Elaine Coffman - [MacKinnon 04] (18 page)

She decided he spoke the truth, for a moment later, she watched
him rub arnica into the raw neck of one ox, and give another pair a good bath.

Soon it was obvious to her that Tom was busy—too busy to
spend any time teaching her anything more today about a bullwhacker’s job—and
Maggie, being too proud to let him see she was lonely, left, heading for the
cookhouse, stopping to talk to John Schurtz for a minute along the way.

Actually, the cookhouse was a favorite place of hers, for
she enjoyed the company not only of Hardtack, the cook, but that of his two
teenage helpers as well. The two young men, Oscar Price and Olley Page, were
not more than sixteen and full of good-natured teasing and boyish pranks.

Although not related, the boys did, in fact, resemble each
other, both being tall, rather gangly, and slender, and both possessing a mop
of curly hair. Oscar had red hair, a liberal dose of freckles, and a cherubic
face, while Olley’s hair was berry brown, like his eyes.

Hardtack, on the other hand, was an institution of sorts in
the camp. Hardtack had gotten his name from the fact that he had once been a
sailor. He had grown up in a fishing village on the coast of Maine and spent
the early years of his life on a whaler. His hair was as white as Father
Christmas’, and his blue eyes were just as merry. In fact, he reminded Maggie a
lot of Father Christmas, aside from the fact that he had seemingly traded a
protruding stomach for a tattoo of a dragon that curled from his shoulder down
to his hand. “I got another tattoo of a snake coiled around my—”

Thankfully, he caught himself just in time, but not soon
enough to stop the sudden burst of red that seemed to explode upon his face.
Maggie pretended not to notice. It was enough that she had seen the coiling,
scaled body of the dragon that ran from his elbow to where the tail came to a
point over his knuckles. The fire-breathing head, he kept covered up.

When he offered to show it to her, Maggie tactfully
declined.

Wondering what mischief Hardtack and his helpers were up to
today, Maggie made her way to the cookhouse. It was large, airy, and relatively
tidy for this part of the country. It was filled with organized clutter that
ran the entire length of the large, rectangular building. Dishes, pots,
utensils, hanging lamps, barrels of flour, tins of spices, and kegs of sugar lined
the shelves and floor.

Dozens of tin cups and coffeepots hung from the beams
overhead, and five long tables that sat thirty men apiece ran the length of the
room.

When she entered the cookhouse, Hardtack was up to his
elbows in biscuit dough, cursing oaths and shouting directions to Olley and
Oscar, who were lost somewhere behind a thick column of smoke and steam rising
from the stove.

“How many times do I have to tell you to turn your head when
you sneeze? Gripes! You think anybody wants to eat soup with slime floatin’ in
it?” He wadded up a ball of dough and threw it through the smoky haze. Beyond
the haze a voice yelled, “Hey! Whad-daya hittin’ me for? He’s the one that done
it.”

“Then I’m hitting you in advance,” Hardtack said, catching
sight of Maggie.

“Come in, come in,” he said, picking up the rolling pin.
“You ready for a hot cup of coffee?”

“I dinna think so, if it’s been sneezed in,” she said, and
cook laughed.

“I think Oscar is through sneezing now,” he said. “He knows
how much biscuit dough I have left.”

“Hey!” a voice behind the steamy curtain called out. “I told
ya it weren’t me that was sneezin’. It were Olley that sneezed.”

“Open yer mouth again, and I’ll close it with this rollin’
pin. See if I don’t,” Hardtack said. “Blasted boys are a pain in the arse.”

Maggie smiled, knowing how fond Hardtack was of the two
boys. “Why dinna you get rid of them, then, if they’re such a nuisance?”

“Well, the way I see it, they’re kind of like my old bunion
here—a real aggravation, for sure, but a whole lot less painful than cutting it
off.”

Maggie smiled at him. “You aren’t saying, in a roundabout
way, that you’ve become attached to the two of them, are you?”

Hardtack cut the last biscuit and placed it in the pan.
Moving to a dishpan, he washed the dough from his hands. “I s’pose I am—in a
roundabout way, you understand,” he said.

Maggie sat on a stool, listening to Hardtack tell about his
seafaring days as he fried enormous slabs of bear steak. Maggie, who had never
seen a bear, much less tasted one, inquired, “Do the men
like
bear
steaks?”

“They like anything that’s dead and smothered in gravy,” he
said, forking the last steak into a platter. He opened a tin next to him and
began spooning flour into the hot grease left from the fried bear.

