Corbin's Fancy (31 page)

Jeff grimaced, swore as he grasped his shin. “Fancy, for God’s sake—”

Fancy kicked him in the other shin and whirled, stomping through the scattered orange fliers. That she collided directly into Adam Corbin was the kind of luck she would have expected.

He grasped her shoulders, scanned her face with startled indigo eyes, and then glared over her head at Jeff. “Well,” he said. That was all, just “well.” But it conveyed his anger and his disapproval, none of which seemed to be directed at Fancy herself.

“I guess I’d better go and meet Mother before she gets worried,” announced Meredith in a simpering voice.

“Do that,” Adam bit out, still supporting Fancy with his hands, still preventing the flight she was desperate to make. And those blasted sobs that she couldn’t control were still shaking through her and rasping past her throat.

“Adam—” Jeff began lamely.

Two grim-faced women walked by, staring. “Aren’t we a lovely family?” Adam asked, smiling acidly.

They scurried on, muttering, and Adam calmly lifted Fancy into his arms and planted her in the seat of his buggy, which was waiting in the road.

“God damn it, Adam,” Jeff hissed, “wait a minute! Where do you think you’re taking my wife?!”

“Oh.” Adam looked surprised as he draped a robe over Fancy’s lap and turned to face his brother. “Is this your wife? I wouldn’t have known it by the way you treat her.”

Jeff’s eyes, dark with an emotion she couldn’t have named, sliced to Fancy’s face. “Frances,” he said, “get out of that buggy.”

Fancy lifted her chin. Her dignity was gone, so she clung to the pretense of it. “Go to hell, Jeff Corbin,” she replied.

Adam shrugged and grinned at his brother, though the expression in his eyes was crisply lethal. “There you have it,” he said, climbing into the seat beside Fancy and taking up the reins.

Jeff looked murderous. As the buggy rattled away, he drew back one booted foot and kicked a cloud of suffrage fliers into the snowy air.

As they drove up the steep and slippery hill to the main house, with its attached hospital and clinging, snow-laced ivy vines, Fancy had second thoughts. Suppose, in his anger, Jeff sought Meredith out again?

Fresh grief swept through her, stinging, too powerful to contain. What difference did it make if he did? There was no doubt in Fancy’s mind that he had already betrayed her. What did one more time, or a thousand more, matter?

It mattered. It all mattered terribly. Fancy covered her face and wept with noisy abandon.

“For what it’s worth,” Adam said in brotherly reassurance, “I really don’t think Jeff would betray you.”

That was too much to hope. It was wishful thinking, and Fancy had done enough of that. “He didn’t even give me a wedding ring!” she wailed.

Adam draped one arm around her shoulders and
gave her a comforting halt hug, but he said nothing more until they reached the main house. There, he lifted her down and escorted her through the front door.

“O’Brien!” he yelled.

Fancy had recovered enough to remind him that Banner was still passing out suffrage fliers near the sawmill and thus couldn’t be expected to answer his call. Maggie came instead.

Throughout the rest of that afternoon, Fancy was fussed over and pampered and commiserated with and, for all that, she felt worse with every passing minute. Jeff was not going to come and claim her, she was convinced of that. He was probably with Meredith again.

Fancy closed her eyes, lying there on the bed and in the room that had been Jeff’s. She felt as discarded as the books that he no longer read, the model of a clippership on the mantel that he no longer valued, the clothes that he no longer wore.

She was like the things in that room—a
wife
that had been Jeff’s.

Fancy’s throat drew tight with tears and she curled up into a little ball, desperate to shut out reality. Had it not been for the baby living inside her, she would have gladly died.

*   *   *

Jeff reeled a little, as he stormed into Adam’s cluttered office. “Where is she?” he demanded.

Adam sat back, removed his spectacles, and slipped them into the pocket of his shirt. Calmly, he swung his feet up onto the surface of the desk. “Who?” he baited innocently.

Jeff felt sick. He’d had too much blue-ruin whiskey on the
Silver Shadow.
Clasping the doorjamb in both hands, he willed himself not to throw up. “Where is Fancy?” he asked in a softer voice, one that betrayed his desperation.

“Upstairs, sleeping. And just in case you’re thinking of storming up there, cavalier-style, let me say that if you try it I’ll turn you inside out.”

“She’s my wife!”

“Oh? And what does that make Meredith?”

