Memory's Embrace (14 page)

“What happened?” he asked, crouching before her, fearing the worst.

Her lovely, elfin face was tear-stained. “He came and took her away. H-He’s here, Keith—he’s actually here—”

Keith caught her hands in his. “Who, shoebutton? Who’s here?”

“Asa—Asa Thatcher—he took my mother—”

He drew her up, supported her when she wavered on her feet. There was no color at all in her face. “That’s your father, isn’t it?”

Tess nodded distractedly. “Keith, she wasn’t well enough to leave—maybe he’s going to put her in some awful place—”

Mentally, Keith reviewed what little Tess had told him about her mother and Asa Thatcher. “Did they leave any kind of message for you?” he asked gently, as he lifted her into the wagon seat.

“I’m to meet them at the Grand Hotel. Suite 17.”

Keith was reminded of his own forthcoming rendezvous at the Grand, with his brothers, and he frowned. Damn, how he hated to give in like that, wait there for Adam and Jeff like some errant child sent off to the woodshed. “It seems simple enough, Tess,” he said, somewhat shortly. “We’ll go there and talk to Thatcher right now. It should be easy enough to find out what he plans to do.”

Tess only stared straight ahead, her teeth gnawing at her lower lip, her shoulders and backbone rigid.

She was so wan and fragile, was Olivia. Which was to be expected, Asa thought ruefully, after all she’d been through.

She sat in a plush velvet chair now, her fingers plucking at her skirts, her gaze taking in the elegant sitting room of their hotel suite with a tentative sort of shyness, as though she expected it all to disappear.

“I’m truly not dreaming?” she asked again, in a small voice.

Asa wanted to weep. Wanted to shout for joy. Wanted, above all, to make this woman his wife before circumstances could separate them again. “No, my darling. You’re not dreaming.”

He had explained it all to her, how his wife and daughter had arranged for Tess and herself to be thrown out of their house, how her letters and Tess’s had been intercepted and disposed of. Now, he patiently explained it again.

“We can marry?” she asked wondering. It was incredible to Asa that a creature so lovely, so sought after, could love such a man as he.

“This very day,” he promised, his voice gruff and near to breaking.

“This very day,” she agreed. “But Tess—what about Tess?”

Asa sighed. The situation of his troublesome daughter had been much on his mind. Always she had been the brightest star in his constellation, next to Olivia, of course—good-humored where Millicent was a curmudgeon, reasonably sensible where Rod was a fool. All the same, she had run off with a peddler, hadn’t she? “I expect Tess will appear at any moment,” he said, deliberately failing to mention the drummer. There was only so much Livie could be expected to deal with, in her present weakness.

Tess swallowed hard, bent her hand into a loose fist, lifted it to knock.

Beside her, Keith gave her a look of tender exasperation
and then knocked at the door himself. With vigor. “Chin up, shoebutton,” he teased, in a whisper. “This is your father we’re meeting, not Genghis Khan.”

The door of Suite 17 swung open, startling Tess, causing her heart to rise into her throat and thicken there. Asa was thinner than she remembered, and no more handsome, but he had a new strength about him, a new spirit.

His dark, cavernous eyes assessed his daughter, misted with an emotion that greatly resembled fondness, and then shifted to Keith, taking in his rough clothes, his dusty bowler hat, in the brief flicker of what could not have been more than a moment or so, taking his measure.

“Come in,” he said gruffly, stepping back.

Olivia sat in a plush chair, her face bright, her thin arms outstretched. “Tess,” she said, in a choked voice.

Tess flew to her mother, into those outstretched arms, falling unceremoniously to her knees before her mother’s chair. “Mama—you’re well—you’re well?”

Olivia embraced her daughter, tangling her ringers in the wild mane of hair. “I’m getting well,” she said softly. “Oh, Tess—my lovely little hoyden. Have you no hairpins?”

The reunion was a glad one, made up of tears and questions and soft laughter. And when Tess had been told that Asa Thatcher actually meant to marry the woman who had been his mistress for so many years, meant to take care of her and cherish her as she
deserved, she looked around the room and noticed for the first time that Keith was gone.

A sense of quiet despair filled Tess. Had he left, maybe forever, without even saying goodbye?

