Fancy bit her lower Up, amused. For some reason, Katherine’s Maggie had taken an instant dislike to poor Mary, and the two of them were always at odds. Maggie had not approved of Jeff’s building a house of his own—it had been her opinion that both he and his new wife belonged with the rest of the family in the enormous brick mansion farther up the hill.
“I would go mad,” had been Jeff’s only comment on that suggestion, and Fancy hadn’t cared where they lived as long as they were together.
“She thinks I’m an upstart!” Mary prattled on indignantly, her shrill voice penetrating Fancy’s reflections. “And me doin’ the best I know how!”
“Hush now,” Fancy said softly, “and have some tea.”
Mary’s mouth rounded for a moment, even though she had been hinting for just such an invitation. “And the captain would kill me right and proper if he caught me sitting with the mistress!”
Sad again, Fancy tucked the letter from her mother into the pocket of her blue sateen skirt. There wasn’t much danger of Jeff catching his housekeeper having tea with his wife—it was only midday and he wouldn’t be home until long after dark. “We’ll stand, then,” Fancy said to mollify Mary.
“You stand? And in your condition? No, no, mum, you sit right here by the fire and I’ll have my tea in the kitchen.”
Fancy’s throat was thick with a lonely sort of despair. “Oh, Mary,” she said, “don’t go. Please.”
Mary poured tea for them both and sat, though she looked poised to leap up should there be a knock at the front door or a sound from the kitchen. She was an enigma to Fancy, always wanting to do daring things and then having doubts about them when the time came.
“Honestly, mum,” Mary blurted out, in her startling and sudden way, “it breaks my heart to see you look so down in the mouth, that it does. What’s the captain thinkin’ of, to leave you here alone so much?”
Fancy closed her eyes and tried to take comfort from the crackling warmth of the fire on the hearth. Actually, the house was heated by a modern, if cantankerous, wood-burning furnace in the cellar, but Fancy loved the cheery fireplaces that graced this room, the dining room, the kitchen, and the master bedroom. “You’re being too familiar again, Mary,” she said, not unkindly.
“I’m always that, ain’t I? And sorry I am for it, too. I–I didn’t mean anything by it, mum.”
“Finish your tea, Mary.”
A slurping sound indicated Mary’s eagerness to be obedient. She nearly choked when there was a knock at the front door.
“Saints in heaven, I’ll wager it’s that nosy Maggie McQuire, lookin’ to see if I’m keepin’ proper care of you!” Mary cried, bolting out of her chair and anxiously smoothing her hair and her skirts as she hurried into the entryway.
Fancy didn’t bother to point out that Maggie never used the front door but the one leading into the kitchen, and that without knocking.
At the lilting sound of Banner’s voice, Fancy was cheered. She was rising out of her chair to offer a proper greeting when her sister-in-law swept into the room in a swirl of snow-dusted green woolen and gleeful complaints about the weather. Due to bear her own child in less than two months, Banner created constant scandal by refusing to stay at home and hide her obvious condition.
“Sit back down in that chair, Frances Corbin,” she ordered, doffing her bonnet in front of the fireplace and setting it down on the hearth. “You look pale.”
“Don’t she now?” fretted Mary.
Banner gave the housekeeper an arch look and Mary fled to the kitchen for another cup and saucer. “She’s a scamp, your Mary,” she observed without rancor. “I don’t imagine things ever get dull around here, with her to—”
Fancy struggled with the hurt expression that had risen instantly to her face, but the falling off of Banner’s comment proved she’d been too late. For all the luxuries, for all Mary’s constant chatter and mischief, things were indeed dull in that house. And lonely.
“That waster!” Banner sputtered, lowering herself cautiously into a chair. “Who does Jeff think he is, treating you like this?”
Fancy loved her husband and even now she felt compelled to defend him. “It was a shock to him that I knew Temple had blown up his ship and still kept it from him.”
“Gull globs,” scoffed Banner. “He’s just throwing one of his famous six-month tantrums!”
“He does have a temper.”
Banner’s hands were resting on her enormous round stomach. “Don’t say that so adoringly. If he wasn’t so big, I’d take a switch to him.”
