Rab smiled. “Well now, ‘Doogie’ is how we would say your name back in Scotland, from whence I came. ’Tis a common name there, and all.”
“Where’s Scotland?”
“Over the other side of that ocean out there. Didn’t Miss Cooper teach you that?”
Dougie shook his head and wiped his sore hand on his britches surreptitiously.
“She sure talks a lot, does Miss Cooper, but sometimes I find it hard to listen.”
“You listen here well enough.”
“I like it here. When did you come away from that place—Scotland? Why?”
“I was about your age, maybe a little older.” Rab stoked the fire with unconscious skill and gazed back in his mind. The lad who had left Sutherland never dreamed of what his life would become.
“Where was your father?” Dougie asked.
“He died, and my ma along with him, as well as my three wee sisters.” His very existence gone to the kirkyard, piece by impossible piece. Even his Border Collie, Gyp.
He turned his eyes on Kelpie who, as ever, lay within reach, and the big Newfoundland swatted the floor with his tail in response. He should have sent Kelpie up the shore with Lisbeth. Why had he let her go alone?
Finishing the tale, he told Dougie, “I had not the means to stay on our croft alone. An uncle paid my passage, out of kindness, he said.” Had it been, though? Would it not have been kinder for Uncle Angus to take Rab in, let him stay where the remnants of his heart lay? Angus had said opportunity lay over the water, so the last of Rab’s ties had been ruthlessly cut.
“I don’t have no father.” Dougie announced it with a hint of defiance, effectively interrupting Rab’s thoughts.
He reached out and ruffled Dougie’s hair. “Everyone has a father, lad.”
“Not one I know. My ma says she’s not sure who he was.” Shame stained the boy’s skin darker. A source of agony to him, was it?
Rab remembered Declan and his brother Pat tormenting Rab more than once about his lack of family and his shabby clothes, at least back before Rab grew big enough to stop the taunts. Tip Howard hadn’t spared much thought for Rab’s appearance. But he’d provided all the food a boy could want and, aye, a rudimentary form of love.
“In the tavern,” Dougie went on, speaking more than he had since Rab met him, “they say he was a Penobscot. That’s why I look the way I do—different from Timmy. Different from everybody.”
Bless Emily Cooper, Rab thought, for sending the lad to him. “Nothing wrong with that, lad, if ’tis true.”
“But people call them ‘dirty Indians.’ ”
“People say all sorts of things that aren’t true.”
“But Mr. Sinclair, if I do have a father, why wouldn’t he come and see me, not once?”
“Ah, Dougie, there could be a host of reasons. Maybe he doesn’t feel he’d be welcome. Maybe,” he added delicately, “he never knew about you.”
“Oh.”
“The important thing to remember, lad, is that you will make the man you become.” Just as Rab had after he landed on this rocky shore alone. “’Tis not easy, but it is an opportunity, if you have the courage to see it that way.”
Dougie nodded and glanced at his palms again. “This is an opportunity, ain’t it?”
“Aye, lad.”
Rab hesitated. He had no wish to ask too much from this boy who began to trust him, but he ached to know one more thing. For he sensed he would have to convince Lisbeth of Declan’s true nature, if he stood a chance of truly winning her heart.
The kiss they had shared earlier still burned through him, a lingering sweetness that made him desire her all the more.
“Tell me, Dougie, does wee Timmy’s father ever come round?”
Dougie raised serious dark eyes. “No, sir.”
“So you’ve no idea either who he is?”
“Folks in the Hogshead say ma’s a tramp and will sleep with anyone—they say it behind her back and to her face.”
And, Rab thought, some things went beyond the need for proof; Timmy’s eyes branded him true. What concerned Rab was the timing of it: the bairn was of an age to show Declan had stepped out on Lisbeth during their marriage.
He asked gently, “How old is Timmy?”
“Four months.”
Four months. Conceived when Declan was wed to Lisbeth, then. The bastard.
He grimaced and took up the hammer. “Here, lad, let me show you again how ’tis done.”
