A Light For My Love (32 page)

He shivered and China saw goose bumps rise on
the broad plane of his back. She wanted to cover him with the
towel, but something about the sound of his voice stopped her.

He went on. "I walked for a long time and it
got pretty late. It was way past midnight by the time I decided to
start back for the ship. The streets were quiet, and even a lot of
the saloons had closed up. I felt, I don't know, lost or something
that night, like I didn't have a home anywhere in the world. All
those dark windows . . . Then up ahead I saw a
window with a light in it, and I thought about your lamp, like I
had every day since the morning we left. But this light turned out
to be in a tattoo parlor. I walked in and drew a picture of what I
wanted. When I walked out, I had this." He turned his head and
looked down at the tattoo.

China stared at the shadows under his
shoulder blades, curved and shaped with muscle. With the benefit of
hindsight, she was beginning to regret very much that he'd ever
left. Maybe all of their lives would have been different if he and
Quinn had stayed. Maybe if Jake had spoken up, if she'd known how
he felt . . . 

He shivered again, making the gold hair on
his arms stand erect, and this time she stepped forward to drape
the towel over one of his shoulders. She perched on the high edge
of the tub next to him,, but he kept his eyes on the floor. The
soot on his face muted his expression. Much as she wanted to sit
here, just to be near him, she knew he was cold and she had to tend
his wounds. She stood and pulled an enameled pitcher from the
corner cupboard, then filled it under the taps.

"Here, let's clean you off," she said
quietly, and eased his head forward. She gave him a bar of castile
soap to wash his face. Then she poured the warm water through his
grimy hair and gently lathered it with the soap. He leaned his arms
on the rolled edge of the tub, dropping his forehead to rest on
them. His Saint Nicholas medal clanked against the porcelain. She
felt the stiff, tight muscles in his neck. Pulling his chain aside,
she kneaded his neck and shoulders, using the warm lather to smooth
her firm strokes. He uttered a wordless sound of relief.

Tired and hurt though he was, she felt a deep
sense of intimacy as she touched him, and a foolish, distressing
desire to kiss his arm where it bore the tattoo of her lamp.

She moved her hands higher to massage his
head lightly. The suds were gray with soot, except in two places,
where they were tinged faintly pink as well.

"Jake," she murmured. "Why did you leave
Astoria? I didn't know how you felt, or what you thought. Couldn't
you have tried to tell me?"

He lifted his head to look at her, his
expression hard and cynical. She felt color creep into her
cheeks.

"Oh, sure," he said. "You could barely stand
to be at the same dinner table with me. And you were busy with your
tea parties and that little pimple, Zach Stowe."

Maybe that was true. If he'd stayed, would
her opinion of him have been magically transformed? After all,
seven years earlier, she had believed she

would marry Zachary Stowe, and Jake Chastaine
had been just one of Quinn's stray-dog friends.

How could she have been so damnably blind? So
wrong about everything? It made her heart ache to listen to him
talk about his love for her in the past tense, as a thing now
obsolete that had never had a chance to really live.

He let his head drop again, and continued,
"Besides, I did try to tell you. With that gold box. I guess it was
my fault for not having the guts to sign my name on the note." He
lifted his shoulders in a kind of reclining shrug. "But it's just
as well that you didn't know. It wouldn't have worked, you and me.
Pop was probably right about that."

She reached for the pitcher to rinse his
hair, pouring water slowly through the clean, pale strands. She
noticed that underneath, where the sun hadn't touched it, his hair
was the same sandy color it had been when he was a boy. Lifting the
towel off his shoulder, she blotted the dripping mass.

"Your father said that? You talked about me?"
She put the stopper in the tub drain and turned on the taps. Then
she picked up some cotton wool and got the bottle of witch hazel
from the cupboard.

Jake paused a moment, as though searching his
memory for the words. "Yeah. Pop told me to stay with my own kind
where I belonged, and away from you. A highborn lady would do me no
good, he said. I didn't want to believe him—Christ, we had some
fights about it. But I suppose he knew what he was talking
about."

