by Susan Wiggs
He applied himself to the other boot. “Ireland, you mean.”
“Aye, County Kerry, just at the coast, with the wild blue Atlantic clawing at the cliffs and the great green hills rising up beyond, the stone terraces reaching toward the heights as if to touch the very face of heaven. I tell you, it came as a huge surprise to me to learn I was poor.”
He rewarded her with a grin. “And who told you so?”
She had to swallow several times before she could find her voice. “Just a few of the gossips in church.”
She looked away, but he saw it anyway, she knew he had. His hands went still. A moment later, ever so gently, he put a finger under her chin and drew her gaze back to his. “Teased you, did they?”
“Oh, aye.” She blinked fast. “It was so long ago, I’ve no idea why it would come back to me now.”
He said nothing. He neither moved nor took his hand away. She felt the warmth of it under her chin, against her neck, and she realized that for her, a human touch was like air and water. Necessary. Vital.
He was quiet for so long that she finally said, “What?”
“You...startle me,” he admitted with roughness in his voice. “There is something enchanting about a girl who has to be told that she’s poor. And something brutal about the moment it happens.”
She shrugged, discomfited by his interest and regard. If that was Jesse Morgan’s idea of brutality, he was a more tender man than she had thought. “I had three braw brothers who took care of people with smart mouths,” she said.
He took his hand away. “Had...?”
“They’re gone now. Dead. All of them.”
“Jesus Christ.” He shot to his feet. His abruptness frightened her.
“What’s the matter?”
He spun around to glare at her. “You lost your entire family.”
“I’ve already told you that.”
“I assumed you were speaking of your parents. When were you going to get around to telling me you had three brothers? And what the hell else are you keeping from me?”
“What else do you want to know?” she shot back.
He drew a deep breath; she could see him struggling to be patient. “What happened to your family?” he asked.
Family. For a moment, she could see them in her mind’s eye, shimmering like heat shadows on the horizon. Mum and Da with their arms around each other’s waists, Rory with his ever-present pipes, Ali and Paddy scuffling playfully on the grassy bawn.
“Last year, it was. One day, Da and the boys went out fishing and never came back. Then Mum...she stood out on the cliffs all that day in the rain, waiting and waiting. I tried to get her to come in, but she just stood there, soaked, staring out to sea, for hours and hours.” Mary remembered the look on her mother’s face when she finally turned away from the sea. Her eyes were dead. “A few days later she took to her bed with a fever. Her lungs filled up, and then she was gone.”
“Jesus Christ,” Jesse said again. “And you’re only now getting around to telling me.”
“I didn’t think you’d be interested.” The lump in her throat was back. She was a bundle of emotion these days.
“How do you stand it?” he asked raggedly.
“It’s not a question of standing it,” she said. “The fact that they’re gone just is. The same as a rose’s petals drift to the ground in the autumn. The same as the sun sets and the moon rises. I can’t change it. Can’t make it stop, can’t make it go away.” She lifted her hand to her chest. “And so they live here now. Here in my heart.”
Jesse was staring at her with a stunned expression. Mary couldn’t help herself. She smiled. It felt good to smile. Healing and warm.
“After losing them all,” Jesse said, “how can you still smile?”
“They wouldn’t have it any other way. They’d not want me to be miserable for the rest of my life. They’d want me to remember the love and the joy, not the sadness and the emptiness.”
“You presume to know a lot about what they would want.”
“I do know,” she said. “And you’d know it, too, if you’d let yourself.”
“Save your platitudes,” he said. “They won’t work on me.”
“Because you’re so superior? So educated and literate?”
“Because I don’t live with my head in the stars.”
She placed her foot back in his hand, so he could finish buttoning her boot. “You ought to try it, then.”
* * *
Jesse had never thought much of the drive up the twenty-mile length of the Long Beach Peninsula. Clustered settlements, dunes, wheeling birds, gorse-topped salt meadows, cranberry bogs—they were all just there. Sights and sounds brushed him like a passing breeze, leaving no impression.
Yet this drive—like everything else—was different in the company of Mary Dare. She regarded life as a series of small wonders. A house, clad in worn and greening shingles, was cause for her to lean out of the buggy, to wave at children playing in the yard. A bear poking through the shellfish in a mudflat elicited a gasp of fearful delight. When she spied a bush of watery orange salmonberries, she insisted on sampling them and picking a hatful for Palina, since they’d stayed behind to man the lighthouse.
So much for the fancy hat Hestia had bought her in town.
The sight of a bald eagle swooping down to catch a fish with talons outstretched nearly moved Mary to tears, so taken was she with the primal beauty of the moment. She was even fascinated with Nahcotta, a busy town surrounded by reeking oyster middens.
Her eyes danced as she gazed out across the blue-gray expanse of Shoalwater Bay. “Look at all the schooners,” she exclaimed.
“Oystermen,” Jesse said. The fleet was draped in pennons of red, white and blue for the occasion. He felt a twist of yearning. The two-masted vessels were fast and fine, their sails spread out like wings. In the far reaches of memory, he recalled a time when he used to set sail on his yacht without a backward glance. Sailing without a care in the world used to give him the sensation of flying. Of course, all that had changed after Emily. All that was gone now.
