The Lightkeeper

by Susan Wiggs

  Feeling foolish, she righted herself and sat down on a low, flat rock, moist from the constantly dripping trees. Her body needed to rest. Just for a few minutes. She picked up a stick and started idly drawing in the needle-laden mud at her feet.

  She could neither read nor write, but there was one phrase she knew by heart, because it was the first thing she had learned upon coming to America.

  She formed the letters in the mud with the stick: N-O I-R-I-S-H. No Irish. The lesson had been drummed into her the moment she’d set foot in New York City and later San Francisco. She had seen the No Irish sign in every shop front and back entry of every home and business she’d visited. America did not want poor Irish girls with no family and no money. That fact had driven her to desperate measures. It had driven her to make the most terrible mistake of her life.

  She had found only one place that did not have the sign-the lightkeeper’s house right here, at Cape Disappointment.

  That, she knew, was because Jesse Morgan did not discriminate. He hated everyone equally.

  Did the people of Ilwaco town hate the Irish? Or would they welcome a penniless, unwed, pregnant woman? That thought drew a bark of bitter laughter from her throat. The world was a hard place. She had best simply accept it and forge ahead. Laboriously, she rose and started along the path.

  As if to mock her new sense of resolve, a rain shower started. The fine droplets hissed through the tree branches and spattered on the large, broad leaves with a rhythm like the bodhran drums of the old country. The cold rain needled her face.

  Mary lifted her shawl to cover her head. She wouldn’t have minded the rain so much except that it brought darkness with it. “Perfect,” she muttered under her breath as the path became increasingly obscure and slippery. “Wet, cold and dark. My, but I’ve had a day!”

  Very few things had frightened Mary Dare since she had left Ireland nearly a year ago. But as the green halls of moss and ferns grew black with the wet and the cold, she felt a frisson of unease. It was like a raindrop, chilling and unexpected, rolling down the length of her bare back.

  She could die here. No matter that she had survived the worst the sea could dish out. Here on solid earth she could die, and the child could die, and it would make no difference to anyone in the world.

  The sky—what she could see of it between the arching branches of the impossibly tall trees—had turned from gray to black. It was a true black, unrelieved by the sparkle of a distant star or the moon.

  She leaned against a tree and slid down its trunk, too exhausted to do anything but stare dully into nothingness. She’d ventured too far from the lighthouse to see its beam. She had no idea where she was. She could only sit and wonder what would find her first—the dawn, or a marauding bear.

  The bear came first.

  She heard the thud of its tread on the path somewhere close by. Too close for comfort. Paralyzed by fear, she stayed where she was. But deep inside her, stubborn determination unfurled. She had not voyaged halfway around the world to surrender her life and that of her unborn child to a bear, of all things.

  Her hand closed around a large, sharp rock, slick with moss. She shot to her feet and stood motionless, awaiting her chance. Nearer and nearer it came, and the hairs on the back of her neck felt as if they were standing on end.

  Then she saw it. The flash of its horrid, malevolent eyes. How bright they were, illuminating the rise of the path she had recently slid down.

  “You’ll not find me an easy meal, you great horrid beast,” she shouted. With all her might, she hurled the rock. It hit its mark with the sound of a stone striking a bag of wet sand.

  A terrible squeal tore apart the silence. Mary stumbled, her heel catching a tree root and sending her sprawling backward onto a bed of creeping vine. The footsteps, muffled by layers of dead leaves, sounded uneven, out of control.

  The squeal rose once more, and Mary saw the flash of light again. And all in a rush, the complete stupidity of what she had done hit her. It was no bear she had struck with the rock, but a different animal. A horse.

  D’Artagnan. Jesse’s horse.

  A lantern—not the glowing eyes of a wild beast—illuminated the shiny sinews of the underside of the horse’s chest as it reared in panic. And high on the gelding’s back, with his oilskin cloak flapping in the wind and his hair flying out in wild disarray, was Jesse Morgan.

