“Rye, I went to see Ezra Merrill.” Laura was grateful that her announcement distracted Rye, and he refrained from reaching again.
“You too? That makes two of y'.”
“Two?” She looked up, puzzled.
“It seems Dan visited Merrill yesterday.’!
Yesterday, thought Laura. Yesterday?
At her look of consternation, Rye went on. “He gave me the news this mornin’ when I saw him at the countinghouse.”
“Then you know already?”
“Aye, I know. But I know that the law can’t dictate how I feel.”
Rather than face his determined eyes, she turned away. But from behind he saw her lift a hand to touch her temple.
“This is such a muddled mess, Rye.”
“It appears the law can’t dictate y’r feelings, either.”
She spun to face him again. “Feelings are not what I’m speaking of, but legalities. I am his wife, don’t you understand? You ... you shouldn’t even be here at this very minute!”
Her head was tipped slightly to one side, and her upper body strained toward him in earnestness. He spoke with deadly calm. “Y’ sound rather desperate, Laura.” Immediately, she straightened. “Rye, I have to ask you to leave and not to be seen here again until we can get this thing straightened out. Dan was ... he was very upset last night, and if he should find you here again, I ... I...” She stammered to a halt, her eyes on the strong curve of his jawbone, where the new side-whiskers nearly met the thick turtleneck of his sweater, giving him a brawny and wholly unsettling appeal. “Please, Rye,” she ended lamely.
For a moment she thought he would raise his fist and shout at the heavens, releasing his tightly controlled rage. Instead, he relaxed—albeit with an effort—and agreed. “Aye, I’ll go ... but the lad is asleep.”
His eyes flashed to the alcove bed, then back to her, and before she could prevent it, he’d taken a single long step forward and grasped the back of her head, commandeering it with one mighty hand while his mouth swooped over hers. She pressed her palms against the wool sweater, only to find his heart thundering within it. She strained to pull away, but his grasp was so relentless it pushed the whalebone hairpins into her scalp. His tongue had already wet her lips before she managed to jerk free. When she did, her lips escaped his with a frantic, sucking sound.
“Rye, this—”
“Shh ...” From violent to gentle, his quick change confused her as his admonition cut off her words. “In a minute ... I’ll leave in a minute.” Recklessly, he’d clasped the back of her neck and forced her forward, the action in direct contrast to his repeated, soft, “Shh ...”
She allowed herself to stay as she was, though rigidly, with his chin pressed against her forehead while his eyes sank shut. Beneath her fingers his heart still pounded, and she closed her fists about the rough, textured wool of his sweater, grasping and twisting it as if it could keep her from sinking. But both she and Rye were trembling now.
“I love y’, Laura.” The words rumbled from his throat while her knees went wobbly. “Josh ...” She heard Rye swallow. “Josh looks like my mother,” he uttered thickly. Then, as suddenly as he’d demanded the kiss, he was gone, spinning away to jerk the door open with only one more word.
“Come!”
But Ship was already on her feet.
And Laura Morgan was left behind to wish desperately that she could follow that order as freely as Ship could.
Chapter 4
THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY NIGHT, Joseph Starbuck’s home was brightly lit with whale oil, appropriate for an occasion honoring the successful voyage of a whaleship.
When Laura Morgan stepped through the front door, it was into a fairyland of artificial brightness such as few Nantucket homes boasted at night. Chandeliers gleamed, reflecting off polished oak floors and the highly waxed bannister of the staircase. On a refectory table in the main hall, smaller lanterns glimmered into the depth of a crystal punch bowl of persimmon beer beside another of syllabub, a rich mixture of sweet cream and wine. Around the edges of the room, small Betty lamps highlighted the array of colorful silk gowns whose skirts were held aloft by whalebone hoops, making the women appear to glide as if on wheels.
Dan had been taciturn and brooding all evening, ever since helping Laura lace her stays and hook her gown. He had looked up to find the whalebone corsets thrusting her breasts up higher than usual, helped along by the stiff boning that shaped the bodice of the dress itself. A sour look had overtaken his face and was still there.
