Jade

by Jill Marie Landis

  Jason watched her carriage swing out of the stableyard. He pulled a kerchief out of his back pocket, wiped the dirt and sweat from his brow, and then threw down his shovel. After he collected his shirt and vest he hurried into the house, intent on taking a bath and locating a copy of the Chronicle.

  IT DID NOT TAKE him long to accomplish both tasks, and within two hours, J.T. was standing outside Matthew Van Buren’s room at the Occidental Hotel on Montgomery Street with a crumpled copy of the Chronicle in his hand.

  Matt looked genuinely pleased and surprised to see him, but when he saw the paper in Jason’s hand, his smile faded.

  “So, you’ve read it. I tried to find you this morning, but you weren’t home.”

  “We went riding.”

  “I take it the ‘we’ means you and the lady in question?”

  “She’s not in question. She’s not anything except innocent of this whole affair.”

  “Come in,” Matt said as he took Jason’s hat and ushered him into a well-appointed room, one of the four hundred and twelve rooms the hotel offered along with a main hall, reading room, and telegraph office near the Montgomery Street entrance. “Maybe you had better tell me the whole story from the beginning.”

  By the time they had each finished two cups of strong coffee liberally laced with brandy, Jason had told Matt the whole tale.

  “It sounds to me like you’re both crazy. You refused to take her home and she did not put up a fight?”

  “No, she did put up a fight. She even went out in the storm, but got drenched by the time she was halfway down the drive.”

  “What were you thinking?”

  “I don’t know. In the beginning I guess I was thinkin’ about what any red-blooded man would, given the circumstances, but after I kissed her—”

  “So you did kiss her?”

  “Once.”

  “Only once?”

  “That night. Then again at the dance. And after.”

  “In public?” Matt probed.

  “We were out on the balcony at the Palace.”

  Matt shook his head.

  “What should I do?” J.T. asked. “Could I write something in rebuttal?”

  “It would only keep the gossip alive. You could let it die down and forget it.”

  “Will it die down?” J.T. said.

  “In time. Of course, Jade’s reputation will never be the same.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of.” Jason stretched and stood up. He ran a hand through his hair, then paced over to the sideboard where he helped himself to more brandy. This time without coffee. “I think I should marry her.”

  Matt looked startled. “Don’t do anything rash. How do you feel about her?”

  J.T. returned to the settee and stretched out again. He faced Matt honestly. “I’m falling in love with her.”

  “Does this happen often?”

  Jason laughed. “That’s what she asked me last night. The answer is no.”

  “How does she feel about you?”

  How did Jade feel about him? “I guess amiable would be the right word. She has a lot on her mind right now.” He paused, looked down at his hands, then back up at Matt. “Someone killed her father. Did you know about that?”

  “The whole town knows. I’m surprised Peterson didn’t mention it in his article. Come to think of it, you really don’t know this girl, J.T. How did she end up on your doorstep anyway? I hear her father, Francis Douglas, was a grand schemer, a man who married into money and set out to get richer as fast as possible. It might be best to just ignore all this. After all, you are going back to New Mexico as soon as everything is settled here. Let her fend for herself.”

  Jason shook his head, denying Matt’s suggestion. “Jade’s the innocent party in all of this. I don’t care who her father was—she was practically raised by her grandfather, and from what she’s told me, she hasn’t had any contact with her father for years. As to how she ended up on my doorstep, that’s still a bit fuzzy, but it seems her friend Barbara Barrett was with her, took sick, and suddenly left Jade there alone.”

  “That explains it. Barbara Barrett is well known for her adventurous escapades. Once she decided she wanted to see what we did inside the Union Club, so she dressed as a man and walked right in.” Matt laughed as he filled Jason in on the details. “Reggie is a member there, and I guess Babs’s curiosity got the best of her. Aside from rooms for members who reside there, we have parlors, a reading room, dining room, billiards, a game room, and a small saloon. Babs bellied up to the bar and ordered a whiskey, belted it down and then took such a fit coughing that the short wig she was wearing fell off and out tumbled her hair.”

  Jason shook his head. It sounded exactly like something Babs Barrett would have done. “That’s why I think Jade’s a victim of circumstance.”

  “Still and all, marriage is a serious proposition.”

  “I wouldn’t have suggested it if I had not already been thinking along those lines,” J.T. admitted. He sat up straight and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. In a low voice he tried to explain. “My mother left here twenty-five years ago in disgrace because she wouldn’t put up with my father’s unfaithfulness. She divorced him and went back to Georgia. But she was the one who lived out her life in shame just because she stood up for what she believed and got a divorce. She might as well have had an affair. I’ve seen first-hand what it’s like for a woman to be talked about, to be whispered about behind her back. To be cut off socially. Jade doesn’t deserve a lifetime of that. Besides, I couldn’t leave knowing I was the one to blame.”

  “Like I said, it’ll die down.”

  “And like you said, they won’t ever really forget.”

  “It sounds like your mind is made up—you’re going to propose to her.”

  Jason nodded, convinced. “I am. Don’t look so sorry for me, Matt. You’ve seen Jade. She’s a beauty. And she has a heart and mind to match.”

