“I am not,” Dovey said. And then, because she suspected she was, in fact, as white as a sheet, she pinched her cheeks to bring up their color. “So there!”
“What happened out there, Dovey?” Jo took her by the shoulders, gazing into her face with such concern and sympathy that Dovey choked back a sob. She pressed both hands over her face, never knowing if she wanted to drive away the memory of the kiss or savor it, reliving the moment over and over.
“Jo, I need to speak to you privately.”
Jo glanced around the room, meeting each woman’s eye with a nervous blink. Then she took Dovey by the hand. “All right, girls. I’m going up to our room with Dovey. All of you, please wait here.”
They climbed the staircase to the largest boarding room, hand in hand. Dovey couldn’t quite make herself release her grip on Jo. She clung to the older woman’s hand with a startling ferocity. When they let themselves into the empty room, Dovey turned to Jo with a desperate cry, throwing her arms around her shoulders, almost weeping against her collar as the welter of her emotions overwhelmed her.
“Dovey—get ahold of yourself! What happened to you out there? Were you hurt—attacked? Are you in some danger?”
Dovey pulled away, dabbing at her eyes. “I’m in no danger—I don’t think. But, oh, Jo! The man I met!”
Jo’s lips thinned. “A man? Dovey, tell me what happened.”
“He was terribly handsome, Jo, and ever so charming. And he said it was just like fate that we’d met.”
Jo sighed and closed her eyes. “You silly girl. So this is what’s stirred you up?”
“And … and …” Dovey trailed off, biting her lip. Ought she to tell Jo the man had asked after a woman named Josephine? She felt the warm intoxication of the kiss again, felt the quivering fire spreading through her belly, and decided against it. She wanted to keep Bradford all to herself—to keep his smile, his resonant voice, his accent that spoke of home, as her own gift to savor.
“And he held your hand, is that it?” Jo asked brusquely. “Or kissed you?”
Dovey’s widening eyes and indrawn breath gave away the secret.
“Lord, Dovey, you can’t go around kissing strange men! Such behavior is dangerous, as well as scandalous.”
Dovey folded her arms tightly; her rain-soaked dress pinched at her elbows. “Scandalous? You sound as bad as Sophronia.”
The door opened suddenly. Sophronia’s pale head popped into the room, thrust past the doorframe like a jack-o’-lantern on a stick. “Josephine, what’s the matter?” Sophronia narrowed her eyes at Dovey, then slipped past the door and shut it firmly behind her.
“Think of the Devil, and he shall appear,” Dovey quoted acidly. “Shoo; I said I’d talk to Jo alone. Don’t stick your nose in where you have no business!”
Dovey glanced to Jo for reinforcement, but Jo only pulled Sophronia closer.
“Dovey, get out of those wet clothes, put on a nightgown, and go dry your hair by the fire. You can’t sleep with wet hair; you’ll catch your death. And put all thought of this man out of your head. You didn’t join Mercer’s party to flounce off with some cad in San Francisco. You’re going to Seattle to meet a good, decent man—the kind who doesn’t kiss girls he finds on the streets.”
“Kiss?” Sophronia gaped at Dovey in astonishment. “You did not kiss a man out there. Tell me you didn’t!”
“Fiddlesticks,” Dovey spat. “People kiss all the time, and the sky doesn’t fall down because of it. Nor does the earth swallow them up. You’re riled up over nothing.”
Sophronia folded her arms under her small breasts, raising her downy-white brows, an expression of infinite orneriness. “You truly are incorrigible, Doreen Mason. Mr. Mercer wanted true women for this expedition, not …” Her lips worked soundlessly for a moment as she wrestled with every possible descriptor of shame and iniquity. “Not hussies like you!”
“Hussy! I’ll hussy you, and then we’ll see!”
Dovey swiped at Sophronia, her fingers flexed like claws, nails flashing in the candlelight. Sophronia darted back with a tiny shriek that sounded like the squeaking of an indignant rat.
Jo stepped between them and caught Dovey by the shoulders. “Enough of this, now! Fighting won’t do you any good. Sophronia’s right; you haven’t behaved properly, Dovey—not for a young lady bound for marriage in Seattle.”
