A Light For My Love (25 page)

Williams maintained his silence for a long
moment and held his gaze steady on Jake, who merely stared back.
The very faintest of smiles appeared at the corners of his mouth,
but there was no humor in his eyes. "Have you ever been shanghaied,
Captain?" he inquired softly.

Jake shook his head once and took a sip of
the burned coffee.

"Twenty-seven men were taken from Astoria the
same night I was. We were dumped in the hold of the
Cecille
.
Some had been drugged, some had been hit over the head. There were
boys no older than him—" he nodded toward Willie, "men my age, a
poor old bastard in his sixties. And one six-and-half-foot wooden
cigar store Indian that had been wrapped in a tarp and sold for
fifty dollars as a passed-out drunk." The smile grew
infinitesimally.

Jake had heard of episodes similar to that of
the wooden Indian. He was once told about twenty poisoned men who
were shanghaied. They had been sold after they mistakenly broke
into an undertaker's cellar and drank formaldehyde from barrels
they'd believed to contain rum. The crimp had collected seven
hundred dollars for delivering a crew of men he knew were dead.

Williams resumed his story, that thin smile
still in place. "I came to belowdecks about fifteen miles out. Of
course, the ship's articles had been signed, but not by any of us.
It was dark in the hold, and it stank like a cholera ward in a
Calcutta hospital. The old-timer, he had rheumatism so bad, I
figured they'd feed him to the sharks straight off. Some of the
young ones were sniffling for their mamas, a couple of them were
plotting escape. Other men grieved over wives and children left
behind. There were sailors, like me, who were sold out by
boardinghouse landlords, or whores, or bartenders. Some of the
landlubbers were seasick. Nearly all the others were sick from the
bad liquor they'd been given, or the knockout drops, or having
their heads whacked. There was one boy who didn't complain, though,
because he never woke up. He'd been on his way home from
school—that's what his friend told me, one who was with him when
they were taken. That boy was all right. But the unconscious one .
. . the sailor runners hit his head so hard they cracked it."

Williams drew a deep breath, but he didn't
surrender his eye contact with Jake.

"I held that boy's broken skull in my hands.
I could feel the bones shift under his scalp like a smashed
eggshell. He died in my arms before dawn. Another man died, from
alcohol poisoning, I think. There was no decent funeral, no shrouds
from the sailmaker, no service; they were pitched over the
starboard side after dark. In the end, though, the rest of us were
in the same spot: we all owed two months' pay for the privilege of
being kidnapped to that ship."

Jake sighed. As much as he disliked Dalton
Williams, he didn't doubt for a moment that he was sincere in his
campaign. "Look, I'm not saying

that I don't understand why you started the
Sailors Protective League. China is the one I'm worried about. I
can't make her seriously see the danger she's in." He told Williams
about the conversation he'd overheard at the Blue Mermaid his first
night in port.

"I know," Williams replied calmly. "She told
me about that, too."

Jake frowned at him. He struggled to keep his
temper in check, but his voice rose sharply. "Well, for God's sake,
tell her to give this up! She'd listen to you."

The other man shook his head, his mouth
turned down. "No. She has her reasons for working with the league.
I need her help, and we've kept this carriage house a secret.
Besides, she's a smart woman and she's old enough to make her own
decisions."

For just an instant, Jake had the eerie sense
of falling backward through seven years to a conversation he'd had
with China about Quinn. She'd asked for his help, and he'd given
her essentially the same answers that Williams was giving him
now.

And there wasn't a thing Jake could do about
it. She
was
smart, but she was also as obstinate a woman as
he'd ever met, and naively fearless.

He looked out the window. The sun was up. He
had to meet with Peter Hollis at his cannery in a couple of hours,
and right now he probably looked like hell. He stood and went to
look at Willie. The boy was coming around.

"Gorblimey," Willie gasped in weak horror,
recognizing the fierce Captain Chastaine standing over him.
"Captain, sir. I didn't mean to sleep through my watch, sir." Sweat
had plastered his hair to his head. He tried to sit up, but Jake
pushed him back down against the pillow and smiled at him.