Fancy was even more defensive. “Adam has a bad temper, too,” she pointed out.
“Yes,” admitted Banner readily, “but he just flies mad and yells awhile and then it’s all over.”
It seemed time for a change of subject, if the peace was to be kept. And since Fancy loved her sister-in-law with all her heart, she cherished that peace. “How are things at the main house?”
Banner laughed. “Pure insanity. Mama is organizing another suffrage campaign—we’re all to stand on street corners and pass out fliers. Adam is stomping around raving about women keeping their places and the printer’s helper is trembling in his shoes.”
“What about the twins?” pressed Fancy, grinning. Danny and Bridget, Jeff’s niece and nephew, were the delight of the entire family.
“When I left, they were trying to find Hershel. He’s loose again and Maggie’s threatening to make him into a stew.”
Fancy chuckled at the pictures flashing through her mind. But she felt a certain nostalgia, too, for the days before Jeff Corbin, when she and Hershel had made their way together in a frighteningly big world. There had been lots of hardships then, but not this aching sense of loneliness. That was new.
“In any case, that’s why I’m here. Mama sent me over to beg you to help,” announced Banner.
“To catch Hershel?”
“To pass out fliers. Fancy, suffrage is important! Why, the most stupid, lice-ridden lumberjack can vote, but you and I can’t!” Banner’s beautiful cheekbones flushed with the heat of her conviction. “Are we going to stand for that?”
“I suppose not,” mused Fancy.
And so it was that, not half an hour later, she found herself standing, bundled up and scarfed to her eyes, in front of Wung Lo’s Laundry, a stack of fliers in her mittened hands, RISE UP, YOU WHO LOVE JUSTICE AND RIGHT! the papers read, EVERY GOOD CONSCIENCE WILL DECREE THAT WOMEN MUST VOTE!
Fancy managed to press a few into the hands of passing women, but the men went so far as to cross the street to avoid her. The snow was falling faster and harder and her feet throbbed with cold. After an hour of almost constant rejection, her political convictions were wavering dangerously. Men were too hard-hearted and selfish to ever let women have the vote anyway, so why was she standing out here under a streetlamp, freezing to death?
Across the street, the door of the newly built Port Hastings Hotel and Restaurant swung open, and a familiar laugh caught Fancy’s attention. Jeff. That was Jeff. And she hadn’t heard him laugh like that since before her confession about Temple Royce.
She stepped forward, peering through the snow, and was nearly run down by a passing lumber wagon. Clinging to Jeff’s arm, smiling up at him, was a beautiful woman with red hair and stylish clothes.…
Meredith! Meredith Whittaker! What the devil was she doing in Port Hastings?
But the answer was all too obvious. Pain scraped the inside of Fancy’s heart until it was hollow, was displaced by a bracing rage. After looking both ways, she stomped across the snowy street and confronted her husband by hurling two hundred suffrage fliers in his face.
Jeff gaped at her, pale with either shock or rage—she couldn’t tell which and she damned well didn’t care. “What the hell—” he rasped.
Although Meredith pouted as he peeled her fingers from his arm and stepped toward Fancy, there was a wounding look of triumph in her green eyes, too.
Fancy was too hurt, too furiou
s to speak. She knew that she must be a sight, with her protruding stomach and her mufflers and the babushka scarf that covered her hair and kept her ears warm, but there was no helping that.
Slowly, Jeff bent and took one of the fliers into his hand. As he read it, a scowl formed in his features. “Have you been bedeviling passersby with this nonsense?” he demanded coldly.
Fancy felt as though her rage lifted her, made her taller, so fierce was its upward sweeping within her. How dare he stand there and reprimand her for having honest political convictions and doing something about them, and he with his mistress on his arm, just coming from a tryst!
Fancy drew back one foot and kicked him soundly in the right shin. A humiliating, sobbing sound was coming from her throat all the while, and her chest was heaving up and down.
Jeff grimaced, swore as he grasped his shin. “Fancy, for God’s sake—”
Fancy kicked him in the other shin and whirled, stomping through the scattered orange fliers. That she collided directly into Adam Corbin was the kind of luck she would have expected.