****
Lisbeth returned shortly before Dougie left for home and just ahead of the dark. Rab breathed a sigh of relief as she passed through the forge on her way to his quarters with Mignon’s gown in her arms and a sling pack over her shoulder.
Kelpie abandoned Rab to follow her inside. By the time Rab bid Dougie goodbye and joined them, she had supper started.
And just like that, after only one look at her, Rab knew something was wrong. He could sense her discord and see the distress in her eyes even though they refused to meet his.
“What’s amiss?” he asked.
“I brought some things from the cottage and will make supper. I want to repay you as I can.”
“You’ve no need to repay me, Lisbeth. Surely you know that.”
She bit her lip. “I must, somehow. Rab, I cannot stay here.”
Rab’s heart sank abruptly. All day long he had relived the morning’s kiss and, if he were honest, hoped for a repetition—if not more. He wanted her so badly he ached. But now he feared he had unaccountably lost ground.
“But you can,” he denied it. “All’s still right and proper with me sleeping down the street.”
Her eyes did lift to his then; blue-gray and dreamy as the sea on a still day, they nevertheless seared him. “How I feel about you is not proper.”
Rab promptly lost all the breath in his body. “And how do you feel about me?”
Her gaze moved over him slowly where he stood leaning against the door jamb, lingering on his arms, the muscles of his half-bare chest, and still longer on his mouth.
“I dare not say.”
He unpropped himself and moved closer. “Lisbeth, lass, if you are ruing what happened between us this morning, you should no’. It has been a year; you ha’ been a widow long enough.”
“But I am not a widow,” she said.
Chapter Eleven
“I need to show you something.” Lisbeth’s hands shook as she turned away from the supper preparations to her pack, which lay on the bed. She drew out Declan’s sou’wester and stood an instant before turning to face the man who stood behind her. She held the hat out to him like an offering.
Bemusement filled Rab’s eyes. His gaze moved from the hat to Lisbeth’s face, questioning. “What is that?”
Lisbeth’s lips trembled as she spoke. “I found it in the cottage, lying on our bed. Declan’s.”
Rab did not move except to shake his head. “I do no’ understand.”
“It’s part of his gear. He had this with him the last time he put out in the White Gull.”
Breath escaped between Rab’s lips; his gaze flew to hers once more. “Nay.”
“The two times I saw him, Rab—when he appeared during the storm and when I followed him along the track—his head was bare. Bare and wet.” She pictured him again, red hair sodden and dripping as if he’d just come out of the sea. “Now this is left for me to find.”
Thoughts moved visibly in Rab’s blue eyes, denial foremost among them. “It must have been there all the while. You’re mistaken about him taking it with him that day.”
“It has been there all this time, has it, and I did not notice it on the bed?”
“Well then, someone is playing a cruel joke. ’Tis not Declan’s.”
“Who would do such a thing to me?” Lisbeth had contemplated the question all the way back to town. “Anyway, it is his. Look.” She turned the sou’wester in her fingers, showing Rab where it had been rent and mended. “He caught it on a nail. I know my own stitches.”
“Sweet heaven!” Rab looked precisely the way Lisbeth felt, as if he’d received a physical blow. He took the sou’wester from her and touched the ridge of stitching with his thumb. “But how can it be?”
“I have been over and over it,” she said, “searching for an explanation. This may have washed up with the pieces of the White Gull—if so, someone found it and waited all this time to, as you say, play a cruel joke. Or, Declan left it on the bed.”
“From the afterlife, you mean? The spirit world?”
And there spoke the highlander, Lisbeth thought. She smiled grimly. “No. I saw him, Rabbie. I know you don’t believe me, but I know, too, what I beheld with my own eyes. Declan must be alive.”
Rab swayed where he stood. “Nay,” he said again. “If so, where’s he been all this while? Why would he no’ come forward?”
The very same questions Lisbeth had asked herself. Declan couldn’t be alive, yet her heart insisted he was.
Her heart knew a wealth of other things also: she no longer wanted to live in the numb dream state she seemed to have inhabited since Declan’s supposed demise. She wanted to take her life into her own hands.
