Taming Charlotte (44 page)

She’d flung herself into Brigham’s strong arms that day weeks before and sobbed with bitterness and pain, but a part of her had still believed that Patrick would not be able to stay away from her forever. He would miss the grand adventure of their life together, just as she did…

Lydia’s gaze held concern, but no pity. “You are a Quade, Charlotte, and you were raised to be strong. When I look at you now, however, I see a woman who has given up. Your father and I are desperately worried.”

Charlotte stiffened in her chair before she could offer an answer, her womb clenching suddenly and violently. In the harbor the daily mail boat sounded its horn, a testament to ordinary things.

Lydia, who had served as a nurse during the Rebellion of the Southern States and helped Dr. Joe McCauley for years, assessed the situation and acted without panic.

“So the time has come, has it?” she said gently, helping Charlotte to her feet.

Charlotte groaned. Her brow and upper lip were wet with perspiration, and her hipbones felt as though they were being pried apart.
Patrick,
she cried, in the deepest part of her spirit, and she thought, for just a moment, that she heard him answer.

Alas, it was only the mail boat whistle.

Brigham Quade recognized the tall, broad-shouldered young bull the moment he opened the front door to him,
and if it hadn’t been for the circumstances, he would have hauled off and decked him, right there on the porch.

Trevarren nodded a greeting and shouldered his way past Brigham, into the cool, shadowy entryway. “Where is she?” he demanded. “Where is Charlotte?”

At exactly that moment, a shriek of pain came from the second floor.

“Upstairs,” Brigham answered coldly. “Giving birth to your child.”

Trevarren went pale and dropped his fancy leather traveling bag, and Brigham thought, somewhere in the calm center of his own distraction, that there might be hope for the rogue sea captain. The man might have some shred of decency in him after all.

“Where?” he rasped.

“First door on the right,” Brigham answered, though grudgingly. Another cry met their ears as Trevarren bolted up the stairs, and Brigham winced. It had been bad enough, standing by helplessly while Lydia bore each of their five strapping sons, but to hear his firstborn daughter suffer so was worse in some ways.

Still, Brigham smiled as he lifted his eyes to the ceiling, recalling Trevarren’s reaction to the news of imminent fatherhood. The man had looked as though he’d swoon, then gathered himself and scrambled up those stairs as though his life depended on reaching Charlotte’s side.

Yes, Brigham reflected. There was still hope.

Charlotte’s back arched as the pain seized her again and she thought she was hallucinating when she saw Patrick burst through the door, sending it crashing against the wall, and collapse on his knees at her bedside.

Lydia, unflappable, did not look up from the delivery. “If you’re going to be underfoot, Patrick Trevarren,” she warned, “I’ll have you dragged out of here.”

Charlotte groped for Patrick’s hand, found it. “You’re here—you’re really here?” she asked stupidly. Again a contraction racked her, again her body rose high off the bed.

“Yes,” Patrick said gruffly, when the worst had passed. He
was still holding her hand in a tight grasp. “I tried to stay away, but God help me, I couldn’t.”

“If God’s going to be of any help to you, Captain Trevarren,” Lydia commented dryly, at the same time examining Charlotte, “I should think He’d have to hit you alongside the head with a shovel first, in order to get your attention.”

Patrick’s mouth curved slightly upward on one side at Lydia’s words, and Charlotte took the familiar smile inside her, where it worked like some magical potion to ease her pain. He kissed Charlotte’s knuckles and said, “Perhaps He has, Mrs. Quade. Perhaps He has.”

“Don’t leave me,” Charlotte gasped. She was ashamed to need Patrick so much, but there it was, the stark reality.

“I’m here,” he assured her, kissing her hand again, this time on the palm.

Charlotte would have been happier if he’d said, “Never again, darling” or “We’ll be together forever,” but she hadn’t the time to quibble. The pain came again, raised to an agonizing pitch, and she had to scream.

Patrick didn’t flinch at her cries, but held her hand, smoothed her hair, and whispered gentle words of encouragement and reassurance.

Finally, after several hours of hard labor, the child slipped from her body.

“A girl,” Lydia said, with joyous tears in her voice, as she tended to the child. “Dear heaven, I thought we were never going to see a baby girl in this family again!”

