A Distant Shore (27 page)

“Seamus!
” He didn’t hear her at first, and so she had to call again. He looked around, squinting his eyes against the sun, and then he caught sight of her and a lovely smile broke over his face—and was quickly replaced with a frown.

“Maggie!” He came towards her and took her by the arm, steering her off the street into the shelter of a building. “What in the name of all that’s holy are you doing here? This is no place for a girl like you.”

“A girl like me?” Maggie let out a laugh that was half-wild. She felt overwhelmed by what she had done, and the fact that she’d actually, finally found him. “Seamus, you have no idea about a girl like me. It’s my aunt who lives in a Back Bay mansion, not me. I’m happiest on a farm.”

He just shook his head, his expression turning all the grimmer. “I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”

“My aunt told me what she said to you,” Maggie told him, her voice trembling. “And it’s so unfair.” She bit her lip, struggling against sudden tears. It
was
unfair, but how could she ask Seamus to go against her aunt’s wishes and lose his place at the school, all just because she missed him? And she couldn’t say anything else… coming to find him like this had been forward enough.

“Unfair it may be,” Seamus said quietly, “but I must respect your aunt. For your sake as well as my own.”

Maggie nodded miserably. Had she really expected him to say anything else? She had risked so much and come all this way—and for what? Simply for Seamus to tell her what she already knew. And yet… she couldn’t leave it like this. Not when this might be her only to chance to speak to Seamus… to
know
…

“Seamus,” she asked in a low voice, “even if you can’t talk to me—even if my aunt forbids it—tell me, please tell me the truth, do you care for me? At all?” Her voice trembled and she kept his frowning gaze with effort. What a forward thing to have asked! And yet she wouldn’t take back the words even if she could. She needed to know.

Seamus gazed down at her, his eyes stormy with conflicting emotion. Tenderness, which gave her hope, and torment, which made her heart twist inside her.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “Yes, God help me, I do.”

Maggie didn’t think. Her mother had always said she was far too impetuous, and never more so than in that moment when she flung her arms around him. Seamus grabbed hold of her shoulders, steadying her, trying to draw her away from him. “Maggie—”

“Then I’m glad I came,” she told him, and tilted her head up to smile at him. Her breath caught in her chest at the sudden intent look in his eyes and without even knowing what was really happening she let her head fall back a little, her lips part.

And then sweetly, so sweetly, Seamus leaned forward and kissed her.

Ian blinked slowly in the dim light, every muscle in his body aching unbearably. He took a breath and felt a sharp, stabbing pain in his chest. He tried to raise his hand to examine where he was hurt, but the effort cost him too much and his arm fell uselessly back to the pillow.

“Ian, Ian… thank heaven you’re finally awake.”

He blinked again and Caroline came into focus, her face pale, her eyes anxious. He turned his head and saw he was in his own bedroom, the curtains drawn against the weak morning sunlight. He could see twists of paper that held medicine powders on the table by the bed, and fresh linen bandages folded on a chair. Judging by all this, he had been bed-ridden and unconscious for some time.

“What… what happened?” His voice sounded croaky and hoarse.

Caroline bit her lip. “Do you not remember?”

“No… wait.” He closed his eyes, the memories filtering into his consciousness slowly. He’d been walking home from the hospital, no, from the Oyster House where he had shared a meal with Peter Smythe. Smythe had warned him about proceeding with the ether experiments. And then… and then, right outside the door, he’d come across Horace Wells, looking almost ill, or even mad, because he’d had a knife—Ian had seen it flash in the moonlight—

He opened his eyes and stared at Caroline. “Did Horace Wells attack me?”

She nodded unhappily. “I saw it from the window. I was looking for you, since you were so late, and I saw him raise his arm, the knife in his hand—” She drew in a ragged breath, her eyes shadowed with memory, a tear slipping down her cheek which she dashed away. “Oh Ian, I’ve never been so afraid. I ran outside at once—”

“You shouldn’t have. He could have harmed you.” He struggled, uselessly, to raise himself in his bed. “He didn’t, did he? God help him if he did—”

“No, he did not. He was raving, Ian, and half out of his mind. After he attacked you he…” She swallowed hard. “He turned the knife on himself.”

“God have mercy on his soul.” Ian shook his head, too dazed to fully comprehend the extent of the evening’s horror. “Is he—is he dead, then?”

“No, at least he wasn’t right then, but there was so much blood. It all caused a great commotion. The neighbors came out, and someone fetched one of the police.” The Police Department had just formed last year, and the sight of the officers on patrol of the city streets still surprised some people.

“And they came?” Ian asked. He knew their headquarters were on School Street, not all that close.

