Mittman, Stephanie

by The Courtship

  She moaned softly.

  Clearly she had lost count.

  The skin on her thigh was satin smooth as he inched his way toward her femininity, the circles he made getting ever closer to her curls, until his fingers were tangled in them and the heel of his hand pressed softly against her belly.

  He felt the change in her and attributed it at first to fear. "I won't hurt you," he promised, his fingers creeping lower, seeking out her treasures for them both to share.

  Her breathing was tight, her muscles tensed.

  "Charlie? Do you want me to stop?" He held his breath waiting for the answer, knowing before she said it what was to come.

  "I'm so sorry," she said, sitting up and pulling away from him. "I love you, Ash. I do. With all my heart and soul. But I'm his wife. I married him for better and for worse. Forsaking all others."

  Tears were streaming down her cheeks as she blindly felt around beside the bed. Reluctantly he handed her the gown she sought and turned his back while she donned it. "He's not a husband to you, Charlotte," he said, his voice coming out more harshly than he intended.

  "You're right," she said, laying one of those tiny hands on his shoulder. "But it doesn't make me less a wife."

  "Even Kathryn thinks you've a right to some happiness," he said as he covered her hand, now cold, with his own.

  "Do you know the truth? I think even Cabot would agree with that," she said with a sad little laugh. "I think he'd be relieved."

  "We'd all be relieved," he said, shifting his weight slightly. "It's a marriage in name only, Charlotte. You never even saw a priest, did you?"

  "I'm married in the eyes of the law."

  "And I may just be found guilty in the eyes of the law. That doesn't make it so, Charlotte. That doesn't make it real."

  "It's real enough," she said, looking around. "So real, it hurts."

  "No matter what we do, I seem to promise you pain, don't I?"

  She looked around again, embarrassed about something.

  "What is it?" he asked, standing and looking down at her. "You can tell me."

  She chewed at her lip for a moment and then shrugged up at him. "I still want to spend the night here, with you... without..."

  That's it, Charlie Russe—don't just plunge the knife in to the hilt. Twist it.

  "Wrap yourself in the blanket," he instructed her, helping tuck it in around her. He didn't want to come in contact with an inch of that silky skin, even by accident. "And scoot over. More."

  She was nearly off the edge of the cot when he finally eased himself down onto the bed.

  He waited through the tears, through the ragged breaths and the sighs, until her breathing evened out and he was absolutely certain she was asleep. And when he was sure, he took her into his arms and held her and let his own tears soak the pillow beneath their heads.

  CHAPTER 21

  One minute she was in heaven, and the next she was in hell. At least that was how it seemed to Charlotte as she'd made her way back to the house just before dawn. Waking up in Ash's arms, seeing his face before even the ceiling came into view—well, everyone knew if wishes were stars, the night would be as bright as the day. What life could be!

  And then she'd sneaked up to her silent lonely room and crawled into her cold bed, Cabot just on the other side of the wall. This was her life, for now and for always, it seemed.

  She wished that she could just discuss it all with Cabot, thrash it out like it was one of their cases, ask him what he thought and seek out his advice. But how could she ask her husband what she should do?

  She wished she could tell him how she felt when she was with Ash. How there were bows and ribbons on her every thought. How the air was crisper, the sun warmer, the world kinder, just because he was there. And when he smiled!

  Not exactly the sort of thing one's husband wanted to hear about his brother.

  There was a piece of her that honestly believed that Cabot would be happy for her—that he'd tell her to leave the old coot and go after some happiness.

  And it was just that piece, that man, that would keep her in her bed swearing she'd never go out to the carriage house and betray him again.

  All the while she dressed in the clothes that Cabot had chosen for her, she thought about what she'd given up. It had seemed so little at the time. Children. Physical love. A hand to hold and a shoulder to cry on.

  She brushed her hair, thinking about what she'd gained. The respect of an entire community. The ability to make a difference. A precious friend in Kathryn. A partner for life.