Charlotte looked at Patrick as their small daughter was placed between them, and saw that his eyes were wet. “What shall we call her?” she asked gently.

He was staring rapt at their child, as if he’d never seen a baby before. “Is there a name fine enough for such a creature?” he whispered, tentatively touching the infant’s tiny cheek.

Charlotte laughed. “Yes. Annie, I think. Annie Quade Trevarren.”

Patrick was still gazing at the child, obviously marveling. “We created her, you and I together,” he said. “I can’t believe it—it’s a miracle.”

Lydia left the room, but Charlotte could hear her voice as she spoke quietly to someone in the hallway—probably Brigham. No doubt Millie was there, too.

Patrick reached carefully past Annie to smooth back a tendril of Charlotte’s hair. “Why didn’t you tell me you could work magic like this?” he teased, his blue eyes shining as he looked at his wife.

A sob of relief and joy rose in Charlotte’s throat. Patrick was there; the sun would shine again, and the moon would spin around the earth, and the stars would take their rightful places in the night sky.

For now, she could not allow herself to believe he might leave her again.

“I love you,” she said, opening her soul to him.

He kissed her—with the sort of respectful passion the situation demanded—but the old spark was there. “And I love you,” he answered.

Presently Lydia returned with Millicent, and Patrick was gently shooed from the room. While Millie rocked the newborn baby, her eyes shining with delight, Lydia bathed an exhausted Charlotte, helped her into a fresh nightgown, put fresh sheets on her bed. Since Charlotte’s milk hadn’t come in yet, Annie was to be fed from a bottle.

“Sleep now,” Lydia said when Charlotte was in bed again, bending over her stepdaughter to plant a gentle kiss on her forehead. “You’ve had a momentous day.”

Charlotte wanted Annie beside her, and Patrick, too, but she was too weary to argue. She closed her eyes, just for a moment.

The room was dark, except for a flood of moonlight pouring in through the windows, when Charlotte awakened. Patrick was lying beside her, sheltering her with his size and strength, holding her in a loose embrace.

“How did you manage to get here just when I needed you most?” she asked, knowing he was awake even though he had given no indication of the fact.

Patrick kissed her temple. “I couldn’t stay away,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Have you been to see the house in Seattle?”

Charlotte recalled all the loneliness she’d endured since
their separation and bristled. “No,” she said. “I knew about it, because your lawyers wrote to me, but frankly I didn’t feel any desire to see the place.”

“Why not?” Patrick sounded confused, and not a little injured. “That house wouldn’t even be built if it weren’t for you and Annie. You’re supposed to
live
in it.”

“Annie and I are not china figures, to be arranged in a fancy cabinet and occasionally dusted, Mr. Trevarren. We will not set foot under that roof, I promise you, unless the three of us are going to be a real family.”

“How can we be anything else?” Patrick asked, clearly still at a loss. “Annie is our child. You are her mother, I am her father. That makes us a family.”

“No,” Charlotte argued. “This—what Lydia and Papa and the boys have, in this house—is a family. They live here
together,
loving and fighting, laughing and crying, all of it.” She paused, drew in a deep breath, knowing she was about to take the greatest risk of her life but unable to avoid it. “If you are going to leave us again, Patrick, then I must ask you never to come back. Papa has powerful friends—he can arrange for a discreet divorce.”

She felt Patrick stiffen beside her, and his embrace tightened, but he did not make the promise her soul hungered to hear. Perhaps it wasn’t even possible for him to do that.

“Until today, I thought I couldn’t go on living without you,” she went on, finding strength, somehow, even in the midst of her great weakness. “When I saw you, I knew I loved you more than ever, needed you even more than before. But then, out of that terrible pain, came Annie. She’s a gift from God, Patrick, a miracle, just as you said. And until I’m strong in my own self again, she can be my reason to live.”

Patrick laid a hand lightly against Charlotte’s face and no doubt felt her tears. She suspected, by the trembling she felt in his large frame, that her husband might have shed a few tears of his own in those moments. “God in heaven, Charlotte,” he marveled brokenly, after a long time. “You are surely the most remarkable woman who ever lived.”

It was no answer, but for that night, it was enough. Charlotte held her husband, and allowed him to hold her, and slept peacefully for the first time in months.

