By The Sea, Book One: Tess (21 page)

The cab driver, an obliging, industrious
fellow, jumped down from his seat to help Tess mount the
carriage.

"Thank you, no. I will manage it myself,"
she said. Very slowly but very surely she pulled herself up by her
good leg and then, with a small and almost controlled gasp, took
her place inside.

"Oh Tess, you do seem to be in pain," said
Maggie.

"No. It's awkward is all. Stop fussing over
me, Mag. It's unnatural and I don't like it. I'm far more concerned
over you. In three months you've lost a stone of weight. Did Father
not watch over you at all?"

"At first he was off fishing most days, and
then after that fell apart and he couldn't find anything more—well,
he was fair ashamed, I think, and didn't like to be around.
Besides, he was always, always looking for work."

"In every pub on Thames Street, I
expect."

"Because that's where his connections
were—fishermen and day laborers and such."

"At least he never considered going back
into service."

"Oh no, never that. He took to saying that
he didn't want to set an example for another generation of Morans
to go down into slavery."

"Well, he got his wish, didn't he! None of
us will."

"Why do you blame Father for Will's death,
Tess? It was so sudden—one minute he was playing stickball, and the
next he was dead. The doctor said the clot from the hit with that
stone was like a bomb, just waiting to go off. No one could have
prevented it."

"I could have! If I'd been here, minding the
family instead of off chasing rainbows, I
would
have!"

"You're very proud, Tess," Maggie murmured
without looking at her sister. "But the good book says that pride
goeth before a fall."

"I've fallen, Mag," Tess answered tiredly.
"About as low as I can go. My pride is my crutch; it lets me walk
away from despair."

"How can you despair? I don't understand it.
Look at the good you've done already with your ... your settlement
from Mr. Gould. You've been able to start Father along on his
dream—"

"His latest dream!"

"—to prospect for gold. Why, anything could
happen—look at Sutter's Mill, at the Comstock Lode.
Some
one
had to be the first man to start digging in
those places. That's what father says. He has a feeling about the
Yukon; it's so lucky for him that he met someone who knows so much
about prospecting."

"It's just another wild-goose chase, Mag.
The song says there's gold in California. I never heard anyone
singing there's gold in Canada."

Maggie shivered and pulled her cape closer.
"I just hope the Klondike is not as cold as Newport is today."

Tess just shook her head, and the two
sisters fell silent as the cab hurried along to the waterfront
shack that had been Maggie's home since the day following the
Servants' Ball.

"Tess?"

"Mmn?" Tess had been staring idly at the few
passers-by on Thames Street, reliving it all.

"I met him. Mr. Gould. At Will's grave, a
month ago."

Tess whipped her attention around to her
sister, and Maggie recoiled from the intensity of it.

"He asked me not to mention it, but …."

Still Tess stared, fierce and silent. Maggie
rambled nervously on. "He was just standing there—he didn't seem to
be praying or anything. At first I didn't see him. Then I tried to
move away, but I was curious who he was, so I hung around, I'm
afraid. He saw me and said, 'Am I holding things up for you?' I
didn't know what he meant—I wasn't going to plant flowers or
anything, not in November—so I said, 'No, just go right ahead with
what you're doing, and so will I.' So I said a prayer for Will, and
he stood alongside for a bit, then said, 'You're Tess's sister
Maggie, aren't you?"

"Which amazed me, Tess," Maggie continued.
"How he could ever have known—you and I are nothing alike—but I
nodded and somehow—I suppose from your description of him as older
and kindly, because he did look both—somehow I knew it was Mr.
Gould. Then he looked at me, really
so
kind and said, 'Tess
loves you very much and she's coming back for you,' and I thought
he was going to cry but he didn't, only saying not to tell, and he
left."

Maggie looked at her agitated sister and
added,
"
Did
you
want me to tell?"