"Good heavens, why? I've never met your
father." China was annoyed to learn that she'd been the topic of a
heated debate over a reason she'd known nothing about, then judged
and condemned. She stood behind him, carefully dabbing at gashes on
his scalp with the antiseptic. They'd stopped bleeding, but at one
point she heard Jake's hissing intake of breath when she touched a
tender spot.

"Does the name Bedford mean anything to you?"
he asked.

"Yes, they're a wealthy Portland family. I
met them once when they visited Astoria, but I was just a girl at
the time."

His shoulders drooped ever so slightly.
"Years ago they used to spend their summers here. Dr. Bedford would
take a house for his wife and daughters, then come down on the
weekends."

“One of the daughters was a rebellious
freethinker. She loved to sneak away from her boring, ladylike
sisters to walk along the docks and watch the fishing boats come
in. That was how she met Pop. He was twenty-three.

"Her name was Lily and she had a big crush on
Pop. She'd be there, waiting on the dock every afternoon when his
boat came in, pretty as a flower with her big straw hat and summer
dresses. She'd tag after him, refusing to go home, pestering him
with a thousand questions. He tried to convince her that he wasn't
the one for her, that she ought to find a man from her own world.
Lily wouldn't hear of it. She was nineteen, old enough to know what
she wanted. And she wanted him. It didn't matter to her that he was
a fisherman, she said. She loved him so much she'd be happy
anywhere they lived, even in a shanty on Tenth Street."

China sat on the edge of the tub again,
facing Jake, to tend a cut near his hairline. He made two fists
against his knees, and his eyes looked like green ice as he stared
up at her.

"Well, Pop was only a man, and a young one at
that. She was too hard to resist and at the end of summer they
eloped across the river to Ilwaco."

China let her hands fall and stared at
him.

He nodded. "Lily Bedford was my mother."

That, thought China, explained Jake's blond
good looks. The Bedfords were very attractive people, and his
ancestry showed in the shape of his head, the symmetry of his frame
and muscles, the fine bones of his face.

"Do you remember much about her?" she asked
softly.

He gave her a familiar lopsided smile, one
she was beginning to realize covered a lot of hurt. "She was
beautiful, I think. She had light hair and blue eyes." He tipped
his head back to consider her. "They were dark blue, like yours.
But mostly I remember that she always seemed sad."

The cocky impudence that China had always
associated with Jake was absent, and in the void she found a man
plagued with self-doubts.

"Life on Tenth Street isn't easy for any
woman," he went on, speaking as though to himself. "But for her,
someone used to comfort and plenty, I guess even love couldn't
overcome the emptiness. I can still remember her sitting on our
front porch in a rocking chair, watching the river go by for hours
at a time." He stared unseeing at the water flowing from the tap.
"Then one day I woke up and she was gone."

Gone to the angels? six-year-old Jake had
asked his father. Like the mother of one of the neighbor boys, a
few doors down? No, he'd been told, she'd

gone to Portland. Jake couldn't conceive that
his mother would leave them. So he made up the story he told Susan
Price, for himself and others: his mother was away visiting
friends, but she'd be back. His father had taken the story a step
further, telling their neighbors and friends that his wife had died
while visiting relatives. His pride hadn't permitted him the luxury
of the truth.

Ethan Chastaine became a bitter man and a
humorless, argumentative father.

"He told me I was wasting my time chasing
after a rich girl. Back then, I thought that if I went to sea and
made something of myself, maybe that rich girl would look at me
differently." Jake rubbed his forehead in a kind of weary gesture.
"But she told me I'd never be welcome in her home again. So then I
had no reason to stay—if I had, I think Pop and I would've killed
each other, and I probably would've had to marry Althea
Lambert."

China felt her throat tighten as she listened
to him, and she cleared it, trying to ease the aching constriction.
"But Jake, you dragged my brother with you. We had so little
family. You may have had no mother. I had no parents, even before
my father drowned."

