Memory's Embrace (25 page)

What might have been the happiest night of her life was to be, after all, the loneliest.

Chapter Fifteen

K
EITH STARED BLANKLY UP AT THE CEILING OF HIS HOSPITAL
room. The pain was unrelenting.

The ache in his shoulder was a constant, fiery throb, and the place just above his right temple, where the other bullet had grazed him, stung like the venom of a thousand bees. Both injuries were trifles, though, compared to what Tess had done to him.

He swallowed hard. When he’d lost Amelie, he’d thought that there could be no greater pain. Apparently, Tess Bishop had been sent into his life to prove how wrong he’d been.

The German nun stood at his bedside, and he
focused his attention on her, desperate to distract himself from thoughts of Tess.

“I suppose you’ve contacted my family,” he said, in hollow tones.

Attila nodded, sympathy written in every line of her starched and bulky being. How much did she know? Had he been raving in his sleep, calling, God forbid, for Tess?

Tess, Tess. Her name pounded beneath his injuries like a steel hammer.

It was as though just thinking her name had worked the magic necessary to conjure her. She came bursting into the room then, her heavy hair already rebelling against its pins, her eyes enormous, her fine cheekbones flushed.

Keith gazed at her steadily, fiercely, because he could not look away. He was absorbing the sight of her, storing every detail within himself. In the days and months and years ahead, he knew, he would need the memory to sustain him.

“He is resting!” protested Attila sharply.

“I don’t care,” replied Tess, in an even voice, her small shoulders squared, her eyes never leaving Keith’s face. “He can rest another time. Right now, he’s going to be married.”

Married. Keith used all his considerable will to tear his gaze from her, to focus again on the ceiling. There were rusty blotches in the plaster, where the rain and snow had leaked through, and he methodically counted them. Again.

He felt Tess drawing nearer to his bed; all his senses leaped in response, and the pain, suddenly, was much keener than before.

She touched his face, her hand cool and light and still slightly rough from years of hard work. “Why are you so angry with me?” she whispered brokenly. “I only went to dinner—”

“With an actor,” Keith said, still not daring to look at her. He knew he was behaving like a spoiled child, knew it but couldn’t seem to stop.

Tess persisted. “I thought you had abandoned me, you know,” she said.

“So you found yourself someone else.” His voice was gruff, rattling in the sore depths of his throat. “You’re resourceful, I’ll say that for you.”

Her voice rose a little. “You are being deliberately difficult, Keith Corbin, and we both know it. I didn’t know that you had been shot. I thought you had—you had just gotten wh—what you wanted and left.”

“You must have been devastated. For five minutes at least.”

Her hand tensed against his face; she tried to turn his head, make him look at her, and he resisted stubbornly.

Tess drew a deep, quivering breath. He heard it, felt it in his own lungs. “Rod—my brother—had been pressuring me to go to dinner at the Goldens’. You see, Mr. Golden is producing this play and Rod is an actor and he wants a role very badly—”

“What does that have to do with you?” Keith was thawing, gentling toward her, against his will, against his every effort.

Tess sighed. “Mr. Golden wanted me to be in the play, too. I’ve told him that it’s out of the question, but he just keeps asking.”

Tess’s fingers were moving on the unbandaged side of his face, their touch almost imperceptible and yet devastating. “Then it would make sense, it seems to me, to avoid him—not to go galavanting off to his house on what was supposed to be your wedding night!”

“You’re jealous!” Her laughter pealed, soft and musical, in the dreary room. “You’re actually jealous of that presumptuous, effeminate fop!”

Keith could no longer keep his eyes averted; they darted to her face, caressing, memorizing, searching. “You don’t like him?”

She laughed again, but there were tears shining in her bright, hazel eyes. “Would I call him such names if I liked him, you goose?”

“You call
me
names,” he pointed out, somewhat petulantly, looking at the ceiling again. The same eleven rusty blotches looked back at him.

“That’s different,” she said softly. “There is no reason for you to be jealous, Keith—not of any man in the whole world.”

Man? He felt more like a child. His throat drew closed, tight as the top of a tobacco sack, and he fought back the tears throbbing behind his eyes.

She bent, kissed him softly. “I love you,” she said. “And I mean to marry you. Right now.”

“Right now?” he croaked, staring up at her.