He grasped her shoulders, scanned her face with startled indigo eyes, and then glared over her head at Jeff. “Well,” he said. That was all, just “well.” But it conveyed his anger and his disapproval, none of which seemed to be directed at Fancy herself.
“I guess I’d better go and meet Mother before she gets worried,” announced Meredith in a simpering voice.
“Do that,” Adam bit out, still supporting Fancy with his hands, still preventing the flight she was desperate to make. And those blasted sobs that she couldn’t control were still shaking through her and rasping past her throat.
“Adam—” Jeff began lamely.
Two grim-faced women walked by, staring. “Aren’t we a lovely family?” Adam asked, smiling acidly.
They scurried on, muttering, and Adam calmly lifted Fancy into his arms and planted her in the seat of his buggy, which was waiting in the road.
“God damn it, Adam,” Jeff hissed, “wait a minute! Where do you think you’re taking my wife?!”
“Oh.” Adam looked surprised as he draped a robe over Fancy’s lap and turned to face his brother. “Is this your wife? I wouldn’t have known it by the way you treat her.”
Jeff’s eyes, dark with an emotion she couldn’t have named, sliced to Fancy’s face. “Frances,” he said, “get out of that buggy.”
Fancy lifted her chin. Her dignity was gone, so she clung to the pretense of it. “Go to hell, Jeff Corbin,” she replied.
Adam shrugged and grinned at his brother, though the expression in his eyes was crisply lethal. “There you have it,” he said, climbing into the seat beside Fancy and taking up the reins.
Jeff looked murderous. As the buggy rattled away, he drew back one booted foot and kicked a cloud of suffrage fliers into the snowy air.
As they drove up the steep and slippery hill to the main house, with its attached hospital and clinging, snow-laced ivy vines, Fancy had second thoughts. Suppose, in his anger, Jeff sought Meredith out again?
Fresh grief swept through her, stinging, too powerful to contain. What difference did it make if he did? There was no doubt in Fancy’s mind that he had already betrayed her. What did one more time, or a thousand more, matter?
It mattered. It all mattered terribly. Fancy covered her face and wept with noisy abandon.
“For what it’s worth,” Adam said in brotherly reassurance, “I really don’t think Jeff would betray you.”
That was too much to hope. It was wishful thinking, and Fancy had done enough of that. “He didn’t even give me a wedding ring!” she wailed.
Adam draped one arm around her shoulders and gave her a comforting halt hug, but he said nothing more until they reached the main house. There, he lifted her down and escorted her through the front door.
“O’Brien!” he yelled.
Fancy had recovered enough to remind him that Banner was still passing out suffrage fliers near the sawmill and thus couldn’t be expected to answer his call. Maggie came instead.
Throughout the rest of that afternoon, Fancy was fussed over and pampered and commiserated with and, for all that, she felt worse with every passing minute. Jeff was not going to come and claim her, she was convinced of that. He was probably with Meredith again.
Fancy closed her eyes, lying there on the bed and in the room that had been Jeff’s. She felt as discarded as the books that he no longer read, the model of a clippership on the mantel that he no longer valued, the clothes that he no longer wore.
She was like the things in that room—a wife that had been Jeff’s.
Fancy’s throat drew tight with tears and she curled up into a little ball, desperate to shut out reality. Had it not been for the baby living inside her, she would have gladly died.
* * *
Jeff reeled a little, as he stormed into Adam’s cluttered office. “Where is she?” he demanded.
Adam sat back, removed his spectacles, and slipped them into the pocket of his shirt. Calmly, he swung his feet up onto the surface of the desk. “Who?” he baited innocently.
Jeff felt sick. He’d had too much blue-ruin whiskey on the Silver Shadow. Clasping the doorjamb in both hands, he willed himself not to throw up. “Where is Fancy?” he asked in a softer voice, one that betrayed his desperation.
“Upstairs, sleeping. And just in case you’re thinking of storming up there, cavalier-style, let me say that if you try it I’ll turn you inside out.”
