Yankee Wife (9 page)

Lydia smiled. “You are very precocious for a ten-year-old,” she said as they rounded the rear of the house and started toward the back steps. “How do you know about all those places?”

Millie preened at the interest. “I can read, after all,” she pointed out importantly. “And Charlotte tells me lots of stories. She plans to be abducted by a handsome sheikh someday and carried off into the desert on the back of a camel. Charlotte says that sheikh is going to love her so much that he'll turn out his whole harem and worship at her feet.”

A blush filled Lydia's face. In New England a young girl would not be permitted to develop such scandalous ideas. “Merciful heavens,” she said. “What does Charlotte know about harems?”

“Quite a lot, I'm afraid,” Millie confided, in a businesslike way that was comically reminiscent of her domineering father. “A good bit of it is made up, of course.”

“Of course,” Lydia said ruefully.

They had gained the kitchen by then, and Lydia was relieved to see no sign of Jake. She sat Millie down at the table and began filling pots and kettles at the pump, placing these carefully atop the wood cookstove to heat. Then she fed the fire and went out to one of the sheds for a washtub she'd spotted there earlier.

Millie chattered on while Lydia heated the water for a bath, small feet swinging, painted face animated and bright. “Does Charlotte have to take a bath, too?” she asked.

Lydia arched an eyebrow, and in the same moment the whistle of the departing mail boat reached her ears. She felt a stinging sadness at the thought of Polly's tragedy, and Devon's. “Only if Charlotte has painted herself like a savage and spent the afternoon crawling through the underbrush, like you,” she answered.

The washtub sat in the middle of the floor, and when the water was warm, Lydia filled it, divested Millie of her dirty clothes, and helped her into the bath.

“Normally,” Millie said, settling in obediently, “I only bathe on Saturday evenings. And sometimes I have to use Charlotte's water.”

The mail-boat whistle shrilled again, and Lydia closed her eyes for a moment. But then she found a bar of castile soap and began washing Millicent the Adventurous.

“Polly's gone away, hasn't she?” the child inquired, when her head was lathered with suds. Lydia had already inspected her scalp very carefully for ticks and lice. “Is she coming back?”

Lydia tilted Millie's head back gently and began pouring water over her hair from a small saucepan. She shouldn't have been surprised at what Millie knew; the child probably missed very little of what went on in Quade's Harbor. Charlotte, no doubt, was equally well informed.

“I don't know if Polly will come back or not,” Lydia answered honestly, handing Millie the soap. “Here, Pocahontas. Wash your face, lease.”

“I won't miss her,” Millie said, with the blithe callousness of the very young. “She stayed in her room most of the time, anyhow. Like Aunt Persephone.”

Lydia had almost forgotten the older woman, in the maelstrom of settling into Brigham Quade's complicated household, being kissed by him, chasing Millie and Charlotte all over the grounds, and seeing poor Polly leave the harbor in disgrace. “Perhaps your aunt is ill,” she said with concern.

Millie stood, and Lydia handed her a damask towel. It constantly amazed her how many such small graces existed in this remote place. Lydia wondered if this was due to the efforts of Brigham's late wife, or of the reclusive Aunt Persephone.

“No,” Millicent said, drying herself. “Aunt Persephone isn't sick. She's just hiding from Charlotte and me. We wear her out and give her sick headaches.”

“I don't doubt that,” Lydia said practically. Some statements simply didn't brook denial. “I'll look in on Aunt Persephone while you're getting dressed again.” She shook a finger at Millie as the child stepped from the tub and started toward the back stairway, wrapped in her towel. “And if you're planning to be an Indian for any significant period of time, Millicent, kindly be a clean one with peaceful intentions.”

Not surprisingly, Millie didn't commit herself.

Lydia emptied and rinsed the washtub before taking it back to the shed, then climbed the rear stairs herself.

She hesitated outside the door she knew to be Aunt Persephone's, torn between concern and a certain reluctance to meddle. In the end, concern triumphed, and she knocked lightly.

“Come in,” called a frail voice.

Lydia entered the spacious room and found Aunt Persephone stretched out on a Roman couch, a neatly folded cloth resting on her forehead. The draperies were drawn, and the faint scent of lavender toilette wafted on the draft.

“Mrs. Chilcote?”

A veined hand, plump and strong-looking, rose to touch the cloth. “Yes? Who is it?”

Lydia suppressed a smile. She'd been around enough true sickness and injury to know chicanery when she saw it. “It's Lydia,” she said, taking the other woman's hand. “I've come to see if there is anything you need.”