Sophronia sniffed. “I tell you, Josephine, we must inform Mr. Mercer. He has a right to know that a woman of his party has misrepresented herself and isn’t what she pretends to be!”
Jo’s face paled, and her gaze slid from Sophronia’s face to the floor. “I don’t … I don’t think that’s strictly necessary. We needn’t tell Mercer anything, so long as Dovey promises—solemnly,” she emphasized, turning to Dovey with a fierce stare, “to mind her behavior from now on, and to comport herself like a proper young lady.”
“She’ll spoil the whole lot of us with her influence,” Sophronia said. “‘A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.’”
Dovey rolled her eyes.
“First Corinthians, chapter five, verse six,” Sophronia added, with a triumphant air that said her point was well proven.
Dovey raised her fist. “I’ll give you a lump to leaven!”
“Enough, Dovey!” Jo rounded on her, and her stern face put paid to the girl’s rising temper. “Neither of us will inform Mr. Mercer, if you swear to behave yourself from now on. It’s for your own good that we say this, and believe me, you’ll thank me one day for looking out for you.”
Dovey’s stomach twisted sourly. Jo’s words were so like her father’s, that day when she’d locked her in her bedroom with plans to cart her off to the chapel. For my own good. Dovey knew exactly what was good for her own body and soul, and she was sick, from the tip of her toes to the crown of her head, of being told otherwise.
But she only nodded. “All right. I promise.”
“Good,” Jo said, threading her arm through Sophronia’s and leading the other woman toward the door. “Now change into something dry and come downstairs. It’s time we all settled in for the night. We’ve had more than enough excitement to go around.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
A PERILOUS REUNION
“Jo,” Catherine Stickney called from the boardinghouse’s hallway, “where has Dovey got to? Do you know?”
Josephine lurched up from her bed. Her embroidery hoop spilled from her lap—she had hardly lifted her needle anyway over the past hour, lost as she was in a tangle of dark memory. Her back and legs, grown used to sitting still, cramped with sudden pain, and her head went dizzy from a terrible alertness. “What do you mean, Catherine? Dovey isn’t here?”
“No. I just asked some of the other girls downstairs, and they thought perhaps she’d told you where she’d gone, since you’re so close with her.”
Josephine looked desperately around the long room with its rows of neatly made beds, as if Dovey might roll out from beneath one of them or step from behind the heavy, velvet drapes that framed the room’s single window. But of course the girl was nowhere to be seen. Dovey hadn’t approached Josephine all the long day. In fact, she had kept most definitely to herself, Jo now realized, ever since her reappearance, soaking wet and with cheeks aflame, the night before. That was unusual for the girl.
“The blasted fool has gone out again,” Josephine said. “I’m sure of it. That brash child! She’ll land herself in more trouble than she can imagine if somebody doesn’t shake some common sense into her curly head!”
Josephine helped the other women search the boardinghouse from attic to foundation, but the whole while she knew the effort was futile. They would find no hint of Dovey in the house, she was sure, and no clue as to where she might have gone. The girl might lack caution, but she wasn’t entirely witless. She left no note behind, no hint of her whereabouts or plans. The only consolation to Josephine was the sight of Dovey’s few belongings, still tucked into the trunk they shared.
“She’s p
lanning to return, then,” Catherine said sensibly.
“She must be,” Josephine agreed.
But God only knew who this strange man was. If his intentions were honorable, the best Dovey could hope for was a rapid marriage to a perfect stranger. If his intentions were less than kind … Josephine shuddered at the thought.
I can’t simply leave her to wander the streets alone, Josephine thought miserably, pressing her aching eyes with the heels of her hands. Perhaps there is some hope that I might catch her before she does something she’ll regret. Or something dangerous.
The other women were mollified by the sight of Dovey’s blue pagoda dress folded neatly in the trunk. Certain that their friend would return, their fear evaporated and they settled into their evening routines of reading or sewing. But Josephine could feel no such surety of Dovey’s safety. As night fell, raising a thin banner of moonlight to shine weakly through the clouds, Josephine pulled Sophronia into the dark corner by the bedroom window.