“Yes… they took Dr. Wells away.”

“To hospital?”

“I don’t know. I told the police what I had seen. They said they would arrest him.”

Ian grimaced, pain shooting through him as he tried to settle himself more comfortably against the pillows. “I hate for you to have witnessed such a scene.”

“I hate it too,” Caroline answered with a trembling smile. “Ian, I thought he’d killed you!” Her eyes turned glassy with tears and she blinked rapidly, her voice becoming choked. “I thought you were dead.”

Ian managed a small smile even though his whole body ached abominably, and his chest where Wells had stabbed him still throbbed with a red-hot pain. “It will take more than a single stab wound to finish me off, I daresay. You’re stuck with me, for now at least.”

“And happily so.” She touched his hand lightly, as if afraid to hurt him, and drew a shuddering breath. “Ian, this whole business has made me realize how wrong it’s been of me to try and force you to take Uncle James’s money, and how childish I’ve been in holding it against you, and letting it come between us. I hate to think I might have lost you when we still had ill feeling towards one another.”

Ian could see how sincere and anxious Caroline looked, her face pinched, her teeth sunk into her lower lip, and he struggled to respond. He could not bear to think of his ether research now, or her uncle’s money, and yet even in his pain-clouded state he recognized the truth of her words… and knew he had had been distant from his wife for far too long.

With effort he reached for her hand and grasped it loosely. “If anyone has been childish, Caroline, it is I, for holding a grudge for nigh on twenty years, and then taking it out on the one person I hold more dearly than other, the one person who has championed me again and again. What a fool I’ve been. A stupid, stubborn fool.” He drew a breath, the movement making his chest throb once more. “I’m sorry for letting the past diminish our present, and even our future. I will not let this come between us again. If you want to support—”

Caroline shook her head and gently squeezed his hand. “We needn’t talk about all that now. I just want you to get well.”

Ian nodded, fatigue crashing over him once more. “I will,” he promised, even as he closed his eyes. “I still have work to do here.” And then, with Caroline still by his side, sleep claimed him.

Moulmein, Burma, 1839

Isobel had spent three days in Moulmein and so far they had been the most awful, awkward days of her life. She’d come to Burma full of hope and determination, but neither comforted her flagging spirits now.

It wasn’t the strangeness of the city, with its rickshaws and zayats, its stately colonial neighborhood of British-style buildings and the sluggish, yellow Salween River, but rather the strangeness she felt in herself and her position.

All the cautious optimism and shy hope she’d felt while on the flat-bottomed boat with Adoniram Judson and his family had leaked right out of her as she’d stepped ashore in Moulmein’s crowded harbor and seen Jack Braeburn jerk back in surprise. Clearly she wasn’t what he’d been expecting—or hoping for.

He’d greeted the Judsons warmly, offering his condolences on the recent death of their young son Henry. Emily Judson, a woman Isobel had only seen act in the kind of gracious, gentle manner she never seemed to manage, accepted his condolences and was soon making sure they were all comfortable in the palankin that would take them to the Judsons’ home.

Isobel had sat stiffly in the still-strange conveyance, her knees brushing those of Mr. Braeburn, who sat right across from her and still managed not to converse with her or even look at her at all.

Fury at his implied slight of her burned, but even so she supposed she could hardly blame him. She was being foisted on him, a man still in mourning, when he hadn’t even indicated that he wished to marry again! And if he didn’t marry her, she had no real place here, no matter what Mr. Judson said about single women as missionaries. She was no pioneer, and she did not wish to be the first single female missionary, especially in such uncomfortable circumstances as these, laboring alongside a man who had refused her.

Yet what, really, were her options? She was no longer in Calcutta, which at least had regular ships to America. Burma had none; to return home now would be much more difficult. She could not travel alone and no one was travelling back to India for months yet.

She was stuck, whether she liked it or not—and whether Jack Braeburn liked it or not. In the three days since that awkward introduction he had continued his silence, at least towards her, and beyond a murmured greeting when they crossed paths in the Judsons’ household, he did not speak or engage with her in any way.

Which begged the question, Isobel thought as she gazed out at the ramshackle buildings and pointed peaks of the many zayats of this foreign city, all shrouded in a yellow haze, just what she was doing here.

She fought an intense wave of homesickness that threatened to sweep over her with tidal force. She’d come so far, and for so long, and yet she felt as adrift and purposeless as ever.

The Judsons were kind and welcoming, but she barely knew them and she was honest enough to admit she did not share their zeal for missionary work. She’d had moments of conviction, she knew, and she’d believed Providence had directed her to come to Burma, but beyond that…