Mrs. Chilcote removed the cloth and looked up at Lydia, blinking. Her face had a healthy pink tint to it, and her eyes were bright, not with fever, but with suppressed energy. “I don't imagine I'm fooling you,” she said, “so it would seem a waste of time to continue.”

This time, Lydia allowed her smile to show. She perched on the foot of the couch as Mrs. Chilcote sat up.

“There must be something troubling you,” she ventured, smoothing her skirts. “Otherwise, you wouldn't be hiding out in this room with the shades drawn.”

Mrs. Chilcote sighed philosophically, reached out for a small crystal bottle on a nearby table, and touched the bottom of the stopper to each wrist. “I was merely trying to give you a chance to become indispensable,” she said. “Miss McQuire, you can have no idea how badly this family needs you.”

Lydia wanted to be needed, but she was also wary of it. She'd seen what the incessant demands of others could do to a person, whether those demands were whimsical or justified. Giving was fine, taking care of others was truly noble, but the soul of the giver needed nourishment as well.

“I suppose you know that Polly has gone,” Lydia said. She had sized up the formidable Persephone Chilcote carefully, and was certain the other woman knew virtually everything that went on in the household.

Sure enough, Mrs. Chilcote sighed and said, “Yes. I saw her board the mail boat, but of course I have no idea why she would leave her bridegroom that way.”

Lydia remained silent. If Persephone didn't know the truth—a possibility that seemed most unlikely, given the woman's obvious astuteness—the new governess would not be the one to tell her.

Mrs. Chilcote eyed Lydia thoughtfully, and her sateen skirts rustled as she rearranged them. “I would like you to call me by my first name,” she said, without preamble. “Do you know what Persephone means?”

Lydia shook her head and raised her eyebrows slightly, in order to invite the confidence.

“It is a Greek name, my dear,” Persephone said. “It means the personification of spring.”

Lydia smiled. “How lovely,” she said. Spring. How nice, how soothing, to be in this place where the breeze did not smell of gunpowder and fear, where the grass was not soaked with blood and the sounds of screaming and cannon fire did not assault the ear.

“What is that terrible sadness I see in your eyes?” Persephone demanded, leaning toward Lydia in a way that suggested she would not be denied an explanation. “You're barely into your twenties, and yet I see the grief of a thousand years in your face.”

Caught off guard by the old woman's bluntness, Lydia looked away, her eyes suddenly stinging. “When I die,” she replied, in a low, hoarse voice, “God will have no call to send me to Hell, no matter how bad my sins. I've already been there, and shaken hands with the devil.”

Persephone drew in a sharp breath at the mention of the most feared of all fallen angels. She also reached out and laid a cool hand over Lydia's fingers. “Tell me what you mean by that, child,” she ordered quietly. “Were you caught in that dreadful war?”

Lydia ran the tip of her tongue over dry lips. “We all were,” she said miserably. It seemed that Persephone had put her under some subtle, lavender-scented spell, for Lydia poured out the whole story of following her father into the thick of battle. She told about the filthy tents, the mud puddles stained crimson with blood, the horrible rasp of metal sawing through bone. And for the first time, ever, she told another living soul about Captain J. D. McCauley, the Confederate prisoner she'd helped to escape.

Persephone did not look shocked, only sympathetic. “Did the Yankees catch this Captain McCauley?” she asked.

Lydia shook her head. Even remembering the experience made her stomach churn and her skin turn clammy with perspiration. She'd seen Union men hanged for attempting to desert, and she'd lived with the gnawing certainty that her treason would be discovered and she too would be executed. “I'm sure he got away.”

“Why did you do it?” There was no condemnation in Persephone's voice, only honest curiosity.

“The government paid a bounty for every amputation a surgeon performed,” she said, feeling sicker as she remembered. “One night, just after my father died, the pickets brought Captain McCauley in with just a flesh wound in his left arm. He should have been stitched up and sent off to one of the camps, but Dr. James Steenbock decided to take off the limb and collect the bounty. I brought Captain McCauley my father's uniform and helped him into it, and told him where to find an unattended horse. Then I distracted the guards while he rode out.”

Persephone's eyes were shining, and Lydia suddenly knew where Charlotte had gotten her love of drama. “Why, Lydia, that was positively heroic! Didn't they ever suspect you?”

