Corbin's Fancy (32 page)

At the door, Jeff got out of the buggy, then helped Fancy down. As Mary appeared on the porch, he bent and whispered, “Get rid of her for the day.”

A rush of pleasure warmed Fancy and pulsed in her cheeks. A thousand errands for Mary leaped into her mind. “What shall I serve for dinner?” she asked in a dignified manner, trying to hide the way he had disconcerted her.

“Yourself,” Jeff replied, and then he was back in the buggy again and driving away. For once, the knowledge that he was probably on his way to that half-finished clippership in Port Hastings harbor did not devastate her.

“I was worried about you, mum—gone all night like that!”

Fancy entered the large foyer, tugging off her gloves as she went. “I’m sorry, Mary—my husband and I spent the night at the other house. I should have sent a message.”

Always quickly mollified, Mary beamed. “Ain’t it a lovely day, Mum? All sunny and warm—”

Fancy thought of the scandalous aside Jeff had muttered when she had asked him about dinner and flushed slightly as she reached to hang her cloak on the brass coat tree. “I’ve a whole list of things for you to do,” she began. “You won’t mind walking down to town, will you?”

Mary was delighted. “Oh, mum, a day like this is just perfect for walking! And I thought I’d be stuck indoors the whole time!”

Sometimes Mary’s exuberance was tiring, but Fancy smiled. “Once you’ve finished your errands, you can spend the afternoon as you like. Visiting friends or something.”

Mary laughed. “So the master’s coming home today, is he?”

Fancy blushed again. “That is no business of yours, Mary,” she said firmly. “Come along, now, and I’ll write out the things I want you to do.”

Half an hour later, Mary left the house with a spring in her step and mischief in her eyes. Try though she might, Fancy couldn’t be angry with the woman for her presumptuous and familiar manner. All that mattered on this beautiful Chinook day was that she’d won out over that dratted clippership for once. That wouldn’t last, of course, but perhaps the new closeness between Jeff and herself would.

Fancy meant to see that it did.

During the coming hour, she rushed about, hair failing from its pins, face flushed, baking the flaky dried apple scones that Jeff loved, fluffing sofa cushions, going over her wardrobe again and again in search of just the right dress.

She could not decide between a sedate mulberry broadcloth and her favorite lavender cambric, which became her but was worn perhaps too often. Fancy was still standing beside the bed, caught in this quandary, when her senses leaped in one startling chorus—Jeff was home.

She turned and there he was, standing indolently in the bedroom doorway, grinning at her, taking in her flour-splotched skirts, her falling hair, her flushed and startled face. In his hands he held, of all things, the old black top hat from Fancy’s performing days.

“Here,” he said, extending it. “See what you can pull out of this, Mrs. Corbin.”

Fancy’s throat was tight and she was filled with mortification that he should see her like this when she had so wanted to be beautiful for him, perfumed and elegant. Perhaps appealing enough to keep him home from the seas. “What—”

A peculiar mewling sound came from inside the hat he was extending. “See for yourself,” he said.

Fancy drew a deep breath, puzzled and quite shaken, though she couldn’t have explained why. She approached and reached cautiously into the hat and warm, soft fur met her touch. “Not a rabbit!” she whispered, closing her hand around the small body and lifting.

“No, not a rabbit,” Jeff laughed, his indigo eyes shining.

“A kitten!” Fancy cried, delighted, holding the ball of white fluff in both hands. It purred and looked up at her with trusting ice-blue eyes.

“It seems to me that any good magician could pull more than a kitten out of a hat this big,” Jeff remarked. “Try again.”

Fancy set the kitten on the floor, where it brushed itself against her skirts and swatted at her petticoats. Wide-eyed, she reached into the hat again and came out with a little box of dark blue velvet.

Lifting the hinged lid, she gasped, for inside the box was a ring, a golden band set with alternating diamonds and amethysts. “Oh, my—” she breathed, overcome. “Is it—”

“Yes,” Jeff said firmly and with mock sternness. “It’s a wedding band. I wouldn’t want other men thinking you’re fair game.”

Fancy held out a trembling left hand and he slipped the ring onto the appropriate finger. When she looked up, Jeff’s face was distorted by a shimmering blur of tears. “W–While you’re at sea, you mean?” she whispered.

