Memory's Embrace

by Linda Lael Miller

  Tess looked down at the trousers and shirt and knew that she was going to have to obey his edict, however improper it was. She was cold to the bone and it was still raining, and the walk back to Simpkinsville and her aunt’s boardinghouse would be a long one. The chances were that she would come down with a bad cold, or even pneumonia, if she didn’t remove her wet clothes and warm herself a while beside the peddler’s fire.

  Drat him anyway, she thought, as she got awkwardly to her feet and made her way into the privacy of the wagon, wrenching the door shut behind her with a clatter that elicited another shout of amusement from the direction of the fire.

  Glumly, muttering to herself all the while, Tess Bishop removed her calico dress and the muslin drawers and camisole beneath it. Then, teeth clattering like a telegraph key sending an emergency message, she pulled on the trousers and the shirt. They were much too large, of course—the shirt hung well down her thighs and the trousers had to be gripped tightly at the waist or they would have fallen off.

  Grateful that she could at least wear her own shoes and stockings, Tess moved toward the wagon door. She would stand by that fire, all right. She would wear those outrageous clothes. And she would let Mr. Joel Shiloh know, in no uncertain terms, what she thought of his orders and his condescending manner. He had his nerve being so patronizing, a man who carried on arguments with and even threw things at God!

  She was just reaching for the catch on the door when a well-worn Bible caught her eye. It lay open in the twisted bedding on the bunk, and, for a reason Tess could not have explained, she took it up. The print was smudged here and there, and passages were underscored. Why would a man with so obvious an animosity toward heaven make such thorough use of the Scriptures?

  Frowning, Tess turned the book and read the name embossed in gold on the front cover. Keith Corbin. Keith Corbin?

  She set the Bible carefully back in its place, open to the same passage, and bit her lower lip as she once again worked the catch on the wagon door. Why would the peddler carry a book with another man’s name embossed on its cover?

  The name—Keith Corbin, not Joel Shiloh—was familiar, too. Where had she heard it?

  Tess was startled to find Mr. Shiloh standing just outside the wagon door, and a guilty flush moved up her face. Did he know that she had been snooping?

  His bright blue eyes moved over her with a look of mingled amusement and appreciation, and then he extended his hands to lift her down from the bed of the wagon. His fingers lingered, it seemed to her, at her waist, but the time was so brief that she might have imagined it.

  “The fire is going and the coffee is ready. Be careful—the cups are metal and they get hot.”

  Having made this announcement, he moved past her to climb into the wagon and shut the door. Tess didn’t move until she heard a drawer open and close and realized that he was changing clothes, too. Her face hot again, she bolted toward the inviting fire.

  There, she warmed her hands and ran outspread fingers through her thick hair, trying to dry it. She noticed for the first time that a mule was grazing near the wagon, its long ears down. As if to acknowledge Tess’s instant surge of sympathy, it gave her a mournful look and brayed.

  “Poor thing,” she muttered, starting toward it, but the reappearance of Joel Shiloh stopped her, distracted her so completely that she forgot all about the mule. He rounded the wagon at a bound, wearing clean, dry clothes, grooming his hair with the fingers of both hands as he moved.

  Tess found herself wondering distractedly whether his hair was brown, like her own, or blond, or some color in between the two. Because it was still wet, it was impossible to tell, though she could see that it was slightly too long.

  He joined her at the fire and, after tossing her one look of good-tempered reprimand, crouched to take the coffeepot carefully by its wooden handle and fill the two mugs he had set out. He held one out to Tess, without rising.

  She took the coffee, letting go of her borrowed trousers in the process, and very nearly disgraced herself. “Why do you leave your poor mule out in the rain?” she asked, while grappling to catch the waistband without dropping the cup.

  Joel Shiloh took a leisurely and ponderous draught of his coffee, and Tess had the distinct feeling that he was hiding another smile. Finally, he answered. “Last time I put him inside the wagon, he complained that the bunk was too narrow for the both of us.”

  Tess lowered her head to hide the grin that had come, unbidden, to her lips.

  Mr. Shiloh sighed philosophically and went on sipping his coffee.

