STAR TREK: TOS #23 - Ishmael

by Barbara Hambly

  “I told you about the War,” Stemple went on. “It left the East short of men, and left a lot of girls without any prospect of marriage. Clancey and Jeremy Bolt got back there—oh, late in ’66. They got thirty girls to make the trip back with them.”

  Ish nodded. “A practical, if somewhat insensitive, scheme,” he agreed. “And where does Bridal Veil Mountain fit into this tale?”

  Stemple chuckled. “Well, Jason Bolt, for all he owns it, isn’t a man of means. Wiving the settlers wasn’t altruism on his part; his men would have walked out on him. But it costs money to bring those girls out here, and costs money to keep them till they choose the men they’ll marry. His back was to the wall, and he had to have financial backing.”

  He grinned at the memory of it. “Now, Jason Bolt and I have never gotten along. He’s as arrogant a son of a bitch as you’re likely to meet, but he can charm the little birds out of the trees. The month I came here I bought title to Bridal Veil Mountain, at the sale of old John Bolt’s estate, only to find he’d deeded the mountain in gift to his three sons jointly the night before he died. Jason won the case, and kept the mountain, and since then we’ve done each other a dirty turn or two.

  “So the long and the short of it was: Jason bet me title to Bridal Veil Mountain, and got his two brothers to sign the papers, in exchange for my paying the expense of bringing those girls out to Seattle and providing them board and keep for a year. And if every one of those girls isn’t married or spoken for in a year—Bridal Veil is mine.”

  “And do the girls know this?” inquired Ishmael.

  Stemple shook his head. “I think Candy Pruitt suspects. They know there’s some kind of bet going about their getting married in the first year, but they don’t know Jason Bolt’s going to lose his mountain over it.”

  They passed through a patch of the woods that hemmed Seattle so thickly on three sides, climbed a short, steep hill in the slaty shadows of the trees. The roar of the creek was deafening from here, and they could hear the incessant, high-pitched buzzing of the saws. As if through a gateway they stepped into daylight again, and paused at the head of the sloppy pathway that drenched its way down to the mill. Ahead of them to their left stood the small, whitewashed box of the mill offices, and behind that, where the ground rose again by the fall of the creek, the long buildings of the mill itself. Stump-scarred and trashy with shavings, the hillslope around Stemple’s Mill looked like a badly shaved chin. Men could be seen there, moving about among the tall stacks of lumber. Soupy with mud and rain, a narrow path wound away past a screen of trees to where Aaron’s four-room town house stood. Beyond, the dark bulk of tree-cloaked mountains reared into the obscuring mists.

  “And will Jason Bolt lose his mountain?” inquired Ishmael curiously.

  “Oh, yes,” said Stemple. “The wager’s up January first. He has—three and a half months. Of the thirty, ten girls are married already, and half the rest are spoken for. If I know Jason he’ll be working like a beaver in a bad autumn to get the rest off his hands by Christmas.” Stemple grinned. “But he won’t get them all.”

  “Is this the law of averages, or a certainty?”

  Stemple laughed. “A little of both. Come on, I’ll show you the mill offices. God knows taking you on as my accountant isn’t doing you any favors. The work’s months behind.” He pointed away down the path. “That’s home,” he added, and strode off toward the small, shabby offices.

  Limping in his wake, Ishmael instinctively checked out the lay of the land, then spared a glance toward the pie-shaped segment of ridgepole and clapboard visible through the trees. In spite of the loss of his memory, he wondered why he had the impression that he had never called anywhere “home” in his life.

  Chapter 6

  “SO WHAT DO YOU THINK OF HIM?” asked Candy Pruitt, coming back from the sideboard with coffee and seating herself between Jeremy and Joshua at the long oak table in the Bolt kitchen.

  Jason, at the table’s head, paused in the act of slopping sorghum into his coffee, and glanced over at her. “Ish Marx? He’s an odd duck.”

  Candy’s eyebrows went up. “In what way?”

  Jason smiled at her defensive tone. He knew Candy liked the stranger, just as he knew several of the New Bedford girls were in love with Stemple’s nephew; as, indeed, several of them were in love with Jason himself.