A week after Annie’s birth, when he could be sure that both his wife and child were well, Patrick traveled to Seattle to inspect the enormous house he’d commissioned long before his arrival in the United States. He did not even stop to check on the project of his two new ships; that could wait.

The brick mansion stood on one of Seattle’s several hills, facing the water. Every huge, gracious room seemed to brim with sunlight, and it made Patrick happy to think of Annie growing up in such a place. Being her mother’s daughter, she would no doubt slide down the banisters and skim over the sleek wooden floors in her stocking feet.

Cochran’s voice didn’t startle Patrick, even though he’d believed himself to be alone. “Tell me, has she agreed to wait for you here, your lovely Charlotte, and receive you in her heart and her bed whenever you come home from the sea?”

Rage filled Patrick. Cochran was his oldest and best friend, and he had a way of going straight to the painful center of things. He turned to face his first mate.

“No,” he replied coldly. “Charlotte told me, in effect, to go straight to hell. She claims she would never live here without me.”

“And?”

Patrick sighed. “And I couldn’t promise her that I would. We’re at an impasse, Charlotte and I.”

Cochran’s usually jovial face hardened with impatience and contempt. “Dear God, man, it never ceases to confound me, what a fool you can be. You’re only half-alive without Charlotte, and you know it!”

Patrick moved to one of the towering, arched windows that reached from the hardwood floors to the ornate ceilings, with their plaster moldings. The harbor was dappled with sunlight and brimming with ships. “She’s safe there, near her father. So is Annie.”

“You’re
afraid, “
Cochran muttered, as if stunned at the revelation. “All during our long association, my friend, I’ve
regarded you as a brave man, a leader, deserving of the title of captain. But I see now that I was wrong—you’re nothing but a coward.”

“Damn it,” Patrick spat, in an explosive undertone, “I have
reason
to be afraid—on more than one occasion, Charlotte nearly died because of my love! And now there’s Annie.”

Cochran was plainly furious and not in the least sympathetic. “I never thought I’d say it, but they’re both better off without you. A great lady like Charlotte needs a
man
to share her life, not a sniveling little whelp scared to take any risk that really counts!”

“Get out!” Patrick flared, gesturing wildly toward the great double doorway of the room that had been meant to be the front parlor. His voice echoed in the emptiness.

“Gladly,” Cochran replied, wounding Patrick with the cold finality of his tone. “You’ll sail those two fine new ships of yours without me,
Captain
Trevarren. I can’t take orders from a gutless wonder like you.”

Patrick closed his eyes against the pain, for the loss of his closest friend was a brutal blow. He wanted to ask Cochran to stay, to understand, but his pride would make no allowance for such a gesture.

He flinched when he heard the front door slam in the distance. After a while, he went outside and walked the grounds. Here, there would be a garden, there a marble fountain, there a shallow pond bright with goldfish to delight his child.

Dreams, Patrick scolded himself. Just so much smoke. Charlotte would never live in this house, their daughter would never run, laughing, through fragrant, colorful gardens. He lifted his gaze to the leaded windows on the second floor, where there was a large suite, complete with an antique French fireplace and smaller rooms for dressing and bathing.

Charlotte would never lie beneath him there, in the grand bed he had planned to install, never open his breeches, take him inside her, and ride him in that sweet, merciless way she had. He would never call out her name in the singular desolation of passion, or hear her call his.

Broken, Patrick turned and walked across the large yard and through the gate, where his hired horse and buggy stood. He didn’t look back, not even once, but instead took himself to the shipyard, where his new mistresses, the half-finished clippers, awaited him.

That night, instead of returning to Quade’s Harbor, and Charlotte, by boat, Patrick took a room at the Union Hotel.

After six weeks, Charlotte had grown strong again. She packed her things, and Annie’s, and set out for Seattle, though certainly not in pursuit of Patrick. The pain of losing him throbbed within her, but she had turned a corner of some sort with her daughter’s birth, and she meant to make something of her life, with or without Patrick.

She rented a small house, not far from the one Patrick was building, and engaged a young woman named Martha Landis to serve as Annie’s nurse. That done, Charlotte met with her father’s lawyers to arrange a divorce, then ordered furniture and art supplies and more new clothes than one woman could ever need. These last, she charged to Patrick’s accounts, since he was still her husband.