Twice Loved (copy2) (2 page)

Geraniums—Laura’s favorite—had already been set out beside the wooden step. A new line of evergreen shrubs bordered the west end of the house, where a lean-to—called a linter on Nantucket—snuggled against the fireplace wall. Surprised, Rye scanned its angled roof. The linter had been added on since last he was home.

As he crunched his way the last twenty feet up the shelled path, the noon clarion rang out from the tower of the Congregational church below. Fifty-two times a day it struck, and had for as long as Rye remembered. It now called Nantucket’s citizens to take their midday meal, but the reverberations seemed to explode within Rye Dalton’s heart as a personal welcome home.

Just short of the house, he stepped off the path to approach silently. The front door was open, and the smell of dinner drifted out as if in welcome. A thrill of expectation again lifted his heart, and suddenly he was grateful she’d chosen to await him in the privacy of their home instead of on the public wharf.

He set his sea chest beside the path, ran four shaky fingers through the bleached hair that lay about his face like tangled kelp, heaved a nervous sigh that momentarily lifted his chest, and stepped to the open doorway.

It faced south, leading directly to the yard from the keeping room into whose shadows Rye peered blindly, his eyes still 
dazzled 
by the brilliance outside. He made not a sound, though it seemed his heart clattered aloud and must forewarn her of his presence.

She leaned before a giant stone fireplace, dressed in a blue flowered floor-length dress and a white homespun apron, which she held like a potholder while stirring the contents of an iron cauldron hanging on the crane.

He stared at the back of her head with its heavy knot of nutmeg-colored hair, at her slender back, at the faint outline of hip beneath blue cotton. She was humming quietly to the accompaniment of the spoon clanking against the pot.

His palms went damp and he felt almost dizzy at finding everything so dearly close to the way he’d left it. In silence he watched her, basking in the simple familiarity of homing to such a woman, such a house.

She clapped the cover back on the pot and reached up to set the spoon on the mantel while he imagined the lift of her breasts, the coffee brown of her eyes, and the curve of her lips.

At last he knocked softly on the open door.

Laura Dalton looked over her shoulder, startled. A tall man was silhouetted in the door space, haloed by the blaze of noon light behind him. She made out broad shoulders, a full shock of hair, something bulky draped between wrist and hip, feet spraddled wide as if against a hearty wind.

“Yes?” She turned, wiping her palms on the apron, then lifting one to shade her eyes. She squinted, and moved forward with uncertain steps until the hem of her dress was lit by the sunlight slanting across the wooden floor. There she stopped, making out familiar blue eyes, copper skin, bleached brows and hair... and the first lips she had ever kissed.

She gasped, and her hands flew to her mouth. Her eyes widened in disbelief while she stiffened as if struck by lightning.

“R ... Rye?” Her heart went wild. Her face blanched, and the room seemed to spin around crazily while she stared at him, shocked. At last her hands fluttered downward and she stammered again in a choked voice, “R ... Rye?”

He managed a shaky smile while she struggled to comprehend the incredible: Rye Dalton, hale and vital, was standing before her!

“Laura,” he got out, half choking on the word before continuing with gruff emotion. “After five years, is that all y’ve got t’ say?”

“R ... Rye... my God, you’re alive!”

He dropped his pea jacket to the floor and took one long step, head bending, arms reaching, while she flew forward to be gathered high and hard against him.

Oh no, oh no, oh no! her thoughts protested, while those long-remembered arms hauled her close against a rough striped shirt that smelled of the sea. She pinched her eyes shut, then opened them wide as if to steady the senses that careened off kilter. But it was Rye! It was Rye! His embrace threatened to crack her ribs and his body with its wide-spread legs was pressed against the length of hers, his cheek of bronze very warm and rough, and very much alive! Her arms did what they’d done a thousand times before, what they’d ached to do a thousand times since. They circled his tough, wide shoulders and clutched him while her temple lay pillowed against his swooping sideburn and tears scalded her eyes. Then Rye lifted his head. Hard calluses framed Laura’s face as he bracketed her jaws with broad hands and kissed her with an impatience that had been growing for five years. Wide, warm, familiar lips slanted over hers before reason interfered. His tongue came hungering, searching and finding the depths of her mouth as the years slid away into oblivion. They crushed each other with the sweet torment of reunion driving their hearts into a ramming dance as the embrace and kiss pushed all sense of time aside.

