Page 19 of I Do, I Do, I Do
An hour later, during a demonstration emphasizing the dangers of camp stoves, Clara gave up trying not to think about him. She couldn’t get over the fact that Mr. Bernard T. Barrett had complimented her as a prettylittlething.
In twenty-six years, no one had ever described Clara Klaus as little. The word ravished her and sent a shiver of delight coursing through her body followed by a pang of regret. Where had men like Bernard T. Barrett been when she was single? She just knew that he didn’t have a string of Mmes Barrett trailing out behind him. Her heart understood with rock-solid certainty that he wasn’t that kind of low-down, good-for-nothing man.
“Clara, are you paying attention?” Zoe glared at her. “We all need to know how to operate this stove, because we’ll each have our turn at using it.”
“Wait a minute.” Juliette’s gray eyes rounded in horror. “You don’t expect me to cook. Oh, my heavens. You do.”
Clara listened to Zoe’s sharp reply with half an ear. As far as Clara could discern, Juliette had not acknowledged the man across the street. Judging by Juliette’s demeanor, she was entirely indifferent to a handsome man’s intent interest.
Which meant that Juliette was a far better person than she, Clara thought with a sigh of irritation. She cast another surreptitious glance in the direction Bernard T. Barrett had taken. She would never see Mr. Barrett again, and that was just as well. After all, she was sort of married.
Bracing herself, she thought of her thieving husband and waited for the anvil of pain to squash her as it usually did when she grieved over Jean Jacques.
The pain came, but it didn’t quite squash her. For the first time since Juliette had appeared and ruined her life, Clara sensed that a moment might come when she could think about Jean Jacques without the anguish of wanting to hold him or kill him.
Possibly. Maybe.
Chapter 5
The piers at the foot of First Avenue were crammed with men jammed shoulder to shoulder trying to shout or push their way on board theAnnasett. Hoping to catch the attention of an armed crew member guarding the bottom of the gangplank, Zoe waved her ticket above her hat. It was useless to shout as everyone was yelling. And, she realized, she was too short for her waving ticket to be noticed in the chaotic melee.
Peering over her shoulder, she screamed at Juliette and Clara to stay right behind her. Then she lowered her head and went to work with her elbows, opening a path. When one man stepped back in surprise or anger, she slipped in front of him and jabbed at the next one. By the time she reached the gangplank, her hat was askew, splatters of tobacco juice soiled her skirts, and her elbows were bruised from banging against ribs, but she presented her ticket with a triumphant flourish.
The crewman’s eyebrows soared at the sight of three ticketed women, but he grinned and waved them on board with a look that said he thought they were crazy.
Once on deck, Juliette gripped the railing and stared down at the crush of men shouting and shoving on the pier, all hoping to be the one chosen to fill a last-minute vacancy.
“What if our outfits didn’t get loaded?” she asked, speaking next to Clara’s ear to be heard.
“That’s why we had them sent to the dock yesterday. To make certain no mishap occurred,” Clara reminded her.
“How safe is this boat?” After straightening her hat and cape, Juliette gazed up at the stack, then scanned the deck. “I was told theAnnasetthas room for sixty passengers, but there’s twice that many standing at the rail.”
“I’m guessing we’ll share the trip with three hundred fellow travelers,” Zoe said with a shrug. “Can’t blame the owner for making a profit while he can.”
Juliette gasped and her face turned pale. “We’ll sink!”
Zoe raised her eyes to the hills of Seattle and fervently wished that Juliette were standing on one of them. All she had heard for the last week was: “I can’t do this.” “What if we don’t have enough food in the packs?” “What if we freeze to death?” What if, what if, what if, until Zoe felt like screaming.
She truly did not understand why Juliette undertook a journey that so clearly terrified her. She must have loved Jean Jacques very much to do something she desperately did not want to do in the hope of finding him.
Jealousy whipsawed down Zoe’s spine. For several days now, she hadn’t imagined Jean Jacques kissing Juliette and Clara every time she looked at them. But at odd moments the images rose with tormenting power, blindsiding her as now.
It made her furious. She wanted to feel nothing but hatred when she thought of Jean Jacques, wanted to imagine no scenes except that of herself firing a bullet into his black heart. Unlike Juliette, Zoe had no questions she wanted to ask, and she didn’t care about getting her money back as Clara did. She just wanted revenge, just wanted to kill his butt.
Glaring down at the docks, she watched Bear Barrett stride through the yelling throng, knocking aside smaller men—which included everyone on the pier. She knew him by sight because he came into Uncle Milton’s store once or twice a year, ordering supplies to be sent to his place in Dawson City. Coming up the gangplank behind him was the man who had shown an interest in Juliette the day they assembled their outfits. Today, the green scarf he’d worn around his hatband was tied to a belt loop.
Zoe slid a glare toward Clara and Juliette, noticing they watched the gangplank, too. And it suddenly occurred to her that they would find other men, other loves, once she had made them widows. But what about her? What man could possibly interest her after Jean Jacques? Men like him came into the life of a Newcastle girl only once, if ever. Except he hadn’t been real.
“I’m going to find our stateroom,” she announced abruptly, turning from the rail.
Stateroom was a grossly grandiose term for what she discovered. Deep in the bowels of the steamship, she entered a closet-sized cubicle barely large enough to contain a cot and a two-decker bunk bed. As a concession to gender, they’d been issued a cracked chamber pot painted with daisies and a cloudy mirror that hung above a shelf supporting a lone washbasin.
“Oh, my heavens,” Juliette breathed, appearing in the doorway. Her gray eyes widened in an expression of shock and dismay that was becoming annoyingly familiar.
“This would be cramped for one person, let alone all of us,” Clara observed tightly, stepping past Juliette and blocking the light from a single smoky oil lamp.
Making little whimpering sounds, Juliette collapsed on the bottom bunk. “Three weeks of this? I can’t endure it!”
