“You smell terrible! Have you been drinking?”
“Copiously,” replied Jeff. “And it was romantic of you to point it out.”
Fancy wrinkled her nose. “Yeesh!” she exclaimed.
Jeff shrugged with suitable humility. “There’s nothing for it—I’ll have to take a bath.”
He watched with love and satisfaction and a sense of homecoming as her eyes widened. “A bath? Why, you couldn’t heat water at this hour! Everyone is asleep—”
Jeff caught her hand and pulled her gently off the bed with him, chuckling. “You haven’t seen the famous Corbin bathtub, I see.”
“Is it like the one in Spokane?”
He wanted to kiss her but refrained out of delicacy. After all, he had been drinking blue-ruin all evening and then he’d thrown up in the side yard. “Not exactly,” he answered, lowering his voice to a whisper as they ventured into the hallway. “The pipes show and there isn’t any fancy tile or anything like that, but it serves the purpose.”
They sneaked down the shadowy passageway to a door roughly midway between one end of the house and the other. “I was hoping we could have a tub like that in our house,” Fancy confided in a whisper.
“We will. If that’s what you want, that’s what you’ll have,” Jeff promised, touching the tip of her nose.
Inside the dark room where the bathtub waited, Jeff took a match from his shirt pocket and struck it with his thumbnail. Light, flickering and soft, danced with the shadows. But he did not light the waiting lamp, but instead chose a single candle, which was kept on a shelf underneath the washstand.
The pipes thundered and roared when he turned the proper spigots, but water poured into the bathtub, hot and inviting.
Since Fancy was wearing only a thin, lace-trimmed chemise, she was undressed and in the water, sighing with delight, before Jeff had even shed his boots. He looked at her with mock annoyance.
“About those fliers you threw at me today,” he began in a husbandly way.
She tossed her head and looked back at him, impish and infinitely appealing in the poor light of that one candle, flickering now on the tub’s broad edge. “It was a matter of conscience,” she said. “I agree with your mother—if women don’t fight for what’s rightfully theirs, they’ll never have it.”
Jeff shed his shirt, his trousers, his socks. “Does this mean you’re going to be a crusader like Mama?”
Reclining luxuriously in the tub, she smiled and rested both hands on her rounded, protruding stomach. “Later. I don’t expect I’ll have much time after your daughter arrives.”
“Suppose my daughter …” He stepped into the bathtub and sat down, facing her. The water was still running and the pipes were making a clatter that would raise the dead, but he didn’t care. “… turns out to be a son?”
Her eyes were very wide and vulnerable. “Wouldn’t you love a girl as much as a boy?”
It hurt, loving a woman this much. Even at its best, it was a keenly piercing thing. Far more hazardous than sailing the seas. “Of course I would, Fancy. What makes you ask a question like that?”
She lowered her head and her slender alabaster shoulders moved in a touching shrug. “My papa wanted me to be a boy—that’s why he named me Frances.”
Jeff sat up a little straighter. “He said that? Straight out?”
“Yes.”
He reached back, turned off the water. The boilers clanked and there was a whooshing sound inside the walls. “Let me touch this place where you shelter my child, Fancy,” he said.
She rose to her knees and he closed his big hands around her stomach, marveling at the shifting and kicking, the blatant life, within. He was so moved that he would have wept again as he had downstairs had she not cupped his face in both her hands and whispered, “I would be properly attended, Jeffrey. Now.”
Chapter Eighteen
“WITH THAT BUMBLING MARY TAKIN’ CARE OF HER,” boomed Maggie McQuire, in housekeeperly reprimand, “it’s no wonder our Fancy’s so frazzled!”
Before Maggie could start making dire predictions, Jeff took Fancy’s arm and escorted her outside to the buggy that awaited them. There, after lifting Fancy into the narrow seat, he squinted up at her and the Chinook wind ruffled his wheat-gold hair. “Do you want to stay here, Fancy? With Maggie?”
