Emma’s tea and toast came to the back of her throat in a rush, but then she realized Lucy was holding a doll. “See?” the woman said, holding the carefully dressed and wrapped “baby” out for Emma to admire. “Isn’t she beautiful? Her name is Helen.”
A shudder moved through Emma’s system, but she managed a slight smile nonetheless. “Yes,” she said, her voice hoarse. “She’s lovely.”
Humming softly to her “baby,” Lucy went into the hallway and back to the room where Macon lay. He was awake again now, and Emma felt more sympathy for him than she had before, even though she knew she would despise him for the rest of her lif
While Lucy sat down again and began to rock her doll, Emma poured water into a glass and lifted Macon’s head so that he could drink. He took several grateful swallows, then fell back against his pillows, gasping.
Emma could remember Nathaniel mentioning a room Lucy kept locked, and now she understood all too well. “Did you know?” she asked, her eyes locked with Macon’s.
He looked at her helplessly for a long time, then nodded. At the same moment, Steven and Cyrus hurried in, accompanied by the sheriff. Macon saw them, but went on. “I knew about the doll,” he said, in a gruff, defeated voice, while Lucy continued to hum to it. “But I really thought Steven killed Mary—I swear it.”
“You weren’t involved with her yourself?”
Macon closed his eyes for a moment, and Emma knew then that he’d wanted to be, but Mary had spurned him.
Emma started to turn away, wanting to run to Steven, but Macon gripped her hand and held her there to the limit of his strength.
“You don’t know how it was,” he rasped, “living with Lucy—”
“No,” Emma replied, pulling free of him. “But I’ve got a pretty good idea of what it was like living with you.” With that, she went to Steven and laid her cheek to his chest.
“Jubal said—” Cyrus began, but when his eyes fell on Lucy, who was still beaming and rocking her “baby,” he went silent.
“It was Lucy who killed Mary,” Emma said, raising her head. “She’d learned the girl was pregnant, and she thought the baby was Macon’s.”
Steven’s eyes were filled with horror as he looked at Lucy, but there was a glimmer of hope in their depths when he turned them to Emma’s face. He was just realizing that he was a free man, that he and Emma would have all their lives to share.
Soon after, the doctor arrived, and Lucy was taken to her room and sedated. She fell asleep holding her doll close, a contented smile on her face. For her, everything was resolved, and she was at peace.
“For a while, I thought you’d lied to me,” Emma confessed when she and Steven were walking in the moonlit garden that night, holding hands. “I thought you really had made a baby with Mary McCall.”
Steven reached out and caressed her face. “I’ve told you the truth about myself and my past,” he assured her. “There aren’t going to be any ugly surprises jumping out at you. Not now.”
Emma put her arms around him, nestling close, resting her head against his shoulder. “What will happen to Lucy? They won’t send her to prison, will they?”
“I don’t know,” Steven replied sadly.
Emma looked up at him and kissed him lightly on the chin. “We’ll make up for all the unhappiness,” she vowed rashly. “We’ll fill Fairhaven with noise and babies.”
He held her close. “Judging by what happened this morning, it seems posible that the first one is already on the way.”
Emma nodded. “Do you want a boy or a girl?” “I want a baby,” he said, grinning. “I don’t give a damn whether it’s a son or a daughter.”
“I’d like a boy, one who looks just like you,” Emma mused, reveling in their closeness, and in the future that lay before them.
“Not a girl, to name Lily or Caroline?” Steven asked gently, and Emma felt the old sadness return. For the first time she realized that there hadn’t been a response to the wire she’d sent to her mother’s attorney in Chicago.
Despite Steven’s freedom, and her great love for him, her happiness was not complete after all.
Steven was publicly exonerated of all charges at nine o’clock the next morning, and onlookers, many of them soundly disappointed, were dismissed from the courtroom. Steven and Garrick Wright exchanged a handshake, and then Steven turned to Emma, who was standing directly behind him.
He offered her his arm and that little half-smile that had both attracted and alarmed her when she’d first met him. “It’s over,” he said, and somehow she heard his voice over the general uproar.
