one would outdo him. He had hired a French designer to create a miniature evocation of the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles.
Gaslight burned low in brass and crystal wall sconces. Gilt-edged mirrors lined the walls, and Deborah could see the endlessly repeating reflections of herself and Philip. They resembled any embracing couple, except that she wasn’t embracing him, but trying to push him away.
He claimed he wanted to show her exactly what her duties as a wife would be. He wanted to give her a taste of the secret delights of marriage.
Leave me alone. She had said it playfully at first. Truth be told, she’d been a little intrigued. Like all brides-to-be, she had been wondering about the wedding night. But she hadn’t thought he was serious about sampling the pleasures prematurely. She had been certain he would pull back, laugh with her and return to watching the opera on stage.
Ah, my darling. You will never be alone, not ever. He had whispered the words in her ear, and she supposed he meant to sound grandly romantic. But his promise disturbed her, as did the insistent press of his hands on her. She looked into Philip’s face, his handsome face, the one in the daguerreotype that had stared at her from a gilt frame upon her dressing table. She felt his touch, closing around her wrist, heard his voice rasping harshly in her ear and smelled his scent of bay rum and macassar oil, filling her with sickness, making her gag.
He had mocked her apprehension, and then he’d grown impatient with her. High-handed. Insistent. If he had been crude, she could have protested, stood up for her dignity and honor. But he had simply been himself, a man entitled by virtue of his social standing to help himself to whatever he wanted. The sort of man she had been taught all her life to honor and admire.
That’s enough, Philip. Please. That had been a mistake. She should not have said please. She had begged, begged him to stop. Instead he had pressed hard on her shoulders and forced her to her knees.
“You plead so prettily, my darling girl,” he had said in a very soft, deadly whisper. “I like it when you beg.” He pressed harder, there in that dark velvet-shrouded private room. He laughed and kissed her, then thrust her into a corner. “You like this, don’t you?” he’d persisted. “I’ll bet you’re going to want to move up the wedding date.” The edge of the gilt chaise, padded by tufted brocade in a fleur-de-lis pattern, cut painfully into her back. She felt something—his hand—up her skirts.
Shock froze her. She could not move, blink, breathe.
This is what you were made for. He accompanied the words with a brusque, harsh tug on her undergarments, tearing them away and putting himself there. This is the whole duty of a woman.
As if it were only yesterday, she could hear the leading man’s clear voice filling her mind. Don Giovanni had been a fitting accompaniment to her deflowering, although why the event was called—in awed whispers at Miss Boylan’s—deflowering was beyond her.
This is what a wife does. This is the whole duty of a woman.
He had chuckled, low and intimately, and she was ashamed to think that there had been a time when she found his laughter attractive, had found his mild features endearing, his personality engaging. Only at that moment, with Mozart’s opera trumpeting in her ears and Philip’s breath hot upon her face, did Deborah realize that she had been party to a huge lie, the lie that kept a woman ignorant of the true cost of becoming a married lady.
It’s not amusing anymore, Philip. Stop. I want you to stop.
That night, she had discovered the lie, but it had been too late for her. The man she had pledged her future to had wooed her into a smug sense of complacence. She had been all too pleased with his courtship, all too happy with her father’s wholehearted promotion of the match. Many of her friends had been promised to men who were old, had nasty grown children or bore obscure European titles. Not so Deborah. She had landed an Ascot, from one of New York City’s first families. While other American heiresses had been sent kicking and screaming across the Atlantic to live in gloomy castles with impoverished noblemen, Deborah had eagerly embraced a future with a young, handsome, vital man who laughed often, flattered with sincerity and pursued pleasure with charming abandon.
The trouble was, his idea of pleasure had somehow changed.
The reaching hands groped relentlessly, tirelessly. Covering her horrified mouth with his, he pressed and pushed. Even when she managed to twist her head away and free her mouth from his kiss, his slender, elegant body, which she had so often admired on the dancefloor, pushed deeper into her.
And she was struck mute. Not out of shock, although she felt shocked, and not out of outrage, although a deep anger flashed through her. No, what held her as silent as a tongueless slave was politeness, a sense that calling out for help would bring more shame on her than enduring whatever Philip had in store for her.
That, perhaps, was most shameful of all. She was too polite to stop him. Life had trained her to be quiet and compliant. She’d had no idea that this was what she was in training for. This was the big secret, the big lie.
His voice whispered into her ear. You like this you want this you’ve waited for this.
She had no idea what to say to him, what to do.
And so she did nothing. Maybe that was why she was so ashamed. She had allowed herself to trust—to esteem—a man who would do this.
Shrouded by the sounds of a haunting Mozart duet, with the smell of carnations and Philip’s brandy breath thick in the air, she could not move, could not speak. And when she finally did struggle and scream, she discovered that it was only in her head. On the outside, she lay on the settee, doing exactly what Philip forced her to do, and all the while, the opera trumpeted in her ears.
The welling of the music, the soaring voices, cleaved through her like a knife. She felt disembodied, for she knew she was gone, finished, murdered, and the strangest thing was, she could still se
e and feel and hear everything. In the draped privacy of the salon, she had discovered that there was something wrong with her, that unlike normal women, she could not perform those duties without going half mad with terror.
Only when Philip was finished with her had she broken down, curling herself into a ball on the brocade chaise and sobbing uncontrollably. Her weeping had infuriated him, but when he had taken her back to Miss Boylan’s that night, he had seemed quite proud of himself.
“I saved you the discomfort of the wedding night, dear heart,” he had boasted. “Hereafter, you will find only enjoyment in being my wife.”
She had sat across from him in the phaeton, as unfeeling and unmoving as a pillar of salt. He had taken her utterly by surprise, rendering her completely unable to act. Had she always been that useless when disaster struck?
Philip, of course, had exhibited his own brand of…she wasn’t sure what it was. Arrogance, maybe. But perhaps he would beg her forgiveness and lift her hand to his lips, and all would be right with the world again. Surely that would happen.
But he showed no remorse, and Deborah had never been able to make sense of what had just happened to her. There was no sense in an act of violation. But there was shame and humiliation and flashes of impotent rage. She didn’t know if those feelings would ever go away.
She used to adore opera, used to love everything about it. Now the very thought of listening to one single note of an aria or chorus made her squirm with fear. All because of Philip. He had made her afraid to touch any man, even an unconscious man, dying of cold. Philip had damaged her in ways she was only beginning to understand.
The realization made her skin crawl. Sweat trickled down between her breasts. No.
She forced herself to regain control. It was over. She had come, albeit against her will, to a place where Philip Ascot would never pursue her, even if he wanted to.
But dear God, how on earth would she explain all this to Tom Silver?
Pregnant. Sweet Heaven, what if she was?
Her mind swimming with poisoned memories, she faced Tom Silver. His presence gave an unexpected boost to her confidence. He sat there like a rock, not in judgment, though he looked supremely uncomfortable in the role of counselor or confessor. Instinctively she knew it was safe to tell him the truth. He had told her to just start talking. She wished it were that easy.