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Magnus spoke in Icelandic to his wife, who nodded sagely and touched her neat kerchief. “Moving her would be a terrible risk after the shock she has suffered.”
“But—” Jesse clamped his mouth shut until his jaw ached. He pinched the bridge of his nose hard as if trying to squeeze out a simple solution. If Palina was right, and something terrible befell the woman as a result of moving her, he would feel responsible.
Again. Always.
“It is the law of the sea,” Magnus said, running his weathered right hand through his bushy hair. “God has given her to you.”
They stood together on the tiled hearth in front of the massive black stove, Palina absently tugging at a thread on Magnus’s empty white sleeve. Yet her gaze never left Jesse’s, and he saw again a spark of faith, ancient and obstinate, in the depths of her eyes.
Faith.
“I don’t believe in the old sea legends,” he said. “Never have.”
“It does not matter what you believe. It is still true,” Magnus said.
Palina set her hands on her hips. “There are things that come to us from beyond eternity, things we have no right to question. This is one of them.”
Every aching fiber that made up Jesse Morgan leaped and tensed in painful denial. He would not, could not, accept this stranger into his house, into his world.
“She can’t stay.” Fear turned his voice to a whiplash of anger. “I can’t give her anything. Can’t give her help or hope or healing. There’s nothing here for her, don’t you understand that? She’d stand a better chance in hell.”
The words were out before he realized what he was saying. They came from the poisoned darkness inside him, and they rang with undeniable truth.
Magnus and Palina exchanged a glance and some low words. Then Palina tilted her head to one side. “You will do what you must for the sake of this woman. This child.” Her eyes sharpened with insight. “Twelve years ago, the sea took from you everything you held dear.” Her words dropped heavily into the silence. “Now, perhaps, it has given something back.”
The couple left the house. Jesse had no doubt that Palina was aware of what she had just done. She had breached the bounds of their association. In twelve years, no one—no one—had dared to speak to him of what had happened. That was the way he had coped—by not speaking of something that lived with him through each breath he took.
He stalked out to the porch. “Get back here, goddammit!” he yelled across the yard. He had never yelled at these people, never sworn at them. But their stubborn refusal to help him set off his temper. “Get the hell back here and help me with this—this—”
Palina turned to him as she reached the bend in the path. “Woman is the word you want, Jesse. A woman who is with child.”
“Can you believe this, D’Artagnan?” Jesse asked in annoyance. He dismounted and tethered his horse to the hitch rail in front of the Ilwaco Mercantile. “The Jonssons think I have to keep that infernal woman because of some legend of the sea. I never heard of such a damned cockamamy thing. It’s about as crazy as—”
“As talking to your horse?” asked someone on the boardwalk behind Jesse.
He turned, already feeling a scowl settle between his brows. “D’Artagnan gets skittish in town, Judson.”
Judson Espy, the harbormaster, folded his arms across his chest, rocked back on his heels and nodded solemnly. “I’d be skittish, too, if you named me after some Frenchy.”
“D’Artagnan is the hero of The Three Musketeers.”
Judson looked blank.
“It’s a novel.”
“Uh-huh. Well, if the poor nag is so damned nervous, you ought to let me take him off your hands.”
“You’ve been trying to buy this horse for ten years.”
“And you’ve been saying no for ten years.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t caught on yet.” Jesse skimmed his hand across the gelding’s muscular neck. D’Artagnan had come into his life at a low point, when he had just about decided to give up…on everything. A Chinook trader had sold him the half-wild yearling, and Jesse had raised it to be the best horse the territory had ever seen. Over the years, he’d added three more to the herd at the lighthouse station—Athos, Porthos and Aramis completed the cast of the Musketeers.
He joined Judson on the walkway. Their boots clumped as the two men passed the mercantile. As stately as a river barge, the widow Hestia Swann came out of the shop. Touching a bonnet that was more flower arrangement than hat, she lifted a gloved hand with a tiny wisp of handkerchief pinched between her thumb and forefinger.
