Dovey whistled, long and low. “You have a sweetheart, Jo? I never knew!”
“No one knows about Bill. You’re the first I’ve told, and the only one I shall ever tell. And you’ll keep the secret, won’t you, Dovey?”
“It won’t be the first secret I’ve kept for you.”
“He’s a good man, gentle and kind, and patient enough that he won’t pressure me to marry. I’ll keep trying to get Clifford to grant the divorce, but he hasn’t responded to one of my letters so far. It makes me nervous, writing him. He knows I’m in Seattle now, you see, and I’m always afraid he’ll reappear, just like he did in San Francisco.”
“All the more reason to leave the city,” Dovey said briskly.
“That was my line of thinking, too. And I love Bill—I do! I never thought I’d be able to say that about a man. I never thought to find one who would treat me sweetly, and never raise his hand in anger. But I’m married, Dovey—married! It’s a terrible thing, what I’ve decided to do. The Lord may never forgive me for it. I know for a certainty the people of Seattle never would.”
“I can see why you don’t want the upright types to know,” Dovey said. “The folks of Sophronia’s style. But I’m happy for you, Jo, fallen woman or no. I can see your joy shining out of your eyes when you talk about this fellow of yours. And about teaching, getting a school of your own! As far as I’m concerned, there’s no shame in joy. I don’t care how you come by it, as long as the joy is real.”
Jo pulled Dovey into an impulsive hug, pressing her face into the girl’s thick brown curls. “I am happy. I oughtn’t to be, it’s all so sinful, so wrong. But I am. Maybe that makes me wicked—rotten to the core.”
“Only the likes of Sophronia would ever think you wicked.”
Jo loosed her hold on Dovey and stepped back, eyeing the girl soberly. “Sophronia is our friend, even if she did ruffle your feathers. We won’t speak ill of her, you and I.”
“Maybe you won’t speak ill of her,” Dovey grumbled.
Jo fixed Dovey with her best schoolmarm stare, and Dovey threw up her hands in defeat. “All right. But promise me you’ll set aside all these worries about sin, and be glad for the turn your life is taking. Maybe some folks will judge you harshly. They’ll judge me, too. Neither of us is exactly doing our part—living up to what’s expected of us.”
“What’s expected?”
“By Seattle,” Dovey clarified. “By Mr. Mercer, who brought us here for such a high and proper purpose. By the whole damned world. But who cares, Jo? We’re not sheep, to be herded where our shepherd pleases. We can plot our own courses through this world.”
Dovey’s boldness was so admirable, her confidence so grand, that Jo wanted to agree. More than anything she’d ever craved before, Jo wished for a share of Dovey’s surety, her unconcern with judgment in the hereafter and the here and now. But in her heart, Jo knew she did care—very much—what Mr. Mercer would think of her, and Mary Terry with her sweet, welcoming smile; what Mrs. Garfield and her friends would think, what Sophronia would think. Sophronia most of all. Jo had made up her mind to defy the world’s expectations—to flout utterly a woman’s proper place. She knew she would face condemnation for that decision.
Guilt gnawed at Jo’s gut until she felt hollow and cold inside. Despite Mr. Mercer’s words of support when she’d met him in his office, she couldn’t forget that Mercer had expected her to marry—to bring morals and civility to this untamed, half-formed town. He had certainly expected her to remain in Seattle if she did choose to teach—no matter what he’d said of following her joy and putting remorse aside.
The day after their arrival in Seattle, when she’d spoken up on Mercer’s behalf, he had told Josephine how grateful he was that he’d brought her along after all.
He won’t be pleased with me when he finds out exactly why I’ve gone to Whidbey Island—when word reaches him, as it must someday, that I’m living there in sin.
Guilt assailed her, too, when she thought of all the men in Seattle who lacked wives to make them settle and behave less like beasts. Absurd, that thought—she knew it was ridiculous. Even if she’d been free to marry, Jo could not possibly wed and civilize every unmarried man. But still, the weight of that responsibility pressed down on her heart.