“Need more flour,” he said, then looking at Maggie, he
asked, “Could you hand me that crock of flour there on the top shelf?”

Maggie slid off the stool about the time Olley and Oscar
both shouted in unison, “Don’t touch it!”

But it was too late.

Maggie, standing on her tiptoes, had just reached for the
crock and was taking it down when she discovered there was no lid.

Hardtack, hearing the boys shout, knew they had been up to
mischief again and looked up about the time a white sea of airborne flour
showered down upon Maggie. Hearing her muffled cry, followed a second later by
the sound of a shattering clay crock, he picked up the rolling pin and started
after Olley and Oscar, who narrowly made it through the cookhouse door before
he sailed the rolling pin at them. It hit the door and fell to the floor with a
clatter.

Maggie, by this time, was gasping for a flour-free breath.
Hardtack came to her aid with a towel and began wiping the mess from her face,
but in the end, he said, “I think you’re gonna need a good dousing in the crick
to get this off.”

Maggie spent most of the next day pulling clumps of dried
paste from her hair. A bath had removed most of the flour, but it had turned
large quantities of it in her hair to glue. Later that evening, Hardtack, with
Olley and Oscar in tow—one on each side of him, held in place by his fingers
wringing their ears—came to offer their most humble apologies.

Maggie offered them tea in the kitchen and graciously
accepted their apology, laughing afterward to Molly that “I wasna certain which
amused me more. The expression on the two boys’ faces when they saw me wreathed
in a cloud of flour yesterday, or today, when I invited them into the house for
tea.”

“That’s because they all know you’re a real lady with a
father that’s royalty.”

Maggie laughed. “I ken my father would say being royalty
isna worth a muckle.”

“You’ll have to translate that one,” Molly said.

“A muckle means not much. And an earl is hardly considered
royalty.”

“Well, it’s probably as close to royalty as those two
younguns will ever come. They’ll probably live to tell their grandchildren that
they had tea with a real, genuine lady who had manners like a queen and the
disposition of an angel.”

“Oh, Molly, you’re exaggerating, for sure. Why, I ken I’ve
never heard such fummery in all my life. It’s a good thing we Scots dinna pay
verra much attention to flattery.”

“It’s not flattery. You don’t have no way of knowing, but I
hear tell from Big John that the men in camp have placed you just a mite below
angels. Seems you’ve won even the hardest hearts in camp.”

“I’ve done nothing to deserve any such comments.”

“Yes, you have. You’ve given these men something no one has
ever bothered to give them.”

“What’s that?”

“Attention. Recognition. A dose of human kindness. A feeling
that they amounted to something. Most of these poor devils have never seen a
lady such as yourself. It would not have stunned them more if the Virgin Mary
had put in an appearance down at the camp, and you not only put in an
appearance, you’ve made it a point to do it on a regular basis. You’ve learned
their names. You’ve asked questions about their families, and their health.
You’ve listened to them tell you about their jobs here, and made suggestions
for improving their lot. You’ve made them feel important, and they hold you in
very high regard for it.”

“I had no idea…”

“I’ll tell you something else, too. There are other stories
circulating about camp, too. Stories about the way you fell in the mud the day
you came here.”

Maggie cringed and said, “Och, I hoped they wouldna remember
that.”

“Well, they have, and it’s proud of you they are for the way
you picked yourself up and went right on like nothing happened. And you did the
same thing when you found yourself on the receiving end of that prank in the
cookhouse yesterday. Every man in camp knows about the way you took it all in a
goodnatured way.”

Maggie fell silent for a moment. She had never considered
her small visits with the men as being something special to them. For her, it
was commonplace to speak to the workers, just as she had done with her father
when he made his rounds of the crofters’ huts. Being a lady in Scotland didn’t
mean sitting down to tea parties on a daily basis. As the daughter of an earl
whose wife was dead, Maggie had taken her mother’s place when it came to
dealing with the people who worked for her father. With these men, just as she
had done with those back in Scotland, she offered her assistance wherever it
was needed: showing them how to mix turpentine and camphor to remove lice,
writing a letter to the family back home, or reading one that had just arrived.

She glanced up at Molly, who was just standing there looking
back at her. It wasn’t very often that Maggie found herself unable to think of
anything to say.

At her usual time the next afternoon, Maggie was finishing
up her rounds in camp and was about to mount her horse when Doc Arnenson walked
up. He wasn’t really a doctor, at least not that anybody knew. Doc was saying
to Big John, “We’ve got ourselves a mighty big problem in the tool shed.”