"Yes. No. Oh, I don't know. God, I don't
know." Tears, more tears, rolled steadily down Tess's cheeks. The
information, told in such sweet good faith by Maggie, was
devastating to hear. It meant that Aaron Gould had gone to Newport
just before returning to New York for the last time; before taking
his own life with the same gun that had shattered Tess's knee. He
had seen the Morans, and he had been moved, and afterward he had
left Tess even more generously provided for in his will. It broke
her heart to know this new reason why.

Tess buried her face in her hands and said
nothing until they reached the shack.

The driver let her descend on her own but
came in to cart out Maggie's trunk and load it on the cab. Tess,
under control now, took one last look around the cleaned up-hovel.
There were pathetic little touches of the frail homemaker—a scrap
of curtain, a little rag rug—but it was still a hovel. "How
could
you have stayed here, Mag?" she asked sadly.

"It wasn't so bad, not until Father left.
After that I was a bit nervous on the rowdy Saturday nights, but I
don't know what for—no one knew about the money you'd sent, and
they couldn't have wanted my virtue," she said with a forlorn
smile.

"Hush that talk, Mag! After we settle at
Saranac Lake, and after I've dressed you and fattened you and fixed
your hair—well, we'll see whose virtue won't need protection all
around the clock."

Maggie laughed at the notion, which made her
cough, and then said almost wistfully, "Will the food there really
be as good as you say?"

"Absolutely. I have it on the best
authority. You won't be able to resist a single meal."

"But … I'm afraid of doctors, Tess. And
haven't I always been?"

"I know, I know. But these are no ordinary
physicians. Some of them suffer from your own ailment, and yet they
are able to go about their business with hardly a care. Just as you
will be. And after that, we'll come back and show Newport who can
win at their game. Just wait. Just see. If you knew the plans I
have for us!"

"I want to hear them all," Maggie said, and
she did sound eager, which heartened Tess.

Tess limped over to her sister and put her
free arm around her. "Ah, Mag, now we need never part again.
Come—let's run as fast as our battered bodies can take us, away
from these sad memories."

****

The
Priscilla,
newest debutante of
the Fall River Steamship Line, lay tied up to bustling Long Wharf
at the head of Newport Harbor, taking in passengers bound for New
York. The four-hundred-forty-foot sidewheeler was luxury itself,
with enough electric light wires to stretch from Providence to
Boston, a powerful new double-inclined engine capable of moving
smartly at twenty-plus knots, steam-heated staterooms for those who
could afford them, a vast quarter-deck floored with tile and
trimmed in marble, and a lavishly appointed and brilliantly
illuminated grand saloon carpeted in the trademark red and gold
pattern of the Fall River Line.

The
Priscilla
cost a million and a
half dollars to build, mere pocket money for some of the cottagers
on Bellevue Avenue, but a wildly extravagant sum for a commercial
vessel. Nothing was spared to transport the movers and shakers of
Boston and New York in a style befitting their station. And if
ordinary citizens could afford the fare, then they were welcome
aboard as well.

Tess had reserved a stateroom for the trip
to New York; Maggie was not in any shape to ride out December
conditions on the ocean except in first-class comfort.

But Maggie objected to being tucked away in
a cabin, no matter how luxurious, when there was so much to see and
admire in their floating palace. And besides, she wanted to bid
goodbye to Newport.

"Can I at least watch on deck as we leave
the harbor?"

"No."

"Only five minutes?"

So they huddled together on deck as the
Priscilla
threw off her enormous hawsers and worked her way
away from the dock. Around them lay Newport: cold, damp, snowless.
The once great seaport had never looked sleepier. A crisscrossing
pattern of gas lamps twinkled on the streets; not an Astor or a
Vanderbilt was in sight. Those who catered to them were gone, too,
either holed up like fat squirrels in warmer climates or scratching
out an existence in town during these, the lean months.

The
Priscilla's
steam whistles
bellowed an end to all of it for the two sisters.

"We were never really part of it, were we,
Tess?" asked Maggie wistfully.

Tess shook her head. "Hardly anyone is.
Newport is a waystation, a place to dance, a place to hustle. It's
a town to take by storm. The slavers did it, and the British, and
now the robber barons. Who will plunder it when you and I are gone,
I wonder? It's too pretty to let live in peace, that I know. Poor,
pretty little Newport."