“Dovey is missing,” she said.
Sophronia gave no answer but a sigh.
“I assume she has run off to meet that handsome man of hers again.” Josephine drew a deep breath, trying to steady the cold quiver in her middle. “She could be in terrible danger, Sophronia. I’m going out to find her.”
“Josephine! At night? You can’t! Wait until Mr. Mercer returns. We can send him out to search. It’s safer for a man.”
“Mercer has been so preoccupied with looking for a new ship to carry us to Seattle. We don’t know when we might see him again. Not for several more hours, perhaps—and by then, Dovey could be …” She trailed off as the grim possibilities raced through her mind, speeding her pulse and raising a sweat on her brow. Married. Assaulted. Killed! She had to find the girl, and soon.
Sophronia glanced around the room, at the other girls bent over their stitches or paging through their leather-bound novels. She lowered her voice. “But, Josephine, it’s dark out. Imagine how it will look, for a woman to go out into the streets alone, at night. Anyone who sees you will think you’re—”
“I know.” Josephine smoothed her skirt in a businesslike way and set her shoulders straight and square. She hoped the effort made her seem both calm and capable. “But I don’t care, Sophronia. You remember the things Dovey said back in Aspinwall—all that talk of managing her own life. Well, my fear is that the girl has finally made up her mind to go and do just that.”
“You don’t mean—”
“What if she’s run off to marry this stranger who swept her off her feet? Or worse, what if she’s decided to take up the oldest profession?” Josephine gave an uncomfortable shrug at the indelicacy of the subject. “What if she’s setting up business right here in San Francisco?”
Sophronia shuddered. “I can just see Dovey doing something as disgraceful as that! That child has no sense of decency.”
“We must stop her, Sophronia. We must find her and turn her from whatever mad path she’s taken tonight, before she ruins her life!”
“But we’ll look just like a pair of fallen women, walking the streets after dark!”
“We have no choice, Sophronia. Dovey needs us.”
Sophronia’s blue eyes sparked with bitter insistence. “We do have a choice—and Dovey has a choice, as well. She has made her decision, but you and I needn’t follow suit. Or even give the appearance of following suit.”
“You’re quite right,” Josephine said coolly. “You and I needn’t go.”
Sophronia’s single curt nod spoke volumes of self-satisfaction.
Josephine bent quickly and lifted her fringed, woolen cape from the trunk. “I’ll go alone.”
“What? Josephine, no!”
Sophronia clung to her arm all the way down the stairs, squalling over propriety until Josephine had hauled her clear out onto the boardinghouse’s front porch. There, in the flickering, orange light of a streetlamp, Josephine turned to her friend with a frown of stern expectation. “Your last opportunity: will you come with me and help me bring Dovey home?”
“I …” Sophronia peered past Josephine, down the steep angle of the hill to the night-darkened city beyond. “I can’t,” she finally said, and Josephine was startled to see tears in Sophronia’s eyes. “It’s wrong for a woman to walk alone at night—wrong! And I simply can’t do it.”
Josephine turned away coldly. The night seemed to beckon, quiet and amused, patiently drawing her to the snare. She would have been glad of Sophronia’s help, just so she would not feel so alone—so helpless and frail, so doomed. But if the Lord wills it, I’ll do this on my own. She hurried down the porch steps before she could change her mind.
Josephine moved carefully through the streets. Whenever she could, she edged around the pools of yellow lamplight, clinging to the shadows that hung over the roofs of buildings or eddied in the stone alcoves of windows and doors. She hadn’t ventured out into the city since their first day in San Francisco, and then she had spent only an hour taking in the sights with several of Mercer’s girls. The lay of the city would have been unfamiliar even in daylight. Now, cloaked and clouded by night, made featureless by the wash of a weak moon, the streets seemed to twist and shift like the track of a labyrinth.
Josephine did not know where exactly she might find Dovey. But she had recognized the girl’s strange and shocking ambition that afternoon in Aspinwall, when Sophronia had found Dovey loitering with the prostitute. If she was to have any hope of finding the wayward girl, Josephine knew she must find the city’s night flowers—the fallen women, as Sophronia would say. And Josephine had seen enough of the world to know that when a woman fell, more often than not she landed at the waterfront.