  “Why were you throwing dishpans and coffeepots at God, Mr.—Mr. Shiloh?”

  Her hesitation over his name brought Joel’s eyes slicing, sharply, to Tess’s face. He rose slowly to his feet, both booted now, his coffee mug cupped in both hands. “I don’t think that’s any of your business, Miss Bishop,” he said coldly.

  Tess was as stricken as if he’d slapped her; she felt the color drain from her face. “I’m sorry—I—I guess you’re right—”

  He looked exasperated, distracted. And quite miserable. “Finish your coffee,” he snapped, “and I’ll hitch up the wagon and take you home.”

  “No!”

  He stared at her, that butternut eyebrow arched again. “No?” he repeated.

  Tess regrouped, realizing that she had protested too quickly and too earnestly. “I mean, I have my bicycle and it really isn’t that far—I can make my own way home.”

  “Nonsense,” he said, and unaccountably he flung his coffee into the fire, where it sizzled and snapped. “Simpkinsville is five miles from here, and you’ve got that camera to carry. Besides, it might rain again.”

  Tess felt her shoulders slump a little. If it weren’t for the flat tire on her bicycle, she could get home just fine, rain or no rain, camera or no camera. But pushing the contraption all that way in another downpour was a disheartening prospect to say the least. “Derora will murder me,” she muttered.

  “Who, pray tell, is Derora?” He was being deliberately caustic, and Tess was hurt.

  “She is my aunt—although it’s none of your business,” she pointed out stiffly.

  “Touché,” he said, with a gruff laugh, lifting his empty mug in a corresponding gesture. “Now, tell me why your aunt would ‘murder’ you, as you put it?”

  “Derora Beauchamp is a very difficult woman,” Tess answered, with miserable dignity, “and she doesn’t like me very much as it is. Her opinion is bound to plummet when I appear in the company of a bedraggled peddler, wearing these clothes!”

  Joel Shiloh smiled and shook his head at the prospect. “Bedraggled, is it?”

  “You do need a shave,” Tess allowed, defensively. “Perhaps a haircut and a bath—”

  He pretended to wield a pencil, making a note in the palm of his hand, the coffee mug wriggling as he “wrote.” “Shave. Haircut. Bath,” he listed aloud.

  Tess laughed in spite of all her contradictory feelings.

  “You really are strange. You argue with God. You have one name on your wagon and another on your—”

  The taut alertness in his face was alarming. Gone was the look of humorous indulgence that had curved his lips, the mirth that had danced in his blue eyes. “Another on my what?” he prompted, in a frightening rasp.

  Tess retreated a step, wishing that she hadn’t stopped at this peddler’s camp at all. How much safer it would have been to push her bicycle the rest of the way to town, even in the rain! “I just meant—well—”

  “You meant what?”

  Tess swallowed the aching lump that had gathered in her throat. “I—I saw the Bible,” she confessed. “I didn’t mean to pry—”

  “Oh,” he said, and he turned away quickly, ran one hand through his hair. Now that it was drying, Tess could see that it was a color somewhere between honey and ripe wheat. “That belonged to a friend of mine.”

  “Y-You don’t need to explain.”

  “I know,” he answered. And then he turned back t
o face her again and the smile was in his eyes. “Where is this bicycle of yours? I’ll put it in the wagon while you’re finishing your coffee.”

  “I really—”

  He waved away her protest and started off toward the road. Moments later he returned, wheeling the bicycle along.

  “Really, Mr. Shiloh—”

  He opened the wagon’s rear door and lifted the bicycle inside. Tess wondered if he ever listened when people tried to dissuade him.

  With deft, practiced motions, Mr. Shiloh went on to harness the beleaguered mule. Coming back to the fire, he kicked dirt over the flames, took up the coffeepot and the mug he had used, and gestured grandly, like a footman about to help a queen into her carriage.

  Exasperated, Tess flung what remained of her own coffee out of the cup and proceeded, scrambling up into the high seat of the wagon before he could contrive to help her.

  “If you would like,” Joel offered, settling into the seat beside her, putting the coffeepot and mugs beneath it, taking up the reins, and releasing the brake lever with one foot, “I’ll explain to your aunt.”

