by Susan Wiggs
Jesse felt a hunger that hadn’t plagued him in ages. A hunger to taste the just-bathed skin of a beautiful woman. This was no fleeting need, but a forest aflame inside him, raging ever hotter, further and further beyond his control. He couldn’t stop himself from wanting her. From imagining the way she would feel, her velvety skin next to his. From wondering if there was any taste sweeter than Mary’s willing lips.
He wrenched his gaze away from her. “Like it?” he asked tensely.
“Oh, aye. Such a lovely sight. So many stars. Plentiful as snowflakes, they are, and just in that band there, they all blend together like a great white mist.”
“The Milky Way,” he told her.
“A spiral galaxy. In the old days they called it an island of stars.”
Jesse stared at her.
She stared back.
“You surprise me,” he said.
A smile bowed her lips. “Do I, then?”
“The things you know...they’re just—” He broke off, feeling awkward. It was hard to imagine that there had been a time when he’d been easy in any social situation, a sought-after conversationalist, a favorite of the most discerning hosts in Portland and San Francisco. Years of living alone had stolen that ability, as so much else had been stolen from him. “It’s just...”
“Just the sort of thing you don’t expect an ignorant Irish lass to know,” she finished for him. “No need to be polite about it. Lord knows, I’ve encountered more than my share of prejudice against Irish. It was the worst in New York City.” She screwed up her face. “Lots of fat immigration officials and harbormen blaring, ‘No Dogs or Irish.’”
Jesse had told himself he wasn’t interested in her past, yet now his curiosity was piqued. “You’ve been to New York City?”
“I didn’t stay but a week before setting out for San Francisco.” She turned back to the horizon. “It’s why I love being here so, at the edge of nowhere. You’ve not judged me, Jesse Morgan. Well, not too much, anyhow. You never said, ‘No Dogs or Irish.’ Have I remembered to thank you for that?”
With the first kiss I’ve had from a woman in twelve years, he thought.
“It means a lot, that you’ve not sat in judgment of me.”
“I’m the last person to sit in judgment of anyone,” he said, more sourly than he meant to sound.
“Ah, that’ll want explaining,” she said.
“You’re a nosy female, Mary Dare.”
Her laughter flowed like a river of light through the air. With a whimsy that was foreign to him, he imagined he could see her mirth illuminating a path through the darkness like the beam from the lighthouse. Then she sobered a little, her gaze following the arc of the beam.
“This was my guiding star,” she said, her voice quiet. “Did you know that? When I was lost, after the ship completely broke apart, this was the light that I saw. If not for the beacon, I would’ve drowned with the rest of them.”
I’m glad you didn’t drown. He couldn’t speak the words, but his heart said them for him. Not with joy, but with a firm conviction he hadn’t felt in years.
Unaware of the upheaval inside him, Mary looked again out at the ocean, her face bright with fascination and acceptance. She didn’t see what he saw. He saw a hated enemy. He saw the thing that had turned his life into a bleak, endless string of gray days.
She—who had been its victim—loved the sea.
He had convinced himself that he didn’t want to know this woman. The less he knew about her, the safer he was from her intrusions. But there were things he had to ask her. Things he had to know.
For official reasons, he told himself.
“Can you speak of it now?” he asked. “Can you tell me of the shipwreck?”
Her gaze stayed riveted on the crystal facets of the huge lens through the window. “I don’t mean to be secretive.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“I know you must think me an unforgivable thief.” She seemed mesmerized by the slow revolutions of the lens. The lilt in her voice was subdued. “It wasn’t until the ship got in trouble that they found me. A fire in the galley brought me out, and a good thing it was, too. I confess the men were a wee bit surprised.”
That was surely an understatement, Jesse thought.
“Before they could decide what to do with me, the weather kicked up.”
“They?”
“The ship’s cook and his worthless helper. He was trying to put out a grease fire in the galley and I simply had to step forward to help him. He should have known better than to use beef fat for frying potatoes. I mean, honestly.” The lilt came back into her voice as she grew indignant. “The great lout had been feeding the seamen poorly, anyway. It was all I could do not to take over and set him to rights.”
He could picture it. She was bossy and brazen enough to want to have things her way.
“I was a better cook than he would ever be,” she said. “It’s how I earned my fare to San Francisco.”
“Cooking?”
She grinned. “I was a ship’s cook. That’s how I came to sail ’round the cape from New York.”
“Cape Horn. You sailed around Cape Horn.”
“It was a ship out of Buenos Aires. You sound amazed, Captain Morgan.”
He was more than amazed, but he couldn’t tell her that, couldn’t tell her about the feeling that squeezed his chest. The idea of such an adventure seized him with a yearning so sharp it pained him in a place he thought long dulled to pain. How exhilarating it must have been to sail the horse latitudes and the roaring forties around the cape, through the icebound gateway between the two greatest oceans of the world.
It was an exhilaration Jesse Morgan would never, ever know.
Yet hearing her speak of it made him want to go there, to feel the roll of a pitching deck beneath his feet and the sharp cold wind in his face.
Impossible.