  Dinner was over. Night had settled on the big clearing where the Bolts had their logging camp. Through the dark glass of the windows a glimmer of lamplight shone from the bunkhouse windows across the yard. Somewhere an owl hooted; far off on the wind, the voice of a distant coyote answered it, unutterably lonely in the icy dark.

  From her position halfway down the table Candy watched the steam rising off her coffee, and surveyed the plainly furnished room, and the three bachelors who inhabited it, with affection.

  Jeremy had cooked dinner with his customary skill—Jason’s dinners tended to be spartanly plain and Joshua’s absentmindedly burnt. Though she’d dined at the cabin numerous times before, Candy could detect that for this occasion the place had been given a thorough and much-needed cleaning. Only Joshua, she thought, would have taken the trouble for that.

  Her eyes went to him, the changeling of the Bolt family, fair-haired and fine as whalebone in contrast to the bronzed, broad-shouldered strength of his older and younger brothers. Then she glanced back at Jeremy, reading in his half-turned profile the reflection of her own inner peace, and of his quiet, easygoing nature. As if he felt her gaze his eyes met hers, then dropped again in sudden shyness.

  Jason was still considering her question, seeking to put his finger on what he felt about Stemple’s nephew. Finally he said, “He—feels wrong.”

  “You mean because of the dogs?” asked Joshua, glancing down the table at him. No dog in Seattle took to Ish at first meeting. Reactions had ranged from hackling snarls to yelping flight, but even the friendliest curs gave him wide berth. Cats, on the other hand, found him as fascinating as the New Bedford girls did.

  “Not exactly,” said Jason. “It’s just that I get the feeling that he’s lying about something, and I wonder what it is.”

  “It’s his b—business,” said Jeremy, and held out his hand for the sorghum pitcher, which Jason slid expertly down the length of the tabletop to him. “If you distrust any man with something in his p—past, you’ll end up with mighty few friends, especially here in Seattle.”

  “He’s one hell of a mathematician,” added Josh suddenly, as if this were a point in Marx’s defense. “You know what he showed me? Look ...”

  Jeremy leaned closer, for he enjoyed Josh’s fascination with numbers though he was unable to share his genius for them. “You pick any number,” Josh explained, “multiply the ones just before and just after it, and they’ll come out to one less than the square of the number. Always. Any number.”

  “Hunh?” said Jeremy.

  “Look—you have five. Six times four is twenty-four. That’s one less than five times five is twenty-five.”

  “Yeah, but that c—can’t work all the time,” Jeremy argued. “Uh—ten times twelve is—uh—”

  “Hundred and twenty,” prompted Joshua. “And eleven elevens are a hundred and twenty-one. And do you know what he told me about prime numbers?”

  “Something incomprehensible, I’m sure,” said a smiling Jason, who had put up with the lonely overflow of Joshua’s fascination for numbers for many long years. Joshua laughed, albeit a little self-consciously, at that. He was aware that no one else shared his appreciation for those cool and abstract beauties, and did his best to keep from boring his brothers to death with them.

  A pity, thought Jason, watching as Candy, Josh and Jeremy went into the further ramifications of testing Ishmael’s mathematical principle (“A hundred and fifty-seven times a hundred and fifty-seven is carry the one—three hundred and eighty-five—no, that’s seven hundred and eighty-five—carry the two ...”), that Josh hadn’t been able to get a better education than he
had. The years that he himself had found so rewarding, the years of work, first with his father and then with his brothers, to make something of himself and of Seattle as well, had been years taken from something else that Josh might have had.

  Well, he told himself, we never had the money to send Josh to college anyway. But he had seen his brother’s hunger for knowledge of these things, things that no one else had any comprehension of. In all the years in Seattle, Ish Marx was the only kindred spirit Joshua had ever found.

  Candy put down her chalk and grocery slate and announced, “Twenty-four thousand, six hundred and forty-nine,” and Jeremy protested, “That c—can’t be true all the time! What about—what about eighteen hundred and sixty-seven?” He pulled the year’s date out of the air, and everybody showed signs of plunging back into the numerical fray.

