Courting Susannah (13 page)

Ethan looked doubtful. “Whatever you say. A word of warning, though—don't name that kid after Julia. Aubrey will never accept her if you do.”

Susannah was still fanciful enough to hope that Aubrey would eventually see reason and had immediately ruled out “Julia” for the reason Ethan had given and several others as well. “I mean to call her Victoria,” she said. She paused. “Will you be her godfather?” she asked again, frankly hopeful.

Ethan hesitated, then nodded. “All right. When's the ceremony?”

She recalled, with some agitation, that she had not spoken to Reverend Johnstone about the christening, as she had intended to do. She would see to the task before returning to her duties at the house. “Sunday, if that can be managed.” She needed confirmation of his promise. “Will you be there?”

“Yes,” he said, with little enthusiasm. Then a wicked grin flashed across his face. “You might want to stand in a doorway, though, in case lightning strikes and the ceiling comes down.”

She laughed. “Are you such a sinner as that?”

“Yes, ma'am,” he replied with another grin. After that, they talked about the gold rush in Alaska and the hardships and perils of crossing the Chilchoot Pass with
the supplies required by the Canadian government. There was no further mention of Aubrey, of Julia, or of the innocent, beautiful child they had made together.

True to her promise to herself, Susannah asked Ethan to drop her off at the church, where he'd found her earlier, and spoke to Reverend Johnstone before hurrying home. The christening was officially scheduled for Sunday morning, after church services were held.

That would leave little or no time for a picnic with Mr. Hollister, but Susannah was convinced he would understand. He was, after all, a reasonable man, quite unlike Aubrey Fairgrieve in that way.

The intervening days were busy ones. Susannah kept Victoria by her side almost constantly, whether she was helping Maisie with the cooking and housework, drawing posters advertising her musical skills, or playing the splendid piano in the rear parlor. The child loved the sound of music—twinkling, dancing Mozart, thundering, ponderous Beethoven, it didn't matter what sort—she would coo and chortle in her basket, waving and kicking like a ladybug on its back.

Susannah's protectiveness and concern for little Victoria deepened into a desperate love, an emotion as intense as if she'd carried the infant inside her own body. As the wind heightened and the sky turned grayer, as the last leaves of the maples and oaks scattered in a shower of crimson and gold, while the fir trees stood fast against the onslaught, she thought often of Aubrey and wished him gone from her mind, not just from the house.

On Sunday morning, a drizzling, icy rain fell, beginning at dawn. That would put a finish to Mr. Hollister's plans for a picnic, Susannah thought, with no great degree of disappointment, but he arrived promptly in a rented surrey to drive her and Victoria around the block
for church. Maisie walked, hand in hand with Jasper, both of them dressed up in their best clothes.

The service was long, the sanctuary was cold, and Victoria was fitful in her magnificent christening gown, but at last the time came to carry the child to the front and stand before the altar. Ethan, who must have been seated in a rear pew, came up the center aisle when summoned by the reverend, clearly enjoying the whispered speculation that swelled around him like foam in a tide pool.

The full name Susannah had chosen for Julia's daughter was Victoria Elizabeth, and there was a murmur of approval from the congregation, most of which had remained to watch and wonder. No doubt some of the members had expected a wedding rather than a baptism; if so, they were disappointed.

Mr. Hollister seemed oddly subdued when the ceremony was over. There was no choice but to cancel their picnic, of course, and he did not offer another suggestion. Neither did Susannah, who wanted only to take Victoria home.

All the same, Hollister drove them both to the house and saw them safely inside. Ethan came, too, driving Aubrey's wagon again, with a proud Maisie sitting stalwartly on the seat beside him, Jasper on her lap, all three of them apparently oblivious to the incessant rain.

“So it's Vicky, is it?” she boomed when she and Susannah and Ethan were all in the kitchen. Jasper was evidently playing in another room, for there was no sign of him, and Maisie made haste to build up the fire in the cookstove and put coffee on to brew. On such a day, she commented, tea simply wasn't enough.

Susannah smiled, happy except for a hollow place tucked away in a corner of her heart.