The dress front was modest, topped by a stiff yoke of narrow pleating which swept from the crest of one shoulder to the other with scarcely a dip at the center. When she’d bought the dress, Laura had laughingly said there was no escaping whaling on Nantucket, for she even looked like a whaleboat! Indeed, the shadows of the pleating resembled the overlapped planking on a dory. But there was no mistaking Laura for anything except what she was—a shapely young beauty whose contours were ripe within her bodice.
Her muslin gown was interwoven with cream silk stripes between sprays of pink roses on a delicate background of tiny green leaves. Artificial roses of pink rode on the crests of her shoulders, from which the sleeves of the gown were also tightly pleated to the elbow before an enormous puff of muslin billowed out beneath a band of pink ribbon.
The dress set off her fine-boned fragility: the delicate jaw, chin, and nose, and an adorable mouth shaped like the leaf of a sweetheart ivy. Her dainty features made Laura’s dark-lashed brown eyes appear even larger than they were, as did the style of her hair, most of which was pulled high onto the crown of her head in an intricate knot entwined with thin pink ribbons, while above her left ear nested another rose, from which fell a gathering of sausage-shaped curls. Around her face, tiny angel-wisps had been cut shorter than the rest and curled like an auburn halo about her delicate features.
Her femininity was further enhanced by the styles of the day, with their elongated waists and enormous skirts, which served to make the fat look fatter, the thin look emaciated, but the lucky ones, like Laura Morgan, look like a Dresden doll.
At the moment, however, Laura felt far from lucky. Her waist was pinched into a miserable little hourglass and felt as if it would surely snap in half a minute! A wide whalebone stay ran up the front of the dress and already it was digging into her stomach whenever she bent, and into the valley between her breasts each time she inhaled. Her discomfort had made her decidedly testy, to say nothing of light-headed.
Laura never went out for a social evening without silently cursing the rigging into which she was forced. But tonight’s occasion demanded that she smile cordially and uncomplainingly, for it was a business dinner, Dan had said, meaning that Starbuck’s more important employees had been invited, along with such honored guests as Captain Blackwell, of the Omega, and Christopher Capen and James Childs, the mason and carpenter whom Starbuck had contracted to build the Three Bricks for his sons.
The conversation seemed centered around the success of the Omega and the progress on the houses, which were well under way. Laura listened with half an ear to Annabel Pruitt, the wife of Starbuck’s purchasing agent, who had a habit of releasing news even before the town newspaper did. Though it was of little interest to Laura that the bricks for the houses had come all the way from Gloucester, her attention was captured when the subject abruptly changed.
“They say Mr. Starbuck has offered Rye Dalton a substantial lay to sail on the Omega next time she goes out.” Mrs. Pruitt closely watched the faces of Dan and Laura Morgan as she divulged this tidbit.
Laura felt Dan’s fingers tighten on her elbow and suddenly scanned the hall in search of a fainting bench, that abominable invention created by men who’d never had to bear being trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey! But in the next moment Dan’s fingers dug in even harder, and Laura realized it was not the mere mention of Rye’s name that had made her husband go stiff. He tugged on her elbow so sharply that the syllabub went sloshing in h
er glass.
“Why, Dan, whatever—” she began, jerking back to avoid soiling her dress, and sending the whalebone digging sharply into her stomach.
But in that instant, following the course of Dan’s glare, the discomfort she endured to look so beautiful became suddenly justified. There, at the door, Rye Dalton was being greeted by the Starbucks. Laura’s heart leaped. She could not help staring, for Rye was dressed like a fashion plate—no sweater or pea jacket in sight.
He wore stirruped pants of forest green with a matching tailcoat boasting a stiff, high collar, with the newest feature— notches—on its lapel. Long, tight sleeves dropped well below his wrist, half covering his bronze hands. His sea-tanned face was the color of a ripe chestnut above a pristine white stock wound tightly about his neck and tied in a small bow, half hidden behind his double-breasted jacket.