At last they separated, though Rye still held her face as if it were a precious treasure, gazing down into her eyes as he whispered in a racked voice, “Ah, Laura-love.” Tiredly, he leaned his forehead against hers while his eyes sagged shut, and he basked in the scent and nearness of her, running his palms over her back as if to memorize its every muscle.

After a long moment she lifted his face, traversing it with fingertips and eyes, familiarizing herself with five added years of creases that webbed its bronzed skin. The days of gazing into high sun seemed to have bleached not only his hair and brows, but the very blue of his eyes.

With those eyes he drank her in, standing a small space away. He lifted one long palm, as tough as the leagues of rigging it had hauled, and lay it on her cheek, pink still from the heat of the fireplace. His other palm fell from her shoulder to the gentle hillock of her breast, caressing it as though to affirm that she was real, that he was here at last.

She reacted as she always had, pressing more firmly against his palm, letting her eyelids slide closed for a moment, cupping the back of his hand with her own as her heartbeat and breathing hastened. Then, realizing what she was doing, she captured his hand in both of hers, turned her lips into it, and pressed it instead to her face, while dread and relief raised a tempest of emotions within her.

“Oh, Rye, Rye,” she despaired, “we thought you were dead.”

He placed his free hand on the knot of hair at the nape of her neck, wondering how far down her back it would fall when he freed it. His rough palm caught in the fine strands he remembered so well, had dreamed of so many lonely times. Once more he circled her with both arms, holding her lightly against him while asking, “Didn’t y’ get any of my letters?”

“Your letters?” she parroted, gathering enough common sense to push at his inner elbows and back out of his embrace, though it was the last thing she wanted to do.

“I left the first one in the turtle shell on Charles Island.”

There was, atop a certain rock in the Galapagos Islands, a large white turtle shell known to every deep-water whaling man in the world. No New England vessel passed it by without putting in to check for letters from home or, if heading eastward around Cape Horn, to pick up any seamen’s letters it held and deliver them to loved ones in towns such as Nantucket or New Bedford. It often took months for these letters to reach the right hands, but most eventually did.

“Y’ didn’t get it?” Rye studied the brown eyes with long charcoal lashes that had seen him through a hundred storms at sea and brought him safely into harbor at last.

But Laura only shook her head.

“I left that first one in the winter of ’thirty-three,” he recalled, frowning in consternation. “And I sent another with a first mate from Sag Harbor when we crossed paths with the 
Stafford
 in the Philippines. And another from Portugal ... why, I know I sent you at least three. Didn’t y’ get any of them?”

Again Laura only shook her head. The sea was wet and ink was vulnerable. Voyages were long, destinies uncertain. There were myriad reasons why Rye’s letters had failed to reach their destination. They could only stare at each other and wonder.

“B ... but word came back that the 
Massachusetts
 went down with ... with all hands.” Unsmiling, she touched his face, as if to reaffirm he was no ghost. It was then she saw the small craters in his skin—several on his forehead, one that slightly altered the familiar line of his upper lip, and another that fell into the smile line to the right side of his mouth, giving him an appearance of rakishness, as if he wore a teasing grin when he did not.

Dear God, she thought. Dear God, how can this be?

“We lost three hands just this side of the Horn. They jumped ship, too scared t’ face roundin’ ’er after all. So we put into the coast of Chile t’ sign on some shoalers and walked into an epidemic of smallpox. Eleven days later, I knew I had it, too.”

“But you took the cowpox inoculation before you left.” She touched the scar on his upper lip.

“Y’ know it’s not foolproof.” Indeed, it wasn’t. The current method of inoculation was to let the pus of the cowpox scabs dry on the ends of threads, then apply the virus to a scratch in the skin. Though it didn’t always prevent the disease, it nevertheless greatly reduced its severity.

