Fire's Lady

by Bretton, Barbara

  And so it began: the inexorable destruction of a marriage. Soon afterward he had taken a lover himself and his last dream of creating a union like the one his parents had enjoyed went up in flames.

  He took a sip of whiskey as he watched his son cavorting on the lawn. The rhythmic pounding of hooves made him look left as his newest coach, pulled by two spirited bays, careened off the drive and bounced across the green lawn toward the croquet game. Madolyn's brother Anthony, as reckless as his sister, held the reins loosely in one hand and a bottle of vodka in the other.

  "The Terhunes are having a house party," Anthony called out. "Why don't we ride over and join in the festivities?"

  The horses whinnied and tugged at their harnesses and Matthew stood up, suddenly alert.

  "Yes!" Madolyn exclaimed, beaming up at her lover. "Adelaide has been insufferably smug about her newest chef. Let's see for ourselves."

  "And me! And me!" Christopher, his blonde hair shimmering in the sunlight, danced around his mother, waving a miniature croquet mallet in the air. "Patty has a new puppy and she said I can play with him."

  Anthony leaned down to lift the boy and the carriage rocked crazily as Madolyn and her paramour climbed into the back.

  Christopher had no business even riding in that damned coach with Madolyn's drunken brother at the reins and if Madolyn had the mothering instinct of an alley cat she would know that.

  "Wait!" Matthew vaulted the railing of the veranda and raced toward them over the vast expanse of rolling lawn.

  Anthony held the crop high and the horses lurched forward, ears flattened against their massive heads. "Take the whip, Chris!" Anthony's words were slurred by drink. "Make them fly like the wind."

  Christopher's china blue eyes were wide with uncertainty as he reached for it. Don't do anything, Chris! The horses are whip-shy. I'm almost there... almost...

  The bays bucked, whinnied, and then took off across the lawn, headed straight for the ravine. Matthew's legs pumped furiously as he leaped an azalea bush and tried to head the carriage off.

  "The wheel!" he yelled to Anthony, his lungs burning for air. "The back wheel is shaking loose!"

  The carriage bounced crazily over the bumps in the lawn. Good God! Christopher held the reins in his tiny hands. Thirty feet before the ravine Matthew managed to grab the long-step in the front. His teeth rattled as the coach slammed over a bed of rocks and he struggled to pull himself up onto the front seat. The horses were wild with fear and Christopher lacked the strength to subdue them.

  Anthony, drunk beyond reason, laughed and tried to hit Matthew's fingers with the vodka bottle. "... spoil our fun... what kind of person would spoil our fun..."

  Matthew levered himself up and swung his legs over the railing. "The reins!" he screamed over the rushing of the wind. "Give me the reins, Chris!"

  But the boy was beyond hearing as the coach rumbled closer and closer to the ravine. In the back seat Madolyn screamed while her useless lover sat still as a stone.

  The coach tilted wildly as the loose wheel worked its way off inch by inch.

  Somehow he found the strength to hoist himself into the front seat over Anthony's drunken objections. Christopher seemed frozen in place. The reins had somehow wrapped themselves around his hands and the leather straps were cutting into his tender flesh as the horses strained forward.

  Matthew climbed over Anthony and, grabbed for the inner reins of the horses' harnesses.

  "Whoa!" he roared as he pulled back with all his might.

  The horses resisted. Matthew pulled back again, pinning Anthony under him on the narrow bench. Christopher's piteous sobs rose over the rush of blood in his ears.

  The coach wobbled as the rear wheel loosened yet another degree.

  The ravine was no more than twenty feet away.

  If it were only his life, he would let the goddamned coach plunge into the blackness and be done with it for certainly eternal damnation would afford him more happiness than this existence had.

  But there was Christopher, his beloved son—his own flesh, his own blood. More than anyone on that coach, Christopher McKenna deserved to live.

  But it was Christopher McKenna who died.

  #

  East Hampton - now

  "I stopped the damned thing," Matthew said, his face buried in his hands. "Just before the ravine."

  His torment penetrated Alexandra's guarded heart and her tears mingled with his. "Oh, my God, Matthew. I didn't know... I had no idea..."

  But he didn't seem to hear her; he was face-to-face with his own private hell. "Everyone was safe. It was over. I climbed down and was about to help Christopher out when the wheel gave way, the horses bolted and—" A deep wracking sob ripped its way up from his gut. "Chris pitched forward and the carriage... the wheels..."

  Alexandra could see it all as if it were happening right before her: the child's small body tossed to the ground; his cap of curls gleaming like fool's gold; the terrifying realization that the boy he'd fathered, the son he'd loved, was gone.

  "They blamed me," Matthew managed. "All of them..." From his wife to her brother to the faceless stranger who shared his woman's bed.

  "But the wheel was faulty," Alexandra said, wishing she could ease his pain. "You tried to stop them."

  His shrug was eloquent testimony to the hopelessness of it all for after a time, even Matthew ceased to believe it was anyone's fault but his.

  Whiskey became his solace; vodka, his confidante. He sought the unending blackness that had devoured his son and plagued his soul. Death was preferable to the living hell his wife set out to create for him.

