Memory's Embrace (5 page)

Sounds from the main part of the house indicated that the lecture was about to begin; buggies and wagons had been pulling up out front for over half an hour. Keith smiled and shook his head and rubbed the sore place on his thigh, where Tess had bitten him.

His smile faded. The bite was something he could live with; in a way, he’d deserved it. But the idea of Tess Bishop practicing free love was another matter. Good Lord, she couldn’t be serious, could she? She couldn’t actually believe that the problems of the world would be solved by so fatuous and simple-minded a concept?

She could. She was only eighteen years old, younger than his starry-eyed sister, Melissa. She was naive, gullible, a succulent fruit ripe for the plucking.

A tremendous rage surged through Keith, sent him rocketing to his feet. His head felt bloodless and light and his stomach churned—to think, just to think, of Tess giving herself to every Tom, Dick, and Harry, and all for the sake of some crack-brained philosophy!

Slowly, after drawing a deep, steadying breath, he sat down again. She claimed that she was already a practicing free lover. If so, why hadn’t anything happened in his camp that morning?

He imagined taking her into the shadowy privacy of his peddler’s wagon, imagined baring those lush and shapely breasts, imagined having her on that narrow cot. Now, in retrospect, Keith realized that, despite his blithe observations that she was too young for such things, he would have possessed Tess in every sense of the word if she’d given him the slightest encouragement.

Reminding himself that Tess was younger than his sister did no good at all, not now. At eighteen, she was a woman, not a girl. And he wanted her more than he had ever wanted anyone, including his bride.

Tentatively, he touched the ring Amelie had slipped onto his finger only moments before her death. The
whole scene came back to him, the outdoor wedding in a Wenatchee churchyard, the presence of his family and friends, the nightmarish explosion and the horrors that had followed.

Amelie had been killed instantly. Even now, after all the time that had passed, Keith could hardly bear to remember the screams of injured people and the shrieks of horses, the hot, acrid smell of dynamite, the still, tulle-and-lace-clad form lying on the ground.

Keith’s eyes were damp now, and he brushed the moisture away with a motion of one arm. He wouldn’t think about the wedding. He wouldn’t think about Amelie. And he wouldn’t think about making love to Tess Bishop, either. She wasn’t like the women he’d used in recent months.

She wasn’t. She couldn’t be. That talk about free love was just that, talk. Talk designed to convince him that she wasn’t a child.

Keith shrugged into a dark suit jacket, freshly brushed by a solicitous Derora Beauchamp, took out his wallet, and counted the bills inside. If the patent medicine business didn’t pick up soon, he was going to have to find himself a job. Lord knew, he couldn’t risk wiring the bank in Port Hastings again. His brothers might be onto that tactic by now, and tracing him to Simpkinsville would be easy if they were.

He sighed and tucked the wallet back into his inside pocket. Life would be so much simpler if Adam and Jeff could be counted on to leave him alone until he’d worked things out, but he knew they couldn’t. The private detectives that had been dogging him for the last year were proof of that.

With a grin, Keith took his bowler hat, also freshly
brushed, from the top of the bureau. He put it onto his head with a flourish. Time enough to think about his brothers and their hired goons later. Right now, he needed a drink and a woman. Or maybe several drinks and several women.

He opened the door at the rear of the converted car and went out, unaware that he’d left Amelie’s wedding ring behind for the first time since that tragic day in Wenatchee.

Tess was careful to sit at the back of the parlor, in a shadowy corner, lest Derora see her and order her away before she could hear Mrs. Hollinghouse-Stone’s lecture. That wasn’t likely to happen, it was true, because there were far more people in attendance than anyone could have dared hope, many of them strangers.

“Did you hear?” whispered Emma Hamilton, Tess’s friend, as she sank into a chair nearby.

“Hear what?” Tess countered, craning her neck to see if Joel Shiloh—if indeed that was his name—was anywhere in the crowd.

Emma was about to burst, her pink cheeks glowing with excitement, her red curls bobbing. “I can’t believe you don’t know! Tess, there’s a showboat at anchor—a real showboat—in our own river! See that man over there—the tall one with the chestnut hair? He’s an actor!”

Tess looked at the man in question and observed to herself that he wasn’t half as handsome as Joel Shiloh. There was something too studied about his smile, and his features were too even, too perfect, to be at all
interesting. Still, he was an actor, a rare enough bird in Simpkinsville, Oregon, and, as such, he was a curiosity.