Fancy shook her head. She wanted to go to her own house, for all its vast emptiness. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask Jeff if he would spend the day there with her, but she didn’t quite have the courage for that. The weather, snowy and cold only the day before, was glorious today, caught up in a false spring that the Indians and old-timers called a Chinook.
“I guess you’ll go down to the shipyard today,” she ventured softly, avoiding his eyes so he would not see the pain and worry in her own.
“I do have some things to do, yes,” he said cryptically, taking up the reins in his strong hands. “I’ll be home for dinner, though.”
Fancy felt a little start; it was rather pathetic to be so delighted over sharing a simple midday meal, when it was the norm in other marriages. “I’d like that,” she said shyly.
They drove home through patches of melting snow and stubborn grass and over rutted roads. The wind was indeed warm, and the sun was bright in the sky, and though it was November, one would have almost believed that it was April instead.
At the door, Jeff got out of the buggy, then helped Fancy down. As Mary appeared on the porch, he bent and whispered, “Get rid of her for the day.”
A rush of pleasure warmed Fancy and pulsed in her cheeks. A thousand errands for Mary leaped into her mind. “What shall I serve for dinner?” she asked in a dignified manner, trying to hide the way he had disconcerted her.
“Yourself,” Jeff replied, and then he was back in the buggy again and driving away. For once, the knowledge that he was probably on his way to that half-finished clippership in Port Hastings harbor did not devastate her.
“I was worried about you, mum—gone all night like that!”
Fancy entered the large foyer, tugging off her gloves as she went. “I’m sorry, Mary—my husband and I spent the night at the other house. I should have sent a message.”
Always quickly mollified, Mary beamed. “Ain’t it a lovely day, Mum? All sunny and warm—”
Fancy thought of the scandalous aside Jeff had muttered when she had asked him about dinner and flushed slightly as she reached to hang her cloak on the brass coat tree. “I’ve a whole list of things for you to do,” she began. “You won’t mind walking down to town, will you?”
Mary was delighted. “Oh, mum, a day like this is just perfect for walking! And I thought I’d be stuck indoors the whole time!”
Sometimes Mary’s exuberance was tiring, but Fancy smiled. “Once you’ve finished your errands, you can spend the afternoon as you like. Visiting friends or something.”
Mary laughed. “So the master’s coming home today, is he?”
Fancy blushed again. “That is no business of yours, Mary,” she said firmly. “Come along, now, and I’ll write out the things I want you to do.”
Half an hour later, Mary left the house with a spring in her step and mischief in her eyes. Try though she might, Fancy couldn’t be angry with the woman for her presumptuous and familiar manner. All that mattered on this beautiful Chinook day was that she’d won out over that dratted clippership for once. That wouldn’t last, of course, but perhaps the new closeness between Jeff and herself would.
Fancy meant to see that it did.
During the coming hour, she rushed about, hair failing from its pins, face flushed, baking the flaky dried apple scones that Jeff loved, fluffing sofa cushions, going over her wardrobe again and again in search of just the right dress.
She could not decide between a sedate mulberry broadcloth and her favorite lavender cambric, which became her but was worn perhaps too often. Fancy was still standing beside the bed, caught in this quandary, when her senses leaped in one startling chorus—Jeff was home
.
She turned and there he was, standing indolently in the bedroom doorway, grinning at her, taking in her flour-splotched skirts, her falling hair, her flushed and startled face. In his hands he held, of all things, the old black top hat from Fancy’s performing days.
“Here,” he said, extending it. “See what you can pull out of this, Mrs. Corbin.”
Fancy’s throat was tight and she was filled with mortification that he should see her like this when she had so wanted to be beautiful for him, perfumed and elegant. Perhaps appealing enough to keep him home from the seas. “What—”
A peculiar mewling sound came from inside the hat he was extending. “See for yourself,” he said.
Fancy drew a deep breath, puzzled and quite shaken, though she couldn’t have explained why. She approached and reached cautiously into the hat and warm, soft fur met her touch. “Not a rabbit!” she whispered, closing her hand around the small body and lifting.
“No, not a rabbit,” Jeff laughed, his indigo eyes shining.