“No, Mr. Fairfax,” Emma answered, smiling up at him with her eyes and laying a hand on his forearm. “It’s only beginning.”
“What will happen to Lucy?” Steven asked of his grandfather as he sat, later, in Cyrus’s study, gratefully accepting a snifter of brandy.
Cyrus glanced at Dr. Mayfield, who was standing by the fireplace, his arms folded. “I guess that will depend on what Paul here has to say.”
The doctor cleared his throat. “Prison’s no place for Miss Lucy, we’re all agreed on that. She’s not competent to stand trial in the first place. If I can bring Judge Willoughby or one of the magistrates around to our way of thinking, we should be able to send her to a hospital I know of out in San Francisco.”
“I won’t send our Lucy to some hellhole,” Cyrus warned. “I’d sooner keep her right here and hire nurses.”
Dr. Mayfield shook his head. “Crawford Hospital is not a ‘hellhole,’ Cyrus,” he told his old friend impatiently, “and I ought to call you out just for suggesting I’d consider such a place for her. ‘Course, I won’t, because there’s been enough bloodshed around here as it is.” He glanced briefly at Steven, then turned his intelligent gaze back to Cyrus. “It wouldn’t be good for Lucy—or for any of the rest of you—if she stayed here. She needs fresh new surroundings.”
“What if she recovers?” Steven asked. “Will she have to stand trial then?”
Dr. Mayfield sighed ruefully. “The damage runs deep with Lucy. She’ll probably live out the rest of her life at Crawford.”
Steven and Cyrus exchanged looks as theoctor excused himself, promising to make arrangements with the proper authorities and the hospital, and when he was gone, Steven asked, “Have you talked to Macon about any of this?”
Cyrus made a disgusted sound and plucked a cigar from the box on his desk, biting off the tip with a vengeance. “He wouldn’t give a damn if we put her on a raft and set her adrift on the Mississippi,” he muttered. He spat away the tip and struck a match, and soon clouds of smoke billowed around his white head. “You might as well know that he’s planning to put Fairhaven behind him for good as soon as he’s up and around. Said something about Europe.”
Steven took another sip of his brandy. His knees were beginning to feel steadier, he thought with a smile. He’d have to see what he could do about making them weak again. “I don’t imagine he exactly relishes the idea of my taking an active part in running Fairhaven.”
“You’ll have to take more than an ‘active part,’” Cyrus informed him. “I’m too old and too tired to oversee this place much longer, and Nathaniel’s still wet behind the ears, so he won’t be much help.”
Steven reached out and helped himself to one of his grandfather’s cigars. Emma hated the smell they left on his clothes and in his hair, but he knew how to get around her sensibilities. “You’ll have to hold on for a while,” he told his grandfather. “There’s something important I have to do, and it’s going to take some time.”
“Emma’s sisters?” guessed Cyrus, who missed very little, all things considered.
Steven nodded. “She needs to find Lily and Caroline and get to know them.”
“And live near them, perhaps?” Cyrus fished, obviously worried that he might be losing his heir so soon after finding him.
“Emma understands that Fairhaven is our home,” Steven answered with a shake of his head. “She just wants to be
in contact with her sisters, to know they’re happy.”
Cyrus sighed heavily. “Any leads?”
“Not much to speak of,” Steven replied, frowning. “But she does have an address where her mother once lived, back in Chicago, and the name of an attorney.”
“So that’s where you’ll be going? To Chicago?”
Steven nodded. “With any luck we’ll find out what we need to know when we get there.” Through the large window behind Cyrus’s desk, he could see Emma walking across the grass, looking distracted and more than a little lost.
He stood, snuffed out the cigar, and excused himself.
He found her sitting in the summerhouse where they’d made love one day not so long past and probably conceived the baby they both knew was growing inside her. She was sitting on one of the mattresses, a letter in her hands, a forlorn look on her face.
“What is it?” Steven asked, taking a seat beside her.
She turned her head and looked at him with tears glistening in her eyes. “The attorney has retired,” she said sadly “and his successor has no records of any association with a Kathleen Harrington.”