Tess nodded, crystal tears blooming in her eyes. “I brought a justice of the peace. The same man who married Asa and Mother and Rod and Emma. That’s all right, isn’t it? Our being married by a justice of the peace, I mean?”

It was more than all right; it was his salvation. “Yes,” he managed to say. “Wh-where is he?”

“Waiting in the hallway.” She was frowning pensively at his bandages. “Now that I really look at you, I’m not sure you’re up to a wedding at all. How serious are your wounds, Keith? Did they operate on you?”

It was a long time before he could answer, for his throat was drawn taut again, this time with joy. “I’ve got a few stitches, but I’ll be fine.”

“Do the police know who shot you?”

“They have a woman in custody, I’m told.”

Tess swallowed visibly, and Keith wished that he could reach up, touch her slender, alabaster throat, but both his shoulders were too sore to permit that. “A woman?” she echoed, her eyes wide.

He laughed. “It isn’t what you think, Tess. I don’t know why she wanted to kill me, but I guarantee you that she wasn’t a jealous lover. In fact, she was the wife of that storekeeper in Simpkinsville—”

Tess’s face drained of all color. “Cornelia Hamilton?” she whispered. “Emma’s mother?”

“I guess. I only remembered her because I used to do business with Jessup sometimes, when I went through Simpkinsville. Tess, what’s the matter? You look—”

“Oh, my God,” breathed Tess. “My God!”

“Tess?” He was frightened by the look on her face, the expression in her eyes. “Tess, what—”

“Would the police let me see Mrs. Hamilton, talk to her? Keith, do you think they would let me see her?”

He didn’t want her going off to a jailhouse, trying to see a woman who was probably dangerous. “Why would you want to?” he stalled.

Tess seemed to have difficulty meeting his eyes; it was a long moment before she did. “S-She was my friend. I want to know why—why she would do something like this.”

“What does that matter?”

Tess stood very straight. Her color returned, in shades of pink and gold, and her eyes snapped. “It matters very much to me. I love you. I mean to marry you. Suppose she had k-killed you?”

“She didn’t, Tess. That’s the important thing. Leave it alone.”

Tess bent, kissed his forehead in a businesslike way that said she had other things on her quicksilver mind. “I’ll be back later, Mr. Corbin. Right now, I’m going to pay a call on your would-be murderer.”

He was desperate to stop her. Pain be damned, he reached out, caught her arm in one hand. “No, Tess. She might hurt you—”

“I’m sure she won’t.”

Keith wished that he could be so certain. He held onto Tess in a grip he knew must be painful to her but could not relax. “You promised to marry me, remember?” he persisted. “You said you brought a justice of the peace.”

A light seemed to go on in her face, glowing behind the weariness. “So I did.”

They were married minutes later, by a harried little man wearing a mail-order suit and a nervous smile, with Sister Attila and a consort for witnesses. Keith couldn’t help recalling another wedding, beneath the wind-rustled leaves of a churchyard tree, and his mood was somber. He knew that he had not really dissuaded
Tess from her intention of visiting Cornelia Hamilton; he had only forestalled the inevitable. After all, he was tied to that bed as surely as if he’d been manacled; there would be nothing he could do to stop his wife from plunging headlong into a potentially dangerous situation.

And God help him, he couldn’t bear to lose a second wife. Inwardly, he raged at his helplessness, repeating the wedding vows through clenched teeth.

Tess, for her part, looked distracted, almost as if she couldn’t wait for the wedding to be over and done with.

When it was, she paid the justice of the peace, dismissed him, and announced, “I’ll be back this afternoon, during visiting hours. I do hope that nun will be elsewhere.”

Keith was annoyed. Scared. “Thank you, dear,” he muttered furiously, “I’m overjoyed that we’re married, too.”

Tess kissed him again, briefly, as though anxious to be on with more pressing matters, now that the troublesome task of marrying him had been taken care of. “I’ll be perfectly safe with Cornelia, so stop your fretting.”

“Damn it, I’m ordering you not to go!”

She laughed, damn her. She actually laughed. “You’re in no position to stop me, are you? Goodbye, darling. And I love you.”

“Tess!”

She was already at the doorway of that great, dreary room, her back straight, her steps sure. She didn’t pause, she didn’t even answer.

