Memory's Embrace (11 page)

Derora thought quickly. “You’ll—you’ll give them both my love, won’t you?”

It was just the right measure of tender concern, of long-suffering devotion. Asa Thatcher smiled and reached into his suitcoat for his wallet. He gave Derora a respectable sum of money for her care of Tess and promised to wire his bank in St. Louis for more, this last meant to compensate her for the cost of Olivia’s confinement.

Derora deliberately widened her dark eyes. “Oh, but it’s too much, Mr. Thatcher,” she lied. “Olivia is my sister, after all—it was my duty—”

Asa was already on his way to the door. “The duty was surely mine, dear lady. How I wish that I had undertaken to fulfill it more wisely.”

It took all Derora’s self-control not to laugh and crow and count through that thick wad of currency again and again, to remain circumspect and dignified. But if her composure was false, her curiosity was not. “Mr. Thatcher, you love my sister very much, don’t you? Pray, tell me why you turned her and Tess out so—so abruptly.”

Thin shoulders moved in a broken, despondent sigh, memories filled the sunken eyes. “My late wife did that, with the help of our daughter, Millicent. I had no knowledge of it until it was too late.”

“You mean, they sent Tess and Olivia away? It wasn’t your doing?”

“I would sooner have parted with the breath in my
lungs than given up my Livie or our little girl. But I was away from St. Louis on business, and it was regrettably easy, apparently, for my wife’s attorneys to convince Livie that the order came from me. When I returned from New York”—Pain, real and ferocious, moved in his plain-featured face—“they were gone.”

“The letters,” Derora remembered suddenly. “Olivia wrote you letters, and so did Tess.”

“I received no letters,” Asa said flatly, and Derora believed him. “It was only after my wife’s death—a scant two weeks past now—that I found out what had happened. My daughter, Millicent, had fallen in love, and this worthy emotion had sparked some pity in her, some sense of compassion. She told me that she and her mother had intercepted the letters and burned them.”

“My God,” breathed Derora, remembering how Olivia had despaired, how Tess had hated.

Asa took her hand, squeezed it. “I must go now and find my dear Olivia. Thank you, madam, for your unfailing kindness throughout.”

Derora remembered the bills clenched in her hand and beamed. “You are most welcome, Mr. Thatcher,” she replied, with the utmost sincerity. “And God speed you on your journey.”

Thatcher smiled his forlorn smile, and then he was gone.

Juniper stood, wide-eyed, in the dining room doorway. “That man was the spittin’ image of Abe Lincoln!” she cried.

Derora lifted the bills, fanned them out in front of her face to be properly admired. “How would you like to own your own roominghouse, Juniper?” she sang.
“Five dollars down and five dollars a week and, my dear, this dreary place is yours!”

“Sold!” said Juniper, with feeling.

Tess did not begin to worry about the night to come until they were well away from the little town where Keith had sold virtually his entire stock and making camp in a verdant, wildflower-strewn clearing beside a pond.

The sky looked angry and too dark for a spring evening; there was a storm coming. The mule, tethered where he could graze and drink from the pond at will, was fitful despite the copse of wild birch trees that would shelter him.

Tess leaned against the wagon, her arms folded, her eyes wide and wary, watching Keith lay rocks in a circle, gather sticks, and start a fire.

“Are you going to help me, woman,” he demanded, with a good-natured sort of impatience, “or just stand there gawking?”

“It’s going to rain,” Tess fretted, glancing ruefully up at the sky.

Keith shrugged, still grinning. Damn him, he knew what was worrying her, but he offered no reassurance. Oh, no. He just passed her, leering a bit as he went, and climbed into the back of the wagon. After a noisy search, he came out with a strip of canvas wound around four long wooden poles.

Smiling to himself, he proceeded to set up a crude sort of canopy that would keep the fire from going out, should the sky make good on its promise.

“What’s so funny?” Tess demanded, tired of his smug smirk. There was a limit, after all.

“You are,” he answered expansively, grasping one of the poles that held up the canopy and giving it a shake to test it. “Drag a log over here, will you? We’re going to need more wood.”

“Drag a—”

“Well, you don’t expect me to do everything, do you? You’ve got to pay your way in this world, Tess. Pull your own weight, as it were.” His blue eyes swept over her, appreciatively mischievous. “Such as it is, anyway,” he reflected, at length.