“Oystermen,” Mary said, breaking in on his thoughts. “They carry nothing else, then?”
“Nothing beyond their crews. They’ll be taking their harvest down to San Francisco.”
“So many of them.” She shuddered delicately. “What is it about oysters that people crave so madly?”
Jesse scanned the meadow ahead for a place to leave the horse and buggy. Already the outskirts of town were crowded with buckboards and gigs and carts, anchored like odd boats in a sea of salt grass. As conspicuous as a giant frigate, the Ilwaco/Oysterville stagecoach dominated the clearing beside a stream.
“They say the miners and railroad workers in California crave oysters. I imagine after months in a muddy trench in the hills, a man would welcome the fresh taste of an oyster.” He angled the buggy into a spot beneath a huge willow tree. The branches drooped all the way to the ground, some of them trailing in the river, making an umbrella-shaped shady area.
“Da used to bring home oysters every once in a while,” Mary said. “I was never fond of them.”
He heard a fleeting wistfulness in her voice. They’re gone now. All of them.
The one thing Jesse could understand was grief. Yet while he walked with the darkness each day of his life, Mary seemed fine. Strong. Holding the memories in her heart but not clinging to them like a drowning sailor grasping at flotsam and jetsam in a turbulent sea.
How do you do it, Mary? How do you stand it?
It amazed him that there was another way to cope with loss. Her way, he thought with resentment. Perhaps it worked for her; after all, she hadn’t been faithless to someone she was supposed to love. She hadn’t sent her family to their deaths.
After tying up beneath the
sheltering willow, he jumped out of the buggy and reached for her. An impersonal helping hand. That’s all he had any right to offer her.
But when it came to Mary, everything was different. Most women would grip his hand and step down, then move gracefully away. Mary fit herself between his hands so that he was holding her under the arms, his thumbs dangerously close to her breasts. God...her breasts. How long had it been since he had felt the softness of a woman’s breast in his hand?
The contact brushed him with fire. And the heat didn’t end there. Oh, no. She had to smile into his face, her eyes impossibly bright and her lips as soft as ripe cherries. With her small hands, she cupped his shoulders, bracing herself for the ride.
He found himself handling her gently, as if she were a fragile snowflake. He lifted her up out of the seat and then drifted her down, down, ever mindful of the precious burden she carried.
Almost immediately, he yanked his thoughts away from Mary’s child. At some point—he wasn’t sure when—they had made a tacit agreement to avoid speaking of the baby and who had fathered it, and why Mary refused to name the man.
Yet Jesse recognized the feeling that always gripped him when he sensed a coming storm. There was an inevitability to the impending disaster. They would have to confront the issue as surely as the people of the Washington coast had to confront a storm. It would bring destruction in its wake, would turn lives inside out and rip them to shreds. Nothing they could do would ever stop it.
And that was how he felt about Mary’s child. He ought to tell her so. That would get her to leave without hesitation.
But when he set her on the ground, she looked up at him and gave him such a dazzling smile that he caught his breath.
Damn.
If she stayed, he was going to break her heart. But if he let her go now, he would never know if she was right about him. Until Mary, he had thought his life wouldn’t change. He had thought he didn’t want it to change. But she had opened his mind and his heart to possibility.
A possibility that would die if he lost her.
Jesse used his hands to part the willow boughs like a curtain. As they passed beneath the dragging branches of the tree, the long, narrow leaves seemed to nod and whisper.
“The centennial of Independence Day,” Mary said, shading her eyes and twisting to look at the streamers strung across the top of the Pacific House Hotel. “Independence from Mother England is a thing the Irish have been craving for centuries. A cause to celebrate, to be sure.”
She took his hand and pulled him toward the gathering crowds of people. “What is that building there?” she asked, pointing at a crude log structure on Front Street. Flags waved from wooden turrets in each corner.
“That’s the old fort. Years ago, during the Indian Wars, the townsfolk built it.” In spite of himself, Jesse grinned briefly. “The Siwash always thought it was a big joke. The wars never bothered people out here. They all got along. The settlers laughed at it, too, and never did get around to putting a roof on it.”
A few Siwash men and women were circulating through the crowd, looking exotic in their bark-leather garb and elaborate shell jewelry. Yet at the same time, they fit in, somehow, the men smoking and gossiping in small groups, the women pausing at the various booths to sample the wares.
Jesse tried to remember the last time he had seen so many people and so much activity in one place. Not since...before. Not since Emily.
The centerpiece of the town was a whitewashed courthouse, looking like a sugar cube upon a broad lawn. Inside, the Honorable Hiram Palmer presided. He was known as a man who would grant any petition—for the right price.
The tinny sounds of a band rose from the grandstand. The melody of “Little Brown Jug,” accompanied by clapping and stomping, clattered across the courthouse lawn. Swags of red, white and blue bunting draped the rotunda atop the main building.
A dance floor had been erected in the midst of everything. At the periphery of the yard, sawhorses groaned under the weight of boards laden with food—mounds of oysters and fried chicken and berry pies and huge kegs of beer and lemonade.
