Page 9 of I Do, I Do, I Do
Standing, she stared down at Juliette’s slender fingers gripping the ale stein and glared at her rival’s ring. No, her world would never be right and wonderful again.
Juliette handed her the stein and then rubbed her forehead. “I can’t think of a ladylike way to say that I’d prefer not to travel to Seattle with you.”
“Because we detest each other?”
“It might be more tactful to say that we don’t know each other and don’t wish to.”
“Unfortunately, there’s only one stage tomorrow. Unless you want to dawdle here for another day, that stage is your only way north to Seattle.” Clara lifted her head and walked to the door. “I’ll be on that stage.” At the door she turned and looked back. Immediately she wished she hadn’t.
Juliette presented a picture of abject misery: sad reddened eyes, the unadorned virginal nightgown, a slumped posture that cried pain and defeat. Clara wondered how she had managed to get this far in her search for Jean Jacques.
Sighing, she shook her head. She didn’t need to lay out Mama’s cards to read the future. Like it or not (and she didn’t like it), she and Juliette would be traveling together.
First, there was only the one northbound stage. Second, she didn’t want Juliette to find Jean Jacques before she did. And third, Clara was cursed with a caregiving nature. On some idiotic but basic level she felt it her duty and her obligation to look after her husband’s other wife. Jean Jacques would expect her to take Juliette in hand because clearly she was stronger and more wise to the world than Her Ladyship.
Shaking her head, she covered her eyes. She didn’t want to take care of Juliette. She wished Juliette would step off a cliff. Or get run over by a freight wagon. She would cheer if a huge rock squashed Juliette. Would love it if a swift-acting disease carried her away before morning.
In Clara’s defense, she hoped Juliette’s death was instantaneous. She didn’t wish any painful suffering on the woman, she just wanted Juliette to vanish and never return.
“Breakfast is at seven.” She sighed heavily, and did the right thing. “You have a foam mustache on your upper lip. You look ridiculous.”
Closing the door behind her, Clara walked down the staircase and made it to her quarters before her heart collapsed and a flood of anguished tears streamed down her cheeks.
Chapter 3
The town of Newcastle filled the depression below a steep hillside that had been logged off to provide lumber for the small, weathered houses ranged along Coal Creek. Stumps littered the ridge like wharf pilings.
Unpainted fences defined minuscule front yards, and here and there a drooping azalea struggled to survive, but most of the yards were dirt and weeds defended by skinny roosters and a few tired hens.
These things Zoe remembered, but the soot and coal dust always surprised her. Yet if someone had inquired, the ubiquitous coal dust would have leapt to mind before anything else. It crept beneath sills and coated floors and furnishings with a layer of dark grit. Outside, the coal dust soiled wet laundry and settled on hats and shoulders and plants and rooftops.
Before she sat down at her mother’s table, Zoe shook out her skirts, knowing better than to brush at the dust and leave a smear. She’d wiped the table after breakfast, only two hours ago, but already a fine layer of grime had accumulated on the surface.
Ma pushed a cup of coffee across the table and glanced at the clock above the stove. “I wish you could stay longer.”
“I do, too,” Zoe said, but her answer wasn’t true. Four of her six brothers still lived at home, in a house with two bedrooms. Creating space for Zoe inconvenienced everyone when she came to visit.
She castigated herself for not coming more often, but she’d been spoiled by living in Seattle on her own, reveling in the one thing she had never known in this house. Privacy. In her two rooms at the boardinghouse she didn’t have to dress behind a screen, didn’t have to listen to the rude noises six brothers could make, didn’t have to fight for a seat at meals. Best of all, she didn’t have to share her space with anyone except her husband. And she didn’t mind that.
“You’re happy, aren’t you?” her mother asked, studying Zoe in the hazy light filtering past grimy windowpanes.
“Yes,” Zoe answered softly, smiling down at her coffee. Ma had given her the last of the real cream instead of using the skim.
“I used to think you never would get married. I guess you broke every male heart in Newcastle.” Alice Wilder smiled, and some of the years softened on her face. “When I was twenty-four, I’d already buried two babies and had two more hanging on my skirts.”
That was the life Zoe had escaped, thank heaven. She didn’t want to be stuck in a tiny, crowded house slaving after males who always had a dark line embedded beneath their fingernails no matter how hard they scrubbed. She didn’t want a half dozen babies wearing her out before her time. Most of all, she wanted a few nice things in her life, something more than a coal miner’s wife could expect.
“I was right to wait, Ma.” If she had married a Newcastle man, she would have been stuck here. Instead, she had bided her time and used the wait to improve herself. Her reward had been Jean Jacques Villette. Zoe hadn’t dared to dream that men like him existed.
Her mother smiled. “I used to tell your pa if you ever lost your heart, it would happen just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “And you’d be married before we even knew you’d met someone special.”
Zoe smiled. “The week I met Jean Jacques was the most exciting week of my life. First I saved the Van Hooten boy after he fell in the tide marsh, then came the award ceremony.”
“And the newspaper article. Don’t forget that. I clipped it out and saved it inside the family Bible. They called you a heroine.” Pride restored the color to her mother’s faded eyes.
“Three days after that article, Jean Jacques walked into Uncle Milton’s store. Did I tell you the first words he said to me?” Lord, she would never forget. “I was working in the back, sacking dried peas, and I heard a man’s voice talking with an accent that made everything he said sound like music. And he said this, Ma. ‘Your hair reminds me of midnight spun into silk.’”
“Oh, my!” Her mother gasped and slapped a hand over her chest. “He saidthat?”
