Captive Bride (10 page)

Alan ignored the inference. “All I’m saying is don’t be impetuous. Court her if you like, but be cautious.

Don’t throw your heart at her feet.” Jeremy smiled. “But that’s love, isn’t it? You have to offer everything. That’s the only way she’ll know how much you care.”

Alan shook his head. Jeremy was hopeless. Either he’d find an equally soft-headed girl and they’d live happily ever after like two cooing doves, or he’d be eaten alive by some she-spider.

He closed his account book. “I’ll tell you what.

Why don’t we close up a little early tonight? Go out, get drunk and maybe you’ll find another girl just as pretty as Cynthia Dodge to fall in love with.” Jeremy frowned and his jaw tightened. “I’m not a fool, Mr. Sommers.”

“I’m sorry,” Alan apologized. “What if I take Mrs.

Dodge up on her dinner offer for next Thursday, but ask if I can bring you along?” 86

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The frown erased and Jeremy’s ruddy face glowed once more. “I’d really appreciate that.”

“I could fall ill at the last minute and you could go alone and make my excuses.”

“You’d do that?”

“I’d be happy to do that.”

Jeremy thanked him again and went to take in the outdoor displays for the night while Alan cashed out the day’s receipts. He felt a little jittery and realized he was nervously anticipating the prospect of spending another evening with Huiann. Damn, he was as foolish as Jeremy, going cow-eyed about a woman he didn’t know. Next he’d be casting his heart on a mud puddle for her to step on as she crossed it.

Huiann had set two places at the table and sat with him without question. She served him from the dishes on the table, and afterward waved Alan away when he tried to help clean up. Tonight he didn’t give her a chance to escape to her room but waited in the kitchen until she was finished washing dishes then indicated the butcher paper he’d set on the table.

“Tell me more about your family.” He found the segment of paper where she’d drawn her village in China and tapped his finger on it. “Family. Father.

Mother. Do you have any brothers or sisters?” She stared blankly. Until now they’d done fairly well at communicating without speaking each other’s language, but they’d hit a frustrating wall. Alan tried to think of a pantomime for
family
then remembered he had a tintype of his own family taken at a studio before he left home.

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“Just a minute.” He held up a finger and went upstairs, returning with the framed tintype of himself, his younger sister, Sarah, and their parents. They looked as stiff as pokers and grim. Of course, at the time Alan hadn’t done a lot of smiling and the rest of the family was angry with him for leaving so soon after returning home from war. His mother was distraught at losing him again and he’d had no way to explain why he had to go.

Huiann’s eyes widened. She pointed to Alan in the picture and spoke rapidly.

“Yeah. That’s me.” He studied himself, hollow-cheeked and dead-eyed. He didn’t quite look like the walking skeleton he’d been when the Union forces had freed him from the camp, but he didn’t look alive either. “This was taken after I got back from the war so I was still pretty skinny.

“This is my mother.” He pointed and repeated the word several times. “And my father. Fa-ther.”

“Motha—
Mu.
Fatha—
Ba,
” she translated for him.

Grabbing up the grease pencil, she sketched stick people and pointed to them. “
Mu. Ba.
Bolin, Bao, Mei.”

Her eyes shone with tears. It must hurt like hell for her to think about the family she’d left behind and the father who’d sold her into slavery.

Alan pointed to his sister in the photograph. “Sarah, my sister. I had another younger sister but she died when she was only two. I don’t think my mother ever got over it. She grew harder after that and Sarah could never do anything to please her. Funny how a grieving person sometimes drives away those he loves.” 88

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Huiann studied his family photo then pointed to his map of America on the butcher paper. He guessed she was asking where they were.

There was a United States map displayed on the back wall of the store, a more detailed representation than his crude sketch. He picked up the kerosene lamp and beckoned Huiann to follow him into the store.

It was evening now and no light came through the shuttered windows to illuminate the room. The glow of the lantern scattered the shadows before them. He showed her the faded map tacked to the wall.