  Why had he come for her? He wanted to get rid of her.

  Frozen by shock, Mary pressed her knuckles to her teeth. She could not speak, could barely breathe as Jesse wrestled the horse back to calmness.

  After what seemed like a long time, D’Artagnan lowered his front hooves and hung his head in submission. Jesse spoke to the horse quietly as he dismounted. Holding the lantern in one hand, he skidded down the slope to where Mary cowered in wet, limp shock in the thick ivy ground creepers.

  “For chrissakes,” he said, setting the lantern aside. “Were you trying to kill my damned horse?”

  Still she couldn’t speak. All she could think of were his last words to her: What happened to Emily? I killed her. Yet all she could feel was the tenderness in his big hands as he drew her to her feet. All she could see was the suppressed panic and sweet relief flooding his eyes as his gaze coursed over her and found her none the worse for the wear.

  “I’m fine,” she said faintly, but she swayed against him. Ah, he was so warm and strong and dry as he opened the front of his oilskins and brought her inside. She found herself thinking of the stories of the selkies—the seal people of Ireland. He was letting her under his skin, placing her next to his heart.

  Surely it meant something.

  “Ah, Mary, Mary,” he said in an aching, weary whisper. “What the hell am I going to do with you?”

  * * *

  Mary looked as small and defenseless as a child as she sat in her dry nightgown, a blanket draped around her shoulders and her bare feet submerged into a basin of hot water. A mass of dark red hair hung in damp tendrils over her shoulders and down her back. She was shivering uncontrollably.

  Jesse eyed her with exasperation. What an infuriating bit of baggage she was. It was hard to believe that someone so small and fragile-looking could turn his entire life inside out.

  He had thought it would be a relief to be rid of her. When she’d stormed out of the house, he had wanted to feel satisfied. He had wanted to go back to what he was before. Instead, visions of Mary, struggling through the forest, had haunted him. The voice of the wind, growing stronger by the moment, had forced him out into the night to bring her back.

  If he had let her go, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself. Now that she had returned, he knew he couldn’t live with her, either.

  She took a sip of tea from the cup he had given her. Her hand shook as she set it down and took up a hairbrush. She made a few ineffectual tries at getting the tangles out of her hair, but her hand was shaking, and she seemed too weak and exhausted to do even this simple task.

  Deep inside Jesse, compassion twisted painfully. It was such a womanly thing, to want one’s hair just so, even though it was the middle of the night and there was no one about to notice whether her hair was combed or not.

  Yet it mattered to her.

  He did not know what made him cross the room and take up the brush. It must have been the utter exhaustion and need in her huge eyes. The frightening pallor in her cheeks. And the endearing sense of vanity that persisted, even now.

  She drew back, questioning him with her eyes.

  “Just hold still,” he told her softly. “Just sit, and let me do this.”

  He shouldn’t have, of course. He knew that. Knew that brushing a woman’s hair was quite possibly one of the most intimate acts outside the marriage bed. There was a forbidden familiarity in lifting the heavy, damp mass, inhaling the fragrance of rain and woman, and draw
ing his fingers, then the brush through the long waves. Her hair held every silken hue of autumn, from fire-tinged gold to deepest russet.

  She sighed and leaned back, turning her face up to the light. Her eyes drifted shut, and the lines of weariness around her mouth eased.

  Jesse’s gaze stole over the curve of her throat, tracing into the shadow of her neckline. His hand was in her hair; it would take no more than a minor slip to trail his fingers down her neck, to caress her breasts...

  Like a dreamer shaking himself awake, he cast off the desire. He should hurry. He should dispense with the intimate task. Instead, he found himself lingering. And waiting. To see if she would speak at last. Uncharacteristically, she had said almost nothing since he had found her.