“Vicky,” Ethan repeated quietly, drawing back a chair
to sit down at the table. “That's a real pretty name. Has some backbone to it.”

Susannah nodded, her mind wandering a little, now that one important task had been completed. “Julia liked that name. One year there were dolls at Christmas—at St. Mary's, I mean—and Julia named hers for the queen of England.”

Maisie and Ethan exchanged an unsettling look, but neither of them spoke.

“What?” Susannah prompted.

Maisie crossed the room, took little Victoria from her arms, and headed up the rear stairway, presumably to change her diaper and put her down for a nap. In the meantime, Ethan dropped into the chair, quite lost in thought.

“Ethan?” Susannah demanded, going to stand opposite him, behind her own chair.

He raised his eyes, and she saw amusement there. “Aubrey is going to be furious,” he said.

She sat down with a sinking motion, all the starch gone out of her knees. She didn't have to ask for any further explanation; Ethan supplied it readily.

“My brother can be real cussed. No matter what name you gave that kid, he'd find a reason not to like it.” His face hardened. “He's like our daddy that way. Nothing makes him happy, especially when it's over and done and can't be changed.”

“But I mentioned—”

“He'll forget,” Ethan said flatly.

Susannah was rigid and, at the same time, weak with confusion, frustration, and worry. “What kind of man—?”

“Forgets? Or what kind of man was our daddy?”

Susannah waited.

“Our ma lit out when we were little,” Ethan said,
“and we were brought up rough in the lumber camps—we passed a month or two in every one between here and San Francisco, I reckon. Dad was a hard man, with a tendency to drink too much, and he probably never had an easy day in his life. Sometimes he took that out on us.”

Despite Ethan's calm way of outlining the tale, Susannah's thoughts were fixed on the image of two small, frightened boys, abused by their father, abandoned by their mother. No wonder Aubrey found it so difficult to trust. Her heart seized painfully. “That's terrible.”

Ethan squeezed the bridge of his nose between his right thumb and forefinger. On the stove, the coffee began to perk, fragrant and welcoming. “Plenty of people have had it worse,” he said.

“Maybe Reverend Johnstone could do the ceremony over—when Aubrey gets back from San Francisco—”

Ethan looked wryly skeptical. “Seems like a lot of trouble to go to, for something that's over and done with.”

“Ethan, why didn't you tell me this before?”

“Seemed like you had your heart set on it,” he said, as though that explained everything.

The coffee boiled over, sizzling on the stovetop, and Ethan got up, hurried over, and burned himself in the process of trying to remove the pot from the heat.

Susannah pumped cold water into a bucket at the sink and stood beside Ethan while he plunged the injured hand into it, expelling a long breath in relief. “That was a very stupid thing to do,” she said.

Ethan laughed. “Thanks for the sympathy,” he retorted.

“What good would sympathy do?” Susannah reasoned, still distracted. Victoria's name had already been penned onto a page of the church record, along with those of other children of the community. Fussing would serve no purpose at all; it was, as Ethan had said,
too late for that. Still, she couldn't help being a little upset.

Ethan cupped his good hand under her chin and made her look at him. “Listen, Susannah. It's behind you, this naming business, I mean. If Aubrey objects, let him solve the problem himself.” He smiled and let her go, clearly noticing, as she had, that there had been no charge to the contact between them. “Besides, Victoria is a perfectly acceptable name. Maybe that little girl upstairs will make it count for something special.”

Susannah was developing a headache. “Maybe,” she confirmed, and pumped more water into the bucket.

Aubrey had been gone a full ten days when he returned to Seattle, one dark and gloomy afternoon in early November. Things had not gone well in San Francisco, and the sea journey back up the coast had been unusually rough. He had one thing to look forward to, by his own reckoning, and one thing only: the prospect of a little verbal sparring with Susannah McKittrick. During his travels, he had come to terms with the fact that he wanted much more from her, which partly accounted for his sour mood. She wasn't the sort of woman he could alternately bed and ignore; she was a lady, with every right to expect marriage from any man who sought her favor.

Not that she would marry him, even if he asked. Which, of course, he had no intention of doing.