“Here’s California, where we are. And here’s my family.” He traced a finger across the entire country from San Francisco to Milton, New Hampshire. So many miles and so much misunderstanding separated him from the people who loved him the most.

“New Hampshire is a lot different than here. Crisp and cold in the fall with beautiful leaves on the trees.

Snowy in winter and never too hot in the summer because we’re near the ocean. Here it’s rainy and foggy all the time. Even in winter it rarely gets below freezing. It took me some time to get used to it.

“People ask how I ended up here, but I don’t have a good answer. I headed west and it was the last stop on the train.”

She murmured something and touched her finger to the map, tracing the western coastline before her finger headed out to sea as if it would cross to China. But the map ended as though the rest of the world had been cut off by its edge.

“We’re alike, you and me. Except I chose to leave my family and you were probably forced to leave yours behind. I could board a train any day and go Bonnie Dee

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back home while you’re stuck here. I’ll pay you though, Huiann, and someday you can afford a ticket home.”

He studied the map and his gaze was drawn inevitably to Georgia. Camp Sumter was only a labeled dot on a map, but reading the name made his stomach churn. Camp Sumter was the formal name for the Confederate prison dubbed Andersonville.

He pointed to the spot. “I was here during the war.

I’m sure you don’t know about our civil war. Why would you? But it tore everyone’s lives apart. I didn’t do anything, just sat around waiting for the war to be over, first in a prison near Richmond and later in the stockade they called Andersonville. It wasn’t unlivable at first but by the end there were over twenty thousand men crowded in space meant for half that many. I read those numbers later in the newspaper. Don’t know if they’re accurate. All I know is we were packed together waiting for something to happen—release, death, it didn’t much matter which. There was little food and only a muddy stream running down the middle of the camp for water. We fought over scraps like dogs, but I also saw some heroic behavior there, men sacrificing for their friends.

“One morning we woke and the guards had gone. A little while later or maybe it was days—time had lost meaning by then—a platoon of Union soldiers set us free. The war was over and we could go home.” Alan listened to his voice telling her all this as if he were an observer, a stranger listening to an interesting story from long ago. He hadn’t spoken to anyone about his experience in the war, not his family or friends, and he could only tell Huiann because she didn’t 90

Captive Bride

understand. He began to understand why the Catholics were so eager to unburden themselves in the privacy of a confessional booth.

“I should be past this by now. As my father pointed out, I didn’t suffer any real harm. I didn’t even have to kill anyone. I was barely in a battle before I was captured. A lot of veterans have amputated limbs or are deaf or blind. I should rejoice in being alive and whole. My father’s right, I know. But here it is five years later and I can’t stop having nightmares.” Then Alan told Huiann his deepest secret, the one he tried not to admit to himself. “I know I should be grateful for my life, but sometime I feel like I already died and I’m just going through the motions. I’m pretending to be alive, running a business, running for government, talking to people, eating food, shitting it out again, going to bed at night then starting all over again the next day. But it all means nothing to me. I’m hollow.”

He glanced at her, and her soulful eyes were riveted on his face. A slight frown puckered her brows. She bit her lower lip. He wanted to reach out and hold her hand. Just that. To feel the warmth of human contact and know he wasn’t alone. But after what she’d been through, she’d think he wanted something else and he didn’t want to ruin her fragile trust in him.

There was a moment of silence so profound he could hear the scurrying feet of a mouse somewhere in the room and the voices of passing pedestrians, horses’

hooves, rattling wheels, even distant piano music from a saloon.

Huiann began to speak quietly. The cadence of her lilting voice had a tangible feeling, shapes floating in Bonnie Dee

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the air he could reach out and pluck like strange fruit.

The gravity of her expression reached inside him and wrapped around his heart. She was confiding a secret or something important to her.

As her story ended and she fell silent, Alan dared to reach out and brush the back of his hand against hers.

When she didn’t pull away, he slipped his fingers around her soft hand.

