Northern Lights Trilogy (99 page)

“I doubt that, sir,” Charlie said very seriously, already drifting back to sleep. “I doubt that.”

Bergen, 1888

E
lsa reached across the sofa to still her mother’s knitting. “Mother, will you not at least consider coming home with us?”

Gratia put down her needles, and the soft auburn yarn fell to her lap. Her eyes were kind and loving, the skin around them so weathered and sagging that it threatened to impede her sight. If only Amund Anders were still alive! Loving a man had kept Elsa’s mother young. Elsa had seen the change in her. Gratia once took pride in her perfectly knitted sweaters; now she missed stitches, unraveling hours and hours of work after finally finding the mistake. There had been a slow unraveling of her health, too—it was painfully evident in the way she moved, so slowly, the way she would touch her chest and sigh when she thought no one was looking. How much longer would she live? Elsa longed to have her mother with her in her mother’s final days.

“Come with me,” Elsa begged, kneeling beside her diminutive mother. “Think of how surprised Tora would be to see you. I’m certain she and Trent will soon marry. Would you not like to be there?”

Gratia reached out to softly pinch Elsa’s chin. “If I were a decade younger, I would go with you, dearest. I would pay a great deal to see my youngest daughter again.”

“You needn’t pay a thing! Come with us to America. To see our new home and your youngest child. I will bring you to Bergen myself when you wish to return.”

Gratia focused on the mantel, but she wasn’t seeing it. She was looking further, as if into the future. “No, Elsa. This is my home. This is where I was born and where I shall die.”

“Die? Don’t speak of such things! You have much for which to be thankful!”

“Ah, yes. I have much for which to be thankful. But I do not have many years left in me. Ach, look what good I am!” She pointed to yet another mistake in her knitting and began unraveling the yarn.

Pained, Elsa rose and left her mother, staring out at the fjord that met the mountains surrounding her birthplace. It had been harder than she expected to be home; memories of Peder, and the love forged there between them, assaulted her at every turn. Yet these months had also shown her that she was healing, getting beyond the constant pain. The memories made her more wistful than melancholy.
Almost two years, my love
, she said silently to the waters that had swallowed her husband on a stormy night at sea.
Oh, how much you’ve missed, and how I’ve missed you!

“
Mormor
, I want some hot chocolate,” Kristian said from the doorway.

Gratia smiled at her four-year-old grandson and then quickly at Elsa.

“Me, too!” Elsa’s one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Eve, pulled her bedraggled blanket behind her as she traced every move Kristian made. They were adorable, her children. It pained her to think that their
mormor
would not be there to see them grow up. It had taken eight years to get home. How long, if ever, would it be until she made the journey again?

She sighed and nodded her agreement. “One small mug of chocolate for you and then to bed! Tomorrow we sail for home, and I do not want droopy-doos for children.”

“We won’t be droopy-doos!” Kristian promised, racing to his grandmother and almost knocking her back to the sofa.

Elsa picked up Eve and looked over her shoulder at Gratia. “I need to spend a bit more time with the Ramstads before I turn in. You’ll put the little ones to bed for me?”

“Of course.”

“I want to go to Farmor Ramstad’s!” Kristian shouted.

“No, no. It’s late. A bit of chocolate and to bed with you.” She handed Eve to her mother. “You’ll say good-bye to your grandparents and cousins tomorrow at the docks. Good night, dear ones,” she said, ignoring Kristian’s petulant looks and kissing them each on the forehead. “See you in the morn.”

“Bright and early!” Gratia added, herding them toward the kitchen. “Oh, it will be a sad day for me to say farewell to you Americans.”

Elsa watched as they disappeared into the kitchen, Kristian happily chattering about America and Alaska. In many ways, it would be good to go home. But would she feel a true sense of home anywhere? She had houses in Camden, Maine, and Seattle. But would anywhere ever really feel like home? Her home was on the sea, just as much as in the homes she had occupied with Peder. It was at sea that she felt at peace.

She walked out into the brisk spring evening and glanced up at the stars that filled the sky above the fjord. How much life had changed in the eight years she’d been away. How much she herself had changed. Suddenly she felt older than her twenty-eight years. What would fill the next twenty-eight?

As she walked toward the barn, she remembered her wedding day to Peder. She remembered Karl, standing at Peder’s side, and wondered at herself that she had been so naive to have mistaken his intense gaze as mere friendship. Now the two were friends again. But that friendship had been torn apart when Karl had kissed her and declared his true feelings. It had driven a wedge between Peder and Karl—friends that were more like brothers. After Peder’s death, Karl came to her, begged her forgiveness. And she had given it willingly. But still
he seemed distraught that he hadn’t done the same with Peder before his death.

She looked out at Hardanger Fjord and wondered where Karl Martensen was. Memories of him now brought only warm feelings. He was as dear to her as he once was to Peder, and she missed him. Elsa made a mental note to look in on his family on the way to the docks in the morning. Knowing Karl, he’d want as much news of them as he could get. Last she’d heard he had planned to take a voyage around the Horn, taking raw materials east with him and new steamship materials back to Alaska. With any luck, they would meet again in Alaska come autumn. How grand it would be to see him! To talk and laugh and embrace—

Elsa stopped short, watching her breath fog into small clouds in front of her face. Embrace? She cast the idea of it away, immediately guilty at the thought. Since when did she dream about holding her friend? It was being home, she decided. Missing Peder and what they had had together made her lonely. Even to the point of romanticizing about a friend! She laughed aloud, disgusted with her wayward imagination, and turned her thoughts back to her in-laws.