“She’s my wife!”
“Oh? And what does that make Meredith?”
Jeff was wavering dangerously. He stumbled to a chair and fell into it with a groan. He wasn’t due for a hangover until tomorrow, but the damned thing was starting early. “Meredith?” he echoed stupidly.
“The lady you were sporting on your arm today,” Adam prompted without sympathy.
“Christ,” Jeff bit out, rubbing his eyes with one hand. “You know who Meredith is—”
“Do I? Fancy believes she’s your mistress.”
Jeff’s hand fell from his face. “What?!”
Adam shrugged. “After all, you have been neglecting her for months. And today she saw you coming out of a hotel—”
“Good God, is that why she kicked me? She thought that Meredith and I—” Jeff shot to his feet and immediately regretted it. “She thinks I would do that?!”
“Sit down before you pass out,” ordered Adam.
Jeff sat, gratefully. And then, perhaps because of the raw whiskey he had been consuming for the past several hours, he began to cry. His sobs were dry and they hurt, but he was not ashamed of them. Not before Adam.
“Talk to me, Jeff,” his brother commanded moderately when the first spate of unbridled misery had passed.
“I love her—doesn’t she know I love her?”
“I don’t think mind-reading was a part of Fancy’s act, Jeff.”
“I built her a house—she has carte blanche at every store in the territory—every store in the goddamned west! I—”
“Do you know what she said to me today?” Adam broke in. “She said you didn’t even give her a wedding ring.”
“For God’s sake, if she wanted a ring, why didn’t she buy one?”
“And you call me insensitive! At least I gave O’Brien a wedding band!”
“I’m going to be sick!” Jeff yelled, jumping unceremoniously to his feet and running for the door.
“I’ll be in the kitchen brewing coffee,” Adam answered with resignation, blowing out the lamp on his desk.
* * *
The sight of Fancy, curled up in his childhood bed as though to shield herself from some shattering injury, wounded Jeff. He fell into a chair where as a boy he had often sat dreaming of the sea, and stared toward the harbor.
It didn’t draw at him the way it once had, that great ocean beyond the Strait of Juan de Fuca, with its mysteries and its terrors.
Behind him, Fancy stirred and whimpered softly in her sleep. Jeff wondered wh
at she was dreaming about. Meredith and her husband’s imagined infidelity? The explosion in the harbor last Christmas Eve? The horror of Amelie’s death?
He sighed and tilted his head back. “Temple,” he whispered, “wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, I’ll find you. If it takes the rest of my life, I’ll find you.”
“Jeff?”
Jeff turned his head and saw that Fancy was sitting up in bed. The room was dark and he couldn’t make out her expression.
“D–Do you love Meredith Whittaker?”
He laughed, but it was a broken, mirthless sound and it hurt his throat. “No, and I don’t sleep with her, either. She’s in town to visit her sister or something.”
Her need to believe him was almost tangible and it shamed Jeff. God, why had he been so hard on her when she was the reason for everything he did, every breath he drew?
“I would forgive you,” she said.
Jeff ached. “I’ve never been unfaithful to you, Fancy. Not with Meredith or anyone else.”
She began to cry, softly. Brokenly. Jeff went to her without thinking and gathered her into his arms.
“Fancy,” he breathed, anguished at the depth of her pain. “Oh, Fancy, I’m sorry.”
Fancy stiffened. “For what?” she demanded, pushing back from him a little.
“For treating you the way I have. Will you forgive me?”
“That depends on whether or not you were lying about Meredith!”
Jeff laughed and this time it felt good, so good. “What a contradictory creature you are, Frances Corbin! You just told me that you would forgive me.”
“Did you or did you not make love to that redheaded hussy?”
“I did not.”
“Then I forgive you.”
“What if I’d said I had?”
She shuddered in his arms with tearful laughter. “Then I would still have forgiven you. It just would have taken longer, that’s all!”
Jeff held her close and buried his face in the rose-water- and tear-drop-scented softness of her hair. “I love you, you little rabbit rustler,” he said.
Corbin's Fancy Page 24
