by Susan Wiggs
Mary’s heart rose to her throat as Hestia and Fiona cooed and fussed over the baby. Was it a woman’s lot, then, to fall instantly and completely smitten with a new baby? These ladies adored Davy with uncritical and unstinting love. Mary wanted—oh, she wanted—that to be true for Jesse, too, but all she could remember was the coldness in his eyes, the bleakness in his face when he had said, “He’s not mine.”
Naively, she’d thought her joy at bringing Davy into the world would rub off on Jesse. But it seemed to have the opposite effect. He was more withdrawn and silent than ever.
How could she break through that fear? How could she change his mind? She had no idea, but she knew she must. They were meant to be together. She had come to him through an act of destiny, and to disregard that was a sacrilege.
“How are you feeling?” Fiona asked, breaking in on her thoughts.
“Well,” Mary said, “I eat like a horse, feed the baby like a cow, and the rest of the time I just sleep along with little Davy.”
“Excellent. That’s as it should be.” Fiona seated herself in the wicker chair Jesse had dragged into the room for visitors. With gentle, assured hands she opened Davy’s gown and subjected him to a thorough and professional examination. “He couldn’t be more perfect. Now, the eating and sleeping aside, is all well here?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?” Mary was appalled to feel tears spring to her eyes.
“Oh, dear Lord,” Hestia said. “I was the same way when my babies came. Filled with elation one moment, and all weepy the next.”
“And your husband?” Mary asked in low, rasping tones. “Did Captain Swann stay clear of you and the baby for days and days?”
Fiona eyed Mary keenly. “Give him time. Everything has changed for him so quickly. He’ll come round.” She buttoned up the baby’s gown. “Won’t he, little man? Won’t your papa come to adore you to bits?”
Her singsong voice coaxed a smile out of Mary. It was sweet, seeing the matter-of-fact Dr. MacEwan let down her professional reserve, charmed by little Davy. Hestia busied herself putting away the gifts, all homemade by loving hands.
“I am so blessed in my friends,” Mary said, and the tears came again, but she laughed through them. In the company of women, she felt surrounded by the essence of her mother’s love. Even though Mum was no longer here, Mary felt her presence in the way Hestia smoothed her hands over the knitted lamb’s-wool blanket, saw it in the joyous crinkles in the corners of Fiona’s eyes.
Do you see us, Mum? Mary asked silently. Your grandson is going to be fine. We’re all going to be fine.
And so she believed, especially when Magnus and Palina returned from Astoria and came bursting into the house, chattering away in Icelandic, then both of them breaking down and crying when they saw the new baby.
“It’s crowded in here and it’s getting late,” Fiona announced over Magnus’s gruff sobs.
“Yes, yes,” Hestia said briskly. “There’s so much to do with all the little ones in the house these days. I’m teaching the Clune children to read.”
Mary savored the sparkle of delight in the widow’s eyes as she bade them goodbye. Since opening her home to those less fortunate, Hestia had lost the pinched look that had haunted her. Now she looked serene and full of purpose. People needed each other. It was such a simple idea. Why was it so hard for Jesse to grasp?
Proud as new grandparents, Palina and Magnus cradled Davy between them and murmured lovingly to the baby. Mary waited without saying anything. Such moments were to be cherished in silence, with no words interfering. Perhaps it was a trick of the afternoon light, or perhaps it was pure magic; a glow surrounded the three of them as if they were a church painting.
The love in the faces of the older people was so apparent that Mary found herself once again on the verge of tears. I have a family, she thought. All her blood relations had died in Ireland, and here she was halfway around the world, and she had found a new family.
The moment passed, and never once did Davy awaken. Mary took him from Palina. “He fits just so in the crook of my arm. I can’t even remember what I used to do with myself before he was born.”
“This is the happiest event we’ve had at the station,” Palina declared. “How proud Jesse must be.”
Mary ducked her head. But not quickly enough.