She saddled a horse and made it to the Ramstads’ home in ten minutes. After knocking, she waited and wondered about the girl who once expected Peder to answer it—the girl she had once been. Her thoughts went back to the last time she had come to this house, at twelve years of age, still able to knock on a boy’s door without suspicion that she was anything other than the playmate down the road. At thirteen, she had been required to wait on the young men to call on her. But that year, she was young and free. She remembered Karl and Peder wrestling as they answered the door, both eager to see her, both shoving each other’s face and arms away from the doorjamb. She had laughed then, and she giggled again at the memory as Helga Ramstad opened the door.

Karl had been as eager to greet her as Peder had been. But since their kiss, Karl had withdrawn from her, even more so since Peder’s death.
Would he ever look at her with such eagerness again? She realized she wanted it now. After all these years. She wanted a man, a man like Karl, to open a door and see her and a smile to light up his face with joy.

“Elsa?
” Helga said, and, by her expression, not for the first time.

“Oh! Forgive me!” Elsa said, embracing her mother-in-law. She wondered, as Helga led her to the formal parlor, if she needed to ask forgiveness for thinking of another man, a man who wasn’t her husband. But strangely, she felt no need.

San Francisco

“Oh, Captain Martensen!” Mrs. Kenney called, turning from her group of fellow socialites. They were at the Society of Friends of the Less Fortunate Ball, a dance designed to bring in enough money to build a new house for the homeless and out-of-luck.

“Mother wants to introduce you to her new friends,” Mara Kenney said, ducking her head toward him. His date for the evening was a beauty, and Karl was the envy of the dance. Why could he not feel more…pleased?

“Let us go and meet them then,” he sighed, hating the displeasure in his voice. The Kenney family had treated him like a second son, and the senior Kenneys had welcomed his offer to escort Mara to the ball. They had been clear in their intentions to secure an honorable man’s hand for their daughter. Somehow, Karl had always thought of himself as an older brother to their girls, not a potential suitor. Now in foolishly offering himself as an escort to the Kenneys’ daughter—who had bemoaned that she would once again come in on the arm of her father instead of a beau—he had unwittingly opened them all up for pain. So what right did he have to feel used? It was his own fault for getting them all into this predicament. The longer he knew Mara, the more he hoped that stirrings of love for her would grow in his heart. Perhaps it was a fanciful young man’s dream—to be in love with your intended.

Mara smiled at him, delight shining in her eyes. How could he squelch the young girl’s pleasure? She was stunning; her dark hair was wound into a dramatic knot and pinned with a fanciful silk flower arrangement that matched another on the shoulder of her dress and still another where the bodice met her tiny waistline. And truth be told, it was gratifying for a man to be admired so.

Mara chatted on about how much “the girls” had mooned over her Nile green China crepe dress, made in the latest style to reach San Francisco society. Her arms were bare, and the low, square neckline had twin gauze strips that formed the shoulders of the dress and ran across her breasts to meet at her waist.

Karl’s gaze moved toward her small hands in long suede gloves, holding an elegant fan. He wanted to dismiss her as being too much like his former fiancée, Alicia Hall. But deep down, he knew Mara to be nothing like the conniving, superficial, heartless woman to whom he had once found himself engaged.

“Captain Martensen,” Mrs. Kenney began, “I would like to introduce you to some of our newest friends from the Society. You have been away much too long.”

“For some of us more than others,” winked a matron at Mara.

Karl glanced down at Mara. She was blushing prettily, the picture of propriety. “Well yes, I was in Alaska, and then back East,” he said. “It is a pleasure to be here at last.” He did not wish to embarrass Mara in the least. The Kenneys were, after all, dear friends.

Mrs. Kenney made the introductions, and Karl resisted the urge to shift uneasily.

Gerald Kenney joined the group and slapped Karl on the back. “It’s good to have you home, son. It feels right, somehow, to have you here.”

“Indeed,” Mrs. Kenney said, smiling at Karl and then the group. She was like a proud hen showing off her chicks.

“Enough socializing with the women,” Gerald said, puffing out his chest. “Let us gentlemen retire to another room for a bit of politics and cigars.”

“By all means, take both to another room,” Mrs. Kenney enjoined. She took Mara’s arm, and the girl glanced at Karl a bit mournfully.
What have I done?
he berated himself when he saw her look. He turned away with Gerald, breathing deeply for the first time all night. Away from Mara’s side, he at least would not dig his grave any deeper than it already was.

But his respite was brief.

“I would be in hot water with Mrs. Kenney if I did not ask your intentions for my daughter,” Gerald said conspiratorially as they entered a huge parlor filled with the pungent aroma of cigar smoke and the lower, rumbling sounds of fervent male conversation.

“I am relieved to speak of it with you, Gerald,” he said.

His friend turned and grabbed two crystal glasses from a passing waiter. Then he turned back to Karl and leaned closer to hear him amidst the din of laughter and dialogue. “Oh?” His merry look said that he had completely misunderstood Karl.

“Yes, I—”

“Kenney! Martensen!” Hayden Stover, an old captain of Karl’s and colleague of Gerald’s, joined them. “I hear you’re just back from Alaska. Tell me, man, what is going on up there? I hear there’s word of a man running some sightseeing trips along the Inside Passage and doing quite well for himself. What say you? Should we all become tour guides?”