Under the Boardwalk: A Dazzling Collection of All New Summertime Love Stories (40 page)

"For good, and for better," she echoed, striving to sound as reasonable as he did. She was, after all, getting exactly what she'd come for. He was relinquishing her to Chilton, and promising never to bother her again. So why, then, did she feel as if she were the one who'd lost? "I never thought of you as being this sensible, Jack."

"Nor you, Miriam. But then we're not children any more, are we?" He smiled as he shook his shirtsleeves down over his arms, almost as if he were shaking himself free of her, too. "Now you keep that yellow silk and make it up into something fancy and fine, and every time you wear it you think of me, mind? There's no sin in remembering, not even when you're grand Madame Chuff of Cambridge. We'll say our farewells here, since I'm clearing off for Boston this forenoon."

"So soon?" She frowned as she stared down at his offered hand, a cold sort of farewell that she'd never thought to see from him. "You cannot stay for the wedding?"

"Oh, aye, wouldn't that be a feast for the gossips?" He winked and leaned down to kiss her cheek, taking her hand since she hadn't accepted his. He frowned as he did so, and turned her palm upwards to uncurl her fingers. There in her palm, forgotten, lay the wickedly suggestive shell that she'd meant to toss back in his face. Jack chuckled, glancing slyly up at her from under his lashes, and carefully folded her fingers back over the shell.

"You can keep that for memory's sake, too," he said. The careless, easy merriment in his eye cut her heart to the quick, and made her dare to ask the one question that still mattered.

"If I hadn't come here this morning, Jack, would you have called at the Lion to say farewell? Or would you just have disappeared again like you did before?"

But he only smiled, no sort of answer at all, and stepped away. "Good-bye, my pirate princess," he said softly. "And may you discover all the love in your life that you deserve."

Alone in her room under the eaves, Miriam crouched down on the floor beside her bed to pull the box with her shells out from beneath. Kneeling, she began carefully to arrange the shells across her coverlet in a fan-shaped design, the lightest ones at the edges and the darker ones pointing toward the center. As she placed each shell, she thought of the person who'd brought it to her, or the place where she'd pulled it from the sand herself. It was a ritual she often followed when she felt troubled, for sorting and arranging the shells somehow ordered and calmed her thoughts as well. But when at last she took Jack's shell from her pocket, she realized too late that the only spot she'd left for it was directly in the center of her design, the one place it—and the giver as well—had no right to be.

"I thought I'd heard you come back, Miriam." Mrs. Rowe came to stand beside her, her hands folded over the front of her apron as she studied the fan of shells on the bed. "I don't know why you spoke so strongly to poor Mr. Chuff about making a shell fancy for his garden. What else, really, do you do with your shells now?"

Quickly Miriam began to return the shells to the box, all pleasure and peace in them gone for now. She knew what her mother's lecture would be, just as she knew she deserved every word of it: how she'd abandoned poor Chilton without his breakfast, how a good wife must always look after her husband's welfare and wishes before her own, how nothing else must ever be more important. Coming up here in the middle of the day, shirking her duties in the kitchen to steal a few moments alone to sort out her confused thoughts over her shells, had only made matters worse.

"I'm sorry about Chilton's breakfast, Mama," she said, her head still bowed. "I know I should have stayed to attend him as he likes, and I promise it will never, ever happen again."

"Apologize to Mr. Chuff, not to me," said her mother as she sat on the edge of the bed next to the shells. Clearly she had come from the kitchen herself, for her cheeks were flushed from the heat of the hearth fire, and tiny, wispy curls—the same fine, silvery hair she'd passed on to Miriam—had escaped from beneath her white ruffled cap.

"Mr. Chuff is a good, fair man, Miriam," she continued. "So good that now he believes he has somehow wronged you, and not the other way around. But Mr. Chuff is not the reason that I wish to speak with you."

"I should have begun the onions for supper," said Miriam in a guilty rush, dusting her hands together as she rose to her feet. "I didn't mean to be so—"

"The onions are fine, daughter," said her mother, gently catching her by the wrist to stop her. "Another five minutes will make no difference."

"But I promise that—"

"I heard this morning that Jack Wilder's back," interrupted her mother. "Here, in Westham."

Miriam gasped. "Henry told you, didn't he? What else did he say? Or was it Zach? Oh, when I catch the pair of them, I'll—"

"Then you did know." Wearily her mother smiled. "And I am too late with my warnings."

"Oh, Mama." Miriam sat on the bed close beside her mother, tucking her hand around the older woman's arm. Mama smelled like the kitchen, of wood smoke and baking apples and grated cinnamon and laundered linen pressed within a hairsbreadth of scorching, and as Miriam leaned against her shoulder she let herself breathe deep of the warm, comforting scents. "There's nothing left to warn me about, not where Jack is concerned."

"With all my heart I pray that is so." Her mother stared down at her hands instead of meeting Miriam's gaze. "If I believe that you're old enough to choose a husband, then I also must not expect you to account to me any longer for your actions."