Even for one who knew nothing of the city, it was simple enough to find the docks. San Francisco sloped ever down toward the water; Josephine followed each street’s decline until it leveled out in a swath of cobbles and lamplight. Then she scurried along the block until she found another lane with a downward slope. She worked her way on in this haphazard manner, until at last the thick, briny scent of seawater pushed away the city odors of coal smoke and horse dung.
Josephine pressed herself against a warehouse and peered out into the night. The docks stretched in countless rows to either side, the masts of innumerable ships rising against the dark sky like a forest of pale, winter-bare trees. From somewhere in that vast, shadowed thicket a dog barked once, twice, the sound echoing and thin. Closer to hand, from the deck of a nearby boat, a man whistled a few notes and fell silent.
Josephine shivered. The cold of the early spring was dampening her skin, seeping into her bones, and she felt that she might never feel warm again. The waterfront was too large, the docks too many for one woman alone to search. She would never find Dovey here—never! A sob of desperation threatened to rise in her throat, but Josephine strangled it with resolute calm.
Any search, no matter how hopeless, must begin somehow.
Josephine stepped away from the wall and turned to the right. Any direction would do, she reasoned, as she walked steadily along the waterfront. Dark, menacing shapes seemed to rear up out of the night, revealing themselves as stacks of empty crates and abandoned barrels as Josephine drew nearer. Now and then small, sinister things scuttled in the darkness around her feet, and once a large cat sprang across her path, its lithe body arching as it ran. A rat dangled from its jaws, kicking and twisting in futile rage.
Josephine had walked for twenty minutes or more with no sign of her missing friend. She halted on the edge of a sallow puddle of lamplight and peered uncertainly around. Should she go back the way she had come, search in the opposite direction—or press on?
She had just made up her mind to retrace her steps when the sound of a woman’s voice caught and held her. Josephine shrank back against a stack of crates, watching the night. Slowly, from the curtains of shadows that hung raggedly beyond the lamp’s glare, the unmistakable shape of two people standing close together materialized out of the darkness. They faced
one another—a towering man with a broad, strong frame and the small, slender form of a girl. In one warm rush of relief and joy, Josephine recognized the parrot green of the girl’s dress, though its bright color was subdued by the dimness of night. There was, however, no mistaking the strange flatness of the skirt without the aid of its crinoline.
“Dovey!”
Perhaps the girl didn’t recognize Josephine’s voice. Or perhaps she did. Whatever the cause of her fright, Dovey uttered a tiny squeak and spun away from her suitor. Josephine caught one quick sight of Dovey’s ruffled petticoats as the girl hiked them high—then Dovey scuttled away from the docks, vanishing into the darkness of a nearby alley before Josephine could blink.
Josephine breathed a curse and hurried after the girl, never sparing a glance for the man who stood still and surprised in the shadows. She could make out little of Dovey in the blue-dark confines of the alley, save for an occasional flash of pale petticoats bobbing through the corridor ahead. The clatter of Dovey’s running feet drew Josephine on, past a heap of refuse and a pile of old, discarded palings. The alley was thick with the smell of rot and human waste; Josephine choked and coughed as she ran, unable to call out again, to persuade Dovey to stop—or at least to slow.
The alley ended in a seven-foot wall of dark, slime-dampened planks—the rear fence of some adjoining storage yard, Josephine assumed. A halo of lamplight arced over the fence, casting Dovey’s face in planes of sharp shadow and yellow glow. The girl’s eyes were wide and strained with panic.
“Dovey—it’s only me!” Josephine reached for her, but Dovey pressed back against the foul wooden fence.
“Land sakes! Why did you follow me here?” Her brow furrowed. “You’d better go back to the boardinghouse, Jo. I’m not coming back with you.”
“Of course you are, Dovey. Don’t be foolish.”
“I’m not. I’m staying put. San Francisco suits me just fine. I’ve made up my mind: I don’t want to go on to Seattle.”
Mercer Girls Page 14
