Courting Susannah (5 page)

A door closed in the distance, and Susannah realized, with a surprising sweep of loneliness, that Mr. Fairgrieve had left the house. She sat still for a few moments, there in that grand and gleaming dining room, trying to sort through the storm of emotions that seemed to assail her whenever she was in his presence, then rose resolutely to clear the table.

In the kitchen, working by the bluish-gold glow from the gas fixtures, she washed the few dishes left undone and put the leftovers in the wooden icebox. Maisie was apparently one of those cooks who clean up as they go
along, a trait Susannah admired, and there was very little work to do. The meal had been excellent, not that she would have complained in any event. Beggars, after all, could not be choosers.

Gratefully, Susannah turned down the lights and mounted the rear stairway. Several lamps burned in the upper corridor, and she found her way easily to the room she had chosen and looked in on the baby, who slept peacefully in her cradle, moved there by Mr. Fairgrieve, her tiny form bathed in the glow of an autumn moon.

She kissed the tip of one finger and touched it to the tiny, furrowed forehead. “Sweet dreams, little one,” she whispered. “Shall I go on calling you Victoria? You're not a Julia, I can plainly see that.” She frowned and shook her head. “Your mother was going to name you after me, you know. It's just as well she didn't, though, for you aren't a Susannah, either.”

The child gave a sigh as soft as a fairy's heartbeat, and a feeling of such poignant tenderness overtook Susannah that tears came to her eyes once again. She hadn't wept, outwardly at least, since the news of Julia's death had reached her. She'd been too busy, first resigning her post, over vociferous protests from her elderly charge, then packing up her few belongings and settling her affairs, and finally traveling.

She laid aside gloomy thoughts and stiffened her spine. The baby needed her to be strong, and she would not fail in this or any other duty.

She tucked the soft blankets gently around the tiny infant, lest the night chill reach her.

A flannel nightgown, far too fine to be her own, lay across the foot of the bed, along with a soft towel and a new cake of lavender soap, still in its painted tin. Blessing Maisie for an angel in disguise, she went to the bathing
room to wash, change, and brush her teeth. While there, she admired the grand tub yet again.

Back on Nantucket, Susannah had taken all her baths in the kitchen, setting the wash tub in the center of the floor and filling it with water laboriously heated on the cantankerous old cookstove. What a wonder it was simply to plug the drain, turn a couple of knobs, and sink into luxury.

After inspecting everything for a second time, rapt as a country bumpkin gone to the fair, she crept back to her own room, checked on Victoria once more, and climbed into bed.

She did not expect to sleep, after her long rest on Mr. Fairgrieve's bed, and promptly dropped off into a world of nebulous, troubling dreams.

She awakened before the child, deeply saddened. All her life, she had yearned for a husband, a child, a home, however modest, of her own. Julia had had those things, and yet she had not been happy. What could have happened to change her from an exuberant bride to the angry woman who had written those final letters?

With a sigh, she got up, pulled on the borrowed wrapper, and crept down the rear stairs, intending to heat a bottle for Victoria.

She found Maisie already there, up and dressed, her thin, flyaway hair groomed, her eyes bright with prospects all her own. Jasper sat at the table, dallying over a bowl of butter-drenched oatmeal.

“Mornin',” Maisie greeted her with a smile. “You look some better, I don't mind sayin'.”

Susannah smiled. “Thank you,” she replied, amused by the unassuming bluntness of the remark.

“Is my sweet'ums awake yet?” Maisie asked. “I've got her bottle started.”

Susannah shook her head. “She'll be awake any moment, though. I'll need diapers, pins—”

“Set them right there for you,” Maisie said, pointing to a bureau near the back stairway. “Fetched them from Mr. Fairgrieve's room just this morning.”

“He isn't—here?” Susannah asked, and then could have bitten off the end of her tongue.

“Bed ain't been slept in,” Maisie replied matter-offactly. “Here, now. Sit down and have some coffee and a bowl of this oatmeal. You'll hear sweet'ums right enough when she wakes up.”

Susannah hesitated, then accepted the offer. Maisie promptly brought the promised breakfast.