Most of all, she felt a great, rushing, baring shame before God. He saw into her heart—He knew that even if she never touched Bill Jakes, still she was committing adultery. She was planning this very moment to forsake her marriage vows. She was a sinner. And no sinner could be entirely happy—could she?
“Mercer brought us here to marry,” Jo said sadly. “And neither of us will. Sophronia’s in such a fluster, I doubt she will, either. I suppose we’re failures as Mercer girls. Maybe Mrs. Garfield and her fellow protesters were right about us. Maybe we are women destined for sin and disappointment.”
Dovey snorted and tossed her head. “I’ll never believe such codswallop. And for Mrs. Garfield, if she were here right now I’d spit on her hem, just like Sophie did. I’m going to have the life I want, Jo—the life I deserve—no matter what any man or woman thinks of me. I don’t live to make others happy anymore. I left that Dovey behind in Lowell. This Dovey lives for herself. Call me selfish if you must—I call it being true to my own heart.”
Tears welled in Jo’s eyes; she hugged Dovey close, and then closer still, wishing her own heart might drink in some small measure of the girl’s plucky courage.
She would need it. Tomorrow, Jo would tell Bill she had made up her mind. She would leave with him for Whidbey Island and start a new life—a life she would live for herself, and for no one else.
Dovey, Jo said silently, will I be as brave as you are when I go? Or will this guilt I feel only grow, until it weighs me down and holds me here in this sinkhole of despair and doubt?
She couldn’t bring herself to ask the question aloud, and so she heard no answer. The only way to learn what the future held was to go on forward.
PART 3
JULY 1871–APRIL 1872
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THE NEW NORTHWEST
Josephine woke in a sweat. A peaceful slant of afternoon light fell through the curtains of her little house, filtering weak and green through the forest outside. She sat up on her bed, dabbing the sweat from her brow with the handkerchief she kept on her night table. She breathed deeply to calm herself, watching the lace curtains stir in the faint breeze. The air smelled of pine sap and last year’s leaves, of hay from the Andersons’ field and salmon smoking over alderwood, earthy and sweet, drifting to her secluded home from some great distance.
She was groggy from the lateness of her nap and from restlessness of her sleep. She had dreamed again of Clifford—of his hard eyes and harder hands. Even after all this time—seven years since she’d come to Seattle, since she’d seen him last, lying in the muck and shadows of that alley in San Francisco—Jo still feared him. She might deny it in the light of day, and even into the twilight. But when the dark of night drew up around her lonely little house in the pines, every twig that snapped in the forest and every stray rustle of the brush was Clifford coming to find her, Clifford stalking through the dark with the unfinished business of their marriage on his mind.
Jo tucked her handkerchief into the drawer of her bed stand. Her fingers brushed the old letter from Dovey—its envelope had yellowed around the edges, and she had read it so many times she didn’t need to look at it again. But the terrible dream still haunted her, so she withdrew it and opened the envelope.
Found this in a paper sent up from San Francisco by one of my lady friends, Dovey had written. Maybe he’ll expire in the calaboose.
The note was dated August 8, 1864—the same year they’d arrived in Seattle, and only weeks after Jo had moved to Whidbey Island to take up her new life as teacher—and mistress to Bill Jakes. Dovey had begun correspondence around that time with several women who ran high-class establishments in the California city, hoping to learn the ins and outs of t
he business for herself.
The note was folded around a newspaper clipping. Jo unfolded the scrap and read its words with her lips pressed tightly together.
JAILED! The miscreant from Massachusetts who stabbed two men in a drunken brawl at Jonesey’s Saloon this May, killing one, has faced his due justice. Clifford Stokes of Lowell, Mass., will not face the noose, as Hon. Robert Greaves deemed the crime aggravated and almost sympathetic. Still, this violent presence who has plagued our streets since April will be locked away for seven years. All of San Francisco hopes his time behind bars will mellow Mr. Stokes and return him as a fit member of society.
Jo carefully refolded the clipping and slipped it back into the envelope, then pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes until white sparks danced behind her eyelids.
The clipping had once filled her with relief—with the certainty that she was safe from Clifford’s vengeance. But the seven years of his sentence were nearly at an end. Once Clifford was on the loose again, would he return to the hunt, pursuing his old quarry with a redoubled hatred?