As a mallard finds its mate in a flock, so Rye found Laura in the throng of people that filled the room. His eyes met hers and sent a shaft of heat down her body. Forgotten were the pains in her stomach; instead, she was filled with pride at how she looked in the dress. As those blue eyes lingered on hers, then traveled down her body and back up, she realized her mouth was open, and snapped it shut.
They had not seen each other for four days, and she certainly hadn’t expected him to be here tonight. Nor had she expected his eyes to seek her out so brazenly, nor the slight bow he gave her even before the footman reached for his beaver top hat.
Immediately, Laura hid her flaming cheeks behind her glass of syllabub, but not before Dan noted the exchange of glances between the two. With an acid look, he gripped Laura’s elbow and turned her away from the door, circling her waist and leaving his hand there possessively, something rarely done here in public, in this city where Puritan founders had left their indelible mark.
Knowing Dalton watched their backs, Dan leaned intimately close to his wife’s ear. “I didn’t have any idea he’d be here tonight, did you?”
“Me? How could I have known?”
“I thought he might have told you.” He watched her face carefully to see if he was right.
“I ... I haven’t seen him since Monday,” she lied. She’d kissed him on Tuesday.
“If I’d known he’d be here, we wouldn’t have come.” “Don’t be silly, Dan. Living in the same town, we’re bound to run into him now and then. You can’t isolate me, so you’ll just have to learn to trust me instead.”
“Oh I trust you, Laura. It’s him I don’t trust.”
Almost thirty minutes passed before the guests were called to dinner. By the time they entered the dining room, Laura had a backache from standing so rigidly and the beginnings of a headache from the tension. Try though she might to forget that Rye was in the room, she couldn’t. It seemed each time she turned to visit with another guest, he managed to be in her line of vision, studying her from beneath those perfectly shaped eyebrows of his, smiling boldly when no one was looking. His hair was neatly trimmed now, but the new sideburns remained, bracketing his jaws in brawny appeal. Though she tried to keep from looking at him, she had little success, and once—she couldn’t be sure—she thought he mimed a kiss to her, but he was lifting his glass at that moment, and the kiss, if it was one, became a sip.
He was in one of his devilish, teasing moods tonight. Laura remembered them well.
At dinner, as if her hostess had intentionally planned to compound Laura’s misery, she and Dan were placed directly across the table from Rye and a talkative young blonde named DeLaine Hussey, whose forefathers, along with those of Joseph Starbuck, had settled the island.
Miss Hussey immediately engaged Rye in conversation about the voyage, sympathizing effusively over his bout with smallpox, studying the few marks left on his face, and claiming they’d done nothing whatever to mar his appearance. She followed this statement with a fluttery smile that made Laura wish the woman would get the pox herself! But Rye—damn him!—was lapping it up, grinning down at the woman, the grin enhanced by the pockmark that fell in the crease of his cheek and dimpled him beguilingly.
In no time at all Miss Hussey pursued a subject that raised Laura’s temperature to that of the clam chowder she’d just been served. “The Omega was gone five years... that’s a long time.”
“Aye, it is.”
Laura felt Rye’s eyes upon her as she lifted a spoonful of steaming soup, but she carefully refrained from returning his glance.
“You don’t know, then, about the group of women here on Nantucket who’ve organized and call themselves the Female Freemasons?” chirped the blonde across the way.
And Laura blew too hard on her soup, making some of it fly onto the table linen. DeLaine Hussey, she thought, had been aptly named! She’d been trying to get her claws into Rye for as long as Laura could remember, and she certainly wasn’t wasting any time, now that word was out Rye had been refused admittance to the saltbox on the hill.
“No, ma’am,” Rye was answering. “I’ve never heard of em."
“Ah, but you will now that the Omega’s come in with full barrels.”
“Full barrels? What do full barrels have t’ do with a women’s group?”
“The Female Freemasons, Mr. Dalton, are sworn to refuse to be courted by or to marry any man who has not killed his first whale.”
Laura burned her tongue on the chowder and nearly overturned her water glass in her haste to cool her mouth.
Mr. Dalton, indeed! Laura thought. Why, the two of them had gone to school together. Just what did DeLaine Hussey think she was up to?