“Does my aunt know?” she asked.

Emma giggled behind one glove as Derora zeroed in on the gentleman. “She must. Look at her fuss over him!”

Tess experienced an odd sense of relief. Perhaps a friendship would bloom, however brief, and distract Derora from Joel Shiloh. After all, wasn’t an actor more interesting than a peddler?

“Isn’t he wonderful?” marveled Emma. “I could perish!”

“Do you know his name?” asked Tess, without much interest. There was still a chance that Joel would come in and see her with a free love lecture program in her hands, and she didn’t want to miss his reaction.

“Roderick Waltam. Roderick!” Emma fairly crooned the name. “It’s so much more romantic than everyday names like Joe or Bill, isn’t it?”

Before Tess had to respond to this inanity, Mrs. Hollinghouse-Stone took her place at the podium Derora kept for just such occasions and cleared her throat. An immediate silence fell. All eyes were on the unprepossessing woman in her dramatic, flowing white robe.

“Mercy,” observed Emma, in a stage whisper. “She only has one eyebrow!”

Tess bit down hard on her lower lip because she couldn’t afford to giggle and attract her aunt’s attention. “Hush!” she hissed, when she dared.

For all her physical shortcomings, Lavinia Hollinghouse-Stone was a convincing speaker, and she
touted free love with authority and flair, just as she had touted suffrage a month before. She paced and she gestured, she raised and lowered her voice at all the most effective times. At one point, she even wept for all the human suffering that could be avoided if only physical intimacy was not so foolishly suppressed!

“I’m going out and love somebody,” Emma confided, with conviction, when the speech was over and the tentative applause had subsided. “Preferably Roderick Waltam!”

Tess had been greatly impressed by the lecture, but not swayed from her own beliefs. “Emma Hamilton, don’t you dare!” she rasped, blushing to the roots of her hair.

It was later, at the refreshment table set up in the dining room, that Roderick Waltam approached Tess, beaming down at her in a way that seemed rehearsed.

“Hello,” he said. His eyes were brown, like his hair, and he was clean-shaven except for muttonchop sideburns. Tess noticed that his blue velvet jacket, however well fitted, was frayed at the collar and cuffs.

“Punch?” Tess offered politely, her hand on the ladle.

Mr. Waltam nodded; he had taken a plate and was loading it with teacakes and cookies and the tiny, elegant sandwiches Juniper had worked so hard to make. Apparently, the acting profession was not a lucrative one. “Thank you,” he said, and his voice was as commanding, in its masculine way, as that of a politician or a schoolmaster. “What is your name?”

Tess was ladling punch into one of Derora’s crystal cups, and, before she could answer, she spotted Joel
Shiloh. He carried his bowler hat in one hand, and he was wearing a suit entirely too perfectly tailored for a peddler.

“Discussing your pet theory?” he asked, with acid politeness.

Some of the punch slopped over to stain the linen tablecloth, and Tess’s face flamed.

“Now, see here—” began Mr. Waltam, lamely, glancing from Tess to Joel and then back again.

Joel gave the poor man a look fit to skewer steel and the actor retreated, careful to take his plate and his glass of punch with him.

“That was very rude!” hissed Tess, glaring. Only moments before, she’d been wishing that Joel would appear, actually wishing! How could she have been so stupid?

He was drunk. How he had managed that in such a short time Tess did not know, but he had. His eyes had a glazed look, and the smell of whiskey wafted across the watercress sandwiches and the teacakes and the punchbowl to assault her nostrils.

“If you really must explore the mysteries of free love,” he began, causing several feathered-and-beaded heads to turn, “I would like to volunteer as your guide.”

Tess was mortified. Was there no end to the shame and embarrassment this man could cause her? “I would sooner mate with a monkey,” she replied, and the wife of Banker Flemming fanned herself and rolled her eyes back, about to swoon.

Joel scanned the room for Roderick Waltam, found him, and swung his condemning gaze back to Tess’s
berry-red face. “So I see,” he answered. “Does the organ grinder know he’s loose?”

Tess had not often been relieved to see her aunt, but at that moment she could have kissed the woman for sweeping imperiously up to the refreshment table and demanding, “Is there a problem, Mr. Shiloh?”