Asa, who had been standing circumspectly beside the fireplace throughout the exchange between mother and daughter, read the question in her eyes, that was clear. But Tess could read nothing in his.

Minutes later, though, when an exhausted, protesting Olivia had been settled comfortably into bed in another room, he lit a pipe and studied Tess with a kindly concern she had never sensed in him before.

“That peddler. Do you love him, Tess?”

Tess sank into the chair that her mother had just left. She had much to say to Asa Thatcher, all of it unkind, but she would not do battle with him now. Not with Olivia loving him so much that she could be sent into madness and then drawn out again at his whim. “Yes,” she said, for there was no point in lying.

“Has he asked you to marry him?”

Tess was losing her patience. Why was Asa Thatcher playing father now, when for five years he had not even cared enough to answer a simple letter? Did he think she’d forgotten the callous way he’d turned them out of their little house in St. Louis, never giving a thought to what might become of them? Maybe her mother could fall back into his arms, like a heroine in a bad melodrama, but Tess wasn’t about to. “No, Mr. Thatcher. The last thing Keith wants is to marry me.”

Asa drew calmly on his pipe, and it was clear that he
sensed Tess’s animosity. But then, how could he not? How could he—even he—not guess that she hated him? “‘Mr. Thatcher,’ is it? Once, I was ‘Papa.’ You used to meet me at the streetcar and—”

“Those days are gone,” Tess broke in stiffly, sitting up straight, her hands knotted in her lap.

“Certainly you are too big to ride on my shoulder, the way you used to,” said Asa, with a gentle, persistent sort of humor. “And I don’t blame you for feeling angry with me, Tess. However, if you’ll just give me the chance, I can explain everything—about St. Louis and the years when it must have seemed that I no longer loved either you or your mother.”

Tess was not going to let him remind her of the days before his betrayal, the happy days when there had been presents at Christmas, fine clothes to wear, endless, exciting rides on the streetcar line. No, she was not going to remember. “We were destitute,” she said, not looking at Asa but at a massive cabbage rose woven into the hotel carpet. “If it hadn’t been for Aunt Derora—”

“I have recompensed your aunt,” Asa put in. “Though, of course, such a debt could never be fully paid. The woman has my eternal gratitude.”

Tess’s eyes shot to her father’s face at this. He had seen Derora then. And her version of the situation had fallen to one side of the truth. She started to tell Asa about the floors she’d scrubbed, the meals she’d cooked, the bed linens she had changed and laundered, to pay for her own keep and her mother’s, too, but thought better of it. What did any of that matter now?

“Derora was kind, in her way,” she said, and then
there was a short, tense silence, for neither of them really knew what to say to one another.

Asa came up with something. He told Tess how his wife, now deceased, and his other daughter—his legitimate daughter, Millicent—had arranged for Olivia and Tess to be evicted without his knowledge. He told of searching, of hiring detectives. He said that neither Tess’s letters nor her mother’s had ever reached him; he had learned of their whereabouts only through the repentant offices of one of the culprits—Millicent herself.

Tess fought against it, but she believed him, for the truth was clearly visible in his eyes and in his manner.

“You are a woman now,” he said gently, when the incredible tale had been told, “so the time when I might have had influence is past. I mean to marry your mother today, if she’s up to a ceremony, and after she’s had time to rest and gather strength, I will take her back to St. Louis. She will be presented proudly as my wife. None will ever be able to say that I hold her in shame.”

Tess was watching Asa now, overcome. Clearly this man loved her mother, truly loved her. At last, after so many years of scandal and secrecy, Olivia would be mistress of his house and his heart.

Asa filled the silence when Tess could not speak. “You, in many ways, have been as badly treated as my Livie has, but all that is changed now. You are to be legally acknowledged as my daughter, and when Millicent and Rod inherit, you will receive an equal share. If you so desire, you may return to St. Louis with Olivia and me and take your rightful place in the family.”

Her rightful place. To live in that sprawling brick
mansion, with its uniformed maids, its manicured lawns and lush gardens! How many times had she stood across the cobbled street from the high gates of Thatcher House and wished that she could enter in, even be welcomed?

“I couldn’t,” she said.

Asa did not seem surprised. “Very well. You will stay here, then,in Oregon?”