“Hello, Mr. Espy. And Mr. Morgan. This is a surprise.” She hung back, keeping a polite distance.
Jesse didn’t take offense. He was a stranger to most of these people, even after twelve years. He didn’t blame them for being wary of him.
“Mrs. Swann,” he said, lifting his oiled-canvas hat.
A smile forced its way across her lips. Famous for her social pretensions, Mrs. Swann was unfailingly cordial to him—because of his family in Portland.
As if that mattered anymore.
“How do, ma’am?” Judson said. Jesse started to edge away.
She waved the handkerchief limply at her face. “Not so well, Mr. Espy, but bless you for asking. Ever since Sherman was lost at sea, I’ve been suffering from melancholia. It’s been two years, but it feels like an eternity.”
“Sorry to hear that, ma’am. You take care, now.” Judson turned to Jesse as they started walking again. “What’s this about you keeping a woman at your house?”
He’d raised his voice deliberately; Jesse was sure of it. Hestia Swann, who had been heading for her Studebaker buggy in the road, stopped and stiffened as if someone had rammed a broomstick up the back of her dress. With a loud creaking of whalebone corsets, she turned and bore down on them.
“What?” she demanded. “Mr. Morgan’s got a woman at the lightkeeper’s house?”
Judson nodded. Mischief gleamed in his eye. “Ay-uh. That’s what he said. I just heard him telling his horse.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. Why would he be talking to his horse?”
“Because he’s Jesse Morgan.”
“And he’s not deaf,” Jesse said in irritation.
“You hush up,” snapped Mrs. Swann. “This is serious business, keeping a woman—”
“I’m not keeping her—”
“Ah! So there is a woman!” Mrs. Swann exclaimed.
“What’s that?” Abner Cobb came out of the mercantile, his apron clanking with its load of penny nails and brass tacks.
Jesse fought an urge to jump on D’Artagnan and head for the hills to the south of town.
“Jesse Morgan is keeping a woman at his house,” Hestia Swann announced in her most tattle-sharp voice.
Grinning, Abner thumped Jesse on the back. “’Bout time, I’d say. You haven’t had female company since we’ve known you.”
“She’s not company,” Jesse said, but no one heard him. A babble of voices rose as others came out to the boardwalk to hear about this extraordinary development at the lighthouse station. Abner’s wife joined them, closely followed by Bert Palais, editor of the Ilwaco Journal.
“Where’d she come from?” Bert asked, scribbling notes on a sheet of foolscap.
“I found her on—”
“Oh, I imagine the big city,” Mrs. Swann proclaimed, her prominent bosom rising and falling with self-importance. “Isn’t that right, Mr. Morgan?”
“Actually, she—”
“Perhaps she was someone he knew in Portland,” the widow decided, then nodded in agreement with her own deduction while a few more people joined the group. “Yes, that’s it. Jesse is one of the Morgans of Portland.” She leaned over Bert’s shoulder. “His family owns the Shoalwater Bay Company. They have connections well down into San Francisco, did you know that?”
“Of course I know that,” the newspaper editor said. Not to be outdone, he added, “Mr. and Mrs. Horatio Morgan left in April for a grand tour of Europe.”
“I remember reading about that big society wedding a few years back,” Mrs. Cobb remarked. “Annabelle Morgan and Granger Clapp, was it?”
Hestia’s chin bobbed like a wattle as she vigorously agreed. “Jesse’s sister. It was the wedding of the decade, to hear people talk. Now, I wonder, is this woman a friend of Ann—”
Jesse didn’t stay to hear more. He walked away, feeling like a carcass being picked clean by buzzards. Ordinarily, he did his business in town in a perfunctory fashion and got out, attracting as little attention as possible. No one except Judson, who hurried to catch up with him, seemed to notice that he had broken from the crowd.
“Much obliged,” Jesse said through his teeth. He turned down an alleyway off Main Street.
“Where’re you going?” Judson asked.