All other noises receded and they were alone in a hushed bubble of warm companionship. Alan never wanted to let go. He listened to her quiet breaths and his own chest rose and fell steadily. A peaceful calmness stole over him even though his heart was beating fast.

Finally, they both let go, their hands sliding apart with a whisper of skin against skin until they were separate once more.

Alan thought he would never see her busy hands cutting vegetables, wiping the table, holding a pencil or sewing cloth without remembering how her hand had felt resting like a nesting bird in his.

Chapter Seven

Huiann fled to her room to escape the spell that wove her and Alan together. She closed her door and leaned against it then rubbed her palm, trying to erase the warmth of his touch. It had felt so good and comforting but she mustn’t allow such closeness between them or he might expect more from her.

There’d been such pain in Alan’s voice and eyes that she’d found herself returning the confidence he shared.

She closed her eyes, frowning as she recalled what she’d told him.

“I know we must revere our parents, but whenever I think of how mine sent me off with a stranger I’m full of rage. Of course, my father didn’t know what Xie Fuhua intended, but even so he let me go to a foreign land, never to see my family again. If he loved me, how could he send me away? I’m a bad daughter, not dutiful or respectful. I should be happy to have brought some security for my family. But I’m angry.

I’m angry!”

The burning feeling in her chest had lifted a little as she admitted the truth at last. And when he reached over and held her hand, Huiann had gripped him like a shipwreck survivor clinging to flotsam. She could’ve held his hand all night.

With a curse, Huiann pushed off the door and crossed the room to the hook where her nightdress hung.

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She was in the middle of changing when she heard Alan’s footsteps on the stairs. Her fingers froze on the buttons of her dress as she listened to the floorboards creak in the hallway. Her heart beat faster. Would those footsteps stop in front of her door? Would he knock or call her name? But Alan’s heavy tread continued on down the hall to his own room.

She exhaled and the heaviness of disappointment filled her. Shameful woman.

Huiann finished dressing for bed and lay down on her bed. She stared at the faint light and shadows on her ceiling for hours, thinking about secrets exchanged in the stillness of night and the potent force of attraction between phoenixes and dragons.

In the morning they behaved politely to one another over breakfast as if nothing had happened the night before, then Alan went into his store and Huiann began another day alone in the house.

Although she would’ve liked to launder the clothes and bedding, she didn’t dare go to the water pump for buckets to fill the washtub. She’d cleaned the rooms so well the previous day there was little that needed to be done so she started sewing muslin into curtains—a project that would fill many hours.

At noon, Alan came for his lunch and taught her more English words for objects around the room.

There weren’t specific words and intonations for variations of a thing like in her native tongue. In English a word had only one pronunciation no matter what the context.

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“Huiann eat appu…apple.” She repeated the simple sentence he taught her then pressed a hand to her chest.

“
I
eat apple.”

“Yes!” He grinned. “Good.”

She would parrot phrases all day if it earned that bright smile.

Alan returned to work and left her to her sewing.

Even with taking a break to cook dinner, she was able to show him a stack of curtains to be hung when he returned that evening. Her neck, shoulders and fingers were stiff from hours hunched over her work, but a glow of pride filled her at his pleasure in her accomplishment.

After supper, he went to the store and brought back lengths of wooden dowels and metal brackets. The rest of the evening was spent hanging curtains, a job that didn’t go smoothly. As Alan pounded a nail into the wall of the sitting room, the thin plaster layer crumbled away and bits fell into his face. He sneezed and muttered what Huiann could only surmise were curses.

She was embarrassed that her curtains had caused him extra work when he would normally be relaxing for the evening. But after he’d brushed the dust from his eyes, he smiled at her. And the curtains covered the damaged plaster.

When all the windows were finished—the bedroom and parlor casements and the small window above the kitchen sink—Alan stepped down off of the stool and smiled at her again. “Good. Good job.”

“Good” must mean
bu lai.
Huiann accepted his compliment with a bow.

Alan reached into his pocket, pulled out a flat pouch and took several American coins from it. She Bonnie Dee