“While I’m where?” he asked, looking honestly surprised.

Fancy turned the ring on her finger; it fit perfectly and the brilliant stones danced. “While you’re sailing that ship,” she said.

“Sailing that—” He caught her shoulders in his hands. “Is that what you thought, Fancy? That I was going to leave you to sail again?”

She could only nod.

He cupped her chin in one hand and lifted. His face was very close to hers. “I love ships, Fancy,” he said softly, forthrightly. “But I love you far, far more. And I won’t be making any voyages unless they’re short ones.”

Hope leaped within her, a searing, brutal, and yet fragile hope. “Exactly what do you mean by short?” she demanded, the kitten still catching at her petticoats.

“You know, brief,” explained Jeff. “Two days, three. The kind of trips that you and the baby could take with me.”

Fancy gave a shout of glee and flung her arms around Jeff’s neck and her feet were completely off the floor. The kitten dangled from her hem for a moment and then fell, with a soft thump, mewing in disgruntled protest. “I thought—oh, Jeff, I was sure—”

He held her tightly to him. “I’m sorry, Fancy,” he breathed into her neck. “I didn’t know you thought I planned to go back to the sea. If I hadn’t been so damned stubborn—”

“Don’t,” she whispered, and she silenced his self-recrimination with a kiss.

Passion howled around them like a fierce wind, and then through them. Between consuming kisses, they stripped each other of every garment, wanting nothing to impede their joining.

When Fancy stood before Jeff in a pool of skirts and petticoats and satiny drawers, he bent to take slow, sweet suckle at her breast. She moaned and flung her head back as he plundered her, his strong hands stroking her rounded stomach.

But there was an urgency in them both that forestalled their usual inclination to linger long over their loving. Jeff swept Fancy up into his arms, carried her to the bed, and fell to her there, strong and hard upon her.

His domination was complete, but Fancy welcomed it. She cried out in triumph as he entered her in a swift but gentle thrust.

He paused, looking worried. “Did I hurt you?”

“Oh, no—no—oh, Jeff, love me! Make me yours—”

And he did. Their bodies moved in splendor, rising
and falling as one, arching in the final, quivering exaltation that wrung a hoarse shout from Jeff and a keening, animal whine from Fancy.

*   *   *

Fancy was setting out cream near the cookstove in the kitchen for the kitten. The dried apple scones had burned, the acrid scent heavy in the air, but neither she nor her husband cared.

“The balloon?” she puzzled, standing up straight again.

Jeff was politely eating one of the scones, having broken away the charred edges she had crimped so carefully. “It’s a perfect day for it, Fancy,” he argued in quiet tones. “Tomorrow it will probably snow again.”

Fancy despised that balloon and had hoped never to have to deal with it again in any fashion except to kick at it surreptitiously when she happened to pass it in the barn, but there was little that could trouble her on this fine day. After all, she had her wedding ring, at last—she had a child growing within her and, best of all, she knew that Jeff would not be leaving her for the sea. They were in perfect accord.

“Well—”

He grinned and flung what remained of his scone into the fireplace. “I promise we won’t fly away this time, Fancy,” he assured her. “I’ll make sure the cable is fastened and we won’t go any higher than, oh, a hundred feet.”

Fancy felt a little thrill of adventurous fright. It would be fun to look down on Port Hastings and on that clippership that would never carry her man away from her. “If you promise,” she said.

“On my honor,” he replied.

The balloon danced and shifted against the blue sky,
straining at the ropes that held it to the grassy clearing behind the main house. Clearly, except for buying the kitten and the ring, Jeff had devoted all of the morning to bringing it there and inflating it.

Sensing that she was about to have second thoughts, Jeff laughed and lifted her carefully into the wicker gondola. She gripped the side with white knuckles as he went from one stake to another, releasing the ropes until there was only one that held them.

Temple Royce appeared so suddenly that Fancy didn’t have time to scream out a warning. He struck Jeff from behind and the one rope that held the balloon to the ground began to unfurl with alarming quickness.

Fancy felt the balloon surging higher, but her own peril was the last thing on her mind at that moment. Jeff was scrambling to his feet, stumbling toward the rope. Its looped end dragged along the ground.

“Thank God,” she whispered. For Jeff was not dead as she had first feared, but only dazed.