  “That would only make matters worse!” pouted Tess.

  “I’m sorry,” he replied, and he seemed to be sincere. “I’ve made a hell of a first impression on you, haven’t I?”

  He had. And Tess hoped that it would be the last impression he made, as well. “No matter,” she said coldly. “You’ll be moving on, as peddlers do.”

  “Perhaps I’ll stay,” he said.

  Tess looked at him in horror and then decided that she didn’t care whether he stayed or not. Her chores at the boardinghouse would keep her so busy that she wouldn’t encounter him again, anyway. “As you wish,” she said.

  They drove in silence for a long time, the mule laboring diligently along the muddy logging road that led to the small Oregon town where Tess had spent the last five years of her life. The beast’s breath made a misty fog around its muzzle, and at least one of its burdens pitied it.

  When the Columbia River, with its log booms and its steamboats, came into sight, Tess forgot the mule and its master and dreamed. She would leave Simpkinsville one of these days, just up and leave. She would go to Astoria or to Portland or even to Seattle. She would get herself a real job….

  The peddler’s voice broke gently into her thoughts, scattering them like so much silvery flotsam. “What are you thinking about?”

  Tess smiled at him: And even though they were very close to Simpkinsville now, close to the boardinghouse, close to Derora, she felt warm and good. “Steamboats,” she answered, raising her voice so she could be heard above the shrieking screech of the saws in the mill they were passing now. “Steamboats and all the places they go.”

  Joel Shiloh’s mouth quirked, and he nodded slightly. He understood and Tess liked him for that.

  Chapter Two

  SIMPKINSVILLE WAS NO BETTER AND NO WORSE THAN ANY of the other lumber towns the peddler had seen in more than a year of wandering. It was a small but noisy community, nestled close to the Columbia River and flanked by mountains thick with blue-green timber. He thought of Puget Sound and then of Wenatchee, another town on that sometimes turbulent waterway, and felt a pang of homesickness.

  Tess directed him onto a side street within walking distance of the cacophonous sawmill. She was a pretty thing, with her wild cascades of rich brown hair, her impertinent nose, her wide, hazel-green eyes.

  And she knew that he was not Joel Shiloh. Keith was sure she had seen through his hasty, awkward lie about the Bible and the name printed on its battered leather cover. Damn.

  He was about to turn to her and tell her who he was when she pointed out her aunt’s boardinghouse. Keith had never seen anything quite like it; it was part house and part passenger train, and the sight of it pushed every thought of confession out of his mind.

  The center of the structure was an ordinary wooden building, square and unremarkable, weathered by the fierce Oregon winters and the hot sun of at least two dozen summers, but branching out from it in four directions were railroad cars, apparently serving as wings.

  Tess glanced quickly at his face, and her lower lip jutted just a little, telling him that she was sensitive about the oddness of her home. “I live here,” she said, quite unnecessarily.

  Keith squinted at the place, still unable to believe what he was seeing. “How—”

  Tess tensed, and her stirrings had an unsettling effect on Keith Corbin. It had been too long, he guessed, since he’d had a woman.

  But he had no intention of having this one. She was innocent, sweet, and entirely too young, and even though he’d left the straight and narrow path long ago, he still had a conscience. Sometimes to his regret.

  “My uncle bought the cars from the railroad, when the spur into Simpkinsville was built,” Tess explained stiffly. “He was going to have a freight line of his own.”

  Keith drew back on the reins, and the mule, sometimes recalcitrant, came to an obedient stop. “Your uncle? You didn’t mention—”

  “He left my aunt two years ago, Mr. Shiloh. He ran away with another woman.” She sat still in the seat, a challenge flashing in her eyes. Probably, given the nature of small towns, she had taken considerable guff about what her uncle had done. “My aunt and I needed a way to make a living, so we had the cars brought here and we attached them to the house, so that we could take in boarders.”

  “I see,” said Keith, softly. Watching her, his throat suddenly felt thick, and his stomach began doing strange things. He wondered if he was coming down with something.