  Matt reached out and gave him a hearty pat on the back and a handshake. “Then I wish you all the best of luck, J.T. All the best.”

  “There’s one more thing I’d like to take care of today,” J.T. told him.

  Matt sobered. “Just name it.”

  Chapter Ten

  To know the road ahead . . .

  Ask those coming back.

  JASON REIGNED IN his stallion, and stared down at the slip of paper he held crumpled in his right hand. Matt’s bold writing stood out clearly in the late afternoon light. He glanced around at the homes lining the street that ascended Rincon Hill, and then behind him toward the waterfront and the ships in the bay. The dwellings around him appeared older and more comfortable than the palatial structures like his father’s on California Street. As he had ridden up the sharp slope, the gathering evening fog had dissipated until, rising above it, he was able to see clearly again. J.T. carefully matched the house numbers with the slip of paper, and continued on up the street. A sporty carriage rumbled past as he studied the large homes and well-manicured lawns that sat askew on the hillside. Finally, he found the one he was looking for.

  It was a two-story white-framed house with what appeared to be a newly added bay window. Millwork adorned the facade. Jason left his horse tied to a hitching post at the curb, opened the low, white picket gate, and slowly walked up the front walk. Before he stepped onto the porch, he tipped his head back to look up at the second story. Snowy lace tiebacks hung at every window. After one last look at the paper in his hand, he folded it into a square no bigger than an inch and slipped it into the pocket of his dark suit.

  Peoney Flannagan. A rather unassuming name for a mistress, Jason decided. He stepped up onto the porch and wondered how many times over the years his father had tread the same path.

  When he had asked Matt for the woman’s name and address earlier that d
ay, his attorney had appeared genuinely surprised and somewhat relieved. J.T. wondered if Miss Flannagan had somehow worked her wiles on Matt to get the man to encourage him to see to her welfare.

  Before he raised his hand to knock on the door, Jason nearly turned around to leave. He didn’t want to be here, didn’t want to see the woman who had usurped his mother’s place in his father’s heart. He could not even hazard a guess at her age—his father had lived with her for nearly twenty years—but had the creature been very young when she met his father, she might now be only a few years older than J.T. He may not know how old she was, but he had a firm picture in his mind of what she would look like—hennaed hair, or perhaps a frowsy blonde, heavy makeup, rubied lips, kohl around the eyes.

  Perhaps Miss Peoney Flannagan had already found herself another paramour, another rich sponsor who was happy to see to her future now that the elder J.T. Harrington was out of the way.

  Jason knocked loudly and firmly on the door, and tried to see through the thick lace curtain hanging over the oval window set in the polished oak. He waited a good thirty seconds before he knocked again.

  Not only had she found a protector, he decided, but it seemed Miss Peoney Flannagan had gone out.

  Just as he turned to leave, he heard soft footsteps echoing through the room just inside. There was a pause as a bolt inside was slipped back, and then the door began to open.

  Jason took a deep breath, cursed himself for coming, and wondered what in the hell he was going to say to this woman.

  A short, plump, brown-eyed woman with thick silver hair piled in a chignon high on her head stared back at him. He was about to ask her to call Peoney Flannagan to the door when, he became arrested by the look of shock and wonder that came over her face. As her hand fluttered to the cameo broach pinned at the throat of her high-collared, black bombazine gown, her eyes began to glisten with tears. She clutched the edge of the door for support and opened her mouth to speak, closed it again, and then shook her head. One lone tear began to trickle down her cheek.

  “Jason,” she whispered.

  Jason Terrell Harrington III simply stared back at the woman on the other side of the threshold.

  Then slowly, he nodded. And took off his hat. Nervously, he began to spin the thing in his hands. At the same time that he wished he had never knocked on the door, he found himself silently cursing Matt Van Buren.

  “Come in,” the woman finally managed. She stepped back and swung the door wide. “Come in and have a cup of tea.”

  “I really can’t stay,” he found himself saying, even as he stepped inside.

  She extended her hand. Jason stared down at it as if it was a snake.

  “Your hat,” she said softly.

  He handed it to her.

  “Please sit down.” Indicating a small parlor off to the right of the entry hall, she seemed unable to take her eyes off him. “I’ll be right back.”

  Before he could protest, she was gone, moving off toward the back of the house. Perhaps, he thought wildly, he had jumped to conclusions. Perhaps the little woman who was the picture of innocence and gentility had gone to summon the real Peoney Flannagan. Perhaps, he took a wild guess, the woman he’d just seen was his father’s mistress’s grandmother.

  He ran his hand over his hair and then unbuttoned the front of his coat and shoved his hands into his pockets. Uncomfortable in the small, crowded parlor, Jason did not take a chair, but began to look around. The smell of fresh baked bread permeated the place along with a hint of cinnamon. It reminded him of his mother’s home in Athens and brought back memories he had not had in years, memories of warm cookies and tarts and flaky apple pie.

  Careful not to bump into any of the small tables scattered about the room, he wove his way between a settee and a tall wing chair and stood before the fireplace. An enormous gilt-framed mirror that stretched to the ceiling hung behind the objects crowded together on the mantel.