He might have slammed the front door when he came in, chased and buffeted up the walk by a seaborne wind, had it not been for the faint, sweet refrain of the piano. The sound, so unexpected, paralyzed him for a few moments; he stood there on the threshold, his hat and coat dripping water while more rain blew in to pool around his feet.

The word
stop
swelled in his throat, and yet he was enchanted by the music, drawn by it, like a sailor summoned to his doom by the songs of sirens. Slowly, ever so slowly, he closed the door behind him, shed his hat and coat, and tugged at the cuffs of his shirt. He found himself at the entrance of the rear parlor, where he had not intended to go.

Notes spilled over him like the crystalline drops of a waterfall, and he shut his eyes tightly, in pleasure. In pain.

“Stop.” He had barely breathed the command, she could not have heard it, and yet the wellspring of sound ceased. She turned on the piano stool, wide-eyed, to regard him in bewilderment.

“You've come back,” she said. It broke the spell, and for that, at least, he was grateful.

“Obviously,” he replied, because at the moment sarcasm was the only defense left to him. The pain was still with him, though slowly ebbing away, and he was vulnerable.

She moved her fingers lightly over the piano keys, just once more, leaving a sparkling trail of sound in her wake, then sighed. A brave little smile faltered on her lips, just briefly, then fell away. “I see your disposition has not improved,” she remarked in tones of cheerful resignation.

He crossed the room, for something to do and no other reason, and poured brandy from a decanter on the bureau. The painting of Julia, commissioned just after their impulsive marriage, while they were still in Boston, loomed above him in all its glory, and he wondered why he hadn't consigned it to the attic. Gazing upon it, he felt no vestige of the consuming passion his late wife had roused in him when they were courting—there was nothing left, not even rancor.

He took another sip from his brandy. Alas, that assessment wasn't quite true. He felt sorrow, he felt pity,
and he felt a peculiar sort of anguish that had more to do with his sense of betrayal than anything else.

“She was beautiful, wasn't she?” Susannah spoke wistfully, and she was standing right beside him. He had not heard her approach.

“Yes. So, they tell me, was Lucifer, before they threw him out of heaven.”

“You are too hard on her. She was flawed, certainly, but she was not a monster.”

Aubrey looked down into Susannah's eyes and wanted, suddenly, desperately, and unreasonably, to kiss her. He reminded himself that he knew even less about her than he had about Julia, and look where
that
state of blissful ignorance had taken him. “Perhaps you didn't know your friend as well as you thought you did,” he said with the slightest lift of his glass.

She did not miss the subtle impudence of the salute; her eyes flashed, and it was plain that she would have slapped him if she'd dared. Instead, she folded her arms tightly against her middle, her hands bunched into fists. “No one knew her better than I did,” she countered. She indicated the painting with a nod of her head, and fragments of gaslight caught in the tendrils of fair hair curling loosely against her cheeks. “I would like to have this painting, if you don't want it. For Victoria.”

It was as though a ram had butted him in the stomach; for a few seconds, he couldn't breathe, let alone speak. The brandy splashed in its glass as he set it aside. “Who the hell is Victoria?” he rasped, though he had a terrible feeling that he already knew the answer to that question.

“She is your daughter.”

As he was absorbing her words, he quite literally saw red, was temporarily blinded by it. Had she been Ethan, the only other person on earth who had ever been able to bring on that particular phenomenon, he would have
struck her. Because she was a woman, because she was Susannah, violence did not even occur to him. “You went ahead and christened that child while I was gone?”

“You said I could do what I wanted—”

He retreated a step, but she had the temerity to follow, even to take hold of his arm, and he did not pull free, even though he was rigid with anger.

“She's a child, Aubrey. An innocent little baby. She'd gone without a name long enough.”

He rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger, weary to the center of his soul. “You're right,” he rasped. “You're right. I'm sorry, Susannah. I don't know what—”

She looked up at him with sympathy, and he supposed he would have preferred scorn to that, or even outright contempt. “You were so furious with Julia,” she said gently. “Did you ever allow yourself to grieve for her? For the woman you believed her to be?”