There had been a time in Jesse’s life when the act of walking into the midst of a crowd had been as natural and uneventful as breathing. Refinement had been bred into him by the finest schools money could buy. Huge gatherings of dignitaries in Portland, company meetings in San Francisco, soirées at the opera had all been as familiar to him then as Cape Disappointment was now. His grandfather had built an empire. His father had gold-leafed it with his own Midas touch. Jesse had shown every sign of gilding the lily of what the Morgans had built.
Then one day, it was all gone.
And nothing mattered. Nothing at all. Not even taking the next breath of air.
Yet now Mary was willfully dragging him back into a world he had shunned for years. True, these were not the Portland upper crust, posturing and making business deals and debating high-flown ideas. There were summer folk among them, but in general the people here were locals.
Mary squeezed his hand, then tugged him toward the bustling town. “It’s a grandstand, boyo. Not a gallows.”
He scowled at her. “What?”
“You have the look of a condemned man on the way to his own hanging. I just wanted to reassure you that it’s a grandstand.”
“I’m not much for being pleasant in company,” he muttered.
She started walking, pulling him again. He was briefly reminded of himself, pulling a victim in from the biting surf. Sometimes the victims resisted—but afterward they were always grateful.
He hoped to slide unobtrusively into the crowd, to stand amid the foot-stomping men and the laughing women, but Mary clearly had other ideas.
Before he could object, she lifted her hand and waved it vigorously in the air. “Halloo!” she called. “Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Swann! We’re here!”
Several dozen pairs of eyes turned in their direction. Jesse felt splayed out in front of them, as naked as a plucked chicken. This was hell, he decided. Hell on earth.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
If the pearly gates of heaven had opened wide before Mary, she would not have been more excited than she was at this moment. Everything about this day, this place, was new and thrilling.
This was the second chance she had hoped for. Prayed for. It was the second chance that explained why she alone had survived the shipwreck. This town rolled out before her like a newly tilled field. She could plant it with anything she wanted.
No one ever need know she had been a whore to a rich man.
“Jesse,” she said, hurrying to the fringe of the crowd. “Thank you for bringing me here today.”
With long strides, he kept pace with her. “You owe me no thanks,” he said in a low voice, and she almost laughed at the sound of it. With every fiber of his being, he was resisting. The fact that she’d wheedled him into coming even this far was amazing.
“It will be a fine thing, you’ll see.” She spied Mrs. Swann chugging toward them, parting the crowd with her progress. The widow’s petticoats were so wide that she left a wake wherever she walked. Her hat was a wonder of engineering. The broad straw brim bore more bunting than the grandstand. Carnations in red, white and blue sprouted in all directions like a display of fireworks. Rising proudly from the center was a small American flag.
“There you are, the two of you,” Hestia Swann exclaimed, angling a red and blue parasol at them.
At a pause in the music, a man in a top hat and narrow beard shouted through a bullhorn, greeting everyone and wishing them a happy Independence Day. Cheers rose.
Mrs. Swann held out her arms, the parasol dangling from one wrist. “And just look at you, Mary Dare. What a picture you make.”
“Thanks to you and Dr. MacEwan.”
“Oh, pshaw. We didn’t put those roses in your cheeks.” The w
oman peeked from beneath the brim of her massive hat and winked at Jesse. “I for one can guess who’s responsible for that.”
“I won’t take credit,” Jesse said. “Mary’s healing has nothing to do with me.”
“Ah, but it does.” Mrs. Swann plucked a handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes. “It’s so romantic I can hardly bear it. You brought this young woman back from the very brink of eternity, Jesse Morgan.”
Mary squeezed his hand. “Aye, that you did. For better or worse.”
For better or worse. She knew Jesse heard an echo of the past in the words. He probably wished he had never come.
“Oh, look!” Mrs. Swann exclaimed. “It’s Reverend and Mrs. Hapgood. And their dear little boy.” Filled with self-importance, she made the introductions. The Hapgoods were soft-spoken and seemed shy to Mary. The little boy had white-blond hair, apple cheeks and eyes full of mischief. Mary didn’t doubt the child was a handful.
After exchanging pleasantries, the Hapgoods moved on, greeting new acquaintances. The older woman dabbed at her eyes again. “Such a blessing, that family. See how they dote on their son.”
“He’s adorable,” Mary said.
“And more precious to them than any of us can imagine.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “She lost her first, you see.”
Mary’s heart gave a leap of panic. “I’m so sorry to hear that.”
“We’d best be going,” Jesse said, his voice gruff.
“What happened?” Mary asked, morbidly curious. “How did the child die?”
“Oh, he didn’t die,” the woman said. “That’s what’s so sad about it. He was taken by—”
“That’s enough, Mrs. Swann,” Jesse said.
She fanned herself vigorously with her handkerchief. “How unforgivably insensitive of me,” she said, flushing crimson. “I’m not ordinarily such a gossip. Can you forgive me?”
Mary couldn’t help smiling. There was something dear about the woman. She sensed a sad loneliness in Hestia Swann.
“How are you feeling, dear?” asked Fiona MacEwan, joining them as they walked toward the tables draped with checkered tablecloths.