God keep me safe, she prayed. Remove Clifford’s old rage from his heart, and change him for the better. Let him forget me—let him leave me in peace.
That was the best she could hope for.
Jo stood, listening to the whisper of the wind through the pines, the singing of the birds, and the repetitive, midsummer churring of insects in the grass. The familiar sounds of home soothed away her anxieties. She had a new life now, she told herself stoutly—the career as a teacher she had always dreamed of. Her little island school was a success; she had earned the respect of her students and the community, and also earned a tidy salary that kept her roof up and her belly full. True, she had no children of her own—she had never conceived in her marriage with Clifford, and now she supposed she must be barren. But her duties as a teacher gave her all the pleasures of motherhood without any of its pains. She had autonomy, self-sufficiency, and even, still—after so many years—the love and loyalty of Bill Jakes, the gentlest and most worthy man she had ever known.
If God meant to visit some punishment upon me, he’d have done it by now. Why, then, did she still fear Clifford? Perhaps a person never could leave the past behind, no matter how far or how long she ran.
Jo washed the pink traces of sleep from her face in the little china basin that stood beside her window. She passed an embroidered towel over her dripping forehead and chin, then paused, gazing at her face in the mirror, counting the lines that traced across her forehead and bunched at the corners of her eyes. She was forty-two years old now—forty-two, and an old maid.
At least, she was a maid as far as Whidbey Island knew. No one on the island had learned of her marriage to Clifford—the lie she lived, the shame she still sometimes felt biting deep into her conscience. Even after she knew him to be safely in jail, not a single attempt she had made to reach Clifford by letter, to negotiate her own freedom, had yielded fruit. In the eyes of the law—and more troubling, in the eyes of God—she was still Clifford’s wife. She couldn’t decide whether the lines her face had collected were scribed by worry—a tally of every cringe of shame she’d made since her deceptions began—or laugh lines, commemorating the joy she took in her new life, the simple, quiet pleasure she found at Bill’s side.
She found pleasure not only at his side, but also in his bed. The island may have believed their schoolmarm a trustworthy spinster, but outside the realm of the schoolyard, in the privacy of her house with its merciful screen of pines, Jo allowed herself a full range of delights. Such was the domain of a married woman, after all. True, she was married to another man—not the gentleman she tumbled with. Her moments of guilt over that fact still loomed large on occasion, but they had dwindled over time, and their sporadic appearances did not seem quite so momentous anymore.
Jo hastened to the little potbellied stove in the corner of her one-room house. She laid the kindling on and lit the fire; as soon as it was reliably blazing she ducked outdoors to the tiny, shingle-sided icehouse. She fetched a plucked chicken; it would make a lovely stew. If she started simmering it that very hour, it ought to be just about ready by the time Bill passed by.
Bill was due back that very evening from his trip to Oregon. He had gone to Portland often of late, securing supplies for his expanding business building homes in the hills and forests around Seattle. She hadn’t seen her beau for more than a week; her heart leaped with anticipation at the thought of his smile, his fond jokes—and his kisses. She glanced at the wall clock in its round, mahogany case—a gift from Bill. The boat from Seattle would arrive at the Coupeville wharf in less than an hour. It never took Bill long to stroll from the landing to Josephine’s house. And of course he paid a call to Jo first thing whenever he returned from his frequent treks to Oregon.
Jo busied herself with the stew until finally the clock chimed the hour. Then she made herself as neat as she could, pulling her most effortlessly pretty calico dress from her simple pine armoire and freshening her hair inside its netted snood. At last, just as she fastened the clasp of the pearl-bead necklace Bill had given her for her birthday, she heard his familiar whistle as he came down the lane through the pines.
Jo restrained herself from running to the door like a schoolgirl. She leaned against the jamb, watching with a thrill of joy as he passed through a deep, low slant of dark-golden light that angled down through the trees, the insects and dust motes drifting about his lanky body. She loved to watch him walking down that lane. The sight of him in an easy stroll, the sound of his carefree whistle, was more a home to her than her little house with its sturdy bed and neat, sensible room. There, in Bill’s face and form, was all the warmth and comfort of a proper, happy life.