  He brushed her hair until it was dry and shining. Until he was half-crazy with wanting her. Then, slowly, he set aside the brush. For a moment he stood like an artisan admiring his handiwork, pleased with what he saw—as if he’d had more than the slightest bit to do with it. Finally, he went down on one knee before her so that his face was level with hers. He wasn’t quite sure what to do with his hands, so he laid them on top of hers in her lap.

  He teetered like a cliff jumper in the dark, uncertain what awaited him if he leaped. Silence was all he had ever wanted from Mary, silence and peace. Yet now that she was quiet, her silence discomfited him. She regarded him with large, haunted eyes, her lips saying nothing, her gaze saying everything.

  “Mary.” His voice sounded rusty and brusque. “I shouldn’t have let you go—”

  “And why not?” she asked, her brogue edged with annoyance. “Isn’t that what you’ve been wanting since the moment I arrived—to be rid of me?”

  He fought the urge to look away. He wished he were blind to her beauty, but he couldn’t be. “I prefer to live alone,” he said. “I’ve never pretended otherwise. It’s just...I’ve no room in my life for another person.”

  “Then why did you come after me?”

  “I didn’t want you to come to harm.”

  She glanced down at their hands, but didn’t remove hers. “It was not fair for me to foist myself upon you. I’ll be gone as soon as I can do so properly.”

  A chill seized him. When confronted with a choice, he chose for her to stay. When had that happened? he wondered. When had he begun to think in terms of her staying? He tried to back away from the thought, but it was too late. The idea had embedded itself in his mind. In his heart.

  “The road’s too damned dangerous,” he said, unable to keep the irritation from his tone. “If I hadn’t found you tonight, you might have died, or caught a chill and fallen sick again.” He felt the blood drain from his face. “If I’d lost you, too—” He stopped, appalled at what he’d almost admitted.

  She sat for a long time, staring at him. He felt sick with what he had revealed. He knelt before her naked, as it were, and she seemed to have nothing to say.

  Finally she spoke. “If you’d lost me, too.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You said ‘too.’ As in ‘also.’”

  He felt color surge into his face, searing him to the tips of his ears. “I didn’t mean—”

  “On the contrary, Jesse Morgan.” She took his hands and turned them up in her lap, studying the creases in his palms. “I think, when you’re not keeping yourself under rigid control, you speak the truth. At other times, you speak only guarded words not worth hearing. I want to know what really happened to your wife. We can’t go on from here until you tell me that.”

  He shot to his feet and pivoted away. “You’re assuming I want to ‘go on,’ whatever that means.”

  “It means we’re coming to know each other. Whether this is a good thing or not is not for us to say. Not yet.”

  “Why bother?” He glared at the blackness outside the window.

  “Faith, I don’t know that, either. All I know is that I was the only survivor of a deadly shipwreck. You saved my life.”

  “That’s my job. It’s what I do.”

  “Everything happens for a reason. We may not know these reasons, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.” Sloshing the water as she stepped out of the basin, she paced the plank floor behind him. “Tell me what happened to Emily. Just telling me can’t hurt anything. Why did you say you killed her? Was it just to frighten me, or—”

  “Yes, goddammit!” He spun around and glared at her. She flinched, hitching up one shoulder and turning her head to the side. The defensive gesture infuriated him even as it broke his heart. He’d made her afraid of him.

  He held his hands determinedly at his sides, even though he had the vague and incomprehensible urge to touch her. “I drove them out of my life and to their deaths,” he said. “I didn’t actually wield the knife, but they died because of me.”

  “They,” she whispered.

  She’d caught him out again. She’d gotten him to say more than he’d intended. The woman had an uncanny knack for such things.

  Just telling me can’t hurt anything.

  “Emily drowned in a shipwreck. I made her go, even when she was begging to stay.” Each word broke from him as if forced out by a hammer blow to the chest. “She was...with child when it happened.”

  It was a wonder he remained standing when he finished. Yet he was. Standing. Facing Mary. Looking into her beautiful eyes and seeing compassion there.

  “The drowning’s not your fault,” she said softly.