  Jason broke into their enthusiasm with, “Before you return to the contemplation of higher mathematical theory I think we’d better get settled which of the pair of you is going to San Francisco with Aaron and Ish on Monday. I’d like to have one of you go, just to make sure we hear the real figures on that tea-clipper deal they’re doing with Struan and Sons.”

  Josh and Jeremy traded glances, each knowing his own strengths and his brother’s. It was universally accepted that Josh was better with figures, but Jeremy dealt better with people—possibly because, being the youngest of the three and five-feet-four, he’d been forced to develop this skill at an early age. Jeremy said, “I’ll g—go,” and Josh nodded, satisfied.

  “Now,” said Candy, “1,867 times 1,867 is ...”

  Later that evening, as he walked her toward the head of the trail that led back to town, Jeremy asked her, “When I’m in San Francisco, is there anything you want me to get?”

  Candy adjusted her cloak over her shoulders. “You could buy me some yarn. Lottie’s birthday’s in November—she won’t say what birthday—and I’d like to crochet a shawl for her. Biddy’s teaching me how to crochet. I never had the patience to learn it before, but I seem to be getting the hang of it now.”

  “All right.” There was a small pause. The air was changing again, the watery moonlight paled and died as thicker darkness rolled in from the sound. Candy’s cloak stirred a little in the cold turning of the rain-smelling wind. Then he asked, “C—can I get you a ring?”

  Jeremy heard Candy’s breath catch, but in the dimness he caught the narrowed glimpse of her tip-tilted green eyes, and the sudden tightening of that wood-sprite mouth. “Did Jason put you up to ask that?”

  “No!” burst out Jeremy. It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the entire truth, either. Jason had been urging him to get at least that marriage out of the way for days now. In the vehemence of his denial Candy caught the partial affirmation.

  “Because I won’t marry—you or anybody else—just so that Jason Bolt can win his stupid bet.” She whirled and started down the path at a quick walk. Jeremy hurried to catch her.

  “C—Candy, I wouldn’t ask you to and it wasn’t a stupid bet. It’s ...”

  “But you just did ask me!” she flared, all her comfort in Jeremy’s presence in the earlier part of the evening forgotten in her sudden rage at Jason for meddling in what should have been hers alone.

  “I did not! I asked you because I love you and why the hell did you c—come to Seattle in the first place if it wasn’t to get married?”

  Candy rounded on him, her eyes blazing and her lips white. “That’s none of your damn business, Jeremy Bolt! And if you don’t think I had second thoughts about being shipped out here like a lot of cows, you’re stupider even than your brother! And then to have him make some kind of stupid bet on it ...”

  “It is not a stupid bet!” yelled Jeremy, trying to make his voice carry over hers but in doing so failing in his hope of calming the discussion.

  “Did he make one?” she demanded hotly. And when Jeremy, torn between his loyalty to Jason and the terrible combination of his love and desire for her, didn’t reply, she turned in furious silence and strode toward the path back to town. Jeremy ran to overtake her, and she pulled her arm violently from his staying grip. “Don’t you speak to me,” she said through gritted teeth.

  “C—Candy, the bet doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters to me,” she flung at him, “because it’s your mountain, too, isn’t it? You have just as much personal stake in marrying me as Jason does. What did you do, draw straws? The short one gets to marry Biddy? Was that it?”

  Jeremy said nothing, wondering if he should tell her the truth, tangled as it was, or finagle his way out of admitting to the bet, as Jason had commanded. And, fatally, he was silent too long.

  “You—men!” She stormed past him, and down the path in the freezing rain. When Jeremy ran after her she added furiously, “And don’t you follow me!”

  Jeremy stood in the rain for some minutes, watching long after she had disappeared down the trail into the darkness. The rain soaked his long hair and trickled down the collar of his mackinaw. The world, sodden with two consecutive weeks of monotonous rain, was suddenly bleak and very cold.

  Then he sighed, and started down the path after her. Jeremy was far too good a woodsman, and far too much a gentlemen, to let her walk the three miles back to Seattle alone.

  From the kitchen windows, fogged with the steam of washing up, Joshua and Jason watched their brother’s dark form vanish into the woods.