"Take it easy, Graham. You don't have to get
up. Mr. Williams here is going to stay with you now." He stood
aside so the boy could see the man who had rescued him from the
alley.

"Oh—aye," Willie replied in confusion,
obviously trying to make sense of the strange, yet familiar, face
and the surroundings.

"One thing before I go, though, Graham," Jake
said. He fixed the tall, gangly young sailor with a stem look. "You
stay out of saloons until you get a little older. Drinking might
stunt your growth."

*~*~*

During the next few days, China's path rarely
crossed Jake's. Willie Graham recovered quickly, and after he no
longer required her care she began spending more time working with
Dalton on the boardinghouse project. He was glad for the help. The
need for a safe, decent shelter for sailors was more important than
ever. With the money they'd collected, and other donations that
were beginning to come in, Dalton began the repairs needed on the
dilapidated old house he'd told her about. The formidable task of
making it liveable commenced, and China rolled up her sleeves to
tackle the job.

Dalton gave Willie a corner in the parlor to
sleep in and made him China's assistant. The lad, obviously moony
about his former nurse, tripped over himself to do her bidding. She
found his sighing infatuation both irksome and touching.

Aside from the project at hand, China had
another motive. She hoped that by losing herself in the work, she
could squelch the impossible, futile attachment forming in her
heart for Jake Chastaine.

As she scrubbed at the grimy wainscoting in
the boardinghouse dining room, again and again her mind returned to
the night in the alcove when he'd kissed her. It was impossible to
deny that she'd liked it, the way her heart had galloped, partly
from fear, but mostly because of the way it felt.

Jake's mouth pressed into her palm. Consuming
her mouth. Hot against her throat. His touch, gentle and yet
demanding. She interrupted the memory with no little irritation and
plunged her rag into the bucket of suds at her feet.

When she stopped to consider it, she was
astounded by this turn of events. As recently as two months ago, if
she'd been told that she would someday develop a crush on Jake (and
that's all it was, she was certain of that), she'd have been
outraged. Even now, she couldn't say what sort of relationship
theirs was. They weren't friends, exactly, but at some point during
the last few weeks, she'd stopped hating him.

No matter how hard she worked, at night she
would lie in her bed watching the shadows cast on her walls by the
bare tree limbs outside, imagining that she heard his soft tap on
her door.

She no longer bothered to tell herself to
stop thinking about him or to remember that Quinn was gone because
of him. No such mental scolding worked. The only thing she could do
was stay away from him. But she couldn't say that she felt better
for it.

China had felt alone many times in these last
few years, but she'd never truly been lonely. Until Jake had
arrived.

*~*~*

Jake spent his days in business meetings. His
three original contacts—Stanhope, Buchanan, and Hollis—had referred
him to competitors and associates, all interested in shipping their
goods on the
Katherine Kirkland
. Many of them also
congratulated Jake for taking a stand against shanghaiing. He was
somewhat chagrined to realize that word of Dalton Williams's
presence at the dinner had worked in his favor. He supposed he
should be grateful, but he couldn't muster an ounce of gratitude
for Williams, although there was a perverse satisfaction to be had
from the situation. Fortunately, China's name never came up during
these conversations, and he was careful not to mention her.

Aside from that issue, Jake had a cargo lined
up that included flour, grain, canned fish, and lumber, all
destined for various points between Portland and Bombay.

Now he stood on Monroe Tewey's dock, watching
while Monroe's crew caulked his ship's seams with oakum. They
pushed the tar-soaked jute into each joint, singing a chantey as
they worked. He could smell it, pungent and grassy. She'd been
scraped—her hull was smooth again—and when the caulking was
finished, she would get a coat of tar. The rare bright sun on this
early March morning shimmered along her rigging. Everyone he had
talked to who'd seen the
Katherine
remarked on her grace and
beauty, and he was proud of her.