Jeff was wavering dangerously. He stumbled to a chair and fell into it with a groan. He wasn’t due for a hangover until tomorrow, but the damned thing was starting early. “Meredith?” he echoed stupidly.

“The lady you were sporting on your arm today,” Adam prompted without sympathy.

“Christ,” Jeff bit out, rubbing his eyes with one hand. “You know who Meredith is—”

“Do I? Fancy believes she’s your mistress.”

Jeff’s hand fell from his face. “What?!”

Adam shrugged. “After all, you have been neglecting her for months. And today she saw you coming out of a hotel—”

“Good God, is that why she kicked me? She thought that Meredith and I—” Jeff shot to his feet and immediately regretted it. “She thinks I would do that?!”

“Sit down before you pass out,” ordered Adam.

Jeff sat, gratefully. And then, perhaps because of the raw whiskey he had been consuming for the past several hours, he began to cry. His sobs were dry and they hurt, but he was not ashamed of them. Not before Adam.

“Talk to me, Jeff,” his brother commanded moderately when the first spate of unbridled misery had passed.

“I love her—doesn’t she know I love her?”

“I don’t think mind-reading was a part of Fancy’s act, Jeff.”

“I built her a house—she has carte blanche at every store in the territory—every store in the goddamned west! I—”

“Do you know what she said to me today?” Adam broke in. “She said you didn’t even give her a wedding ring.”

“For God’s sake, if she wanted a ring, why didn’t she buy one?”

“And you call me insensitive! At least I gave O’Brien a wedding band!”

“I’m going to be sick!” Jeff yelled, jumping unceremoniously to his feet and running for the door.

“I’ll be in the kitchen brewing coffee,” Adam answered with resignation, blowing out the lamp on his desk.

*   *   *

The sight of Fancy, curled up in his childhood bed as though to shield herself from some shattering injury, wounded Jeff. He fell into a chair where as a boy he had often sat dreaming of the sea, and stared toward the harbor.

It didn’t draw at him the way it once had, that great ocean beyond the Strait of Juan de Fuca, with its mysteries and its terrors.

Behind him, Fancy stirred and whimpered softly in her sleep. Jeff wondered what she was dreaming about. Meredith and her husband’s imagined infidelity? The
explosion in the harbor last Christmas Eve? The horror of Amelie’s death?

He sighed and tilted his head back. “Temple,” he whispered, “wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, I’ll find you. If it takes the rest of my life, I’ll find you.”

“Jeff?”

Jeff turned his head and saw that Fancy was sitting up in bed. The room was dark and he couldn’t make out her expression.

“D–Do you love Meredith Whittaker?”

He laughed, but it was a broken, mirthless sound and it hurt his throat. “No, and I don’t sleep with her, either. She’s in town to visit her sister or something.”

Her need to believe him was almost tangible and it shamed Jeff. God, why had he been so hard on her when she was the reason for everything he did, every breath he drew?

“I would forgive you,” she said.

Jeff ached. “I’ve never been unfaithful to you, Fancy. Not with Meredith or anyone else.”

She began to cry, softly. Brokenly. Jeff went to her without thinking and gathered her into his arms.

“Fancy,” he breathed, anguished at the depth of her pain. “Oh, Fancy, I’m sorry.”

Fancy stiffened. “For what?” she demanded, pushing back from him a little.

“For treating you the way I have. Will you forgive me?”

“That depends on whether or not you were lying about Meredith!”

Jeff laughed and this time it felt good, so good. “What a contradictory creature you are, Frances Corbin! You just told me that you would forgive me.”

“Did you or did you not make love to that redheaded hussy?”

“I did not.”

“Then I forgive you.”

“What if I’d said I had?”

She shuddered in his arms with tearful laughter. “Then I would still have forgiven you. It just would have taken longer, that’s all!”

Jeff held her close and buried his face in the rose-water- and tear-drop-scented softness of her hair. “I love you, you little rabbit rustler,” he said.

“You smell terrible! Have you been drinking?”

“Copiously,” replied Jeff. “And it was romantic of you to point it out.”

Fancy wrinkled her nose. “Yeesh!” she exclaimed.

Jeff shrugged with suitable humility. “There’s nothing for it—I’ll have to take a bath.”

He watched with love and satisfaction and a sense of homecoming as her eyes widened. “A bath? Why, you couldn’t heat water at this hour! Everyone is asleep—”

Jeff caught her hand and pulled her gently off the bed with him, chuckling. “You haven’t seen the famous Corbin bathtub, I see.”