So much for Tess’s promise to love, honor, and obey, thought Keith furiously, reaching out at great expense
to his injured shoulder and sending the metal urinal flying across the room to bounce off the wall with a bell-like clang.

It was only as she swept imperiously past the German nun, who sat, glaring, at her polished wooden desk, that Tess remembered the incredible story Emma had told her, about her father dying and her mother turning her out. And a lie. Emma had mentioned a lie.

Suddenly, it was no longer important to see Cornelia; it was important to see Emma.

The breeze, scented of seawater and sawdust and horse dung from the road, met Tess Corbin as she came out of the hospital and grasped the handlebars of her bicycle, which rested against the trunk of a sturdy elm tree. Knowing Emma as she did, she could almost have told the tale without confronting her friend at all.

Tess got onto her bicycle, arranged her skirts as best she could. Mixed with her rising anger and her sense of purpose was something precious, something joyous, something to be cherished no matter what might happen in the future. She was Keith Corbin’s wife, and he was her husband. Nothing and no one would ever separate them again, she vowed, as she pedaled toward town, not Emma’s lies, not Cedrick Golden, not even her shop.

As she rode, she reviewed the events that had probably preceded Keith’s shooting. Emma had thrown herself at Rod, that night of the show aboard the
Columbia Queen
, determined to win him in any way she could. And, of course, Rod had availed himself of a night’s diversion, never planning to stay and fulfill
Emma’s childish fantasies. When he had gone away, Emma had panicked, felt a need to confess to her parents, lest there be a baby. For reasons of her own—probably to protect Rod from her father’s inevitable moral outrage—Emma had laid the seduction at the feet of the man she knew as Joel Shiloh.

Keith.

Tess pedaled toward the Grand Hotel with furious motions of her strong, slender legs, her mind moving much more rapidly, much more furiously. Emma had been stunned and guilt-stricken, of course, over her father’s death, and it had probably never occurred to her that Cornelia might suffer mental collapse, having lost him, that she might avenge the loss. Against the wrong man.

Reaching the hotel, Tess abandoned her bicycle out front without a backward glance, leaving it to lean against a streetlamp. She stormed through the lobby, turned the elevator knob, barked a command at the operator when the mechanical horror arrived, lurching and creaking on its cables.

Within seconds, she was pounding at the door of the suite that had, until so recently, belonged to Asa and Olivia. When Emma answered, she looked so wan and distraught that some of Tess’s anger seeped away.

“Tess. How nice of you to—”

Tess was instantly furious again. Jessup Hamilton was dead, after all, and Cornelia was probably hopelessly insane. Her own husband was confined to a hospital bed, perhaps permanently disabled. And all because Emma had been so thoughtless, so self-serving, so ignorant!

“I want to know,” she began, in a harsh rush, as she strode past Rod’s wife and into the suite, “about that lie you said you told.”

Emma grew paler still. “Lie? What lie?”

“The night your father died and your mother turned you out,” Tess insisted ruthlessly. Her hands were clenched at her sides, her heart was beating against her ribcage as though to break through. She knew she was flushed by the almost intolerable heat in her face. “You told them that you’d been with Joel Shiloh, didn’t you, Emma? That’s why you fainted that day, when you first came to the shop and saw him there.”

Emma fluttered one hand in front of her face and wavered her way into the sitting room, where she sank into a chair. “Yes.”

“Your mother shot him.”

Emma’s mouth dropped open for a second, and she swayed in her chair. “Mama?! Mama did that?”

“Yes. She thought she was avenging your honor, Emma. God in heaven, how could you? How could you tell such a lie?”

“Tess, I was desperate! I didn’t know what would happen—it seemed safe to name Mr. Shiloh, because he was gone—”

“Safe?! He was nearly killed because of you, Emma! My husband was nearly killed because of you!”

“Wh-where is Mama? Is she in jail? Oh, Tess, what will they do to her?”

The rush of frantic questions weakened Tess, made her feel sick with despair for Cornelia, for Emma. For Jessup. She fell into a chair herself and covered her face with both hands just briefly, until she could look at her
friend again. “Where is Rod?” she asked, in a soft, defeated voice.

“He went out this morning, with Cedrick Golden and that hussy Cynthia. Something about the play.” Emma shot out of her chair and then sagged back into it again, wringing her hands. “I can’t think about him now—I don’t care about him—I’ve got to go to Mama!”