“Anyway, I was one of the unlucky ones who caught it. At least, I thought I was unlucky when they put me off ship. But later, when I heard that the 
Massachusetts
 had piled up on Galapagos and gone down with all hands...” A haunted look came into his eyes and he sighed deeply at his near brush with death and memories of his lost shipmates. Then he seemed to draw himself back to the present with a squaring of his shoulders. “When the fever and rash were gone, I had t’ wait for another ship in need of a cooper. I made my way t’ Charles Island, knowin’ they all put in there, and I got lucky. Along came the 
Omega,
 and I signed articles on her, then headed into the Pacific, all the time believin’ my letter would reach y’ and y’d know I was still alive.”

Oh, Rye, my love, how can I tell you?

She studied his beloved face—long, lean, handsome, and hardly marred by the scars. She counted each one—seven, she could find—and resisted the urge to kiss each of them, realizing that the physical scars of this voyage were nothing compared to the emotional scars yet to come.

His thick hair was the color of corn shocks darkening in the weather, and her eyes followed the L-shaped side-whiskers as they jutted toward his cheeks, then she lifted her gaze to his beautifully shaped eyebrows, far less unruly than his hair, which always seemed styled by the whims of the wind, even after he’d just combed it. She smoothed it now—ah, just this once—unable to resist the familiar gesture she’d performed so often in the past. And while she touched his hair she became lost in his eyes, those eyes that had haunted her so when she’d thought him dead. All she’d had to do was step to the doorsill and scan the skies on a clear day to know again the color of those pale, searching eyes of Rye Dalton.

She looked away from them now, haunted anew by all he’d suffered, by all he must yet suffer, through no fault of his own.

They had fought before he left, bitter arguments, with him promising to go whaling just this once, to return to her with his cooper’s “lay”—his share of the profits—and put them on easy street. She had begged and pleaded with him not to go, to stay and work the cooperage here on Nantucket with his father. Riches mattered little to her. But he’d argued, just one voyage—just one. Didn’t she realize how much a cooper’s lay could be if they filled all their barrels? She had expected him to be gone perhaps two years and at first had schooled herself to accept an absence of this duration. But the Nantucket whalers could no longer fill their barrels close to home. The entire world sought whale oil, baleen, as whalebone was called, and ambergris, a waxy substance used in making perfume; those who went in search of these products of the deep found them harder and harder to find.

“But five years!” she half-moaned.

Moving again to cradle her face in his hands, he said now, “I’m not sorry I went, Laura. The 
Omega
 chocked off! Filled ’er hold! Do y’ know how rich—”

But just then a small voice interrupted. “Mama?”

Laura leaped backward and pressed a hand to her hammering heart.

Rye spun around.

In the doorway stood a lad whose pale blond head reached no higher than Rye’s hip. He peered up uncertainly at the tall stranger while one finger shyly tugged at the corner of a winsome mouth. A burst of emotion flooded Rye’s chest. A son, by Jesus! I have a son! His eyes sought Laura’s, but she avoided his questioning glance.

“Where’ve you been, Josh?”

Josh,
 Rye thought joyously. Shortened from my father’s Josiah?

“Waiting for Papa.”

Panic tore through Laura. Her mouth went dry, her palms damp. She should have told Rye immediately! But how do you tell a man a thing like that?

His face, alit with joy only seconds ago, suddenly lost its smile as he turned a quizzical expression to his wife. She felt the blood leap to her cheeks and opened her mouth to tell him the truth, but before she got the chance, steps crunched on the shell path outside and a square-built man stepped to the doorway. His attire was very formal: square-tailed black frock coat, bowed white cravat, and twilled pantaloons stretched faultlessly taut between hidden suspenders and the straps riding under his shoes. He removed a shiny beaver top hat and hung it on a coat tree beside the door in a smooth, accustomed movement. Only then did he look up to find Laura and Rye standing like statues before him. His hand fell still halfway down the row of buttons on his double-breasted topcoat.

Laura swallowed. The face of the man in the doorway suddenly blanched. Rye’s glance darted from the dapper man to Laura, to the beaver hat on its peg, and back to the man again. The sound of stew bubbling in the pot seemed as loud as the roar of a nor’easter, so silent had the room become.

Rye was gripped by a sick feeling of dread, a dread much stronger than any he’d experienced while rounding Cape Horn in the jaws of two oceans that ripped at one another and threatened to dismember the ship.