  She hugged the poster of her bed and rapped her head gently against it several times in the hope of juggling her brains back into working order and knocking some sense into her head.

  The noise continued even after she stopped.

  "Señora Charlotte?" Rosa's soft voice called through the door. "You are in?"

  "I am in," she answered. "Deep."

  Rosa opened the door a foot or so and poked her head into the room. With the door open Charlotte could hear Cabot's voice drifting up from the front hall. She caught a word here and a word there, but the tone told her enough.

  "Thank you, Rosa," she said, hurrying past the maid and rushing down the stairwell.

  In the foyer with Cabot were two uniformed policemen and the district attorney, who held several papers in his hand.

  "What took you so damn long?" Cabot was asking Brent. "I expected you here before the ashes were cool to revoke his bail."

  Brent didn't look as pleased as Charlotte would have expected. "Just waiting for the charge," he said, looking up at Charlotte and then gesturing toward Cabot's office. "It might be best if we—"

  "Whatever it is," she said, coming to stand next to Cabot, "I want to know. If Mr. Whittier is in more trouble—"

  Brent nodded. "He surely is. But it's not just that, ma'am. I'm afraid I've some bad news for you. You might want to sit down."

  She stood her ground, all Cabot's training holding her upright when all she wanted to do was collapse in a heap on the floor. "What is it?"

  Brent exhaled hard enough to raise the dust Rosa had missed on the hall tree. One of Liberty's feathers flew up off the glove box and came spiraling down slowly while they all looked on in silence.

  Charlotte held out her hand for the summons, but Brent handed it to Cabot. "I'll just have him out again this afternoon," Cabot said, but there was no muscle behind his words.

  And if she had any doubts about just how bad it was, the fact that Brent nodded rather than argued latched the lock for her. Reaching over, she tried to take the summons from Cabot, but his fingers refused to release it. She pulled harder, until he finally shrugged and let go so abruptly that she nearly lost her balance.

  She was familiar enough with summonses to cut right to the heart of the matter with one glance. The People of the State of California were arresting Ashford Warren Whittier for the murder of Selma Mollenoff.

  Selma was dead.

  "I was going to see her this morning," Charlotte said to no one in particular, "after we got some work done on Ash's case. I was going to stop at court on the way over to the hospital and get a date for Virginia's case so I'd be able to tell her. I was going to bring her a bouquet of Liberty's feathers in that lovely bottle Ash brought me from South America. And I was going to tell her about the letter from Clara Foltz."

  No one said anything.

  "You can't think that Ash would ever have hurt Selma," she told Brent. "He was going to start reading Little Lord Fauntleroy to her this morning. He was the one to give her a job when no one else would. Remember, Cabot, how everyone said she was a troublemaker and they didn't want their women roused?"

  "They're going to take him in," Cabot said softly. His mother was just coming down the stairs and he motioned for the officers to move back toward the door. "He's out in the carriage house," he told them.

  "You aren't going to let them," Charlotte said, coming down hard on her knees by Cabot's side. "Cabot, he's free on bai
l. Tell them. Tell them he's been remanded to your custody."

  "It's a capital offense, Charlotte," Cabot said, his hand touching her wayward locks. "Bail is revoked and further bail will surely be denied."

  On the stairwell Kathryn's cane rapped softly. "But you will see him found innocent, won't you?" she asked, holding the banister so tightly that her knuckles were white.

  "I'll do my best to see him found not guilty," Cabot corrected. "But I'm a lawyer, Mother, not a miracle worker."

  "Selma dead. Poor Eli!" Kathryn said, sinking down to the third step as if it were her chair. "Charlotte, tell Arthur I'll need the carriage brought around and someone to drive me to Dr. Mollenoff's. Where's Maria? I'll need something baked right away to bring with me. And Rosa can come and serve. What is it they call a Jewish wake? A cold?"

  "Shivah," Charlotte said. "Appropriate, isn't it?"

  "Well, I wonder what Eli will think of his God now," Cabot said.

