Yankee Wife (11 page)

Her employer shoved a hand through his unruly ebony hair and looked exasperated. “Get Polly's address when you see her, and tell her I'll have Harrington arrange for regular bank drafts until she remarries.”

Lydia swallowed. She wanted to dislike Brigham Quade—in fact, she was
desperate
to dislike him—but she could not overlook the man's gruff generosity, or his sense of honor and decency. She nodded, turned and walked away.

Lydia's persistence was soon rewarded. She found Polly in the mess tent next to one of the mills, harriedly pouring coffee for at least two dozen men. She pushed up her sleeves, grabbed the second coffeepot, and began to help serving.

“There's a dance tonight,” someone said. “You want to go reelin' with me, pretty girl?”

“Will you marry me?” another man asked, his brown, gapped teeth showing in a broad and confident grin. He smelled, his gray hair stuck out all over his head in wild thatches, and he apparently believed the very sight of him would drive Lydia wild with passion.

“Some other time,” she said briskly, filling his cup and moving on to the next man. Polly was standing stock-still, staring at her, and she didn't move until one of the other workers slammed his metal cup down on the plank-board table.

For the next hour, while the men ate their supper of biscuits and roasted meat and peas from some nearby garden, Lydia concentrated on avoiding pinches and pats, and she poured more coffee. When the dining tent was finally empty, except for her and Polly, the latter approached her.

“What are you doing here, Lydia?”

Lydia took the money Brigham had given her from the pocket of her skirt and held it out. “Here,” she said. “Brig—Mr. Quade asked me to give this to you, and to get your address. He'll have his clerk send you regular bank drafts until you get married again.”

Polly looked at the money for a long moment, biting her lower lip, then reluctantly accepted it and tucked it down inside her bodice. “How's Devon?”

Lydia sat down at one of the rough tables and propped her chin in one hand. “I think you already know the answer to that question,” she replied, without rancor.

Tears swelled in Polly's hazel eyes. “Is he courting you?”

“Yes,” Lydia answered. “But I don't think he means it.”

Polly raised the hem of her apron and pressed it to her eyelids. “I miss him so much.”

Lydia patted her friend's hand, already chafed and reddened from hard work. “Why don't you go back to him, then? Just get on the mail boat and head for Quade's Harbor?”

After a sniffle and another pass of the apron hem over her puffy eyes, Polly shook her head. “I couldn't. He'd turn me away, and I wouldn't be able to bear that.”

Just like the woman she'd met earlier, in the church, Lydia was struck with an inspiration. “You could still go back,” she insisted. “Brigham would surely hire you to do the same work you're doing here—I heard him say just the other day that he can't keep a cook in the camps.”

Polly looked horrified. “Lydia, I couldn't live on the mountain with all those dreadful men! They'd be plaguing me to—” A light went on in her eyes, and suddenly, tentatively, she was smiling. “They'd be plaguing me to marry them.”

Lydia nodded, her own lips curved into a delighted grin. “If that doesn't drive Devon Quade straight out of his mind, nothing will!”

“Do you really think it would work?” Polly sounded doubtful now, afraid to hope.

Raising one shoulder in a shrug, Lydia replied, “Who knows? But you might as well cook there as here.”

Polly thought for a moment, then nodded. “I'll use this money for work clothes and passage back to Quade's Harbor on the mail boat,” she said, patting her bodice, “and save the rest in case Devon doesn't come around.”

Lydia embraced the other woman briefly, then rose from the bench. “I'd best get back to the hotel now,” she said. “Aunt Persephone will be waking up from her nap and wanting company.” As she left the mess tent, escorted by Polly, the strains of a fiddle and the twangy, unidentifiable sound of another instrument met her ears.

“There's a dance tonight,” Polly said, and Lydia recalled the many invitations that had been extended to them both.