  Tess was scrambling out of the wagon seat, an awkward undertaking, since she was wearing trousers that were about to fall off. “Thank you very much for all your help,” she said, standing ramrod straight and holding her borrowed trousers up with one hand.

  Keith swallowed a laugh. God, but she was beautiful, even if she was a child, even if she was wearing his clothes instead of her own. “Don’t you want your things?” he asked, and before she could answer, he set the brake lever and jumped to the ground. The burn on his right foot stung so fiercely that he winced. That’s what you get for standing in fires when you have holes in your boots, he thought, as he rounded the wagon and opened the door at the rear.

  Tess was waiting on the rickety wooden sidewalk—weeds were growing through the cracks—and casting nervous looks toward her aunt’s boardinghouse as he wrestled the bicycle out of the wagon and then reached for the camera.

  She wheeled the bicycle a few feet away and let it rest against a picket fence in no better repair than the sidewalk and came back for the camera. Her eyes were alight with mingled caution and fondness as she reached for the cumbersome box, and Keith wished incomprehensibly that she would look at him that way.

  “Will you take my picture someday, Tess Bishop?” he found himself asking.

  She colored richly, averted her eyes for a moment, and then looked at him with a sort of tender defiance. “Yes, but only if you shave,” she said importantly.

  It was then that he saw the sign swinging from the roof of the boardinghouse’s narrow porch. “Lecture Tonight,” it read.

  Keith rubbed his beard-stubbled chin thoughtfully. This place was getting more and more intriguing by the moment. Besides, he did need a bath and a shave, and the prospect of sleeping in a real bed had distinct appeal, after all the nights he’d spent in his wagon. “Does your aunt have any rooms to rent?” he asked.

  Tess stiffened and her cheeks flared, yet again, with an appealing rose color. “No—I—”

  Before she could finish, the front door opened and a woman almost as tall as Keith himself came sweeping down the walkway, looking at once interested and annoyed.

  “Tess Bishop, where have you—” Dark eyes swept Keith’s frame, stopped at his face.

  This would have to be Derora, Tess’s aunt. Keith was taken aback, once again, for he’d expected a scarecrow or a fat curmudgeon. This woman, a few years older than himself and flawlessly beautiful, was certai
nly neither.

  She smiled. “Derora Beauchamp,” she said, extending one elegant hand. Her morning gown was made of some fluttery pink fabric, and Keith’s desire for a proper bath and a bed was redoubled by her touch.

  “This is Mr. Joel Shiloh,” Tess announced, from somewhere in the shimmering fog. Then, disparagingly, she added, “He’s a peddler.”

  Derora Beauchamp smiled, revealing a set of perfect, pearl-like teeth. “A road-weary traveler,” she said. “Ours is the finest roominghouse in town, Mr. Shiloh. Won’t you avail yourself of the comforts we offer?”

  “Ours is the only roominghouse in town,” put in the hoyden at Keith’s side, grudgingly.

  The warmth of Mrs. Beauchamp’s hand, resting in Keith’s, made sweet shivers run up and down his weary spine and dissipate in the aching muscles of his back. Too long. It had been too long.

  He managed to nod and sensed rather than saw the scathing look Tess flung in his direction. Little Tess. He smiled and rumpled her wind-and rain-tangled hair and allowed Derora Beauchamp to lead him down the primrose path.

  Tess Bishop simmered as she watched her aunt usher that crazy peddler into the house. She’d make tea, Derora would. She’d offer him the best chair in the parlor and perhaps even a cigar.

  Stopping before the sign proclaiming tonight’s lecture, she glared up at it. Free love. How fitting that the topic was free love!

  But it won’t be free, Mr. Joel Shiloh, she thought, with bitter satisfaction. It won’t be free.

  Not wanting to face either Derora or her aunt’s prospective conquest, Tess walked around the house, with its railroad-car wings, and slunk up the kitchen steps, holding the trousers in place with one hand and cradling her camera against her middle with the other.

  Juniper, the black woman who, with Tess’s help, cooked for the boarders, came to the screened door, with its tears and rusty places, and looked out, rolling her great round eyes so that only the whites showed. “Tess Bishop, you little scamp, what you doin’ wearin’ them clothes? Where you been?”