  Kathryn, who had gotten up with Charlotte's help and then turned around on the steps, heading back up, paused. "I don't want to see my son taken from here," she said, more to herself than to Charlotte and Cabot. She shook her head, slowly took a few more steps, and then called over her shoulder. "Cabot, see that he's released in time for supper."

  Cabot chewed at the corner of his mustache. "Of what year?" he mumbled, shaking his head at his mother's back.

  "Ash and Moss were working on some new possibilities," Charlotte said, positioning herself so that she could see through the dining room windows even though she remained in the vestibule.

  "Really?" Cabot's eyebrows lifted slightly. "When was this?"

  "Last night," she said. "After you went to sleep."

  "Yes, I thought I heard you three talking down here after I went up. What did those two legal beagles sniff out?"

  "It was very late, Cabot," she said softly. "In the carriage house."

  "And then they came back here and told you what they'd come up with," he insisted. "What was it?"

  Cabot Whittier was a complicated man, but he was nobody's fool. He believed nothing that he didn't choose to believe, of that Charlotte was certain.

  "Charlotte?"

  "Hmm?" If he wished so clearly to remain in the dark, was it fair for her to turn up the lights?

  "Lawyers do not daydream, Charlotte. Daydreaming doesn't win cases." She supposed he didn't understand that dreams were all that were left to her.

  "Can we win this, Cabot?" she asked, watching for Ash to emerge from the carriage house with the men who had gone in after him.

  "Win it, Charlotte?" he answered. "We'll be lucky to survive it."

  ***

  "Would it be all right if we just stopped off at the main house for a moment?" Ash asked the district attorney, who'd reluctantly agreed to let him get into his clothing as one of the men opened the box Moss had left on his dresser.

  "Your lawyers can visit you in jail," Brent said, signaling the officers to get going.

  "Can you give my brother a message for me, then?" he asked as they put his hands behind his back and fastened his wrists together. Brent was right. Kathryn wouldn't want to see him like this. And Charlotte... All he wanted was to keep Charlotte out of the sordid details of his past, to keep her safe, separate. "Can you tell him I don't want some woman defending me? Tell him to keep his wife at home and do the job himself, or I'll get myself some other lawyer."

  She'd hate him for shutting her out. But he was going down and he wasn't going to take her with him to the bottom, or allow her to be there to watch him go under.

  I want you to be my first. My only.

  He was grateful they'd stopped when they had. No good ever came from opening up someone else's gift.

  He was glad. Hell, maybe someday he would be anyway. When he was too old to remember what had really been between them.

  CHAPTER 22

  "Look," he said as they stood in the lobby of the courthouse, two guards watching his every move.

  "She's said herself a million times that no judge takes her seriously—"

  Cabot, like the rest of them, was caught between a rock and a hard place. Not that Ash gave a damn where Cabot was caught, just so long as Charlotte was kept out of it.

  "And you?" Charlotte asked, just the hint of a quiver in her voice. She might have been looking at him. He supposed she was, from the way his skin warmed and his bones went soft. But he kept his eyes riveted to his brother at all costs. "Don't you take me seriously?"

  "Well, you might be able to do some good outside the courtroom," he said as casually as he could without risking a look her way. "There are the notes Moss and I left in the carriage house, if you want to go through them."

  "Maybe I ought to take a look at them," Cabot said, his eyes shifting to Charlotte with no thought for what Ash would give to study her face just one more time.

  "At least it's something I can do to help you," she said. "But don't think I don't know why you're doing this."

  Even laced with pain she had the loveliest voice he'd ever heard—somehow it was strong, yet soft. Or maybe it was soft, yet strong. He concentrated on what the difference was, if any, while he studied the floor beneath them.

  God, but it hurt to stand there as if she meant nothing to him. He watched her shadow on the floor and studied the curve of her cheek, the tilt of her nose, the way her new short hair capped her head beneath her hat.

  "You find anything that might help me, Cabot?" he asked, still studying the floor. There were sixteen pieces of black marble in a square around her shadow. Within the sixteen black tiles were eight white. Her shadow fell across six of them. In the center was another black tile about where her heart would be. He moved slightly so that his foot could touch the shadow of her hem while his brother cleared his throat.