"But, Mama, he told me that he—"

"No excuses, Miriam, nor explanations." Troubled, her mother hesitated, searching for the right words. "Some would say it is my fault, you know, for letting you and Zach become so close to a boy like Jack Wilder. But the truth is that I felt sorry for the lad, left alone in the world with only that wicked uncle of his for family. Imagine leaving any child in the care of a ne'er-do-well drunkard like Joe Wilder!"

Miriam didn't have to imagine it, for she'd seen the reality of Jack's dismal childhood. When Joseph Wilder had returned to Westham with the sickly baby boy, the only product of his dead brother's brief and faraway marriage, he'd vowed to raise the child like a son. It was a blessing, then, that Joseph had fathered no children of his own, for poor Jack was left to more or less raise himself, with tales of his father's piratical exploits the only real nourishment he found. He'd grown up charming and reckless, as wild as his name, and, in the opinion of most of Westham, born only to be hanged. The sole place that welcomed him was the Green lion, where Miriam's mother had always managed to find one more piece of bread or chicken leg lor him—a kindness that, to Miriam's surprise, her mother seemed now to regret.

"You did the right thing, Mama," she said. "Jack needed friends, and you were always one of his best."

"I wonder." Mrs. Rowe shook her head uneasily. "I meant to be kind to the boy, that was all, not that it has helped him tell wrong from right. A very pirate, merciful heaven! But how could I know such charity would put my own little ones in danger?"

"You didn't," said Miriam slowly. She felt the sands of truth beneath her shifting precariously toward falsehood in a way she didn't wish, not with Mama. "What harm could come from your kindness?"

"No harm to Zachariah, no," her mother answered. "Like most men, he has always been able to look after himself, no matter who his friends might be. But you, lamb, you were different, soft and gentle and trusting, your eyes shining bright whenever Jack came whistling down our path. I would never wish poor Jack ill, of course—he's done enough of that to himself without me—but you cannot know how happy I was to see him go off to sea, or how I would have done anything—
anything
—to keep him from returning to you."

Appalled, Miriam stared at her mother. She'd always thought her feelings for Jack had been a well-kept secret between them, and she guiltily wondered how much her mother might have spied from her bedchamber window the other night. "But, Mama, I didn't—"

"Do you think me blind, Miriam? Do you think that I never saw the looks that passed between you two, or heard how your voice would grow low and breathless with him?" Mrs. Rowe sighed and awkwardly patted Miriam's fingers where they lay curled around her arm. "But you're four years older now and, I pray, four years wiser."

"I am," said Miriam with more sadness than she intended. In her heart she knew Jack would always remain her first love, most likely her only one, but Chilton was the man she'd determined to marry. How could there be a better definition of wisdom and maturity than that?

"You're a good daughter, Miriam," said her mother softly, the highest praise she could give. "And for your sake, I trust that whatever attachment lay between you and Jack is done. With Mr. Chuff you have the opportunity to improve yourself beyond measure, a gentleman's wife of standing and reputation. No woman with an eye to her own welfare and future could wish for more. And yet, and yet, I wonder still."

"What is there to wonder, Mama?" asked Miriam, remembering how blithely Jack was once again sailing from her life. "Everything is as you say."

"I pray that it is." Her mother smiled wistfully. "You know I do not often speak of Zachariah's father, from respect for yours. There's little enough to say, anyway, for we were wed less than a year before he was lost. But I want you to know that I loved him when I married him, Miriam, loved him with all my heart and body, through richer and poorer and sickness and health and even through drowning in a nor'easter off Halfway Rock. I loved him, just as I now love your father."

"But why are you telling me this
now
?" asked Miriam, her voice wobbling with unshed tears. "Don't you believe that I… I care enough for Chilton?"

Why, why hadn't she been able to make herself say the same word Mama had used? Why couldn't she love Chilton the way she had loved Jack—loved him still?

"Only you know that, lamb," her mother said gently, all the criticism she'd offer. "And only you know what matters most to your own heart. And now, I think, it's high time we tended to those onions before our guests give us up for lost."

Brusquely Mrs. Rowe brushed her hands down her apron and rose to her feet, pulling Miriam up with her. She gave Miriam's shoulders a quick hug, then bent to sweep the last of the shells into the box.

But Miriam could only watch in miserable silence, striving to turn her thoughts, too, away from Jack and Chilton and her own confused heart, and toward peeling the onions for dinner. Mama was always so good at that, able to decide what needed to be done, then doing it, and moving along to peeling onions or apples or whatev-er else was waiting in the kitchen. Mama wouldn't weep over things that couldn't be changed. She ordered her life with the same tidy efficiency that she ruled the Green lion—an efficiency that Miriam, even on her best days, felt hopelessly incapable of copying.

But she would keep trying, just as she'd promised Chilton to keep trying to control her tempers and passions. She
would
.

And try to forget the one man she loved, who'd already forgotten her.