“Steenbock did,” Lydia recalled, with soft bitterness. “But he couldn't prove his allegations, and the other surgeons needed my help at the operating tables too badly to accuse me. About a week later, Dr. Steenbock wanted to rid a young man from Kentucky of a leg that needed only stitches and a splint. I went to one of the other doctors and told him what was about to happen, and he investigated. Steenbock was relieved of his commission and sent to one of the camps, to be dealt with after the war.”

Persephone's color had drained away and her eyes had grown big. “Did he know you'd been the one to point the finger at him, this Steenbock fellow?”

Lydia drew a deep breath, let it out slowly. She would never forget the way Steenbock had looked when he was taken into custody in the surgery tent that day. He'd glared at her, letting the full, fathomless evil of his soul show in his eyes.

Sometimes in her nightmares he stood at the foot of her bed, a scalpel in his hand, and like the many soldiers he'd robbed of arms and legs, she was unable to escape him, incapable of moving. She would awaken with shrieks of terror echoing in her throat, knowing she'd held the sound inside her, like the memories and the fear.

Eyes shining with the tears Lydia had never been able to shed, Persephone reached out and embraced the younger woman with one arm. “There now, all that's behind you now. This is a good place, and you'll be safe under Brigham Quade's roof, I can promise you that. Why, anyone who knows my nephew would rather tangle with the big saw down at the mill than with him.”

Lydia had already deduced that Brigham was strong, and that he was powerful. But she wouldn't let herself depend on him for protection or anything else. He could send her away at any time, leaving her not only alone in a treacherous world, but dangerously weakened by her own failure to remain independent. “I can look after myself,” she said, firmly but with kindness.

“You are planning to stay here for a while, though, aren't you?”

Lydia nodded. She was drawing a reasonably good salary, and she had a safe place to sleep and plenty to eat. She would remain until there was reason to leave. “For as long as I'm welcome, yes,” she said.

Persephone's face was bright. “Marvelous!” she said, exultant. “If you're staying, there is absolutely no reason why I cannot pay a long visit to my dear sister Cordelia, back in Maine.” With that, Mrs. Chilcote rose from her couch and proceeded to open the draperies and the shutters to the late afternoon sunshine. Apparently, she had instantaneously recovered from her ailments.

S
OMEONE GOES AWAY, SOMEONE ARRIVES
, L
YDIA
thought, one penny-bright afternoon a few days later, as she watched a bearded man stride down the ramp from the mail boat. A seaman's bag bobbed from his shoulder, and a meek-looking woman followed in his broad wake, a small child grasping each of her hands.

Lydia was pleased, for now there would be someone living in one of the tidy saltbox houses. One of the children, a little girl with pigtails as shiny-dark as a crow's breast, was clearly old enough to attend school. The other, a boy in knee pants, was barely out of the toddling stage.

Charlotte and Millie stood on either side of Lydia— they had not been watching for the mail boat, but instead attempting to identify hermit crabs and other small creatures. Lydia had found a nature book in Brigham's study, and she and the girls had been matching the pictures to the minute, industrious beings populating the shore.

“People!” Millie breathed in wonder, as though she'd never seen another human being until that moment.

Charlotte looked petulant, as usual. “Of course they're people, goose,” she said. “What else would they be?”

“Hush,” Lydia interceded, although it was peace she wanted from the girls, not necessarily silence. Millie fidgeted eagerly at her side.

“I don't see any reason at all why that girl wouldn't like me,” she said solemnly. “Do you, Lydia?”

“Certainly not,” Lydia said, smiling slightly. “If I were you, I would go forth immediately and introduce myself.”

Millie released her hold on Lydia's hand and raced down the wharf, undaunted by the other girl's enormous father and drab, tentative mother. The child's face lit up when Millie spoke to her, and by the time they all reached the foot of the dock, their arms were linked.

“This is Anna,” Millie said, presenting her friend joyously. “Anna, here is my teacher, Miss McQuire, and my sister, Charlotte.”

While Charlotte was dreamy and often distracted, she was not unfriendly. She smiled in a warm fashion and said, “Hello.”

Lydia looked at the uncertain faces of the man and his wife before bending to offer her hand to Anna in formal greeting. “How do you do, Anna?” she said. Then, turning to the little boy, she added, “And who is this?”

“Rolf,” Anna said, sounding proud and shy, both at the same time.

“Hans Holmetz,” said the bearlike man solemnly, holding out one enormous, callused paw. “I have heard there is work in this place. I am strong, and Magna can cook and clean.”

Lydia had no authority to hire workmen, of course, but she also hadn't any doubt that Brigham would find a place for Mr. Holmetz on one of his crews. Heaven knew, he'd made enough noise about wanting families to come and settle in his ready-made town; it wouldn't make any sense at all to turn one away.