  "A host of things," Cabot said unconvincingly. "Myriad lines of defense. And a suspect to throw at the jury, to boot." One wheel of his chair was lined up perfectly against the edge of the black marble. The other missed by several inches. The imperfection of it must have irritated him to no end.

  But not as much as seeing just the tip of Charlotte's brown kid boots was bothering Ash.

  "I heard this brother of mine is thinking of taking you on a vacation when this whole mess is over," he said as cheerily as he could, allowing himself to look in her direction for just the quickest moment.

  She'd been crying. Her eyes were red rimmed and her nose matched them well.

  "Where might you go?" he asked. He liked the thought of her on a ship sailing to the South Seas, where she would drink milk from coconuts and turn brown from the sun.

  She looked at the watch on her breast. His eyes followed. Through the brown wool jacket, through the starched white shirtwaist, through the underthings beneath that, he could still see the contour of her breast, feel the slight weight of it in his hand, taste its sweetness on his lips.

  He groaned and pulled his eyes from her.

  "I thought perhaps Chicago," Cabot said. "Or St. Louis." He pronounced the s at the end.

  "Chicago?" he said, nearly choking on the word. "Why the hel—" He caught himself. None of his business anyway. He surely couldn't offer her anything better, now, could he? Chicago beat visiting him in prison, if only by a little.

  "There's a seat on the Federal bench opening up there," Cabot said. "And another in St. Louis."

  "Well," Ash said, swallowing hard. She'd be hundreds of miles away. Thousands. The air he breathed would never have touched her first to carry a kind thought to him. He risked another look at her. "At least there'd be one judge on the bench who took you seriously. Even if it is in Chicago."

  "Better than Wyoming, don't you think?" Cabot asked. "Though from what Charlotte tells me, they'd welcome anyone to the bench there—even her!"

  "You'd get your vote there, anyway," Ash said, looking only at the top of her head.

  "Time!" one of the clerks told Cabot. "Judge is coming in now."

  Cabot nodded. "Ready?" he asked As
h.

  "You might as well go pay our respects to Eli, Charlotte," Ash said.

  "Oh, but I—" she began in the voice that he heard with his heart.

  "Tell him how sorry I am. Not that—you know what I mean. Tell him I'd like to find the man who did this to Selma and watch him swing from the end of a noose."

  "I know." That voice again.

  He wished she wouldn't say another word. And he wished she'd never stop speaking.

  "Please let me come in."

  "We can't stop you from sitting in the back," Cabot said, already beginning to wheel himself toward the courtroom doors. "But if the client doesn't want you at the table, there's nothing I can do."

  Ash made room for her to pass and as she did, she touched him. All right, perhaps it wasn't even a touch— perhaps her skirts merely brushed against his leg—still he felt her softness one last time.

  "Don't be part of this," he begged, his voice so low that only she could hear.

  "I won't get in Cabot's way of defending you," she said. "But don't think I won't be doing everything I can."

  "It's not your fight," he said, bending down to tie laces that didn't need retying so that Cabot would get farther and farther ahead of them. "Stay out of it."

  She looked down at him with her tiny breasts heaving, so that he could only see part of her face. "Cabot's right," she said, stepping on his lace as he rose so that this time it was truly undone. "You are an idiot."

  She crossed in front of him, nearly knocking him off balance, just as the guards who had kept their eyes on him from the distance came to escort him to the defense table.

  He stood, straightening his jacket and vest, his tie. He checked the cuffs of his shirt to see that they looked presentable, and then stole one last glance at the woman he couldn't bear to see witness his debacle.

  She was sitting with her arms crossed over her chest in the very last row. Seething.

  ***

  Davis stood against the wall in Dr. Mollenoff's parlor and watched as the old women threw black cotton cloths over the mirrors. He watched as they pulled out small stools and fussed with platters of food that made his mouth water.