He lunged for the rope and Temple, looking like the mad and hunted creature he was, lunged for him. They rolled in the wet grass, over and over. The balloon drifted higher.

“Jeff!” Fancy screamed, and her cry was lost on the wind.

Both Temple and Jeff got to their feet, neither of them aware, it seemed, that Fancy was about to fly off in a craft she had no idea how to navigate or land. There were trees, tall and ready to pierce the orange and white balloon, and beyond them, the endless Pacific Ocean.…

Fancy cried out again and Temple looked up at her and laughed, waving one hand in farewell. He stepped backward and, in that moment, the looped rope caught
around his right ankle. There was no more slack now and nothing to hold the balloon to the ground.

Temple shrieked in startled horror, hanging upside down now by one booted foot, and the balloon went higher still. Jeff grabbed for him with both arms and missed, landing on his stomach.

“God help us,” Fancy muttered, sick with fear. “Help us all.”

Temple was flailing and struggling at the end of the rope now, his head coursing a dozen feet above the ground. They were wafting seaward and Jeff was shouting something but Fancy couldn’t hear him for the wind and the pounding of her own blood in her ears.

Suddenly, as they neared the tall Douglas firs that rimmed the clearing, there came a strangled scream from below and the balloon stopped, with a sickening lurch. Tree branches brushed the sides of the gondola and clawed at Fancy’s face, filling her lungs with the paradoxically festive scent of Christmas.

Trembling, certain that she would topple to the ground at any second, Fancy gathered all her courage and peered over the side. What she saw made her forget her own plight.

Temple still hung from the balloon rope, arms and legs outspread, face caught forever in an expression of staring horror. A tree limb had gone through his chest and now protruded from his back.

Fancy slithered to the floor of the gondola, shaking, her eyes clenched shut. Never, ever, as long as she lived, would she forget what she’d just seen or the desperate fear she still felt.

“Jeff,” she whispered, “Jeff, Jeff.”

And she heard his shout from below. “Fancy! Fancy, are you all right?”

“Yes,” she managed to cry out. Above her, the balloon was making a frightening, hissing sound and she could feel the gondola shifting in the thick branches, like an endangered bird’s nest.

She was going to die now, right there. In a tree! Her baby would never be born.…

“Don’t move!” Jeff called hoarsely. “Sit perfectly still and I’ll get you down, Fancy! I promise I’ll get you down.”

Fancy began to cry. The wind was buffeting the balloon from the other side now; she could feel it coming loose from the branches, leaning precariously toward the clearing. The hissing sound told her that it was slowly deflating.

With a jarring motion that made Fancy utter a choked scream, it broke free of the tree. The gondola rocked as if to spill her out and then steadied, fixed to the tree by Temple’s body.

Fancy got to her knees and risked looking down. Jeff was there—oh, God, to have him hold her, to be safe again—his head tilted back. It must have been thirty feet to the ground.

“Stand up, Fancy,” Jeff ordered calmly, and she saw that there were other people running into the clearing—Adam, Banner, Melissa, even Katherine.

“I can’t!” wailed Fancy.

Jeff ignored her words. “Remember how I made the balloon land that other time, Fancy?” he asked reasonably. “Pull the white cord—slowly. Very slowly.”

Fancy’s knees were made of jelly, but she stood up, reaching for the cord in question, her eyes closed tight.

“No!” Jeff roared. “That’s the gas valve! Pull the white cord!”

Fancy forced herself to open her eyes. Her stomach was leaping within her and her throat burned with bile. But she looked up and the white cord was there. Her hand trembled so that she could hardly grasp it, but she did, after long, torturous moments of struggle, manage to catch hold.

“Pull it very slowly,” Jeff ordered. How could he be so calm?

Resisting a frantic need to wrench at the cord, Fancy pulled it gradually downward. There was a splintering sound as the balloon descended, and she knew without looking that Temple had fallen.

And then the gondola was within two feet of the ground, and Adam and Jeff were both grasping its edges in strong hands, hauling it the rest of the way down. Jeff caught Fancy by her shoulders and wrenched her out, holding her close, muttering senseless words into her hair.

She wailed with terror and relief, clutching at his shirt with her hands. Jeff lifted her into his arms and, with his wan mother scrambling along at his side, carried her out of the clearing.