“There is a problem, eh?” Magnus thumped his knee. “I have but one fist left. Pray it is enough to wallop some sense into his thick head.”
“No—”
“Wait—”
Both Mary and Palina spoke at the same time. They looked at each other and laughed.
“Let him be for now,” Palina said, then added something in Icelandic. “You were not so very charming immediately after the birth of Erik.”
Magnus affected a scowl, but he bent and kissed his wife’s brow before leaving the room.
“Now,” Palina said. “Tell me.”
Mary smoothed her hand over the downy fuzz on the baby’s head. “I had to be stronger and braver than I ever thought was possible. And just like the last time, it was Jesse who got me through it.”
“Just like the last time?”
“When I was drowning. It felt the same.”
Palina smiled broadly. “Yes. Yes. Jesse helped you through it. That is as it should be. I am not surprised.”
“But he’s different now that the baby’s here,” Mary confessed with a catch in her throat. “More like the way he was when I first got here. He wants to be alone, wants nothing to do with me or with Davy. I think he wishes we had never happened to him.”
“If you ask him, that is what he will say.” Palina rose and knotted her shawl with deft hands. “But look at me. I am an old woman. A busybody. I stare at people and I see them as they truly are. I see things that are invisible to others.”
“I don’t doubt it, Palina. I never have.”
“When I look at you and Jesse together, I see the love happening.”
A strange chill spread through Mary, prickling her scalp. She felt it in her gut—the starkness of the blunt statement. “What do you mean?”
“Exactly that. You do not see it, because you are too busy feeling it and pretending it’s easy. Jesse is too busy feeling it and fighting it. But I see the way he looks at you when you’re not aware of his gaze. I see the way you care for him. And so when you think he wants you gone, it is not that. He is simply afraid to lose you.”
* * *
Jesse found that if he tried hard enough, he could avoid thinking about Mary and the baby for whole minutes at a time. So long as she slept with the infant downstairs, so long as he stretched his duties at the lighthouse as much as possible, he could pretend nothing had changed.
He left the beacon and went down to the sheltered cove below Scarborough Hill, where the trees thinned and gave way to fields of ferns rolling down to the water’s edge. He hadn’t checked on the pilot boat in the nine days since the baby’s birth. According to the telegraph from Annabelle, she was well and busy, looking forward to their parents’ return from the Continent after Christmas. Apparently, Granger had limited his misuse to Mary.
Jesse felt a shameful wave of relief that he wouldn’t have to go to see his sister, after all. The very thought of setting sail struck him cold.
As always, he sensed a waiting silence down by the water. Abel Sky had once told him the hill was a hallowed retreat of the Chinooks. In the time before the white man had come, the natives brought their chieftains here for canoe burials.
A light wind rippled off the water and sang through a pair of white hawthorne trees. The sound had a whispery quality to it as if the old chieftains’ ghosts were stirring. Shaking off the fanciful notion, Jesse went to the boat and found it, as always, in perfect repair. He cared for it with the same devotion he cared for the horses. But unlike the h
orses, this never left the shore. Its hull and fixtures gleaming, the craft waited for a moment that would never come, not so long as Jesse was the lightkeeper.
He spent a while clearing away dried leaves that had blown into the cockpit, but inevitably, the time came for him to go back to the house. He stood in the boat for a moment, feeling a roar of frustration build in his chest. It was ridiculous. He was torn between a boat he feared to sail and a home he feared to enter.
Swearing aloud, he returned to the house. He stomped up the stairs and crossed the porch, banging the door behind him.
Mary sat by the hearth in the rocking chair Magnus had made for her as a gift. She wore a dress Palina had sewed from blue cloth, and the firelight cast a warm glow over her. The dress was unbuttoned in the front, and she held the infant to her breast.
When he stepped into the room, she raised her face to him. Her mouth was curved in a soft, beautiful smile. This was the first time he’d actually seen her nurse the baby. He wasn’t prepared for the tenderness it stirred in him.