When Bill reached the clearing that served as her yard, Jo gave her customary glance around the forest. Even after seven years, caution was a necessity, although the nearest neighbors were a quarter of a mile away. Still, Jo had lived for so long with her wariness and care—always fearful that her affection for Bill would be noted. She didn’t know what might happen if her thoroughly unacceptable situation was found out. The sensible side of her mind told her that half the town of Coupeville had pieced together the mystery already, but in her less rational moments she feared a spectacular downfall, her school and career wrenched away, and an ignominious end in the dockside cribs of Seattle. For the sake of her career, Jo maintained the disguise of a prim old maid most studiously. Bill had long since grown used to her peculiar shyness about shows of affection, and chalked it up, Jo knew, to a woman’s proper modesty and skittishness about all things indelicate. If Bill suspected the clandestine existence of a husband, he never spoke of it.
Bill sniffed the air as he sauntered across the clearing. “Smells good.”
“Just one of the Andersons’ old hens I’m stewing up. She wouldn’t lay anymore, so they sold her to me cheaply. Their biggest boy even dispatched her for me so I wouldn’t have to. I can’t stand to see chickens twitch and flutter after their heads are offed. It gives me the cold creeps.”
He kissed her, long and sweetly, with his hand firm and warm in the middle of her back. Then he pulled back with a little chuckle. “Here’s something else to give you a thrill.” He removed a newspaper from where it was tucked beneath his arm. “There were two ladies visiting Portland who’d set the whole territory to flapping their jaws. Made quite a stir. The tales that were told about them—”
“Low women?” Jo asked warily. Whenever she contemplated fallen women, she got a sick little knot in her middle, a queasy reminder that she was to be counted among their ranks.
“I wouldn’t call them low,” Bill said. “Though some thought them the most debased—the most scandalous daughters of Eve to be found anywhere, since Eden was shuttered. Funny enough, most who objected to these ladies were women themselves. You can read all about it. I thought their story might bring a twinkle to your eye, at least.”
Jo examined the paper in the afternoon sunlight.
A fancy, Gothic script was scrawled across the upper edge: THE NEW NORTHWEST—and below, the newspaper’s adage: FREE SPEECH, FREE PRESS, FREE PEOPLE.
Jo scanned its several columns quickly.
WOMEN, THE CIRCUS, AND THE PAPERS
The daily press was jubilant during the past week over the performances of ladies in M’lle Jeal & Co’s Circus. We were treated to graphic accounts of equestrianism, acrobatic skill and “posturing”—though we haven’t the least idea what that last is. Not one word have the papers said about these “strong-minded women” being out of their “sphere.” They have sent forth no wail about neglected husbands and suffering children and deserted firesides. They have not complained that those women are not “clinging vines”; they have not likened them to “lost Pleiades”; neither has their modesty received the slightest contusion. It is only when woman arises in the conscientious discharge of her duty to amend the loose morals of society, and arouse the public to a higher sense of woman’s moral and legal responsibility, that men are seized with spasmodic modesty.
She searched another column, frowning in concentration, mystified but wholly intrigued.
PROSTITUTION AND PROFIT
A sad case was lately tried in the United States District Court for Oregon, before his Honor, Judge Deady. Nicholas Gregovich had obtained a divorce last spring in San Francisco from his wife, and was by the California courts awarded the custody of his child, a little one aged five years. The mother subsequently stole the child and removed to Portland, and the father, following, found her with the child in a house of ill fame. The scene of separation between the mother and child, as related by an eyewitness, was heartrending. Evidently, so long as times are so sadly out of joint under man-made rule that women can earn more money by one hour of prostitution than by a week or month, or even a year, of household drudgery under some lawful master, just so long will there be found frail “divinities” who cannot resist the golden temptation. When the weaker sex assert their power to make the laws that vitally concern their personal weal, these houses of ill fame, that flourish under the pay and patronage of men, will languish and die for want of support. Then we shall hear no more of women who desert their husbands for the emoluments of prostitution.
Mercer Girls Page 28