“A kitten!” Fancy cried, delighted, holding the ball of white fluff in both hands. It purred and looked up at her with trusting ice-blue eyes.
“It seems to me that any good magician could pull more than a kitten out of a hat this big,” Jeff remarked. “Try again.”
Fancy set the kitten on the floor, where it brushed itself against her skirts and swatted at her petticoats. Wide-eyed, she reached into the hat again and came out with a little box of dark blue velvet.
Lifting the hinged lid, she gasped, for inside the box was a ring, a golden band set with alternating diamonds and amethysts. “Oh, my—” she breathed, overcome. “Is it—”
“Yes,” Jeff said firmly and with mock sternness. “It’s a wedding band. I wouldn’t want other men thinking you’re fair game.”
Fancy held out a trembling left hand and he slipped the ring onto the appropriate finger. When she looked up, Jeff’s face was distorted by a shimmering blur of tears. “W–While you’re at sea, you mean?” she whispered.
“While I’m where?” he asked, looking honestly surprised.
Fancy turned the ring on her finger; it fit perfectly and the brilliant stones danced. “While you’re sailing that ship,” she said.
“Sailing that—” He caught her shoulders in his hands. “Is that what you thought, Fancy? That I was going to leave you to sail again?”
She could only nod.
He cupped her chin in one hand and lifted. His face was very close to hers. “I love ships, Fancy,” he said softly, forthrightly. “But I love you far, far more. And I won’t be making any voyages unless they’re short ones.”
Hope leaped within her, a searing, brutal, and yet fragile hope. “Exactly what do you mean by short?” she demanded, the kitten still catching at her petticoats.
“You know, brief,” explained Jeff. “Two days, three. The kind of trips that you and the baby could take with me.”
Fancy gave a shout of glee and flung her arms around Jeff’s neck and her feet were completely off the floor. The kitten dangled from her hem for a moment and then fell, with a soft thump, mewing in disgruntled protest. “I thought—oh, Jeff, I was sure—”
He held her tightly to him. “I’m sorry, Fancy,” he breathed into her neck. “I didn’t know you thought I planned to go back to the sea. If I hadn’t been so damned stubborn—”
“Don’t,” she whispered, and she silenced his self-recrimination with a kiss.
Passion howled around them like a fierce wind, and then through them. Between consuming kisses, they stripped each other of every garment, wanting nothing to impede their joining.
When Fancy stood before Jeff in a pool of skirts and petticoats and satiny drawers, he bent to take slow, sweet suckle at her breast. She moaned and flung her head back as he plundered her, his strong hands stroking her rounded stomach.
But there was an urgency in them both that forestalled their usual inclination to linger long over their loving. Jeff swept Fancy up into his arms, carried her to the bed, and fell to her there, strong and hard upon her.
His domination was complete, but Fancy welcomed it. She cried out in triumph as he entered her in a swift but gentle thrust.
He paused, looking worried. “Did I hurt you?”
“Oh, no—no—oh, Jeff, love me! Make me yours—”
And he did. Their bodies moved in splendor, rising and falling as one, arching in the final, quivering exaltation that wrung a hoarse shout from Jeff and a keening, animal whine from Fancy.
* * *
Fancy was setting out cream near the cookstove in the kitchen for the kitten. The dried apple scones had burned, the acrid scent heavy in the air, but neither she nor her husband cared.
“The balloon?” she puzzled, standing up straight again.
Jeff was politely eating one of the scones, having broken away the charred edges she had crimped so carefully. “It’s a perfect day for it, Fancy,” he argued in quiet tones. “Tomorrow it will probably snow again.”
Fancy despised that balloon and had hoped never to have to deal with it again in any fashion except to kick at it surreptitiously when she happened to pass it in the barn, but there was little that could trouble her on this fine day. After all, she had her wedding ring, at last—she had a child growing within her and, best of all, she knew that Jeff would not be leaving her for the sea. They were in perfect accord.
“Well—”
He grinned and flung what remained of his scone into the fireplace. “I promise we won’t fly away this time, Fancy,” he assured her. “I’ll make sure the cable is fastened and we won’t go any higher than, oh, a hundred feet.”