“Uh, I’d better get more wood for the fire,” he said, taking a step back toward the door.
“There’s plenty of wood.”
“Then I’ll see to the horses.”
“Erik fed them not an hour ago.”
“Sometimes he forgets—”
“He never forgets.” She kept staring at him.
He tried with all his might to wrench his gaze from her breast. The skin was like cream, the baby’s mouth a rosebud fastened around the nipple. The image branded Jesse, scorched him, made him burn with unthinkable lust.
He took another step toward the door.
“Jesse, don’t leave,” she said. “I made chicken soup for supper and Palina brought another loaf of rye bread.”
“Call me when it’s ready.”
Her expression never wavered. “It’s ready.”
“Call me when you’re ready.”
With a glint of defiance in her eyes and a deliberate, unhurried motion of her finger, she detached the baby from her breast. Jesse couldn’t help seeing it all vividly. The glistening hungry mouth. The engorged nipple with a tiny teardrop of rich milk clinging to it. Then it was gone as Mary fastened her dress.
Before he knew what was happening, she handed him the bundled baby. “Here. He’s practically asleep. You put him to bed and I’ll set out supper.”
Jesse stood in the middle of the room with the baby in his big, clumsy hands. The infant felt as light as an autumn leaf, and as fragile. A fairy or maybe an angel, not a flesh-and-blood human being. He was too small, too delicate, too perfect to be real.
He smelled of milk and warmth and Mary, and the fragrance alone nearly melted Jesse to the floor. He steeled himself with a reminder—this was Granger’s son. Granger’s bastard. Jesse would always be a distant, reluctant uncle to this child.
But Mary was his wife.
Mary had named the child David. David, son of Jesse.
He went to the room where Mary and the baby napped during the day and slept during the night. Feeling awkward, he set down the swaddled form.
“Put him on his side,” Mary called from the kitchen. “And put the pillows and bolsters around him so he doesn’t fall.”
In just a few short days, the room had been transformed. A milky, powdery smell hung in the air, and everywhere there were baby clothes and diapers, a rattle carved of driftwood and a conch shell decked in feathers, a gift from Abel Sky.
Jesse glanced one last time at the sleeping baby and wished he hadn’t. How tiny he looked, adrift in the middle of the bed. Like a bit of flotsam lost at sea.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“People have been warning me about the winters here.” Mary lifted her face to the crystal-blue November sky. “They kept saying we wouldn’t see the sun until next March.”
Jesse slapped the reins on the rump of the horse as the road leveled out to the main street of Ilwaco, and gave his usual disinterested grunt.
“The weather suits me just fine.” She inhaled deeply. How she loved the crisp cool air of a seaport—the briny smell of nets hung to dry from tall posts at the dock ends, and the scent of tar wafting from the shipyard.
Davy made a small squeak of bewilderment as Jesse drew the buggy to a halt. Mary smiled down at the baby. At six weeks of age, he was alert, and this morning, he had gifted his mother with the inexpressibly precious favor of his first real smile.
“Watch a moment. Maybe he’ll smile again,” she said, putting her hand on Jesse’s arm.
Out of politeness, he stared at Davy for a few seconds. “I don’t think he’s going to do it.”
“He did it this morning. I saw it with my own eyes. Didn’t you, a gradh,” she cooed. “Didn’t you, my treasure?”
Davy blinked up at her. His eyes had begun to lighten in color. She suspected they would be blue.
Granger Clapp had blue eyes.
She slammed the door on that thought and waited while Jesse tied up the buggy and helped her down. A sense of excitement stirred inside her. This was her first visit to town since having the baby, and she was anxious to show him off.
The people of Ilwaco didn’t disappoint her. In the mercantile, where they went to buy new haycock covers, Abner and Mrs. Cobb made an appropriate fuss, and the little Cobbs gathered around, begging for turns to sit in the big wing chair behind the counter and hold the baby.