“What sort of problem, Doc?”

“Mice and rats. Lots of ‘em. Big enough to carry off an
anvil, some of them are, and they’re eating their way through the burlap bags
and gnawing on the wooden handles.”

The next morning Big John Polly’s laughter could be heard
clear over to the cookhouse, and timberbeasts came running from everywhere to
see just what all the ruckus was about. Finding Big John standing in front of
the tool shed with a crowd behind him, the men saw him point to a piece of
paper nailed to the wall, not more than three or four inches from the floor.
Not a man breathed a word as Big John read what it said.

“Rat and mouse,

Away from this house;

Away over to Talbot’s mill

And there take your fill.”

The men laughed, and Big John told them how the Scots were a
superstitious lot, believing in magic and holy wells and amulets and charms and
the like.

“All right now, enough of this,” Big John said. “You’re
clustering worse than a gaggle of geese. Now, back to work with the lot of
you.”

The men turned away, but more than one of them was heard to
speculate upon what old Talbot would do if an army of rats and mice showed up
at his mill, way up in Seattle.

The day Adrian returned, he looked out the window of his
office and raised his brows. “What in the blue blazes is Maggie doing here?” he
asked, catching a glimpse of his wife going into the medicine hut, where ten or
so men formed a line outside the door.

With a sense of dread, he watched Big John tally the last
column of figures for the previous week’s production, then lay the pencil
aside.

Adrian braced himself for Big John’s reply.

“Maggie has been coming down to camp every day since you
left,” Big John said. “Contrary to what you’d think, it hasn’t caused any
problems from the men. In fact, it seems to be quite a morale booster. The men
look forward to her coming…”

“Oh, I’m sure of that,” Adrian said.

“She’s an intelligent woman, Adrian. She has made some
suggestions that have merit.”

“And?”

“And she has gone further than to suggest on a few of them.”

“What are you trying to say, Big John?”

“That your wife has made a few changes during your absence.”

Instead of flying into a rage, or sending immediately for
his wife, as Big John fully expected him to do, Adrian simply went to his chair
behind his desk and sat down. Leaning back, he propped his feet up, made a tent
of his fingers and placed them over his stomach, and said simply, “Go on.”

Those two words and the way Adrian looked ready to hear
almost anything prompted Big John to go ahead and get it over with. “Before I
go into the details, I want you to know there has been a marked increase in
production since Maggie began spending a little time here in camp. It’s all
here in the production reports from the previous two weeks,” he said, waving
his hands over the stack of reports.

“And you attribute
that
to Maggie’s presence here in
camp?”

“I do.”

“Well, go on. I’m listening.”

“Maggie has not only made some changes that have been
instrumental in making the men’s lives easier and healthier, but in doing so,
she seems to have put a little spark of purpose in their lives.”

“Give me the specifics,” Adrian said, “and stop talking like
you’re at a ladies’ church social.”

“First off, I want to tell you that Maggie has learned, in a
remarkable amount of time, just what it means to own a lumber mill. She has
carried account books home at night to read, only to come back the next day
with a detailed account of things she wanted to question or suggest.”

“We can’t run a lumber mill like a household account.”

“I know that, but honest to God, Adrian, some of her ideas
have real merit.”

Adrian looked bored, and Big John went on. “I’m not talking
about hanging frilly curtains on the doors, Adrian. I’m talking about the notes
she made in regard to shipping.”

“Shipping?”

“She has a point, Adrian. We’ve already got the lumber, and
right now we own ten ships. We both know we could easily use ten more. Maggie
has suggested that we build them.”

“I’m not a shipbuilder, and I have no desire to become one.”

“But you could be.”

“What in the hell has been going on here? I’m gone for two
weeks, and my wife has turned my business upside down. My brothers build ships.
I don’t know the first thing about it.”

“Then give the business to your brothers. With them building
the ships for you, instead of you buying them outright, you’d still save a
passel of money.” Big John sorted through some papers, locating one and
bringing it to Adrian. “Take a look at this,” he said. “She’s put the pencil to
it, and it makes sense. She also said your brothers could design ships that
were better for carrying lumber than the ones we’re buying, and that they could
be built much cheaper than they can be bought. The idea of sturdier,
better-designed ships makes sense. You know how many ships are lost on these
shifting sandbars—if not by us, then the others. She even mentioned
steam-powered tugboats.”