Lydia was thoughtful for a moment, listening to the rough, merry music, intrigued by it. She wasn't even sure she'd know how to dance, since she'd never had the chance—except with imaginary partners in her girlhood room, back in Fall River.

“We're staying at the Imperial Hotel,” she said, feeling a strange, eager energy gather in her feet. “You'd best come by in the morning and talk with Brigham before you go back.”

“I will,” Polly promised. “Do you want me to walk to the hotel with you?”

“You would have to come back by yourself,” Lydia reasoned, with a shake of her head. “No, Polly, I'll be fine. And I'll see you tomorrow.”

With that, the two women parted. There was a moon, and light swelling into the street from the doorway of the States Rights Saloon, as well as a plank-board eatery and a place of suspicious enterprise, so Lydia didn't need a lantern.

She tried to ignore the music as she passed the large meetinghouse where the dance was being held, but it pulled at her spirit, like an invisible hand. Lydia was filled with an achy nostalgia for earlier, simpler times, when war was only something mentioned in a history primer and she'd still believed in mystery and magic.

Reaching the Imperial Hotel, Lydia hurried upstairs and knocked at Aunt Persephone's door, which was directly across the hall from her own.

Persephone was enjoying a carry-up dinner at a table next to the window. “Merciful heavens, Lydia, I thought you'd been carried off by white slavers or something. Where in heaven's name have you been?”

Lydia drew up a chair and sat, shaking her head when Persephone offered her a portion of her meal. “I helped Polly serve her lumberjacks tonight, and she gave me supper.”

Persephone looked detached, in a crafty sort of way. “Her lumberjacks?”

“She's working as a cook,” she said.

The older woman pushed back her plate and sighed contentedly, evidently willing to let the subject of Polly go without further discussion. “What are your plans for the evening, Lydia?”

She thought of the music, and the dancing, and the pure frivolity of the occasion, and took her wanton nature firmly in hand. “I'm planning to retire early,” she said. “Charlotte and Millie will be back first thing in the morning, and your ship sails in the afternoon—”

Persephone stood, smoothing her sateen skirts and touching her gray chignon with a girlish gesture of her palm. “I do declare, Lydia, sometimes you are a sore disappointment to me. You've got music in your eyes and you've been tapping your feet ever since you sat down. You'll go to the dance if I have to drag you there!”

Lydia was stunned. “But—”

Persephone interrupted by clapping her hands briskly several times. “No more protests. It'll do you good to go dancing, and probably have a redeeming effect on Brigham as well.”

Mystified, Lydia allowed herself to be pushed to the door. In the hallway, Persephone looked her over critically.

“A pink party frock would be just the thing, with that lovely coloring of yours, but God knows you're pretty enough even in calico. Those men will be falling all over themselves to get to you.”

Lydia was hurt. She'd had the distinct impression that Aunt Persephone was pushing her toward Brigham ever since their brief acquaintance began. Now it seemed the other woman was anxious to marry her off to the first presentable suitor.

Persephone linked her arm with Lydia's and propelled her down the hallway toward the stairway. Words poured out of Devon and Brigham's aunt in an eager rush. “I dare say I may acquire a beau or two myself.” She gave a trilling, youthful laugh as they hastened down the steps. “And wouldn't my sister Cordelia and I have a fine time telling
that
story around Bright Harbor, Maine!”

Music and light still poured through the open doors of the meetinghouse as they approached, moments later, and Lydia couldn't stop the smile that spread over her mouth.

At one end of the hall, on an improvised dais of planks balanced on bricks, a fat, smiling man with a patch over one eye and a single suspender holding up his battered trousers played a fiddle. Beside him, on an upturned tobacco crate, sat a blond giant with an ordinary saw blade quivering between his meaty hands, making the plaintive, oddly lovely sound Lydia had heard earlier, while walking back to the hotel.

On the dance floor, which was really just hard-packed dirt with a little sawdust sprinkled over it, other men whirled gracelessly with plain-faced Indian women. Yet other men danced with each other, in a playful way that made Lydia smile. She would have bolted from the place if Aunt Persephone hadn't been holding onto her arm so tightly.