  With a tired little wheeze, the camelback clock on the parlor mantel coughed out the three-quarter hour. Coming downstairs in pitchy darkness, Ishmael Marx subliminally identified it as quarter to four. He knew, though he had been asleep at the time, that the rain had ceased two and a half hours ago. Some of the clouds had cleared, enough to bathe the hillside in front of Stemple’s house by the mill in leaky white moonlight and show him the faces of the two women whose knocking had brought him to the door.

  “Mrs. Hatfield, Miss Cloom,” he greeted them doubtfully. “Is there something wrong?”

  “Well, we don’t know,” said Lottie, following him into the parlor.

  Biddy added, “It’s just that Candy was up to the Bolt brothers’ this evening, and still hasn’t got back. We wondered if something had happened to her. I waited and waited for her, but the rain’s been over for just hours, and there’s still no sign of her.”

  “Might she have spent the night there?” inquired Ish, going to the embers of the fire to light a spill with which he kindled one of the kerosene lamps.

  “Oh, no,” Biddy protested. “That wouldn’t be proper.”

  “But perhaps more sensible than a long walk back to town at midnight.”

  “As I said, we don’t know,” said Lottie, her round pink face puckered with worry. “But I think Candy would have waited the rain out and walked back, no matter how late it was. I realize it’s an imposition, but I was wondering if you or Aaron would walk with us as far as Bridal Veil Mountain, just to be sure.”

  “What’s this?” Aaron came down the stairs, sleepy and rumpled in his shirtsleeves and pants that, like Ish, he’d hastily pulled on at the sound of voices downstairs. “What the hell time is it, anyway?”

  “Three fifty-two,” replied Ishmael, with his customary precision. “Allowing for the error of the clock. Lottie and Miss Cloom would like one of us to go with them to Bridal Veil Mountain, to make sure that no ill has befallen Miss Pruitt on her way home.”

  “At this hour? She’d have stayed over, surely?”

  “I don’t think so,” insisted Lottie. “The girls are all pretty strict about that, and Candy especially. And it wouldn’t hurt to check.”

  “I will go,” Ishmael offered, and vanished upstairs to get his boots. Stemple grumbled, but fished around in the corner by the fireplace for his own.

  Almost an hour later the four of them were climbing the last hill to the Bolt brothers’ logging camp on Bridal Veil Mountain. There was already a light on in the cook shack in the big clearing, and small movements in the shambling log barracks were the
men slept. As they came toward the darkened cabin that old John Bolt had built when he’d first claimed the mountain, they saw a light go up in the lean-to kitchen. A drift of white smoke snuffled out of the tin chimney.

  Joshua answered the door, barefooted in jeans and long-handles, his blond hair falling in his eyes. He took one look at them and asked, “What happened?”

  “Did Candy Pruitt spend the night here?” asked Stemple bluntly.

  Josh’s eyes went quickly over Lottie and Biddy, reading in their mere presence that Jeremy had not, as he and Jason had supposed, spent the night on the parlor sofa in the Seattle dormitory. He shook his head. “I’ll get Jason. Come in.” He padded swiftly back through the long front room, adding as he went, “There’s coffee in the kitchen.”

  “I knew she wouldn’t have stayed,” wailed Biddy. “I knew it. Oh—” She flustered away into the kitchen, competently locating several cups and bringing them out to the table strung on her fingers like rings. “Oh, Aaron, what are we going to do? Oh, Jason ...”

  “Calm down, Biddy.” Jason was pulling on his buckskin shirt as he came down from the loft that the three brothers shared.

  “But anything could have happened to them!” she moaned. “They could have been captured by Indians, or eaten by a bear, or washed away by a flooding river. ...”

  “There is no river between here and Seattle,” Joshua reminded her.

  “But anything ...” she began again, disregarding this obvious fact.

  “Miss Cloom,” said Ishmael severely, “your speculations are alarmist, illogical and exaggerated. ‘Anything’ could not have happened to them. They could neither have been run over by a railway train nor devoured by dinosaurs, and if you are not silent, I will put my hand over your mouth.”

  Biddy shut up, round-eyed. Jason turned away to hide a snort of laughter behind his coffee cup. Ishmael went on, “As the rain will have washed out any tracks that they might have left, we can only follow the route they would have taken, and make casts in the woods on both sides for clues.”