Corbin's Fancy (30 page)

“Keith.”

Tormented azure eyes glittered in the lantern light. Fancy wanted to walk away, wanted not to hear, but she couldn’t move. She remembered the way he had wrenched off his clerical collar that morning and flung it into the roiling Columbia.

“What about God?” she asked softly, and then could have bitten off her tongue because she hadn’t meant to speak. She had no right to.

“God,” scoffed Keith, on a long, raspy breath. “There is no God.”

Adam reached out a hand to his brother, drew it back at the menacing look of warning the gesture inspired. “Keith, listen to me—the pain will stop. You’ll be able to think clearly again—”

Keith swung up into the saddle and the gelding danced beneath him like an evil beast, part of the night, a pet of the devil. “Said the man whose wife waits for him with a baby in her belly,” he broke in bitterly.

“You can’t run from this, Keith. It will follow you.”

A sudden and ragged sob, terrible to hear, tore itself from the depths of Keith’s chest. “Don’t stand there and preach to me, God damn you! Your wife isn’t dead—you have Danny and Bridget—”

“Get down from the horse,” Adam went on smoothly,
reasonably. Fancy wondered if Keith heard the tears in his older brother’s voice the way she did. “We’ll talk. We’ll get drunk. Anything. We’ll get through this, Keith.”

“I couldn’t get drunk enough to forget that damned bell!” roared Keith. “It—it crushed her—the bell from my own damned church—”

“I know,” said Adam, and he was holding out his hand now. “Please. Stay.”

But Keith shook his head. “I can’t, Adam,” he breathed. “I can’t.”

And then he was gone, perhaps forever. Though he was shaken, Adam took Fancy’s arm in a firm grasp and escorted her back to the house.

Chapter Seventeen

T
HOUGH THE HOUSE WAS FINISHED, IT STILL SMELLED OF
sawdust and fresh paint. Every window was taller than Fancy herself, and she stood before one that faced toward the harbor, her mother’s letter in one hand. An early-winter snow slanted past the glass.

Even from that distance, the new ship was clearly visible, its bare timbers and towering masts a constant reminder that Fancy was losing her husband. She sighed. Surely, she had already lost Jeff.

Oh, he shared her bed. But for all its ferocity, Jeff’s lovemaking was somehow distant, not born of love but of the undeniable needs of a healthy male body. She had the feeling that any woman would have done.

The child, due in late February by Banner’s calculations, moved within her. Despite the tears blurring in her eyes, Fancy smiled. She had this baby, she would always have this baby.

“Mrs. Corbin?” sang a bright, nasal voice from the vicinity of the front door. “Mrs. Corbin, you here, mum?”

“In here, Mary,” she called, turning back to the window as the new housekeeper entered the spacious but still only partially furnished parlor.

“Saints be praised, it’s a chill day!” Mary babbled, and Fancy smiled again. Mary was young, redheaded, and frankly Irish, and she had a talent for lifting her new and inexperienced mistress out of a dark mood. “Would you like some tea, then? I could make it that fast.”

“That would be nice, Mary,” replied Fancy. Her vision was clearer now, but she still didn’t dare to turn around and show her tear-streaked face. “Thank you.”

The snow was coming down faster now; by nightfall it would be deep indeed. What fun it would be to play in it, to roll up a snowman or to make angels in the pristine whiteness.

Fancy sighed again and looked down at the letter, twice-read already. It was a comfort to know how happy her parents were, living at the Wenatchee house, overseeing the orchards. Fancy’s father thrived on the fresh air and her mother had pretty clothes to wear and Alva Thompkins to look after her. The two women were great friends, sewing together, planning gardens, reading aloud to each other from the many books in Keith’s fine library.

Fancy folded the letter, and now she did not see the clippership that haunted her days and nights like a specter. She did not see the snow or the bustling spectacle of Port Hastings. No, she saw Keith riding away that night after Amelie’s funeral, his soul broken in his eyes. No one had heard from him since, though
Jeff, in a rare moment of communication, had said that the banker had told him that Keith had drawn twice on his private funds. One draft had been sent to Sacramento, one to a place called Los Alamos, in the New Mexico Territory.

Now, living in a beautiful new house, a child growing inside her, and with all the money and security she could ever have hoped for, Fancy felt as much a lost wanderer as Keith. Jeff was so rarely home; his every waking moment was consumed either by that blasted clipper or consultations with the Pinkerton agents he and Adam had hired to search for Temple Royce.