The
Priscilla
had already steamed
past the Navy's torpedo factory on Goat Island and past Fort
Adams—ordered built by George Washington, though never a shot was
fired there—and was heading toward the open water of Rhode Island
Sound. Maggie shivered and huddled closer to her sister.

"Will you ever forgive him, Tess?" It was
said so softly, so sadly, that Tess had no choice but to
answer.

"There's nothing to forgive, Mag. He
fulfilled his part of the bargain, and more. We can do anything we
want with our lives now, thanks to him."

"Oh yes, the
money.
But Tess, he
asked you to
marry
him ...."

"I never should have told you, I see that
now. You will always wonder whether I held—hold—it against him that
he changed his mind. Well, I don't. I am not the same person he
asked to marry him," Tess said evenly.

"
You
are
the—"

"I'm
not,
you silly child! You'll
never understand.
You
look past the form, at the soul of
things, Mag. But for Aaron—how can I explain this?—the form
was
the soul."

"You're right. I don't understand." Maggie
slipped her arm around Tess's waist and leaned her head
affectionately on her sister's breast. "Did he love you, do you
think?"

"He did."

"And now he doesn't? Because you don't walk
the same?"

Tess sighed. Maggie was too simple, too good
ever to understand. "The shooting created an enormous scandal,
Mag," she said at last. "In the end it was too much for him." Tess
hadn't the heart to tell her sister of the even more shocking
scandal that followed. Word must have traveled to Newport of Aaron
Gould's suicide; but Maggie did not move among the set who would
have heard of it.

Maggie was silent for a moment, and then she
said,
"I'll
always love you, Tess."

"Which is quite enough for me," Tess
answered, embracing her sister. "Now—to bed. I'll be along in a
minute."

Maggie left reluctantly, and Tess was left
to feel once more the lift and fall of a boat under her on the wide
black ocean, this time alone. She clung to the rail, uncertain in
her balance now, certain, only, of one thing: that she was
completely and solely responsible for her sister's care.

And cure. Tess had heard wonderful things
about a sanatorium in Saranac Lake in New York. Surely the clean
mountain air of the Adirondacks would do wonders for Maggie.
Between Mother Nature and Tess's money and will and devotion,
Maggie's prospects were not only hopeful but practically
guaranteed. It
had
to be so.

As for Tess herself, she couldn't help
feeling that she had left her youth completely behind her. Would
she miss it? On the whole, she thought not. There were
compensations: she had her beloved Maggie, and her stock portfolio,
and the income from the trust fund that Aaron had created for her.
She had her whole life ahead of her.

And a baby inside her. Her hand went to her
stomach—again—to monitor the progress there. Instinctively, she
wanted to protect the fatherless child she would eventually bear.
Alone. If Aaron had known … would it have made a difference? She
felt sure that it would. He would not have abandoned himself to
guilt and sorrow; he would have felt the same stirrings of wonder
that she did.

Aaron
. She felt a surge of awareness
of him, unbidden and irresistible. The December cold stung her
cheeks and made her eyes tear, but in her memory the night was
warm, the moon was high, and she was smiling, laughing, in
love.

Memories! If she could sell them the way she
could her railroad stocks, she'd do it in an instant. Memories were
unnecessary baggage, a burden to carry through life. She had her
own life to live, another to save, and a third to nurture.

Never look back. Look only ahead.

"Miss Moran, is it?" It was a steward,
touching his hand courteously to his cap. "There's a young girl in
the main saloon who's in a fair bad way. She says she's your
sister. Coughing and such. Could you come to her, please?"

New Year's Day, 1897

Doctor Henry Whitman, the trim, handsome,
and surprisingly approachable head of the medical team at the
Phoenix Sanatorium in Saranac Lake, ascended the shoveled steps of
the charming cure cottage with a certain spring in his step. He was
there personally to invite Tess Moran, sister of the patient
within, to the grand holiday feast that was slated for later that
day.