  “I didn’t tell you,” he said tightly, “in order to gain your pity.”

  “I know that. But if I felt no pity for a man who lost his young wife at sea, then I’d be a hard woman indeed, would I not?”

  “You could never be hard, Mary Dare. Not in that way. Hardheaded, perhaps,” he suggested.

  One corner of her mouth quirked up. “Hardheaded for certain, but that’s nothing new to me.”

  Jesse could not believe he had survived the moment of saying aloud what had happened to Emily. Even after twelve years, the memory still scalded him. Speaking of it did not lessen his pain.

  But it didn’t make the pain worse, either.

  Mary turned and went to the kitchen. He heard the clink of a bottle, then she returned to the keeping room with two glass jars half filled with amber liquid.

  “Palina’s corn liquor,” he said.

  “I’m not much for spirits, but tonight I need just a tiny sip or two.”

  They sat on the settle and looked at the fire Jesse had built in the hearth. For a while they simply watched the flames and listened to the sparks crackle into the silence. She sipped her drink while he downed his in a few easy swallows. Smiling slightly, she handed him her glass. He finished hers, as well.

  “You’re corrupting my moral fiber, Mary Dare,” he said. The whiskey had a relaxing effect on him.

  “I’m certain you did that on your own long ago,” she said. “All I want is for you to talk to me. Tell me about Emily. You say you drove her out of your life. Why did you do that?”

  “Because I was a fool.” He might as well tell her. She’d be as disgusted as he was with himself. “I had let myself stray to another woman. She was nothing to me. Just a diversion.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Now do you see? Now do you understand?”

  “I understand you were young. Probably very spoiled, if you’re like most young husbands. Not that you’re excused, mind. And I assume you planned to say goodbye entirely to the other woman, yes?”

  “Yes. Then she started to make demands...threats. I had to end the affair, and I wanted Emily to be away when it happened. So I put her on a ship bound for San Francisco.”

  At the mention of San Francisco, Mary looked away. “And the ship wrecked,” she said.

  “At the Columbia bar. The tug had just cast off its lines, and she’d set
sail. Then a storm rolled in, and the boat got in trouble on the shoals and broke apart during the squall.” He watched the flames, letting the tongues of orange and yellow mesmerize him. “No one survived.”

  “And you’ve spent each day since then blaming yourself.”

  “I made her go,” he said. “Even when she begged to stay, I made her go. Because I was out whoring, Emily took ship. Because she took ship, she died. A horrible death.”

  The clock pendulum thundered in the silence. The fire crackled, punctuating the long, desperate moments.

  “You have to find the end of your grief, Jesse.” She regarded him with a purity of purpose in her eyes that he could not escape.

  “There is no end, don’t you see?” he said.

  “You’re wrong,” she said. “There is an end. You’ve just never bothered to find it. You’ve been so wrapped up in trying to punish yourself that you’ve given up hope. I won’t let you, Jesse. I won’t let you anymore.”

  He heard the promise in her voice. Part of him stood aloof, fascinated by this small, vehement creature who had entered his life like a half-drowned madonna and who was now settling deeper and deeper into his world, against his will, against all common sense. She had a verve for life he didn’t think he’d ever possessed, even with Emily. Even when he’d had everything a man could possibly desire.

  His chest ached. He knew why. Though his head was muddled by the whiskey, he understood what was happening. Life hurt. She was thawing his heart, and the sudden warming was pure agony.

  “When your pain is your own,” she said, “you’re being selfish. Share it and see what happens.”

  As if watching someone else govern his body, Jesse saw himself draw back his arm, hurl the empty jar at the fire. It exploded in a fount of shattering glass. “I don’t need this,” he roared, leaping to his feet. “Christ, I don’t need you.”

  She said nothing, but he felt her stare as he strode to the front door and wrenched it open. His intent was to stalk out, to relieve Magnus early from his watch and spend the rest of the night trying to escape all the feelings Mary dredged up in him.