“Was Mr. Fairgrieve unkind to Julia?” she dared to inquire after several minutes of silence. There were men who abused their wives, both physically and verbally. Perhaps the handsome Aubrey was such a one, for all his charms and graces.

Maisie took a few moments weighing her answer. “They shouldn't have married up in the first place, the two of them. They was too different, one from the other. Mrs. Fairgrieve, she liked parties and dancing and fancy clothes. As for him, well, I think he thought she was somebody else entirely from who she really was. He wanted her to be home at night, readin' and sewin' and waitin' for him. It got to be a real sad situation.”

“He seems to believe—” Susannah swallowed, started again. “He seems to believe that Julia was unfaithful. Even promiscuous.”

“I ain't sure what that last word means; the first one's clear enough, though. She tended to her own business, the missus did, and I tended to mine, and we sure never talked about such as that.” Maisie made a sound that might have been a chuckle, though it held more sorrow than humor. “Oh, no. Mrs. Fairgrieve never confided in
me, 'cept to ask me to send for you.” She sighed. “She was a fragile little thing, homesick for the life she knew in Boston.”

“Did she have other companions? Women, I mean?”

The older woman gave a forceful sigh. “Not many, truth to tell. She had a way of lookin' down her nose at folks that didn't win her much in the way of admiration.”

Susannah closed her eyes for a moment, exasperated even in her grief. Julia had always thought well of herself, or pretended to, at least, and she had never had many friends. Still, when she fell so wildly, romantically in love with Aubrey Fairgrieve one spring day and soon after eloped to Seattle, Susannah had dared to hope that her friend's happiness would inspire her thereafter to take a more generous view of the world. Instead, something had spoiled her joy, turned her love for Aubrey to bitterness.

Maisie lingered at the stove, raised one of the lids, stirred the embers with a poker, and added two hefty logs from the basket on the hearth. A lovely, crackling blaze rose, casting light onto the whitewashed walls. “Mind you, if you go out, take a warm cloak,” she instructed Susannah. “I've seen the pneumonia take them that was careless in such things.”

Susannah nodded, touched by the woman's concern. They were, she suspected, more alike than different, for, like Maisie, Susannah had taken care of others for the better part of her life. “I'll be careful,” she said. She wasn't planning to go out, at least not that day, but she would need to put up fliers soon, offering her services as a piano teacher in order to have money of her own.

“You hurry yourself, young feller,” Maisie said to the boy. “School'll be startin' right quick.”

Jasper made a face. Like his mother, he was unremarkable in appearance, but Susannah had a sense that he shared Maisie's determined, kindly nature. Then he
proceeded to finish his oatmeal, and Susannah did likewise.

A feathery snow was just beginning to fall when Jasper and Maisie left the house, both of them bundled against the cold, and Victoria summoned Susannah with a furious shriek of hunger.

After a number of days spent sitting upright on a noisy, filthy train, surrounded by strangers, it was utter bliss to move about a warm, clean house, attending to ordinary tasks. She hummed as she took the warm bottle from its pan next to the stove, grabbed up the diapers and pins, and hurried up the stairs. Victoria began to scream with the lust of an opera singer.

She was changing the baby's diapers, amidst the din, a difficult proposition when she did not dare uncover the infant to the chill, when an impatient knock sounded at her half-open door and Mr. Fairgrieve stuck his rumpled head into the room. He was fully dressed, though in need of a shave, and Susannah wondered where, he'd passed the night, recalling that Maisie had said he hadn't slept in his bed.

“Is that kid dying or what?” he demanded. “For God's sake, do something before she raises the dead.”

“She's hungry,” Susannah said, somewhat testily. Victoria was in fine form, wriggling and kicking both feet. “I'll attend to that as soon as I've finished with the diapers.”

He thrust out a martyr's sigh. “Well, hurry it up. I'm getting a headache.”

“Perhaps,” Susannah pointed out, irritated not, oddly enough, because he was behaving impatiently but because he had been out all night, “if you went elsewhere, the noise wouldn't bother you so much.”

The baby continued to kick and flail and scream at the top of her tiny lungs, as if to put in her two cents' worth. Muttering, Aubrey closed the door. Susannah
finished with the diaper, made a quick trip to the bathroom to wash her hands, and returned to give Victoria the bottle.