“Enough about her blasted ideas. You mentioned changes. What
changes?”

“Opening the medicine hut on a daily basis. Teaching the men
about cleanliness. She’s set up a laundry area behind the cookhouse and has
been lecturing the men on boiling their clothes to get the lice out. She’s
ordered lye soap. We now have a steam hut.”

“And what, may I ask, is a steam hut?” Adrian asked,
listening with mounting irritation as Big John explained how Maggie had the
steam engine hooked up to the bathhouse so the men could steam themselves and
shed their lice.

“The next thing I know, you’ll be telling me she’s opened l
goddamn social parlor. What are you getting at?” Adrian asked, giving him a
mixed look of irritation and impatience.

“I’m trying to point out a few things to you, if you weren’t
blockheaded where your wife is concerned.”

“I don’t want her meddling in camp.”

“Her ideas are sound.”

“To hell with her ideas. I don’t want her down here. Is that
clear?”

“Yes,” he said, “it’s about as clear as your stubborn
refusal to admit she might be an asset to this establishment.”

“Whatever changes my wife has made, I want things put back
the way they were before I left.”

“The changes are for the good of the men. To go back to the
old ways will cause trouble.”

“Then there’s no problem, is there? I’ve had nothing but
trouble since the day she arrived.”

Although Maggie had been in the medicine hut the day Adrian
returned, and one of the men came running in to tell her, she didn’t actually
see him until that evening at dinner.

Sitting across the table from her, Adrian was silent. The
way he watched her made her think all her secret thoughts were being read by
him. There was little doubt that he had heard about her visits to camp while he
had been away; little doubt that he wasn’t pleased with what he had heard. The
fact that he might be displeased with her trips to camp did not bother her in
the least. It was time Adrian learned he had not married a woman who could do
nothing but whine, breed, complain, and run an efficient household. She had,
after all, a perfectly good mind, and by all the saints in heaven, she intended
to use it. Adrian would save himself a lot of trouble by realizing it.

Maggie felt an additional strain all through the meal,
knowing Adrian had not forgotten about the words they had exchanged before he
left, and wondering just when he would choose to bring it up again. Neither of
them spoke much, but the tension in the room seemed to relay its own message.
Maggie knew the worst was over, as far as her previous marriage went, for
Adrian had been away for two weeks, and that was enough time to at least soften
the blow. Instead of worrying herself into a state for no reason, she managed
to smile and converse lightly on a wide assortment of subjects.

“I hear you’ve been learning your way around the mining
camp,” he said at last.

She felt disappointed. “I have been, but shame on the person
who told you. I wanted it to be a surprise.”

His blue eyes locked on her. “Oh, it was a surprise, all
right. I come home to hear my wife has been taking flour baths, tacking bits of
enchanted wood to doors, and filling the men’s heads with ideas of
cleanliness—going so far as to have the bathhouse converted into a steam hut.”

“The men are covered with lice…”

“As men in every logging camp are. It’s something they are
accustomed to, and they learn to live with it.”

“But they dinna have to. Lice can be controlled.”

“I don’t want you hanging around camp, Maggie. It’s too
distracting for the men to have a woman about.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask you why there are no women here. I
know some of the men are married.”

“Some are, but most of them are single. Their work is
dangerous, and it requires the agility that comes with youth. Most of them
haven’t had time to court a woman. The ones who have wives aren’t allowed to
bring them here.”

“Why?”

“Because I forbid it.”

She looked astounded. “But why?”

“It’s a responsibility and a distraction, and I have neither
the time nor the inclination to waste my energy on it. Women and children mean
stores and doctors and schools. Before I knew it, this place would be a town,
not a camp.”

“But—”

“Leave it alone, Maggie. You have full run of the house, but
leave the mining camp to me. And that includes the medicine hut. I don’t want
you going there.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t expect you to understand. I expect you to obey me.”

Maggie came to her feet. Having a conversation with Adrian
was like playing a game of wordy battledore and shuttlecock—keeping a feathered
bird in the air by batting words about. No matter how well she played, now and
then a bird was bound to fall to the ground, and when the inevitable happened,
Adrian seemed to gain strength from it, like Samson gained strength from his
long hair.

Still, she wasn’t one to give up, or to keep her thoughts to
herself. “I’m afraid the word
obey
isna in my vocabulary.”

“Then add it.”