The servers came then to remove the chowder bowls and Laura realized she should not have eaten the entire helping, but she’d become preoccupied with the conversation and hadn’t realized she was putting herself in jeopardy. Her restrictive whalebones were already causing extreme misery, but the servers were now bringing in a steaming veal roast ringed with glazed carrots and herbed potatoes.
Laura had no choice but to accept the main course when it came her turn. But the veal stuck in her throat, along with the flirtatious conversation continuing on the other side of the table.
The smitten Miss Hussey continued to delineate the doctrines of the chivalric order of island ladies devoted to loving only proven whalers, until Rye was forced to ask politely, “And are you a member of th’ group ... Miss Hussey?”
At that precise moment, Laura nearly choked on a piece of veal, for something soft and warm was working her skirts up and caressed her calf beneath the table.
Rye’s foot!
“Indeed I am, Mr. Dalton,” DeLaine Hussey simpered.
The gall of the man to do a thing like that while innocently smiling down at DeLaine Hussey! Why, he knew full well it was his and Laura’s old playful signal that they wanted to make love when they got home!
While Rye’s foot made shivers ripple through Laura’s flesh, the doe-eyed Miss Hussey continued batting her sooty lashes and gazing devastatingly into Rye’s eyes while pointedly asking, “Have you killed your first whale yet, Mr. Dalton?”
Rye laughed uninhibitedly, leaning back until his jaw lifted before he grinned engagingly at his table companion again. “Nay, Miss Hussey, I haven’t, and y’ well know it. I’m a cooper, not a boatsteerer,” he reminded, using the official name of the harpooners.
At that moment Rye’s toes inched up and curled over the edge of the chair between Laura’s knees, all the while he smiled into DeLaine Hussey’s eyes. This time Laura visibly jumped and a chunk of veal lodged in her throat, sending up a spasm of coughing.
Dan solicitously patted her back and signaled for the server to refill her water glass. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“F ... fine.” She gulped, struggling for composure while that warm foot brushed the insides of her knees, preventing her from clamping them shut.
The coughing, unfortunately, brought her hostess’s attention to Laura’s plate, and Mrs. Starbuck noted how little her guest had eaten and inquired if the food was all right. Thus, Laura felt
compelled to lift yet another bite of veal and attempt to swallow it.
Just then Rye smiled nonchalantly at Laura and said, “Please pass the salt.” He could see she was in misery: he remembered well enough her abhorrence of whalebone corsets.
To Laura’s surprise, she then felt a tap! tap! tap! against the inside of one knee. And while across the table Rye and DeLaine Hussey engaged in a seemingly innocent conversation about coopering, Rye cut two pieces of his own veal, ate one, and covertly dropped the other on the floor, where the Starbucks’ fluffy matched Persian cats immediately cleaned up the evidence.
Laura raised her napkin to her lips and smiled behind it. But she was grateful to Rye, for at the next possible opportunity she practiced the same sleight-of-hand he’d just demonstrated, which ultimately saved her from embarrassing either herself or her hostess—or both.
The meal ended with a rich rum-flavored torte, which neither of the cats liked—a barely perceptible shrug of Rye’s shoulders made Laura again take smiling refuge behind her napkin—so she was forced to eat half her serving, which left her stomach in a perilous state.
By the time Rye chose to remove his foot, Laura was not only queasy but flustered. Their host and hostess were rising from their chairs when Laura could tell by the look on Rye’s face that he was searching for his lost shoe. She let him suffer, slipping it further underneath her chair while up and down the table guests were getting to their feet and repairing to the main hall. Dan moved behind her chair, and for a moment she considered leaving the shoe where it was, but if it were spied there, it would convict her as well as Rye, so his scowl was rewarded a second later by the safe return of the shoe.
A string quartet played now in the main hall, and some couples danced while others visited. A small group of men stepped outside to smoke cigars, among them Joseph Starbuck and Dan, who reluctantly left Laura’s side at his employer’s request. But first he observed that Rye was still in the clutches of DeLaine Hussey, so he assumed Rye would have no chance to bother Laura.