So far, not a trace had been found. Fancy half hoped that Temple would never be located—if he was, Jeff would kill him and no doubt hang for it.

“Mrs. Corbin? Mrs. Corbin, the tea’s ready.”

Fancy started and turned from the window to smile at Mary. The thin winter light danced in the girl’s short, springy curls. “Thank you.”

“Was a fair walk,” hinted the housekeeper brightly, “up that steep hill. That snooty Maggie McQuire from the big house went right by me in a
carriage,
if you please—didn’t even offer a lift!”

Fancy bit her lower Up, amused. For some reason, Katherine’s Maggie had taken an instant dislike to poor Mary, and the two of them were always at odds. Maggie had not approved of Jeff’s building a house of his own—it had been her opinion that both he and his new wife belonged with the rest of the family in the enormous brick mansion farther up the hill.

“I would go mad,” had been Jeff’s only comment on that suggestion, and Fancy hadn’t cared where they lived as long as they were together.

“She thinks I’m an upstart!” Mary prattled on indignantly,
her shrill voice penetrating Fancy’s reflections. “And me doin’ the best I know how!”

“Hush now,” Fancy said softly, “and have some tea.”

Mary’s mouth rounded for a moment, even though she had been hinting for just such an invitation. “And the captain would kill me right and proper if he caught me sitting with the mistress!”

Sad again, Fancy tucked the letter from her mother into the pocket of her blue sateen skirt. There wasn’t much danger of Jeff catching his housekeeper having tea with his wife—it was only midday and he wouldn’t be home until long after dark. “We’ll stand, then,” Fancy said to mollify Mary.

“You stand? And in your condition? No, no, mum, you sit right here by the fire and I’ll have my tea in the kitchen.”

Fancy’s throat was thick with a lonely sort of despair. “Oh, Mary,” she said, “don’t go. Please.”

Mary poured tea for them both and sat, though she looked poised to leap up should there be a knock at the front door or a sound from the kitchen. She was an enigma to Fancy, always wanting to do daring things and then having doubts about them when the time came.

“Honestly, mum,” Mary blurted out, in her startling and sudden way, “it breaks my heart to see you look so down in the mouth, that it does. What’s the captain thinkin’ of, to leave you here alone so much?”

Fancy closed her eyes and tried to take comfort from the crackling warmth of the fire on the hearth. Actually, the house was heated by a modern, if cantankerous, wood-burning furnace in the cellar, but Fancy loved the cheery fireplaces that graced this room, the dining
room, the kitchen, and the master bedroom. “You’re being too familiar again, Mary,” she said, not unkindly.

“I’m always that, ain’t I? And sorry I am for it, too. I–I didn’t mean anything by it, mum.”

“Finish your tea, Mary.”

A slurping sound indicated Mary’s eagerness to be obedient. She nearly choked when there was a knock at the front door.

“Saints in heaven, I’ll wager it’s that nosy Maggie McQuire, lookin’ to see if I’m keepin’ proper care of you!” Mary cried, bolting out of her chair and anxiously smoothing her hair and her skirts as she hurried into the entryway.

Fancy didn’t bother to point out that Maggie never used the front door but the one leading into the kitchen, and that without knocking.

At the lilting sound of Banner’s voice, Fancy was cheered. She was rising out of her chair to offer a proper greeting when her sister-in-law swept into the room in a swirl of snow-dusted green woolen and gleeful complaints about the weather. Due to bear her own child in less than two months, Banner created constant scandal by refusing to stay at home and hide her obvious condition.

“Sit back down in that chair, Frances Corbin,” she ordered, doffing her bonnet in front of the fireplace and setting it down on the hearth. “You look pale.”

“Don’t she now?” fretted Mary.

Banner gave the housekeeper an arch look and Mary fled to the kitchen for another cup and saucer. “She’s a scamp, your Mary,” she observed without rancor. “I don’t imagine things ever get dull around here, with her to—”

Fancy struggled with the hurt expression that had risen instantly to her face, but the falling off of Banner’s comment proved she’d been too late. For all the luxuries, for all Mary’s constant chatter and mischief, things were indeed dull in that house. And lonely.

“That waster!” Banner sputtered, lowering herself cautiously into a chair. “Who does Jeff think he is, treating you like this?”