He took her hand and squeezed it reassuringly. “We’ll go to Chicago anyway, Emma. We’ll talk to her neighbors—”
She was shaking her head. “It’s just foolishness,” she said despairingly. “All of it. I’m not going to go gallivanting around the country when I’ve got a fine home right here, and a husband who loves me.”
“What about Lily and Caroline?” Steven pressed softly.
Emma bit her lower lip for a long moment, the picture of utter misery, before answering. “They’re probably perfectly happy without an interfering sister to complicate their lives—if they’re alive at all.”
Steven gave her a look of gentle sternness. “Emma—”
She shook her head again. “It’s over. I’m giving up.”
“You’re just saying that because you’re pregnant and your emotions are pulling you every which way. We’ll talk about this again after the baby’s born.”
Emma wiped away her tears with the back of one hand. “I love you,” she whispered.
Steven smiled and started to rise from the mattress, his hand still clasping hers. But she resisted, and he looked back at her in surprise. “What—”
Her lips trembled, but she didn’t speak. It was her eyes that told him what she wanted, and he was only too happy to accommodate her.
The first letter from Lucy was like a message sent from boarding school by a homesick child. She didn’t like the ocean, or the fog, or the sunshine that burned it away at midday. She wanted to come back to Fairhaven.
Macon scoffed at her letters and said she should have been sent to perdition for all the trouble she’d caused. He packed six trunks full of clothes and other mementoes and left for Europe on the tenth of August, without so much as troubling to drop his wife a note.
Steven and Cyrus were too busy reorganizing the family holdings for such sentimental pursuits as writing letters, and Nathaniel was courting a girl over in St. Charles parish, so he was away most of the time. Thus the task of keeping up a correspondence with Lucy fell to Emma, who derived some comfort from sharing the love she might have given to her sisters.
She composed long discourses, telling Lucy everything that was going on—except, of course, for describing Macon’s uncharitable attitude or saying that she was going to have a baby. She wrote about Steven and Cyrus and Nathaniel, and about the servants and the neighbors. She recounted gossip painstakingly, and copied down lines of poetry and occasional Bible verses meant to shore up Lucy’s courage.
In November, when Emma was big with child and Steven had business to conduct in San Francisco, she accompanied him and went to visit Lucy at Crawford Hospital.
It was a lovely, quiet place overlooking the stormy gray sea, and Emma found Lucy sitting in a solarium with a view of the shore, her small hands moving over the keys of a grand piano. She played beautifully, and Emma stood listent=“0em” with a mixture of sadness and joy. She was eager to see Lucy, but a little afraid her obvious pregnancy might upset the woman. After all, Lucy had wanted a baby of her own more than anything else in the world.
“Lucy?”
The trim woman stiffened on the piano bench, then turned to look up with a curious, childlike expression in her eyes. She was wearing a soft ivory blouse and a sateen skirt of a cheery blue, and her brown eyes widened with delight. “Emma!” she burst out, standing up to clasp both her sister-in-law’s hands in her own.
The two women embraced—an awkward proposition, considering Emma’s large protruding stomach.
Lucy looked down at her in questioning amazement. “Oh, Emma,” she whispered, raising her eyes to her sister-in-law’s face. “When?”
“January, the doctor thinks,” Emma answered softly.
A wide smile spread across Lucy’s face even as her doe-like eyes filled with tears. “That’s wonderful,” she said, and they embraced again.
“I’ve brought you some books and some new sheet music, and Jubal sent along some of her pecan fudge,” Emma told Lucy as they walked arm in arm along the hallway. “It’s all waiting for you in your room.”
“Where’s Steven?” Lucy asked, looking and sounding almost normal.
“He’s in the city, tending to business,” Emma answered gently, “but he’s promised to take us both out for dinner tonight. If you want to go, that is.”
They entered the suite of rooms where Lucy stayed, and she immediately opened the box containing Jubal’s fudge and helped herself to a piece with a child’s mischievous relish. “Would you like one?” she asked, extending the candy to Emma, who ruefully shook her head.