And she had feelings—powerful ones—for this man who stood before her. Yet he was not Declan. And if Declan lived, she remained still his wife.
“Here—sit.” Rab clasped her hand and drew her onto the edge of his cot. “How sure are you the man you saw was Declan?”
“Sure.” A woman knew her husband even after he had supposedly been a year in the sea.
“When he made these appearances, did he say anything to you?”
“My name.” Lisbeth, in a gurgle—not with that crooning, Irish lilt he’d sometimes used in the dark.
Again the thoughts moved in Rab’s eyes. He released Lisbeth’s fingers and formed his hands into fists which he rested on his knees.
“But lass, if ’tis Declan, why would he stay a year away from you?”
“I don’t know. I’ve a mind to go back up there and stay until he appears again so I can ask him.”
Rab stiffened in protest. “Better I go instead.”
“He may not come if you’re there. It may be me he wants to see.”
“Over my dead body will you go back out there alone.” Rab grimaced. “Sorry, Lisbeth—a bad choice of words, that.”
Lisbeth studied him. “Before you saw that hat, you believed I imagined all this.”
“I did not know what to believe. Declan always had such a hold on your heart.”
“On all of me.” Lisbeth began to see that now, like a woman truly waking from a dream—or a spell. From the first moment she met Declan back in school, she had been unable to turn her eyes away.
“Magic,” she whispered. “Declan had a kind of magic.” Grimly she corrected herself, “Has a kind of magic.”
Soberly, Rab nodded. “And as we know from the old tales, lass, magic can sometimes deceive.”
Lisbeth’s gaze flew to his. What did she see in his eyes? Rueful reluctance? Certainty… “Why do you say that?”
He drew a breath that expanded his deep chest. “Lisbeth, I would have you consider Declan may not have been what he seemed. I know”—he held up a hand—“how you idolized him. The sun rose and set on him for you. But the man was far from perfect.”
“I know that.” Lisbeth had been well aware of Declan’s faults, the primary one of which was his selfishness. It and it alone motivated nearly all he did. But that ceased to matter once he gave her his wide grin burgeoning with charm, and spoke to her in that Irish brogue, calling her “Lisbeth, mine.” It had ceased to matter when he chose her and her alone out of the flock of women who pursued him. He might have smiled at them all, danced attention on them all, but he’d married Lisbeth Parsons. Didn’t that prove his heart could love?
He’d stayed selfish during the year of their marriage, often going off to drink with his brother and pals on fine days when he should have been hauling traps, neglecting chores about the cottage like his father before him. Fortunately, they’d had what Lisbeth earned, sewing, upon which to fall back.
Indeed, she thought now, the wonder was that Declan had put out to sea that fatal day, one that threatened storm.
Seriously, she told Rab, “I am not a fool.”
“Aye, you are not, which makes it more surprising you could no’ see the truth.”
“If you have something to say, Rabbie Sinclair, out with it. Do not dance about.”
“I have reason to believe Declan was no’ faithful to you in your marriage.”
Lisbeth caught her breath, as at a blow. Not that! The unwelcome thought had appeared from time to time in her mind, but she had always pushed it away firmly. He had married her, and the marriage vows had to mean something. They had taken them together in St. Joseph’s, the church of his faith. Declan would always be Declan, but there had been a streak of devoutness running through him, the same that led him to cross himself before he went to sea and refuse to take the Lord’s name in vain.
Yet Lisbeth knew Rabbie Sinclair for a man honest to the bone.
“What reason have you to believe this?” she asked.
For the first time, Rab’s gaze fell from hers. Reluctantly he said, “There were rumors both before and after you wed.”
“I never heard them.”
“Folk were no’ likely to bring such a thing to your ears, were they? They spoke in whispers. Declan was not always where he should be. No one wanted to hurt you.” Implied in the words was the meaning: he, Rab, had not.
Distress pierced Lisbeth to the heart. As if sensing her emotions, Kelpie came and rested his chin on her knees. Unthinking, she caressed his big head.
“Proof,” she said. “I will need proof.”
Rab’s gaze returned to hers. “There may be some.”