“Is it like the one in Spokane?”

He wanted to kiss her but refrained out of delicacy. After all, he had been drinking blue-ruin all evening and then he’d thrown up in the side yard. “Not exactly,” he answered, lowering his voice to a whisper as they ventured into the hallway. “The pipes show and there isn’t any fancy tile or anything like that, but it serves the purpose.”

They sneaked down the shadowy passageway to a door roughly midway between one end of the house
and the other. “I was hoping we could have a tub like that in our house,” Fancy confided in a whisper.

“We will. If that’s what you want, that’s what you’ll have,” Jeff promised, touching the tip of her nose.

Inside the dark room where the bathtub waited, Jeff took a match from his shirt pocket and struck it with his thumbnail. Light, flickering and soft, danced with the shadows. But he did not light the waiting lamp, but instead chose a single candle, which was kept on a shelf underneath the washstand.

The pipes thundered and roared when he turned the proper spigots, but water poured into the bathtub, hot and inviting.

Since Fancy was wearing only a thin, lace-trimmed chemise, she was undressed and in the water, sighing with delight, before Jeff had even shed his boots. He looked at her with mock annoyance.

“About those fliers you threw at me today,” he began in a husbandly way.

She tossed her head and looked back at him, impish and infinitely appealing in the poor light of that one candle, flickering now on the tub’s broad edge. “It was a matter of conscience,” she said. “I agree with your mother—if women don’t fight for what’s rightfully theirs, they’ll never have it.”

Jeff shed his shirt, his trousers, his socks. “Does this mean you’re going to be a crusader like Mama?”

Reclining luxuriously in the tub, she smiled and rested both hands on her rounded, protruding stomach. “Later. I don’t expect I’ll have much time after your daughter arrives.”

“Suppose my daughter …” He stepped into the bathtub and sat down, facing her. The water was still
running and the pipes were making a clatter that would raise the dead, but he didn’t care. “… turns out to be a son?”

Her eyes were very wide and vulnerable. “Wouldn’t you love a girl as much as a boy?”

It hurt, loving a woman this much. Even at its best, it was a keenly piercing thing. Far more hazardous than sailing the seas. “Of course I would, Fancy. What makes you ask a question like that?”

She lowered her head and her slender alabaster shoulders moved in a touching shrug. “My papa wanted me to be a boy—that’s why he named me Frances.”

Jeff sat up a little straighter. “He said that? Straight out?”

“Yes.”

He reached back, turned off the water. The boilers clanked and there was a whooshing sound inside the walls. “Let me touch this place where you shelter my child, Fancy,” he said.

She rose to her knees and he closed his big hands around her stomach, marveling at the shifting and kicking, the blatant life, within. He was so moved that he would have wept again as he had downstairs had she not cupped his face in both her hands and whispered, “I would be properly attended, Jeffrey. Now.”

Chapter Eighteen

“W
ITH THAT BUMBLING
M
ARY TAKIN’ CARE OF HER,”
boomed Maggie McQuire, in housekeeperly reprimand, “it’s no wonder our Fancy’s so frazzled!”

Before Maggie could start making dire predictions, Jeff took Fancy’s arm and escorted her outside to the buggy that awaited them. There, after lifting Fancy into the narrow seat, he squinted up at her and the Chinook wind ruffled his wheat-gold hair. “Do you want to stay here, Fancy? With Maggie?”

Fancy shook her head. She wanted to go to her own house, for all its vast emptiness. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask Jeff if he would spend the day there with her, but she didn’t quite have the courage for that. The weather, snowy and cold only the day before, was glorious today, caught up in a false spring that the Indians and old-timers called a Chinook.

“I guess you’ll go down to the shipyard today,” she ventured softly, avoiding his eyes so he would not see the pain and worry in her own.

“I do have some things to do, yes,” he said cryptically, taking up the reins in his strong hands. “I’ll be home for dinner, though.”

Fancy felt a little start; it was rather pathetic to be so delighted over sharing a simple midday meal, when it was the norm in other marriages. “I’d like that,” she said shyly.

They drove home through patches of melting snow and stubborn grass and over rutted roads. The wind was indeed warm, and the sun was bright in the sky, and though it was November, one would have almost believed that it was April instead.