  "But why not a divorce?" Alexandra whispered, holding him close to her breast as dusk wrapped them in its embrace. "Why would she stay married to you?"

  "My punishment," he said, voice flat. "Madolyn sought to create my eternal punishment here on earth."

  "But you left San Francisco, Matthew; it's been years since you lived together as man and wife. Surely now, after all this time, she would—"

  He grabbed her shoulders and she looked up into his eyes. "She will not, Alex. If you understand nothing else, understand that. Until she draws her last breath, she will never let me go."

  "Maybe now," she said, her hands spanning her belly protectively. "Maybe now that we—"

  "She would see me dead first."

  There would be no marriage between them. No gold and diamond ring upon Alexandra's hand, no flower-bedecked church, no happily-ever-after ending as in the fairy tales she had loved as a child.

  There was only this man and this moment and the love that tore at her heart and she prayed it would somehow be enough.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Alexandra's heart ached for Matthew and the little boy he'd lost. A happy child named Christopher who had played and laughed and died many years before his time. Was it any wonder Matthew had sought solace in a bottle of whiskey?

  With their child growing safe within her belly, she could only guess at his anguish. This baby was still a stranger to her and yet she loved it with a fierceness that sometimes frightened her. She rarely painted any longer and it seemed as if she lost yet another part of her independence with each night she spent in Matthew's arms, powerless to break free. Her sense of self, her need to create beauty on canvas, had both been overshadowed by her need for this man.

  The phrase, "Like mother, like daughter," occurred to Alexandra with increasing frequency and she found it difficult to reconcile her feelings for Matthew with the fact that technically he was a married man. Although he still had not spoken of love, that emotion seemed visible in the way he held her through the night, the way he eased her fears and encouraged her dreams. Surely God would not bless her with Matthew's child, only to withhold the sacrament of marriage.

  We will find a way, she told herself each morning when she awoke. All Matthew had to do was contact his wife, offer her a settlement. Madolyn had already built a new life for herself; Alexandra was certain the woman would
be ready now to set Matthew free.

  Life had become so complex, so confusing that were it not for the simple beauty of the love she felt for Matthew she might have booked passage back to Provence.

  I never knew how it would be, Alexandra wrote to Gabrielle in French rusty from lack of use these past months. He has become my reason for being.

  And—may God forgive her—she allowed her old friend to believe she and Matthew were married.

  By mid-October, Alexandra's pregnancy was quite apparent and she stopped accompanying Matthew on his trips into town. Evangeline Ames's eyes were too sharp and she did not want to be the topic of any more gossip.

  Sea View offered her the privacy to revel in the changes happening within her body—and the opportunity to shield those changes from prying eyes.

  She spent her days resting and walking the windswept beach, trying to see around the corners of her life and seize a glimpse of her future. The gypsies had set up a new camp on the beach some two miles east of Sea View and twice Alexandra had tried to find the young girl who had given her the warning about Stephen, "the yellow-haired man," and thank her but each time she had been turned away by a fierce-looking young man guarding the caravan.

  Finally on the morning of All Hallow's, Alexandra found the girl collecting cranberries from the bog alongside Old Beach Lane.

  "I have been looking for you," Alexandra said in Rom to ease the girl's fears.

  "I know," the girl replied in English. "It has been spoken of in the camp."

  "You were right," Alexandra said, suppressing the urge to pat the girl on the forearm to reassure her. "You warned me about the yellow-haired man and it came to pass."

  "You are angry?" The girl's onyx eyes widened and she took a step back.

  Alexandra smiled. "I am only sorry I did not realize his treachery sooner. I am in your debt."

  The girl clutched her basket close to her chest. "You will not tell the authorities I take these berries?"

  "I will not."

  Alexandra stood quietly as the young gypsy studied her.

  "Your babe comes with the New Year," the girl said. "A fine daughter."

  "Not a son? I had imagined the child to be a boy." A boy to fill the emptiness in Matthew's heart left by the loss of his son.

  The girl's long hair whipped around her face as she shook her head. "A fine and healthy daughter to make you proud but there—" She stopped and looked away. "I say no more."

  "But you must!" Fear raced through Alexandra like a chill wind off the ocean and she grabbed the girl's slender wrist. "Is it the baby? Is there something you see in the baby's future that you dare not tell me?"

  "'Tis not the baby's future, lady, 'tis yours."

  "Mine? What on earth—?"

  "I say too much," the girl protested, backing away. "'Tis not illness or death I see."

  "Then what?" Alexandra cried. The girl's eyes mirrored Alexandra's anxiety. "I see no man, lady. I see no man with you at your time at all."

  #

  That evening Alexandra and Matthew slipped away from the house and lit a fire on the beach. He wrapped her in a warm blanket and they sat together and watched the flames dance against the backdrop of the roaring ocean.

  "A girl," said Matthew, his hand warm against her round belly. "I'll be damned."

  "I promised you a son," she murmured. "Would a daughter disappoint you?"

  His laughter rumbled delightfully against her ear. "Not if she is like her mother."