  Amid candlesticks, figurines, and vases filled with fern fronds was a scattered line of daguerreotype pictures printed on thin copper plates and set in a variety of velvet cases and tarnished silver frames. He peered closely at the one set to the far left of the mantel and then picked it up. He tipped the daguerreotype and tilted it until the mirrorlike image revealed the likeness of a small child in a long white gown staring solemnly back at him. His heart sank to a point somewhere near the pit of his stomach.

  It was a likeness of him. He recognized it because his mother had possessed an exact copy of it herself. If he remembered correctly, it was in a trunk filled with her keepsakes at the ranch in New Mexico. Gingerly, he set the picture down and looked at the next. It was another picture of him, but in this one he was wearing short pants, dark woolen stockings, and a shirt with a sailor collar.

  For some inexplicable reason, as he realized what the pictures meant, his eyes filled with tears and J.T. began to blink furiously. With his hands still buried deep in his pockets, his fingers balled into fists, he proceeded to walk slowly along the length of the mantel, and as he did, he saw himself grow older in each daguerreotype. The progression ended abruptly with a photograph taken when he was fifteen.

  He distinctly remembered the day his mother had insisted he have that last portrait done. They had been about to embark upon their journey to New Mexico. She was certain the situation between the Union and the Confederacy was about to become all-out war and had made provisions for them to live with the Youngers. But before they left Athens, she had insisted he go for his yearly session at the portrait studio. As always, his mother wanted one portrait of him alone, and one of the two of them together. J.T. realized now that he had never really questioned her as to where his pictures had disappeared to, except for the one time when she had replied, “I’m keeping them safe for you in a memory book.”

  He reached out and ran his finger over the frame of that final picture. All the time she had been sending them to his father. And for all those years his father had been bringing them here, to this house, where his mistress proudly displayed them on her mantel. Beside the final picture was a photograph of a face so very like his own that the two might have been mistaken for each other, if the viewer had not looked closely and noticed the silver hair where Jason’s own was lightened by the sun. The same light blue eyes stared back at him, the same strong jaw, the same broad shoulders. He stared at the picture of his father and then looked away, only to see his own reflection in the mirror above it.

  He was the very image of his father, and he could not even remember the sound of the man’s voice.

  He turned away from both reflections—that of the past and his own in the mirror. Carefully, Jason began to study the rest of the parlor. A faded ruby rug patterned in gold and black floral borders carpeted the room. Two wing chairs and a rocker were drawn up near the fireplace, each companioned by small footstools upholstered in finely executed needlework. Enormous vases filled with cattails and dried seagrass flanked the fireplace.

  Everywhere around the room he saw touches of comfort mingled with refinement. Cabbage rose pillows were propped invitingly against the back of the settee. Still-life paintings and seascapes stood out against the worn but once gilded wall covering. An étagère covered with china plates and tea cups stood in one corner behind another low, comfortable chair.

  Coupled with the mouthwatering scent of bread and cinnamon, the appointments in the crowded, well-lived-in room gave the place an overwhelming feeling of hominess. It was a far different dwelling than the edifice the elder J.T. Harrington had built for himself on California Street: Jason was all too certain, as he stood staring around the charming little room, that this was where his father had truly lived.

  “There you are.”

  The silver-haired woman’s melodious voice startled him into turning around. He watched her walk through the doorway carrying a tea tray lined with embroidered white linen c
loths and covered with cups and saucers, a plate stacked high with cookies, and a white tea pot with a slow trail of steam ascending from its spout.

  “I really—” he began to protest, suddenly awkward in her presence. He had invaded her privacy, his late father’s privacy. The sight of his own pictures so carefully displayed on the mantel had shaken him as nothing else could have. During all the years Jason had spent hating his father for what he had done to his mother, the man had been charting Jason’s growth through the pictures his mother had sent him.

  The woman looked up at him, her eyes once again glistening with unshed tears. As he stared down at her, J.T. could not help but notice the red-rimmed eyes, the pale complexion, the slightly trembling lips. It was obvious she had been crying in the kitchen and had taken the time while the water boiled to come to terms with her tears: She gave no indication that there was anyone other than herself at home.

  This small, brown-eyed wren of a woman with a massive pile of shockingly silver hair was indeed Peoney Flannagan, the woman his father had chosen over his wife and son. She was the opposite of everything J.T. expected. She had to be over sixty years old. The severe black dress she was wearing was an obvious sign of mourning for his father. He watched her bat away a telltale tear as she sniffed and adjusted the tray in her hands.

  Jason sat down on the rocking chair near the fire.

  She set the tea tray on a low table beside him and took her own place on a wing chair on the opposite side of the table.

  “You look exactly like your father,” she said as she deftly poured him a cup of amber tea. “It gave me quite a start when I saw you standing at the door.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” He took the cup and saucer from her and carefully set it on his knees. The dainty handle of the china cup seemed far too small and fragile between his thumb and forefinger, but he carefully lifted it to his lips and tried to take a sip. He burned his tongue.

  “This must be hard for you,” she tried again, “coming here like this.”