At her surgery, Fiona pronounced Davy fat and flawless.
Bert Palais, at the paper, slapped his vested chest, pushed back his visor, and declared that he wanted to write a nice announcement.
“I’d rather you didn’t,” Jesse said tersely.
Bert blinked. Mary blushed. “My husband’s always been a private man,” she said.
“I’ll say.” Judson Espy, the harbormaster, pushed into the newspaper office. “Well, now, look at this.” He grinned hugely at the baby. “A little woodchopper of your very own, Jesse.”
“Woodchopper,” Jesse muttered.
“Aren’t you a woodchopper, aren’t you, aren’t you?” Judson said in a ridiculous voice, his grin broadening from ear to ear.
Davy made another squeaking sound. Mary feared he would start to wail, but instead he grinned right back.
And they were all there to see it.
“I haven’t heard this much fuss since Donati’s comet passed over,” Jesse said.
Mary tried to tell herself it wasn’t important that he didn’t share her joy in a milestone like Davy’s first smile. She tried to tell herself Palina was right, that Jesse loved her and the baby in his own distant, awkward way. But as she watched him go about his business, in his normal terse, dignified fashion, she felt the cold shadows of doubt creep over her.
At midday they called at Hestia’s house. Mary sought the privacy of a second-story lounging room to change Davy and feed him. As she was sitting in an upholstered chair beside a potted palm, feeling the rhythmic tug of Davy’s mouth drawing nourishment from her body, she felt a wave of inexpressible sadness.
Against her will, she thought of Granger Jones. No, Granger Clapp was his real name. Jones was how he was known to doormen and stupid Irish girls. She remembered the day he’d revealed his plans for the baby. He’d never doubted it would be a boy—and he’d been right. He told Mary the lad would have a beautiful nursery crammed with toys, nannies dancing attendance on him, the finest schools in the land, a career of importance at the shipping company. At first she’d thought she would be part of those plans. How silly her assumption seemed now.
Granger had wanted the baby. Only the baby. To him, Mary was simply a broodmare. But now, thinking of the way Jesse ignored the poor lad, she wondered if he might not be better off with a father who wanted a son more than anything else in the world.
Her heart rec
oiled from the very idea, and she dragged her thoughts back into the present. She studied the paisley pattern in the carpet and the fleur-de-lis shapes of the leaded glass in the upper part of the window. The beveled glass cast rainbows across the wall, glittering with the richness of illusory color. But it was all a trick of the light. When the sun went behind a cloud, the colors disappeared and the world returned to drabness.
Fiona swore it wasn’t so, but Palina insisted the mother’s mood affected the nutritional value of her milk. Mary cradled Davy’s small body against hers and thought how blessed she was to be safe and healthy.
But she still slept in the downstairs room.
The light tread of a footstep on the stair startled Mary. A woman in a tattered wool bonnet and a threadbare coat appeared on the landing.
“Hello,” Mary said.
The woman gasped and shrank back against the white wooden rail. She dropped one shoulder and flinched, and her bonnet fell askew.
“I didn’t mean to give you a fright.” Mary modestly drew her shawl, covering the baby. “I’m Mary Morgan.”
Pressing herself against the rail, the woman came down a few steps. Her hands shook as she replaced the bonnet, but she wasn’t quick enough; Mary saw the angry shadow of a bruise on her cheek.
“Pleased to meet you,” the woman whispered, then hastened past. Wondering who she was, Mary finished feeding the baby and returned to the salon, where Jesse waited. He looked out of place in Hestia’s house, his size incongruous on the fringed fainting couch, a dainty teacup perched on his knee.
“...and a woman’s vote counts for just as much when it comes to domestic matters, that’s my opinion, if you really want to know,” Hestia was saying with a self-important sniff. “I intend to tell the territorial governor about it myself, even if I have to ride pillion all the way to Olympia.” The moment she saw Mary, Hestia’s tone changed to doting. “Oh, my dear sweet baby, there you are.”