“Welcome,” she said, with extra warmth, seeing the frightened hope in Magna Holmetz's thin, plain face. “I'll show you where to find Mr. Quade—”

Hans and Magna had a soft, brisk exchange in a language Lydia didn't recognize, and Hans lowered his bag to the ground. Unless Lydia missed her guess, that patched and tattered duffel contained everything the Holmetzes owned.

“There's no need to go looking for Brigham,” a masculine voice interrupted, and Lydia turned to see Devon approaching from the direction of his construction project. He didn't smile; his normally mischievous blue eyes were dull and flat, and he was in want of a shave. “We need all the help we can get. They can have their pick of the houses, and I'll see that supplies are sent over from the company store.”

Lydia's heart twisted at the desolation she saw in Devon's face, but at the same moment she felt joy for the Holmetzes.

Magna stepped a little closer to Hans, clearly afraid she'd mistranslated Devon's words. Probably, his pronouncement sounded too good to be true.

“We get house?” Hans asked, frowning.

Devon smiled his broken smile and reached out to ruffle the small boy's corn-silk hair. “Please see that these children have something to eat right away, Lydia,” he said, with gentle authority, and just then she sorely wished she could love him, step into the awful breach Polly had left in his life.

After more consultations in their guttural language, Hans and Magna agreed to let the children go with Lydia and the girls, while they followed Devon to the street of waiting houses.

Anna and Millie ran ahead, up the hill toward Brigham's place, chattering as if they'd known each other since babyhood. Rolf walked dutifully at Lydia's side, his thin hand in hers. It was plain that he had his doubts about these towering strangers and the places they might lead him, but he would not have considered disobeying Hans's instructions.

In the kitchen of the big house, Lydia settled the children around the table, Charlotte and Millie included, and then went to the springhouse for a jug of milk, a wedge of cheese, and some cold chicken left over from supper the night before.

When she set her burden on the counter to pour the milk, Rolf and Anna looked at her with wide, wondering eyes. Those were difficult times, for the tentacles of the war had reached even into the West, and there was no telling how long it had been since they'd eaten.

Lydia was quick in dispensing the creamy, yellow-white milk, and the Holmetz children reached for their glasses with grubby, awkward hands. A lump thickened in Lydia's throat as she watched them drink.

She served them chicken, cheese, and bread, all of which they consumed while Millie and Charlotte were still taking delicate sips of their milk.

A shape loomed unexpectedly in the open doorway, and Lydia looked up from the ravenous children, expecting to see Devon or perhaps Jake, the cook.

Instead the visitor was Brigham, and for one fanciful moment it seemed to Lydia that he not only blocked out the sunlight, but absorbed it somehow. Its light seemed to glow in his enigmatic gray eyes and turn itself into a pulsing vitality, barely restrained within his powerful body.

Lydia felt the charge of his presence like a lightning bolt, and she braced herself to keep from being swept away by the sheer force of his personality.

He smiled at his daughters, and at the shy Holmetz children, and finally at Lydia.

She was rocked by this sweet, intangible assault, and she prayed Brigham Quade would never guess the power he held over her. Even then, with a history of just one kiss between them, she knew he could seduce her easily, make her surrender what she had never given to any other man.

“You will have your meetinghouse,” he said.

Lydia was mildly disappointed at the practicality of his words, since her soul had been primed for poetry, but of course she was also relieved. It wouldn't do for private things to be said with the children present.

“When?” she said.

Brigham sighed, but his eyes were smiling. “The men will begin cutting and planing the lumber today,” he said. “You may have the west side of the clearing between Main Street and the cemetery. I'll stake out the four corners of the building.”

Lydia lifted her chin. “Thank you.”

He laughed, took the basin from the wall, and went to the stove to fill it from the hot-water reservoir. The children might not have been in the room at all, so intense and strange was the intangible interaction taking place between Lydia and Brigham.

“How grudgingly you speak those benign words, Miss McQuire,” he teased, carrying the basin of steaming water toward the back door. “But then, I guess I shouldn't expect anything different from a New England spinster.”

Lydia followed him to the doorway, fumed there in the chasm while Brigham stood on the ground nearby, the basin balanced on a sawhorse. He began to splash his face and neck industriously.

Even though she knew Brigham was only baiting her, she hated being called a spinster. The term made her sound like tattered goods, passed over in the marketplace for sounder stuff. “I believe you are a New Englander yourself, Mr. Quade,” she pointed out tautly. “And you're none too polite, if I do say so.”