Tess hadn’t thought about that, hadn’t thought beyond her mother’s recovery. There were so many things to think about now. “I don’t know. I was going to get a job here, so Mama could stay in the hospital—”

“What about that young man—Keith Corbin? Doesn’t he figure into your plans?”

Tess stared at her father in surprise and then realized that, of course, while she and her mother had been greeting each other so joyously, Asa had probably been questioning Keith. “I may never see him again,” she said directly. “He promised to see me safely to Portland. That was all.”

“I see. Would you marry him if you could?”

Tess’s face was alight at the prospect. “Oh, yes!” She paused, remembered the wedding ring Keith still wore on a chain, remembered the name he had cried out in their greatest intimacy. “But he loves someone else, I think.”

Asa arched one bushy brow. “Forgive me, my dear, for my bluntness, but you and that young rapscallion have been intimate, haven’t you?”

Tess betrayed herself by gaping. By the time she’d closed her mouth and assembled a look of indignation, it was too late.

“Mr. Corbin would have you be his mistress, then, if not his wife?”

The words went through Tess like lances. Never, ever, would she be any man’s mistress! “If I can’t be his wife, I’ll not be his lover, either.”

“It’s a little late to come to that decision, isn’t it? Lofty though it may be, it is a bit after the fact, don’t you think?”

Tess drew a deep breath, straightened her shoulders, worked up her courage. “I don’t want to talk about Keith Corbin,” she said flatly. “He—we—it was all a mistake.” She lifted her eyes to her father’s gaunt face, struggling to keep her gaze level. “There is a way you could recognize me as your daughter, if you were serious before. I’m not interested in an inheritance or anything like that, but I would like a loan to buy a little shop.”

Asa looked interested. “What sort of shop?” he asked, tapping his pipe against the inside of the fireplace so that bright embers of tobacco fell to the bare hearth.

“I would take photographs and develop the plates.”

“You’re a photographer?” He looked at her with pride and fondness. “How on earth did you manage to learn such a skill in Simpkinsville, Oregon?”

“I take very good pictures, Mr. Thatcher. I-I saved my money for the camera and I know I could process photographs, too, if I only had the materials and an instruction book.”

Asa smiled. “Don’t you think another sort of establishment might serve your purposes better—a millinary, for example? Or a dress shop?”

Tess shook her head vigorously. “I want to work with photographs.”

He laughed, this father she had despaired over and hated and, for all of it, loved. “There will be no loan, Tess. We will buy the shop, you and I, and stock it with all the supplies you’ll need. Since businesses rarely pay a profit at first, you will have an account for living expenses, too.”

Once again, Tess was overwhelmed. “I couldn’t ask you to—”

“Why not, Tess? I am a wealthy man. Won’t you let me ease my sore conscience, just a bit, by giving you this small gift? After all, your brother went to Princeton and your sister had the Grand Tour, among other things.”

Tess found that the idea of a brother and sister was hard to imagine; though she had, of course, known always of their existence, they were no more real to her than the princes and princesses in the fairy tales she’d read as a child. “If I cannot repay you, I will not accept the money,” she said.

Asa shook his head, looking pleasantly baffled. “We’ll have to settle that argument later, my dear. I warn you that I am a stubborn man, used to getting my way.”

“And I am a stubborn woman,” replied Tess forthrightly.

“Perhaps you inherit that trait from me.” He paused, smiled. “Thank the Lord in heaven your looks came from your beautiful mother. You might have resembled me, as your poor sister, Millicent, unfortunately does.”

Suddenly, Tess was curious about the prince and the princess. She didn’t like admitting it, even to herself, but she was. “And my brother? What does he look like?”

Asa drew a wallet from the inside pocket of his suitcoat, rummaged through it, drew out two small, sepia-tinted photographs. There was a third, which Tess guessed was of herself, but he did not offer that one.

She reached out and caught the pictures in one hand, looking first into the unfortunate face of Millicent Thatcher. Her eyes were deep-set and mournful, like Asa’s, and her brown hair was drawn back from her face in a knot so severe that it appeared to lift her ears by half an inch. Life, for all her privilege and wealth, had not been kind to Tess’s half-sister; that was easy to deduce from her grim expression.

“Millicent recently married a fine man,” Asa said quietly. “A missionary doctor with a calling for Africa. I’m certain that my daughter will scare the fear of the Lord right into those natives, whether they want it or not.”