“If you think, for one minute, Mr. Keith Corbin, that I am going to—”

Keith folded his arms, the bowler hat at a cocky angle on his cocky head, his azure eyes twinkling. “I thought you believed in free love. Don’t you want to save the world, Miss Bishop? Don’t you want to end war and hunger and poverty by giving yourself to me?”

Tess colored richly; she hated herself for blushing but she couldn’t help it. “How would that end war and hunger and poverty?”

“Exactly my question. But that’s what you free lovers believe, isn’t it? Here’s your chance to strike a blow for universal peace. Are you going to miss it?”

“You lecher. You’re not concerned with ‘universal peace’! You’re concerned with your own p-personal satisfaction!”

“Aren’t we all?” he countered, and though he didn’t move, it was as though he had shrugged.

Tess wanted to claw his eyes out. “I’m not,” she said loftily.

“Nevertheless, Miss Bishop, I’m going to make love to you tonight. I’m going to—”

“You’re not going to do anything to me!”

He only laughed.

And because Tess knew that her body would override her will if that insufferable man so much as kissed her, she turned and flounced off into the trees to find the log he’d asked for earlier. Maybe the effort of chopping it into firewood would exhaust him.

She found a fallen birch bough, and, as she dragged it back toward the camp, Tess reflected, huffing and puffing, that it might be she who was exhausted, and not Keith.

Sure enough, he chopped the huge limb into suitable pieces without even working up a sweat. Tess sat bleakly under the canopy, watching him while she stirred the stew they’d bought at the restaurant in town.

After washing up with disturbing industry—he removed his shirt if not that insufferable hat—at the edge of the pond, Keith joined Tess at the fire and sat down on the ground, cross-legged like an Indian.

He ate his share of the warmed-over stew with good appetite, his eyes seldom straying from Tess’s slightly pinkened face.

“What more can a man ask?” he finally observed, philosophically, setting his metal bowl aside and settling back against an empty laudanum crate with a sigh. “A snapping fire. A hot meal. And a woman. What else could I want?”

For her part, Tess wanted a hot bath, a shampoo, and perhaps a cup of tea, but she mentioned none of those things. After all, it wasn’t Keith’s fault that she was without such comforts; forsaking them had been her own idea.

“You definitely have a fire,” she pointed out, determined to keep her temper, “and you’ve had a hot meal.
But you will not have a woman, Keith Corbin. Not this one, at least.”

“Why not?” He was still teasing her, but there was a gentleness in his voice now.

Tess couldn’t help it; tears slid down her cheeks, tears of weariness, confusion, and hurt. “Because I’m sore,” she said honestly. “I was, after all, a virgin.”

The azure eyes, so mischievous before, seemed to caress her now, to console her. “Why didn’t you stop me, Tess? Why didn’t you tell me?”

Tess lowered her head, dashed away the foolish tears. “I guess I wanted—I wanted you to take me.”

Keith made a sound of gentle exasperation, but no move to touch her. He seemed to sense that she could not have dealt with that, not at that moment, anyway. “You know something, shoebutton? You’re the most confusing woman I’ve ever met. When you could have told me that you were a virgin, you didn’t. And now, when it would preserve your pride to say I forced you—”

Tess met his gaze instantly. “But you didn’t force me! I—I was willing—”

“Most women wouldn’t admit that.” Now, he moved closer to her, set the bowler hat on the top of her head, smoothed her hair with an unbelievably gentle hand. “Tell me just one thing, Tess. When you said that you liked making love, were you just trying to get my goat, or did you mean it?”

Again, she averted her eyes. “I meant it,” she admitted. “It was—well—do you think it would be like that with any man?”

He slid an arm around her shoulders, held her in a comforting, undemanding way. His shirt was not fully
buttoned, though he had had the decency to put it on again after washing, and she could feel the warm, hair-roughened hardness of his chest against her shoulder. “I hope not,” he said, in a faraway voice.

The sky rumbled above them, threatening mayhem, and a cool wind made the birchwood fire dance in its circle of stones.

“I do wish I could take a bath,” Tess wailed softly, despairingly, for want of something better to say.

Keith laughed gruffly and hugged her. “Then a bath you shall have,” he said.

Tess watched him in love and wariness and wonder as he filled a large kettle with pond-water and then set it over the fire to heat. What an enigma this man was, shouting at her, teasing her unmercifully, baiting her. And then going to such effort to provide her with hot water for a bath.