Chapter Twelve
“You’ve done a lovely job.” Mignon La Marche held up the blue gown and scrutinized it with her shrewd hazel eyes. “Were you able to let out the seams as I asked?”
“Yes.”
“Then let me try it on and make sure it fits before you go.”
And pay me, Lisbeth added silently. She’d walked all the way out to Mignon’s grand house on the bluff—no short trek from Rabbie’s forge—and delivered the gown the day before the dance, as promised.
“Would you like some tea while you wait?” Mignon asked, very offhand. “I’ll tell the maid.”
Stiffly, Lisbeth shook her head. She had to admit she felt uncomfortable standing here in the opulent parlor with its damask draperies and red velvet furniture. Back when they’d been girls together, Mignon had always held herself as just that little bit superior to Lisbeth and Frannie. Yet who would have thought then she would land, like a jewel, in this setting?
But she had wed a wealthy man, while Lisbeth had taken in marriage the near-penniless lobster fisherman with the shabby cottage and the reluctance to work even when he should. True, back then Mignon had wanted Declan too, had rarely left off following him with her eyes or seeking to engage him in conversation.
Strange how things turned out, she thought as Mignon hurried from the room with the gown in her hands.
She crossed to the parlor windows and looked out. The room commanded a fine view out over the cliffs and across the south end of Frenchman Bay. On a clear day like this one, it seemed she could see forever.
And did Declan’s bones lie there beneath all that blue water? Had she dreamed about seeing him after all? But no; she’d held his sou’wester in her hands.
She shivered, the spasm passing down her spine long and slow. For all its grandeur, this big house seemed far too silent and empty. She didn’t know how Mignon stood it here alone.
Upon that thought she heard a creak as of a foot on a loose floorboard, and spun to face the door. No one there; she had to get hold of her nerves, she thought impatiently.
The ticking of the case clock in the corner grew deafening before Mignon returned. She entered the room still smo
othing her rich, auburn hair and gave Lisbeth a smile.
“It fits very well. Now I shall just have to refrain from comforting myself too often with biscuits. Of course after I wear the gown at the dance tomorrow, it won’t much matter, will it?”
All those stitches, all the hours spent, Lisbeth thought, and Mignon meant to wear the gown but once.
And where was the coin Lisbeth had been promised? They’d had a deal, fine lady or no. Surely Mignon did not mean to make her ask.
Lisbeth straightened her spine even as he cheeks grew warm. “I am glad you’re pleased with my work.”
“It’s fine, thank you.”
“There is the small matter of payment.”
“But surely I paid you when I ordered the gown.”
“You gave me the cost of the fabric which I ordered, yes. You promised the rest upon completion.”
Mignon tipped her head, studying Lisbeth thoughtfully. “Are you certain?”
“Quite certain, Mignon. Do you not remember you tried to give me the gown in payment?”
“I do not recall. Not trying to double charge me, are you? No, of course you wouldn’t—not an honest woman such as Lisbeth O’Shea. What was the agreed price?”
Lisbeth named it, lips stiff and cheeks now flaming.
“Wait another moment.”
Mignon went out, and Lisbeth caught an additional whisper of sound from the foyer beyond. Did Mignon speak to someone? Her maid, surely.
Mignon returned quickly this time, with a small purse. Careful as a miser, she counted out the coins and dropped them one by one into the palm of Lisbeth’s hand, which now trembled.
“There you go. I hope you will do a job or two for me again.”
Lisbeth longed to refuse and knew she could not. Mignon’s was the best custom she could hope to get in Lobster Cove.
She nodded, still stiffly.
Mignon tipped her head again. “Funny how things work out, isn’t it?” she asked whimsically, echoing Lisbeth’s earlier thoughts. “So many of us who were at school together ended up orphaned—Pat and Declan, when their parents died, then my father soon after. Your parents died on that journey back to St. John’s, and Rab arrived here an orphan. Only Frannie has a parent to her name. And now you and I are widowed, as well! It’s a hard berth in Lobster Cove.”
The White Gull Page 6