  Like mother, like daughter. Alexandra sighed deeply. Was there to be no escape from it? All day long she'd carried the gypsy's prediction inside her chest like a hot stone burning against her heart. She would give birth without Matthew to comfort her, without Matthew to witness the miracle of his newborn daughter, without Matthew to pledge his undying love to the family they had created.

  "You are quiet," Matthew said, stroking her hair. "Do you feel unwell?"

  "I wish my mother were here with me," she blurted. "She would understand."

  But, of course, that was impossible for it wasn't Marisa Glenn Alexandra needed; it was Esme. Esme with the kind voice and the gentle hands and the gypsy-black eyes that saw into Alexandra's soul and cast light where there had been only darkness.

  "Then write to your mother," Matthew said, meaning Marisa. "Tell her how you are feeling."

  Alexandra thought about the score of letters she had begun to Marisa only to consign them, unfinished, into the fireplace in her room.

  "I have you, Matthew," she whispered against his cheek, trying to will away the gypsy's prediction. "You are all that I need..."

  #

  Switzerland

  "Madame is well today?"

  Marisa looked up from the book she was reading. "If Madame were well she would not be in this godforsaken place, now would she, Doctor Beaulieu?"

  He leaned over to place a hand upon her forehead and she caught the scent of lilac-scented soap. Fop, she sneered inwardly. She had always preferred a man to smell of the outdoors, of fresh pine and clean skin and the brisk November winds blowing beyond her window—not of womanly flowers.

  "Pain?" he asked, sitting opposite her.

  "Pain." Jagged flaming barbs of pain ripping away at her day and night.

  He patted her hand. "I shall increase the morphine dosage immediately."

  She nodded her thanks, unwilling to acknowledge her need.

  "You realize, Madame, that you shall not be entirely lucid with such a dosage."

  "I realize." Dull my mind, Doctor. Lift me from this bed, this room, this body and take me somewhere else.

  "If you have any familial matters that need tending, this would be the time."

  Alexandra. She owed Alexandra a letter of explanation. "I shall take care of such matters immediately, Doctor."

  As soon as she could figure out how to tell her daughter she was dying.

  And as soon as she could figure out why her daughter should even care.

  #

  Thanksgiving Day dawned clear and cold and Sea View buzzed with activity. Matthew watched, amused, as Alexandra threw herself into the thick of things. She had taken to baking pies in the kitchen with Cook who had become one of her staunchest supporters. Alex overflowed with questions about this uniquely American holiday and he found her enthusiasm to be catching.

  Even Andrew seemed caught up in the spirit and Dayla informed everyone that he would indeed be taking dinner in the dining room that afternoon. A sense of family had settled over the house and they had Alexandra to thank for it.

  For the first time since Christopher's death, the splendors of whiskey had dimmed. She was his intoxicant; the sweetness of her body, the buffer between himself and old guilts.

  The past, most especially his disastrous marriage, had no business intruding upon him now. Not even Strawbridge's letters with their portents of doom could dim the joy he felt and he tried to communicate that in his return letters.

  You must understand my position for neither money nor Madolyn's threats will bring me back to San Francisco. Be happy for me, Edward, for my life is here and here it will remain.

  He had found happiness for the first time in years, an optimism that he'd thought forever lost and he would do anything in his power if he could suspend the passage of time and savor these golden days a little longer.

  But he would be both a fool and a liar if he didn't admit to himself the guilt he felt each time he looked at Alexandra growing large with his child. It was not as if he could offer her more. On the other side of the continent, a woman he had learned to hate carried his name and fortunes through the bedrooms of San Francisco.

  No, there would be no marriage, no wedding band glittering on Alexandra's finger; but, Matthew took comfort from the fact that what he gave her was everything he had to give: his heart.

  #

  San Francisco

  Stephen Lowell's patience was wearing thin.

  It was the first week of December. The round of holiday soirees
had just begun and still he was no better off than when he first arrived.

  He watched as Madolyn McKenna poured them each a tumbler of brandy then settled on the settee next to him. Her heart-shaped face was flushed with pleasure—and with good reason. They had just spent two interesting hours in her enormous bed.

  For five months he'd painstakingly laid the groundwork for his plan to destroy both McKenna and Andrew and for four months he'd been up against a stone wall.

  Madolyn had definite ideas about what constituted revenge and forcing her husband back to San Francisco did not figure among them. There was an undercurrent to Madolyn that he had not at first recognized but which now disturbed him. She was given to mercurial changes of personality that kept him ill at ease, never knowing which Madolyn he would find in his bed.

  Violence rippled through her, an uncontrollable edge of wildness that would drive him away were it not for the prize at stake. She leaned back and her negligee dipped low across her breasts. At that moment he would forego another taste of them for the satisfaction of getting his plan underway.

  A letter from Danziger & Doheny burned inside his breast pocket. He had the information he needed to make Madolyn change her mind and now was the time to use it.

  "You do not seem to understand my position," she was saying as a kittenish smile drifted across her perfect face. "Although you have made a rather valiant effort..."