Not “Is there a problem, Tess?” Oh, no. The implication was that Mr. Shiloh was the offended party. Tess sighed.

“Absolutely not,” said the peddler, swaying a little and smiling stupidly down into Derora’s upturned face.

Derora’s responding smile was dazzling. Sweetly forgiving. She hooked her arm through Joel’s and ushered him away from the table, chattering about Mrs. Hollinghouse-Stone’s theories and then proceeding to introduce him to every respectable matron in the place.

Exasperated, Tess forced herself to brace up and even to smile as she served punch to guest after guest. The men were eagerly polite, the women venomous.

It was very late when the occasion ended; Mrs. Hollinghouse-Stone retired to her room in the “east wing,” and that prompted the departure of her audience. As Tess helped Juniper clear away the mess, she told herself that she was glad Joel Shiloh had disappeared again. Glad! The sot, he was probably passed out in a drunken stupor.

Which was better than his spending the night in Derora’s room, she had to admit. Mr. Waltam had been chosen for that honor, anyway; he’d tried to be subtle about the whole thing, but as Tess washed glasses and dessert plates at the kitchen sink, she saw him
climb the wrought iron steps of the car that pointed due south.

The moment she realized that it was Sunday morning, Tess Bishop’s eyes flew open and she bounded out of bed, raced across the hallway to the bathroom, and made short work of her morning ablutions. If she hurried, she could get out of the house before it was time to leave for church.

Because Juniper would already be in the kitchen, preparing breakfast, Tess made her escape through the front door. The morning was gloriously clear, washed with rain and tinted gold by a spring sun. Lilacs, in white and purple, spilled their luscious perfume into the dewy air.

For all her problems and all the curious feelings that had kept her up half the night, Tess had to hold back a shout of pure joy.

“Good morning,” greeted a familiar masculine voice, from the vicinity of the fence.

Tess squinted, saw Mr. Waltam between the pickets. Wearing no coat or vest, but only a lacy white shirt, he was kneeling on the sidewalk, his hands busy with the bent wheel of her bicycle.

“Good morning,” she answered, feeling alarmed but drawn to the actor nonetheless. “What are you doing?”

He gave a great wrench at the tire, using both his hands, and then stood up, looking pleased. His fingers were stained with grease, and there was a splotch of the stuff on his elegant shirt, too. “Fixing your tire. It is your bicycle, isn’t it?”

Tess nodded, amazed. Roderick Waltam certainly
didn’t look like the mechanical sort, but apparently he was. The wheel was straight again, she could ride whenever she wanted. “Thank you.”

“Not so fast,” he said, in a teasing voice, using a handkerchief to wipe his long-fingered, callous-free hands clean. Or, at least, nearly clean. “There is a price for my services.”

“And what would that be?” demanded a second masculine voice, from behind Tess.

She whirled, startled, to see Joel standing behind her, his arms folded across his chest, his bowler hat at a cocky angle on his head. Gone was the fashionable suit he’d worn the night before; today he was clad in ordinary trousers, a vest, and a patched shirt.

“A ride on her bicycle,” answered Roderick Waltam evenly, holding Joel’s gaze as he had not been able to do the night before. Perhaps a night of abandon had made him brave.

Speechless, sensing that the two men were discussing something completely unrelated to a common bicycle but having no clue as to what it was, Tess turned her eyes back to Joel. A muscle leaped in his jaw and stilled again, as though forced into submission.

The fresh air was suddenly charged; each man took a step nearer the other. God knew what would have happened if Derora hadn’t appeared at that very moment, wearing a lavender satin dressing gown, on the front porch.

“Tess, dear!” she sang out sweetly. “Church!”

Church. Tess shook her head. Although Derora was anything but religious, whenever she entertained a gentleman guest of a Saturday night, she invariably attended services the next morning. The curious thing
was that the special smile on her face and the light in her eyes showed no inclination whatsoever toward penance.

“I’m not going to church,” Tess summoned up the courage to say. “I have a headache.”

Derora opened her mouth to protest, but Roderick stayed her by striding toward the porch. “I’d be honored to accompany you,” he said adoringly, and Derora forgot all about Tess and her duties as an aunt. She and Roderick disappeared into the house, gazing into each other’s eyes as they went.