He chuckled, looking up at her, his black lashes beaded with water, his jet-colored hair wet and unruly and altogether appealing. She gripped the doorjamb because she wanted to go and weave her fingers into it.

“Go ahead,” he taunted with gruff ease, “lose your temper, Miss McQuire. Let out all that rage inside you, and deal with it.”

Lydia's throat closed, and her grip on the doorjamb tightened. She'd thought her private fury well-hidden, and to have the likes of Brigham Quade read so deftly from the pages of her soul only increased it. She wanted to fling herself at him, screaming and clawing, kicking and biting, not because he'd done her any real wrong, but because there were so many violent feelings trapped within her.

“I'm not angry,” she said, the chatter of the children at the kitchen table seeming far away.

Brigham ran his eyes over her, insolently, making her flesh leap in secret response beneath her dress and underthings. “Liar,” he replied.

Rage rocked Lydia. She closed her eyes, struggling against it, afraid as always of what would happen if she ever opened a door on the storm in her spirit. Once let loose, it might never be contained again.

Brigham continued to stare at her, hair dripping, eyes mocking her. Challenging her. Then he turned away to toss the contents of the basin into the deep grass, and inexplicably some barrier within Lydia gave way.

She forgot the children, forgot the tenets of civilization. She lunged from the step, landing on Brigham's back like a wildcat, one hand clutching his shirtfront in a choking hold, the other knotted into a fist and pounding at his back. All the while, a low, barely-audible animal sound surged from her throat.

Brig pressed her down into the grass, bruising it, releasing its sweet green fragrance like a perfume, kneeling astraddle her hips, but he made no effort to restrain her flying fists.

In those terrifying minutes, he represented war, and pain, and hunger. He was the night screams of wounded children scattered over battlefields, he was injustice and cruelty. He was Lydia's own helplessness in the face of those things.

Lydia pounded at his chest until she was exhausted, then lay still in the grass, breathless and horrified at what she'd done. Tears slipped over her cheekbones, to fall away into her hair and trickle into her ears.

Brig backed away slightly, drew her up gently into his arms and held her. She knotted her fingers in his shirtfront, unable to let go.

“Poor little Yankee,” he said, his lips warm at her damp temple. “The war's over now. There's no need to be afraid.”

Lydia came back to herself then, realized what a spectacle she'd made, leaping on Brigham like a she-wolf from a high rock, carrying on like someone who should be wrapped tightly in a wet sheet and calmed with tincture of opium. Charlotte and Millie were standing in the doorway of the kitchen, watching the scene with unreadable expressions.

“Oh, dear God,” Lydia whispered, trying to push Brigham away even though she felt faint.

He rose to his feet, drawing her with him, holding her against his chest. The scent of his hair and skin weakened her further. “It's
all right
, Lydia,” he said sternly.

She wanted him to lift her into his arms, carry her up the stairs to his bed and take complete control of her mind and body, at least for a little while, and that wanting was the most frightening thing of all. She pulled free, backed away, smoothed her hair, which was falling around her shoulders, with shaking hands.

Brigham gazed at her for a long moment, chest heaving, shoved a hand through his tousled hair, and then passed her to enter the house. Charlotte and Millie moved to let him go by, and Lydia turned away, unable to face them. She had no answers for the questions in their eyes, no answers for the questions in her own heart.

She sat on the bottom step of the porch, hugging herself, and waited until her composure crept back on cautious feet. Then she went inside.

Mercifully, there was no sign of Brigham, and Charlotte too had wandered off, probably to refuel her imagination from a favorite book. Millie, Anna, and Rolf all looked up at Lydia with worried eyes, though, and she fumbled for an explanation.

And, of course, there was none. She could think of no earthly way to rationalize an irrational action.

 

Devon drove the final nail into the last of the boards forming the roof of his store. The shingles still had to be put on, but at least the inevitable summer rains would be partially deflected from the floors and roughed-in walls beneath. He looked up at the pristine blue sky, knowing well enough not to trust it, and then, in a burst of grief and frustration, flung his hammer off into the trees.

He climbed down the ladder at the side of the structure, half tempted to lean back on the rungs and let himself go tumbling over the steep, rocky embankment to the place where the tide washed the edges of sharp boulders. All that stopped him, in fact, was the possibility that he might not die from the fall, but only be injured to the point of helplessness. He couldn't bear the thought of lying in bed for the rest of his life, pissing in bottles, unable even to shave himself.