In the early days after Emily’s death, he had tried to make himself put out to sea. He had no fear of the surf, which reason told him was more treacherous by far than open water, but the terror in his mind didn’t listen to reason. The moment he set foot on board a ship, horror seized him, without fail, slashing at him with great talons of accusation, driving him back, back to the place where earth and sea meet, where he was destined to stay forever.
“...had read the law but never took up the practice,” Mary was saying.
Her sprightly voice snatched at him, drew him back to the present. “What?” he asked with an impatient shake of his head. “I didn’t hear what you were saying.”
“I was telling you about Mr. Stevenson. A fine gentleman, for all that he’s a Scot and has some strange ways. Malcolm, he insisted I call him. He was on the ship that brought me ’round the cape. Headed for a place in the South Seas, he was. Sandwich Islands, but he called it by its native name—Hawaii. Quite ill, poor soul, though he never complained. Consumptive, I think. Yet for all that, he simply adored adventure.”
“And this Mr. Stevenson was your...friend.” Jesse couldn’t help himself. His gaze strayed to her stomach.
“Don’t you dare.” Her voice lashed out with more fury than he thought her capable of. “Malcolm Stevenson is a man of honor with a lovely wife. Don’t you dare think for one moment that Malcolm...that I...we—”
Jesse cleared his throat. “If you came here expecting civility, you came to the wrong place.”
She buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook. She looked so small and lost that Jesse had a strange urge—the impulse to touch her.
He resisted it.
When she raised her face to look at him again, her cheeks were pale in the eerie beacon light, but she seemed quite composed. “Malcolm was my friend and a great teacher. He’s the one who taught me about the weather and the stars. There is so much
in this world I don’t know.” She sighed, a lifetime of regrets whispering on a single breath.
Her hand rested on her stomach. “It’s odd when I think about it sometimes. They say the voyage ’round Cape Horn is the most treacherous in the world. Yet the greatest danger I encountered was right here.”
The wind picked up, pressing the fabric of her dress against her legs, outlining a form Jesse didn’t want to see but couldn’t help gawking at. He opened the glass pane and stood to one side. “Let’s go in. The tea will be getting cold.”
Without even thinking, he put out his hand to help her. She glanced at him, eyes wide with surprise. Then a smile curved her mouth, and she put her hand in his. Her fingers were cool and slightly damp from the sea air. He tried not to feel the strange energy that passed between him and Mary as they crossed the threshold from the catwalk into the beacon room. He wondered if she felt it, too.
“Thank you,” she said.
They went to the small chamber below, where the tea waited. Their silence was comfortable—and unexpected, given Mary’s verbal proclivities. The sound of the wind and the sea only made the inside feel more cozy. Her gaze was wistful as she moved to the desk and idly thumbed through the station log. “He was going to teach me to read and write,” she said.
“Who?”
“Malcolm. He knew how badly I wanted to learn. But after the ship made port in San Francisco, I...decided that it was best to stay there.”
He heard a disturbing inflection in her voice when she mentioned San Francisco.
“What is in this book?” she asked.
“Reports. It’s much like a ship’s log. All lighthouse keepers must record a summary of activity each day.”
Her face lit up. “You mean this is a record of your days? Every single day?”
“Ever since I came here.” He pointed out the volumes stacked under the desk. “These are from the keepers before me.”
“Every single day,” she said slowly. “Sure and it’s a rare thing, to have such a record.” She plunked the logbook onto the table in front of him. “Read me the entry about the day you saved me.”
Jesse was annoyed to feel his ears redden. He flipped back a page and put his finger on Sunday’s date. She bounced up and down excitedly. “Read me what it says, Jesse. I daresay no one has ever written a word about me before.”
He cleared his throat. “Sunday, second of June, 1876. Six-oh-two of the morning. Recovered one survivor, a female, from the wreck of the oysterman Blind Chance.”
He closed the book.
Mary stared at him. The wonder shining in her eyes had a curious effect on him. He wasn’t used to adulation from anyone. Particularly from someone like her. She gazed at him as if he had just presented her with the moon on a platter. How she must admire him for writing about her in the log.
“You call that a story?” she said at last.
He blinked. “No. I call it a log entry.”
He realized then that her wide-eyed wonder wasn’t wonder at all, but profound displeasure and disbelief. “What did you expect?” he asked, slightly annoyed. “Robinson Crusoe?”
“Who?”
“Never mind.”
She stood and pressed her palms to the surface of the table, leaning toward him and looking a bit like a fierce pixie. “‘One survivor, a female.’ Is that all you can say?”
“It is precisely what happened—”
“I had no idea that an event that has altered the course of my life could be reduced to such a terse, stingy recollection.”
He glared back at her. “This is not some penny melodrama. It’s an official log.”
“Who said official has to mean idiotically boring?”
That put him at a loss.
She dragged out a volume at random from beneath the desk. Her face lit up as she spied masses of spidery text scrawled with copious flourishes. “Is this in the same style as your entry?”
Jesse scanned the page. The keeper before him had been far more indulgent with his pen. He had written a saga of tempest-tossed weather and dire supplications to God. “It goes into a little more detail.”