It was going to be awful, giving him up, saying goodbye to him. It was going to be impossible. And yet, when they reached Portland, Tess knew she would have to do just that.

Chapter Seven

A
SA
T
HATCHER HAD HAD ALMOST ALL THE SHOCKS HE
could bear during the past hour—his beloved Olivia in an insane asylum, his Tess cavorting with a common peddler! Asa was not a comely man, but he was a wise one, and he knew the state of his family was a shame that belonged at his own doorstep and no other. With one clenched and weary fist, he struck the steamboat’s railing in what was, for him, a wild gesture of anguish.

There had been no trains leaving that sleepy little Oregon town that afternoon, not even the one he’d arrived on. And so he had bought passage on this vessel, the
Columbia Queen
, the craft was called. It was
a gaudy showboat, but that didn’t matter to Asa. No, all he cared about was reaching Portland as soon as possible.

The captain, who was something of a showman in the bargain, had assured him that they would put into port in that coastal city early the next morning.

Asa sighed, scanning the river—it was the color of worn jade—and the rich timberlands that edged it. What a fool he’d been all these years, taking Olivia and Tess for granted, staying in a marriage that had made both him and his wife miserable. Please God, if he could reach his Livie, if he could have a second chance with her—

There was some kind of ballyhoo going on on the ship’s ramp, and Asa turned, mildly curious, to see what was happening. A young woman was sobbing that she’d been besmirched, used; it was all very dramatic. But it was her tall and handsome swain that gave Asa pause. Was that—? But no, it couldn’t be?

It was. It was Rod.

Asa considered and then approached his son. Truly, this was a day for surprises.

“My papa will make you marry me!” wailed the girl, a small, plump, red-headed bundle of outrage and betrayed virtue. “You can’t just sail away from what you’ve done, Roderick Waltam!”

Asa sighed. So he was still up to his old tricks, was Rod. And using his mother’s maiden name. “Asa Thatcher, Jr.,” had never been good enough for him—he’d amended it to Asa Thatcher II while at Princeton and that hadn’t satisfied him, either. Finally, he’d dubbed himself “Roderick,” sometimes retaining his
rightful surname of Thatcher, sometimes calling himself Waltam.

“Rod?”

He turned, faced his father, speechless with surprise. Color moved up the handsome face inherited from the more comely Waltams, faded away again to a striking sort of pallor. “Father?”

The steamer’s whistle blew, and, having no real choice, the young lady stormed down the ramp to the shoreline.

“My papa will find you!” she screamed, from the riverbank. “Mark my words, Roderick Waltam—”

Her voice faded away into silence as Asa Jr. and Asa Sr. stood on the slippery deck of that riverboat, staring at each other.

“Mother is—” Rod began, hoarsely, after some considerable time.

Asa took his son’s arm, ushered him back to the railing, where they could talk as the steamer moved out into the river in a graceful arc. “She died two weeks ago,” he said, when the time was right.

Rod was recovering himself. “How did you find me?” he managed to ask.

“It was an accident,” Asa confessed, in his straightforward way. “But I’m glad of it. That girl back there—”

Incredibly, Rod grinned. “Emma. Isn’t she something? I’ve never met anyone quite like her.”

Asa bit back a lecture on the proper treatment of women. Who was he to talk, when he had driven Livie to madness by his own indecisiveness? And Tess—well, God knew what would happen to Tess.

Rod watched the distant figure that was Emma—she was like a furious little mudhen, pacing the riverbank, waving one fist in the air—until she and the town disappeared from view. And it seemed to Asa that his son bore a certain fondness for the girl.

“Mother suffered?” the younger man asked, at great length, his expression serious again.

“No,” Asa was relieved to answer. “She died very suddenly, in her sleep. You might have written home once or twice, Asa—we were worried about you.”

The flawless face hardened. “My name is Rod,” he pointed out. “And I wanted nothing further to do with any of you, so why should I have written? You cared for nothing but your work and that mistress of yours, whoever she was. And Mother and Millicent spent their days trying to find her and destroy her.”

Asa sighed and braced himself against the railing, suddenly weary almost beyond bearing. Suppose, after all this, he could not reach Olivia with his love? Suppose she could not or would not become her old self?