“To get Doc MacEwan.”
“The woman needs a doctor?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So, she sick or something?”
“Or something.”
Judson scowled in frustration. “Well, what the hell is it, then?”
“She’s pregnant.”
Judson struck himself on the forehead and stumbled back. “Well, I’ll be. You devil, you, Jesse—”
“And if you breathe a goddamned word of this,” Jesse warned him, “I’ll—”
He was too late. Judson was already running back around the corner. “Hey, everybody!” he bellowed to the crowd on the boardwalk. “Guess what?”
Jesse took hold of the brass handle on the door to the doctor’s surgery. He stood for a moment, wondering what had happened to his quiet, isolated existence. Then he thumped his brow against the door once, twice, three times.
It didn’t help.
Dr. MacEwan reveled in being a source of constant controversy. A proponent of radical medical ideas garnered from a fancy eastern college, the physician was aggressive, compassionate, outspoken and undeniably skilled.
Still, many in the close-knit community of Ilwaco regarded Dr. Fiona MacEwan with deep suspicion. Perhaps that was why Jesse felt a vaguely pleasant kinship with her.
He waited in his kitchen while Fiona examined the stranger from the sea. Despite a trying morning in town, Jesse let himself relax a little. By threatening the harbormaster with a large fist, he’d finally managed to get his point across. He told Judson to check his records for a ship that was due in the area. Before long, they would know the identity of the woman.
And now the doctor was here. In just a short time, Dr. MacEwan would take the stranger off his hands and his life would return to normal.
To normal. To its normal hellish loneliness.
Jesse gritted his teeth against feeling, because feeling had been his downfall. This lonely life, his exile, was his fate.
He looked out the broad front window of the house. The days were growing reasonably long, so he didn’t have to worry about getting the light burning for several more hours.
Then the solitary vigil of night would begin.
Hearing a step behind him, he turned to see Dr. MacEwan coming out of the birth-and-death room. Fiona had a broad face and hands that were as sturdy and work-worn as any farm wife’s. She wore her thick, graying hair in a haphazard bun held in place by a pencil or a knitting needle or whatever happened to be at hand. Today it looked as if the object of choice was a crochet hook.
“Well?” Jesse asked.
“She’s semiconscious.”
“What does that mean?”
“Drifting in and out of sleep.” Fiona removed her stethoscope, placing it in its black velvet pouch. “Did you notice she’s wearing no wedding ring?”
“Not everyone wears one.”
“It opens some interesting possibilities,” she said. “She could be a widow—”
“Or a fallen woman.” It was easier to think the worst of her.
“Why is it always the woman who falls?” Fiona mused. “And not the man?”
“For all we know, he’s fallen into the sea, so she’s better off than he is.”
“True.” Fiona lifted her immaculate white pinafore over her head and took her time folding it. “I got her to drink some water and use the necessary. But she’s endured a terrible trauma and is still in danger.”
“Is she…hurt in any way?” Jesse told himself he was asking because he wanted her well and out of his life. The sooner the better.
“I think her collarbone is bruised, so you’ll have to be careful with that.”
“I’ll have to be careful?” A familiar dread crept like a spider across Jesse’s chest.
“Yes. It seems tender there.” Without asking permission, Fiona went to the larder and helped herself to a finger of brandy from his bottle on the shelf. “The right side.”
“Seems to me you should be talking to the people she’ll be staying with.” Even as he spoke, Jesse felt a thump of suspicion in his gut.
Fiona tossed back the brandy, closing her eyes while a look of pleasure suffused her strong, handsome face. Then she opened her eyes. “She’s staying right here. With you. Jesse, you saved her. She’s your responsibility.”
“No.” He strode to the kitchen, slapped his hands on the table and leaned across it, glaring at the doctor. “Damn it, Fiona, I won’t have—”
“You won’t have,” she mocked. “It’s always about you, isn’t it, Jesse Morgan? You see everything in terms of yourself.”