“Fine,” she said, putting the musty old log away. “Then we must rewrite your entry.”
“We?”
“I just told you I don’t read or write. So I’ll dictate and you write down what I say.”
A protest leaped to Jesse’s lips. He hesitated, weighing his options. He could refuse, and she would stay here all night arguing with him. Or he could agree and write some abomination in the logbook. The lighthouse inspector almost never came to Cape Disappointment, and even when he did, he rarely checked the log closely.
With grim resignation, Jesse dipped his pen and turned to a fresh page. “Very well. What would you have me write?”
She closed her eyes, concentrating deeply for a few moments. “Now then. Are you ready?”
The ink was drying on the tip of his fountain pen. “Ready.”
She folded her hands, pressing them dramatically to her chest. “Strong blew the wind that night, howling like the great banshee of Dunglow, snatching at the cold shivering souls of unborn children. And deep in the darkest part of the night, when the blackest of storms swept in, and not a mother’s son on board the ship could know what lay ahead... Have you got all that, then?”
Jesse was writing furiously, trying to keep up with her ridiculous narrative. He nodded.
“...it was then that the tempest rose. Bless our eyes to the heights of heaven, the poor benighted Blind Chance—bobbing, it was, like a cork in a bucket—did ride upon the most lethal shoal in the sea. Crash!”
Jesse flinched as she punctuated the sound by slapping her hands on the table.
“By the hand on me,” she went on, her voice rising, “I swear the ship broke apart with a great rending of timbers that sounded like all the horrors of hell.”
She closed her eyes and clutched at her chest, clearly transformed by the magnificence of her own story.
“And then, like the very arm of Cuchulain the Giant, a great wave scooped our brave heroine into its cold, wet clutches and hurled her down the decks.” She stood and thrashed from side to side, pantomiming the action. “Like a ball she was, rolling at ninepins.” She paused. “I say, that is a rather nice turn of phrase, isn’t it?”
Jesse felt his shoulders begin to shake. His eyes smarted with tears. He felt something in his throat, but he was so unaccustomed to it that he didn’t realize it was laughter until a rusty bark came out.
Fortunately, she didn’t recognize it as laughter, either. “I know, dear Jesse,” she said in a soothing voice, “it was quite harrowing and you may well weep for me, but as you can see, I’m all right, so don’t be distressed.”
“I’ll try to control myself,” he managed to say, his penmanship deteriorating as she dictated.
“She knew her everlasting fate lay in the hands of the Almighty Himself. Frantically, she lashed herself to the mast as it floated by. In minutes the great sucking maw of the sea had swallowed up the Blind Chance and all it contained, including—and may God rest their blessed souls—every last man aboard. Only our intrepid heroine lived to tell the tale....”
She went on, caught up in her story as if it were Melville’s Moby Dick. Jesse’s handwriting covered page after page of the logbook. Through it all, he barely managed to hold his laughter in check. She was so unguarded and earnest as she dictated, absolutely convinced that her fanciful version of the adventure belonged in the records for posterity.
“...and down to the beach he ran, like a great, fearless hero of legend. Dark, he was, with hair of raven silk and eyes of sapphire. He swept the poor woman up into his brawny arms and placed the most magical, the sweetest of kisses on her cherry lips—”
“Now wait just a minute.” He paused
in his writing. “Who are we speaking of here?”
She regarded him in utter innocence. “Why, you, of course. The moment you found me. Dip your pen again, there you are... All right, where was I? Read that last bit back to me.”
He tried. He honestly and truly tried to keep his face solemn and dramatic. “He swept the poor woman up into his brawny...arms and placed the most magical...the sweetest of kisses on her cherry lips...”
By the time he finished reading, Jesse was completely incoherent. Unable to continue, he put down his pen, planted his elbows on the table, covered his face with his hands and shook.
A moment later, he felt her touch on his shoulders. “There now,” she whispered. “I know it’s a moving account, but try to hold in your tears—”
Jesse, who had not been moved to mirth in twelve years, threw back his head and loosed the loudest, longest stream of laughter of his life. It felt like a celebration going on inside him. He struggled to regain control, then finally dared to look at Mary. She had been pacing and gesticulating the whole time she spoke, but she’d stopped and was staring at him as if he were a lunatic.
“Ah, Mary,” he said. “I shouldn’t have laughed but—” His gaze strayed to the phrase “brawny arms” and laughter threatened to erupt again. “I...apologize.” He tried to will himself to sober up, but he was like a drunk who knew he had no hope of conquering his intoxication.
Her lips twitched, and suddenly she was smiling, too, her face as bright as the rising sun. “’Tis lucky you are, boyo, that I happen to have a sense of humor.” She touched his hand. “Jesse.”
He looked up at her. “Yes?”
“I’ve never seen you like this before tonight. I’ve never heard you laugh.”
He placed his free hand on top of hers. “It’s not something I often do, Mary Dare.”
“You should. Mum used to say laughter is a song without words.” Mary turned away. The corner of her shawl knocked the pen to the floor. As one, they stooped to pick it up, both reaching out at the same time. Slowly they rose, facing each other, gazes locked, the pen between them forgotten.