Still sitting calmly, Adrian watched and waited to see what
she would do. With as much detached interest as he could muster, he studied the
complex woman before him.

Wrapped in yards of rose taffeta with her hair piled softly
upon her head, diamond earrings in her ears reflecting the light from the
chandelier, she looked beautiful, inexperienced, and yielding—though he knew
her appearance was an illusion. She looked beautiful, but she wasn’t. She
looked inexperienced, but she had been married before. She appeared to be
yielding and submissive, but in truth she was both stubborn and determined.

Were these the things that drew him to her? “It shouldn’t be
so difficult to add one word to your vocabulary,” he said at last.

“I canna,” she said softly. “Not that word. It would make me
feel like an animal. Humans respond, Adrian. They dinna obey.”

Humans respond…
Dear God, didn’t he know it. That was
what he had thought about for two weeks now, making her respond to him, making
her writhe beneath him until she cried out his name and he drove himself into
the very heat of her, erasing forever the memory of another man from her mind.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He wanted to keep his thoughts of Katherine
fresh and alive, but already this woman was supplanting the memory he had
harbored for years.

He wanted Maggie. He did not want to want her, but he did.
That was more than enough reason to hate her, but even then, he couldn’t bring
himself to feel anything for her save desire.

Go ahead
, he told himself.
Fuck her and get it
over with
. His crudity surprised him. He knew why he used such a word. He
wanted to degrade her to make her less than acceptable to him. But it didn’t
work. Not this time. Because he knew in his heart that Maggie wasn’t the kind
of woman a man fucked. You made love to a woman like Maggie. Exquisite love.
Long and drawn out. To the point of exhaustion. He felt himself swell with the
thought.

While Adrian was lost in his own musings, the silence in the
room was stifling to Maggie.
Go ahead
, she told herself.
Tell him.
Tell him about the children. Get it over with. Don’t live with this deception
any longer.
This wasn’t a good time. He was still hurting over the news of
Bruce.
Give him a little while to get over that before you dump another load
of bricks over his head.
No, now wasn’t a good time, but when would there
be a good time? Perhaps tomorrow? Perhaps next week?

At last, Adrian glanced up. “Sit down, Maggie,” he said, and
looked her over slowly. “You know as well as I, we have a lot to discuss.
Leaving won’t do anything but postpone it, and I think we both agree that won’t
do either of us any good.”

He watched her sink slowly into her chair. He wanted to tell
her he was aware of her discomfiture, and remembering the things he had said
the last night they had been together, he searched for some way to broach the
subject.
Go ahead
, he told himself.
Put her mind at ease. Tell her
you know it wasn’t her fault that Ross didn’t tell you about her marriage. Tell
her you’re willing to give it a try.

“I’m not…” she said.

“I want…” he said at the same time. They both stopped.

“Go ahead,” he said. “What were you going to say?”

“It can wait. You go ahead.”

“I wouldn’t be much of a gentleman if I did.”

“We willna have much to discuss if you dinna,” she said. “I
seem to have forgotten what I was going to say.”
Coward
, a voice inside
her said.

I’m not a coward. I’m just shy. Ha!
said the voice.
Maggie willed it away.

“I was going to say,” Adrian began, “that I wanted you to
understand that I didn’t mean to be so hard on you that night before I left. It
wasn’t you, Maggie. It was simply the shock.”

“Aye, I ken that. It was a shock to me as well.”

“A shock? Now, that
does
surprise me,” he said, his
eyes sparkling with humor. “Here I was thinking you
knew
you were
married.”

She laughed and seemed to relax. “You are’na angry with
Ross, are you?” She flinched when she saw his knuckles go white, the tight
clench of his jaw.

“Not as angry as I was.” Adrian inhaled deeply. “Two weeks
ago I could have beat that pretty face of his into a living, bloody pulp, but
time has taken some of the edge off my anger.”

“I’m glad to hear it. I know he thought he had good
reason—that he meant well.”

“I’m sure he did,” Adrian said, in a tone that dismissed any
further talk about his brother.

For several seconds they simply sat there, each one
wondering what the other was thinking. At last Maggie spoke. “What happens
now?”

“I don’t know, Maggie. Take it one day at a time, would be
my best guess. I can’t promise that it will be easy from here on out, but we’ve
both come this far. I hate to see it end before we’ve even given it a try. I
suppose what I’m trying to say is, you are locked in here for a while longer,
regardless. Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t leave. It’s almost winter now
in South America. Going around the Cape this time of year is too dangerous.”