Fancy felt a little thrill of adventurous fright. It would be fun to look down on Port Hastings and on that clippership that would never carry her man away from her. “If you promise,” she said.
“On my honor,” he replied.
The balloon danced and shifted against the blue sky, straining at the ropes that held it to the grassy clearing behind the main house. Clearly, except for buying the kitten and the ring, Jeff had devoted all of the morning to bringing it there and inflating it.
Sensing that she was about to have second thoughts, Jeff laughed and lifted her carefully into the wicker gondola. She gripped the side with white knuckles as he went from one stake to another, releasing the ropes until there was only one that held them.
Temple Royce appeared so suddenly that Fancy didn’t have time to scream out a warning. He struck Jeff from behind and the one rope that held the balloon to the ground began to unfurl with alarming quickness.
Fancy felt the balloon surging higher, but her own peril was the last thing on her mind at that moment. Jeff was scrambling to his feet, stumbling toward the rope. Its looped end dragged along the ground.
“Thank God,” she whispered. For Jeff was not dead as she had first feared, but only dazed.
He lunged for the rope and Temple, looking like the mad and hunted creature he was, lunged for him. They rolled in the wet grass, over and over. The balloon drifted higher.
“Jeff!” Fancy screamed, and her cry was lost on the wind.
Both Temple and Jeff got to their feet, neither of them aware, it seemed, that Fancy was about to fly off in a craft she had no idea how to navigate or land. There were trees, tall and ready to pierce the orange and white balloon, and beyond them, the endless Pacific Ocean.…
Fancy cried out again and Temple looked up at her and laughed, waving one hand in farewell. He stepped backward and, in that moment, the looped rope caught around his right ankle. There was no more slack now and nothing to hold the balloon to the ground.
Temple shrieked in startled horror, hanging upside down now by one booted foot, and the balloon went higher still. Jeff grabbed for him with both arms and missed, landing on his stomach.
“God help us,” Fancy muttered, sick with fear. “Help us all.”
Temple was flailing and struggling at the end of the rope now, his head coursing a dozen
feet above the ground. They were wafting seaward and Jeff was shouting something but Fancy couldn’t hear him for the wind and the pounding of her own blood in her ears.
Suddenly, as they neared the tall Douglas firs that rimmed the clearing, there came a strangled scream from below and the balloon stopped, with a sickening lurch. Tree branches brushed the sides of the gondola and clawed at Fancy’s face, filling her lungs with the paradoxically festive scent of Christmas.
Trembling, certain that she would topple to the ground at any second, Fancy gathered all her courage and peered over the side. What she saw made her forget her own plight.
Temple still hung from the balloon rope, arms and legs outspread, face caught forever in an expression of staring horror. A tree limb had gone through his chest and now protruded from his back.
Fancy slithered to the floor of the gondola, shaking, her eyes clenched shut. Never, ever, as long as she lived, would she forget what she’d just seen or the desperate fear she still felt.
“Jeff,” she whispered, “Jeff, Jeff.”
And she heard his shout from below. “Fancy! Fancy, are you all right?”
“Yes,” she managed to cry out. Above her, the balloon was making a frightening, hissing sound and she could feel the gondola shifting in the thick branches, like an endangered bird’s nest.
She was going to die now, right there. In a tree! Her baby would never be born.…
“Don’t move!” Jeff called hoarsely. “Sit perfectly still and I’ll get you down, Fancy! I promise I’ll get you down.”
Fancy began to cry. The wind was buffeting the balloon from the other side now; she could feel it coming loose from the branches, leaning precariously toward the clearing. The hissing sound told her that it was slowly deflating.
With a jarring motion that made Fancy utter a choked scream, it broke free of the tree. The gondola rocked as if to spill her out and then steadied, fixed to the tree by Temple’s body.
Fancy got to her knees and risked looking down. Jeff was there—oh, God, to have him hold her, to be safe again—his head tilted back. It must have been thirty feet to the ground.
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