“My waistline is expanding rapidly enough as it is,” she protested.
“How is Macon?” Lucy asked, and her voice was eager, as if she’d been in accord with her husband all her married life.
“He’s fine,” Emma responded evasively. “Busy as always.”
Lucy and Emma visited until Steven came to collect them at four o’clock, and they all rode into the city in an elegant carriage. Lucy talked delightedly the whole way there and throughout dinner, and it wasn’t until they’d returned to the hospital that she took Steven’s hand and said, “Please, Steven—can’t I come home?”
Emma appreciated his gentleness as he touched Lucy’s cheek and said softly, “Not yet, love. You’re not ready for Fairhaven. But we’ll come to visit you as often as we can, I promise.”
Lucy seemed to be mollified by that, and it came to Emma that, within a few hours, Macon’s fragile little wife might not even remember that they’d been to see her. “I’m sorry,” she said as Steven and Emma were about to leave. “I know you suffered because of what I did.”
Steven kissed Lucy’s forehead. “All that is over now,” he assured her. “You just concentrate on getting well.”
Lucy nodded—maybe even then she knew her situation was hopeless—and there were tears in her eyes when her company finally left her standing in the solarium, beside her piano.
The first legitimate baby to be born in Steven’s immediate family in over forty years decided to arrive on a rainy night in January, when the roads were thick with Louisiana mud.
Emma awakened Steven rudely by arching her back and letting out a howl of startled discomfort. He sat bolt upright in bed, shoved one hand through his hair in agitation, and babbled that he was willing to pay five thousand dollars for the piece of land he wanted, and not a cent more.
In spite of her pain, Emma laughed at his incoherency. “I’m in labor, Mr. Fairfax,” she told him, as her stomach contorted visibly beneath her nightgown and her face twisted in a grimace. “You’d better get the doctor, fast.”
Fully awake now, Steven clambered out of bed, shouting for Cyrus and Nathaniel.
They both appeared posthaste, clad in flannel nightshirts that would have started Emma into laughing again if she hadn’t been in so much pain. Steven didn’t recall that he wa
s naked until after he’d dispatched Nathaniel to fetch Dr. Mayfield and Cyrus to bring Jubal from the servants’ quarters. And when he did, he didn’t give a damn.
He struggled into his clothes, swearing under his breath the whole time.
Emma let out a peal of amusement that somehow transformed itself into a loud moan. Her belly rose up as though it were being pinched between two giant, invisible fingers, and she felt a rush of water between her legs.
“Is it supposed to happen this fast?” she asked Steven, panting out the words in the wake of another hard contraction.
“How the hell should I know?” Steven barked, stumbling around in the darkness until he managed to strike his shin against the chest at the foot of the bed. When that happened he bellowed another curse and demanded, “Where the devil is the doctor?”
“He lives five miles away,” Emma reasoned. “Calm down, Mr. Fairfax. Having a baby is a perfectly normal—” At that moment another pain seized her, wringing out a squeaky scream.
Jubal rushed in then, carrying a lamp and shooing Steven aside with impatient motions of one hand. “Get me some clean sheets, Mr. Steven,” she ordered. “Right now.”
While Steven rushed off on this errand—Emma would have bet he had no idea where the linen closet was—Jubal lighted all the lamps in the room and lifted her mistress’s nightgown for a brief examination.
The black woman indulged in a long, low whistle. “This one’s mighty anxious to get here,” she said, just as one of her helpers rushed in with hot water.
Jubal used the water to wash her hands up to the elbows, then helped a writhing Emma out of bed and into a nearby rocking chair. While Jubal waited for Steven, the other woman stripped down the bed and spread several old blankets over the mattress.
When Steven returned h the sheets, the bed was quickly made up again and he was told in no uncertain terms to stay out of the way.
Jubal and her friend put Emma back on the bed and propped pillows behind her. “You squeeze on my hands,” Jubal ordered when Emma shrieked with pain. “You squeeze real hard, so’s to push the bones together.”
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