It wouldn't be long now before she was back
in the water. He missed the sensation of his hand on her wheel,
making her respond to his touch. He could almost feel the rise and
fall of her deck under him, hear the sigh of her timbers as she
sliced through the swells, her full sails gleaming white under a
tropical sky. He knew her, what to give her, what to expect from
her.

But more often these days his mind turned to
a woman from whom he never knew what to expect. It could be
exasperating, this uncertainty, but it had an appeal that he felt
pulling at his thoughts and the course of his future, luring them
away from the sea like a magnet on a compass needle.

And that frightened him more than anything
else.

*~*~*

One evening, when China was in the kitchen
making tea for Susan and herself, Jake came in from outside. He'd
missed dinner again; that had happened so often lately that he'd
told Gert not to bother putting a plate in the oven for him
anymore. China hadn't been alone with him, or seen much of him at
all, since the night he helped her take care of Willie, more than a
week earlier. She'd begun to suspect that he was avoiding her. The
appalling truth of the matter was that she missed him, and though
she chided herself for the thought, she let her eyes rest on him,
taking in every detail of his lean, broad frame, like a blind
person who had just regained her sight.

He smiled. "You're exactly the one I wanted
to see. Come out to the back yard." He took her shawl from its hook
by the stove and, draping it over her shoulders, grasped her
hand.

She pulled her arm away. "Back yard? I really
don't have time—"

"Yes, you do. Come on, China, come outside. I
want to show you something."

His expression was so open and appealing, she
couldn't tell him no again. "All right," she relented, abandoning
the teapot on the table.

He nodded, apparently satisfied, and took her
hand in his to lead her down the back steps to the yard. It was a
mild, clear night, rare at this time of year. He stopped on the
path between the house and the gazebo. The wind rustled the tree
branches, raising the scent of fir needles.

"Look," he murmured, pointing at the sky.
China looked. "I don't see anything," she said, very aware of
him.

"You have to keep watching," he said, and
somehow his arm was around her shoulders. From the river, she heard
the far-off clanging of a buoy, growing louder, then softer with
the shifting wind.

She craned her neck to scan the sky—searching
for what, she couldn't imagine. But she found nothing, and she was
beginning to feel a little uncomfortable, like he'd tricked her
somehow. He was too close, and she fit into the shelter of his arm
too easily.

"Jake, this is silly. I'm going back to—"

"There!" he said, pointing again. "See?"

And China saw a bright star fly across the
velvet night, as though it had escaped its moorings in the heavens.
"Yes," she breathed, spellbound. She kept her eyes trained on the
stars, looking for movement, and she realized that they sprinkled
the dark sky, leaving luminous trails as they went. "Oh, Jake, it's
beautiful. I've never seen anything like it."

"You should see it on the ocean. The sky is
so much bigger out there, without trees or mountains or buildings
to get in the way. In good weather, sometimes I'd string my hammock
on deck and lie there, watching the stars rain down." There was a
sound in his voice of wonder and admiration.

"I hope they don't all fall tonight," she
said, her head tipped back against his arm. "So there'll be some
left to look at."

Jake chuckled. Her remark was sweetly
childlike, making him think of the young girl she might have once
been. He couldn't say for sure; it was a side she had not shown to
him. She'd usually made a point of avoiding him.

But this week he'd been dodging her. It tied
his insides in knots to look at her and know he couldn't touch her,
to watch her wearing herself out with that damned boardinghouse and
be unable to help her. To lie awake at night, edgy and tense,
knowing that across the hall she slept. Twice he'd actually gotten
up, intending to sneak into her room just to sit at the end of her
bed and watch her sleep. What a brainless thing to do. Luckily, as
soon as he closed his hand on her doorknob, cold and metallic to
the touch, he regained his wits. No woman had ever put as many
crazy ideas in his head as China Sullivan had.

But tonight he'd glanced up at the sky on his
way to the back door and seen the star shower. And he'd wanted to
share it with her. Now it felt like the most natural thing in the
world to stand here with her, warm and protected in the curve of
his arm. Then he recalled his original reason for seeking her out
this evening. He reached into his pocket, withdrew two pieces of
paper, and offered them to her.