Fifteen minutes later, sated at last, Victoria nodded off to sleep again. Smiling, Susannah kissed her smooth little forehead and laid her gently in the crib. Then she simply stood there, watching the baby sleep; the sight was infinitely beautiful to Susannah, and she was filled with a kind of joy she had never known before. Victoria was not hers, she had no illusions on that score, and yet, in the brief interval since her arrival in the household, Susannah had formed an enduring attachment to the child.

She went to the chair near the window, sat down, and leaned forward slightly, resting her forehead on her palms while she struggled to rein in her emotions. She was normally level-headed; it was not like her to feel so deeply, and she was frightened.

Maisie found her there minutes later. Although she had shed her cloak, her cheeks were bright from the cold outside. “Here now,” she said in a gruff whisper. “The little mite's dropped off to sleep. Let's you and me head downstairs and have ourselves some tea.”

Gratefully, Susannah nodded and rose to follow Maisie out of the room and down to the kitchen.

“That Jasper,” Maisie remarked fondly, setting the kettle on to heat with a clunk of metal against metal. “He don't much care for school.”

Only then, in the warmth of that spacious kitchen, with snow drifting past the windows, did Susannah recall her first impression of Jasper—that he was three or four years of age. Surely he was too young for school.

“How old is Jasper?” she asked.

“Six,” Maisie answered. Her gaze was discerning, though she was obviously a woman of simple means
and background. “He's a bit small for his age. Smart, though. Smart as a whip.”

Susannah smiled and nodded. “Have you any other children, Maisie?”

Maisie's strong, plain features teetered on the brink of something, then assembled themselves into a stalwart expression. “Nope. No husband, neither. It's just me and my Jasper.”

Susannah devoutly hoped Maisie wasn't feeling defensive; it was nothing new for a woman to be left alone with a child. “How long have you worked for Mr. Fairgrieve?”

“Nigh onto a year,” Maisie said, spooning dried tea leaves into a crockery pot while the kettle chortled on the range. “My man done got himself sent off to prison, over yonder in Montana somewheres, and me and Jasper wound up here in Seattle after knockin' around this way and that for a spell. The mister hired me to do for his new wife.” She assessed Susannah. “What about you? You ever been married?”

Susannah had always kept her hopes and dreams to herself, for all were fragile as butterfly wings, not to be shared with the other students at St. Mary's, with the nuns, or with Mrs. Butterfield, her crotchety employer. Somehow, though, in the presence of this unassuming woman, it was easier to let down her guard. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “I've never had a husband, or a child.”

“Are you plannin' to stay on here?” Maisie asked, meeting Susannah's gaze squarely in the snow-dampened morning light. The fire made the room warm, fogged the windows with steam. “That baby needs you. Mr. Fairgrieve, he cares for the child right enough, whatever he'd like folks to think, but he's a man, and they don't know chicken scratch about raisin' up a little one.”

Susannah spoke moderately. “I came to Seattle to look after Julia's baby, and I mean to stay.”

“And the mister?”

“What about him?” Susannah retorted, wary.

“He's a good man, miss. He can look after himself out there in the world, and better'n most, I'd say, but when he comes back here, he needs to have somebody waitin' for him. He didn't build this here house just for himself, you know. I reckon he was powerful lonesome. And the reason there's lots of bedrooms is because he hopes to have lots of babies to fill them up.”

Susannah hoped the hot blush rising around her cheekbones wasn't visible on the outside. “I'm sure there are many women who would marry such an attractive—such a prosperous man,” she said stiffly.

“Not out here there ain't,” Maisie countered. “Oh, there's the tawdry ones, down on Water Street and thereabouts—he don't hold with such as them, but they say he's got himself a fancy lady down at the Pacific Hotel. Thing is, a mistress ain't the same thing as a wife. Ain't the same thing at all.”

It nettled Susannah mightily—for poor Julia's sake, of course—to think of Aubrey Fairgrieve keeping such a woman. Why was Maisie telling her all this? “Perhaps he is the sort who expects to have both,” she said uncharitably. “Wife and mistress, I mean.”