Almost instantly a crowd gathered, and Lydia blushed self-consciously as the horde of men looked her and Aunt Persephone over like a pair of two-headed hens on display at the fair. Then a tall, muscular, and very handsome young man stepped forward, his red hair glinting in the lantern light.

He bowed low, to the cheers of the other men, and offered Lydia his hand without a word.

She took it, too. She'd never danced with a real partner before, because she'd spent her early years looking after her hapless father, and then the war had come along, but her untrained feet seemed to know how to make the steps.

Out of the corner of her eye Lydia saw Aunt Persephone go barreling by in the embrace of a bald man with arms the size of tree trunks, a pink blush highlighting her cheeks.

After the first partner, another presented himself, and then another. Lydia grew breathless, and a little dazed, but she wanted to keep dancing forever.

When she suddenly found herself in Brigham's embrace, being swept through the steps so gracefully that she couldn't even be certain her feet were still touching the floor, she thought she was imagining things. Then she saw the grim set of his jaw and the angry flash in his eyes and knew he was only too real.

“You're just full of surprises, aren't you, Miss McQuire?” he asked. Another man tried to cut in just then, and Brigham seared him with a look that would have dried up Puget Sound. “What the hell do you think you're doing, making a spectacle of yourself in front of all these men?”

Lydia laughed, intoxicated by the exercise, the unaccustomed attention, the music, and the sheer fun of being the belle of the ball. “Is that what I'm doing, Brigham? Making a spectacle?”

“Yes,” he hissed, his breath warm on her face, his hard body pressed close to her soft and pliant one. “I'm taking you back to the hotel, right now!”

The other people in the big room were a colorful swirl around Lydia; she was conscious only of Brigham, and the way he was holding her, and the things he made her want.

“I'm not going anywhere,” she informed him.

A resigned look came over Brigham's handsome features, and without any warning at all, he hoisted her over his shoulder like a sack of pearl barley and headed for the door.

Lydia began to kick and struggle, but Brigham was far too strong, and she knew it was hopeless. He carried her over the board sidewalk, across the manure-strewn street, and set her down on the hotel steps with a thump that jarred her bones.

She was mad as a hen doused in winter well water, and for the moment all she could do was stand there, staring up at him and quivering with helpless rage.

If anything, Brigham looked even angrier than she was. “You're lucky you didn't end up in the hold of one of those ships out in the harbor,” he snapped, glaring at her, “on your way to some brothel in South America!”

Lydia felt the color drain from her face. “You're just saying that to scare me!” she accused in a furious whisper. “Besides, I was perfectly safe the whole time. Aunt Persephone was there, and not one of those men would have hurt me.” She paused. “Aunt Persephone!” she cried, and started back across the street to reclaim the adventurous old woman before she met with a foul fate.

Brigham caught her arm and hauled her back to his side again. “My aunt has been reading in her room all evening,” he said.

For a moment Lydia was baffled. Then she realized she'd been tricked. Persephone had obviously wanted Brigham to find her at the dance, but had that been the act of a friend or a foe? On the one hand, Brigham seemed jealous, and the thought was a heady one, filling Lydia with excitement as she entertained it. That could well have been Persephone's aim.

On the other, however, the clever old woman might have been trying to get rid of an unwanted house guest, believing Brigham would send her away in disgrace if he found her enjoying the attentions of other men. Just the way Devon had sent Polly away.

Lydia felt true grief, imagining how it would be to leave the girls and Quade's Harbor and, yes, God help her, Brigham. Still, pride caused her to hold her head high.

Before she could offer to resign, however, Brigham guided her up the stairs and into the lobby of the Imperial Hotel. “It would seem there is only one way to keep you out of trouble, Miss McQuire,” he said. “Perhaps I'd better just make you my wife and be done with it.”