His head came up at her words, and he briefly
touched a hand to her arm. Water droplets fell on his bare
shoulders from his hair, catching the light like crystals. "China,
Quinn was my best friend. He was like a brother to me, too. But I
knew him for what he was—bored and a little selfish. Most of all,
he was a hellion. We got along because we were alike. You must know
that. He wasn't like those prinking boys who came to your parties.
And after that day in the alcove with you, I practically begged him
not to ship out with me. I told him

his family needed him. But I couldn't change
his mind."

For a frozen moment, she could see Jake
running against the backdrop of her memory, young, tall, and
spare-fleshed, with Quinn loping along beside him, the summer sun
gleaming off their two heads, one sandy blond, the other black as
midnight.

Her heart grew heavier in her chest by the
minute. She felt as though she were living some Shakespearean
tragedy of misunderstood intentions, words not spoken,
opportunities lost forever.

China reached for the taps to turn off the
water. The room was hot and damp with steam. She turned to face him
again, crossing her arms over her chest to keep from putting her
hand to his cheek.

"So, now I know why you left. Why did you
return to Astoria after all this time? You could have found a cargo
for your ship anywhere in the world."

He leaned over and trailed his hand in the
bath water. His words came with difficulty. "Yeah, I could've. But
when I got the
Katherine Kirkland
, I had to come back to
prove that I'd succeeded—to Pop, to everyone who thought I was just
a guttersnipe and could never be anything else. That ship, owning
her has gotten me something I never had here before—I have respect.
Not a lot, but enough. From Pop, although he'd rather die than
admit it, from the men I'm doing business with, from some of the
people who expected me to fail." He raised his eyes to hers and
leaned forward slightly, his words emphatic. "I like that, China.
It feels good. And there isn't much in the world I'd trade for
it."

She regarded him as he sat before her, strong
and broad-chested, with a sense of honor and loyalty that she had
never suspected. Before, when she'd looked at him, she'd merely
seen the ways in which they were different. If only she had seen
the ways that they were the same, before their lives had diverged.
But she hadn't, and the chance to alter their course was long
lost.

She rose from her seat on the edge of the
tub. "I'm glad you got what you wanted, Jake. Are you going back to
your ship tonight?"

He stood too and looked at his watch. "It's
almost midnight. If it's okay with you, can I stay here tonight?
I'll be out of your way before breakfast."

Out of her way, out of her life. It was too
late now to let him know how she felt. Too late for almost
everything. She glanced at him one more time, taking in the
quintessence of everything he was. The chances were good that he'd
never be back. He belonged to another woman now, the
Katherine
Kirkland
. And China had to begin sealing him away in a corner
of her heart that she'd not open again.

"You're welcome to stay. After all, your rent
is paid through the end of the month." She went to the door and
paused, letting her eyes touch briefly on his left arm. "I don't
suppose you had anything to eat."

"Not here, I didn't," he said. "I guess I'm
really late for dinner tonight."

She smiled ruefully. "If you're hungry, I can
find something for you in the kitchen before I go to bed. It won't
be fancy, but it'll help."

"That would be great, China. Thanks." As
polite as two strangers, she thought.

China walked out, pulling the bathroom door
closed behind her. On her way downstairs, she tried to block out
the look she'd seen on his face, the familiar crooked smile.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The bathroom door latched, and Jake stripped
off his filthy, wet dungarees and gratefully immersed himself in
the hot water. He uttered a low groan as it covered his shoulders
and he stretched out his legs to the end of the tub. The heat
flowed over him and sank into his aching muscles, loosening them.
He'd miss this tub after he left; two feet deep and over five feet
long, it was a far cry from washing in sea water. But that was the
least of his worries.

He hadn't meant to come back here tonight.
His wounds weren't mortal. But after the fire and the raging
confusion at the boardinghouse, he had to make sure China was safe.
He couldn't trust Dalton Williams to put her welfare above that of
the Sailors Protective League. Williams was so ready to sacrifice
himself that he probably would think nothing of sacrificing her as
well.