Fancy loved her husband and even now she felt compelled to defend him. “It was a shock to him that I knew Temple had blown up his ship and still kept it from him.”

“Gull globs,” scoffed Banner. “He’s just throwing one of his famous six-month tantrums!”

“He does have a temper.”

Banner’s hands were resting on her enormous round stomach. “Don’t say that so adoringly. If he wasn’t so big, I’d take a switch to him.”

Fancy was even more defensive. “Adam has a bad temper, too,” she pointed out.

“Yes,” admitted Banner readily, “but he just flies mad and yells awhile and then it’s all over.”

It seemed time for a change of subject, if the peace was to be kept. And since Fancy loved her sister-in-law with all her heart, she cherished that peace. “How are things at the main house?”

Banner laughed. “Pure insanity. Mama is organizing another suffrage campaign—we’re all to stand on street corners and pass out fliers. Adam is stomping around raving about women keeping their places and the printer’s helper is trembling in his shoes.”

“What about the twins?” pressed Fancy, grinning. Danny and Bridget, Jeff’s niece and nephew, were the delight of the entire family.

“When I left, they were trying to find Hershel. He’s loose again and Maggie’s threatening to make him into a stew.”

Fancy chuckled at the pictures flashing through her mind. But she felt a certain nostalgia, too, for the days before Jeff Corbin, when she and Hershel had made their way together in a frighteningly big world. There had been lots of hardships then, but not this aching sense of loneliness. That was new.

“In any case, that’s why I’m here. Mama sent me over to beg you to help,” announced Banner.

“To catch Hershel?”

“To pass out fliers. Fancy, suffrage is important! Why, the most stupid, lice-ridden lumberjack can vote, but you and I can’t!” Banner’s beautiful cheekbones flushed with the heat of her conviction. “Are we going to stand for that?”

“I suppose not,” mused Fancy.

And so it was that, not half an hour later, she found herself standing, bundled up and scarfed to her eyes, in front of Wung Lo’s Laundry, a stack of fliers in her mittened hands,
RISE UP, YOU WHO LOVE JUSTICE AND RIGHT
! the papers read,
EVERY GOOD CONSCIENCE WILL DECREE THAT WOMEN MUST VOTE!

Fancy managed to press a few into the hands of passing women, but the men went so far as to cross the street to avoid her. The snow was falling faster and harder and her feet throbbed with cold. After an hour of almost constant rejection, her political convictions were wavering dangerously. Men were too hard-hearted and selfish to ever let women have the vote anyway, so why was she standing out here under a streetlamp, freezing to death?

Across the street, the door of the newly built Port
Hastings Hotel and Restaurant swung open, and a familiar laugh caught Fancy’s attention. Jeff. That was Jeff. And she hadn’t heard him laugh like that since before her confession about Temple Royce.

She stepped forward, peering through the snow, and was nearly run down by a passing lumber wagon. Clinging to Jeff’s arm, smiling up at him, was a beautiful woman with red hair and stylish clothes.…

Meredith! Meredith Whittaker! What the devil was
she
doing in Port Hastings?

But the answer was all too obvious. Pain scraped the inside of Fancy’s heart until it was hollow, was displaced by a bracing rage. After looking both ways, she stomped across the snowy street and confronted her husband by hurling two hundred suffrage fliers in his face.

Jeff gaped at her, pale with either shock or rage—she couldn’t tell which and she damned well didn’t care. “What the hell—” he rasped.

Although Meredith pouted as he peeled her fingers from his arm and stepped toward Fancy, there was a wounding look of triumph in her green eyes, too.

Fancy was too hurt, too furious to speak. She knew that she must be a sight, with her protruding stomach and her mufflers and the babushka scarf that covered her hair and kept her ears warm, but there was no helping that.

Slowly, Jeff bent and took one of the fliers into his hand. As he read it, a scowl formed in his features. “Have you been bedeviling passersby with this nonsense?” he demanded coldly.

Fancy felt as though her rage lifted her, made her taller, so fierce was its upward sweeping within her. How dare he stand there and reprimand her for having
honest political convictions and doing something about them, and he with his mistress on his arm, just coming from a tryst!

Fancy drew back one foot and kicked him soundly in the right shin. A humiliating, sobbing sound was coming from her throat all the while, and her chest was heaving up and down.