A Light For My Love (7 page)

on the opposite wall. It was a picture of one
of Captain Sullivan's early vessels, the
Joyce P.
Frankenberg
, a square-rigger under full sail in choppy seas. He
searched for that painting now, but he didn't find it. Then he
realized the floor was bare and the massive sideboard that had
stood against one wall was gone, too.

China tried to pretend that this breakfast
was no different from any other, but she wasn't having much
success. She was painfully aware of the extra person sitting at the
table. Though she refused to let herself look at Jake, that blond
head of his shone like a beacon, and time and again he appeared in
her peripheral vision. Feeling no more appetite than she had the
night before, she pushed her cooling food around on her plate with
her fork. Only a bite or two actually went into her mouth. Her
mush, for which she had no particular fondness anyway, congealed in
its bowl. She was glad Aunt Gert kept the conversation going
because she could think of nothing to say.

"Jake, tell us about the
Katherine
Kirkland
," Gert urged, pouring a drizzle of cream over her mush
from a silver creamer. "It's uncommon for a man your age to own a
ship. How did you come into the money to buy her?"

China flinched at the bald question, and
directed the slightest frown at her aunt. Gert could be artlessly
blunt sometimes, and she was getting worse. She claimed that her
nearly sixty years gave her the right to be frank. Still, although
loath to admit it to herself, China was curious about the same
thing: had Jake done so very well after leaving Astoria?

Each person at the table except China, but
especially Susan Price, leaned a bit in Jake's direction, forks
stilled. Old Captain Meredith cocked an ear toward him, waiting for
his reply.

Jake sipped his coffee, the dainty porcelain
cup looking out of place in his grip. "I didn't buy her. I was the
ship's mate and I won her in a poker game from the man I sailed
under."

"Eh?" came Captain Meredith's blaring
inquiry. He wiped his nose on the napkin tucked into his shirt
collar, and his white brows drew together as he demanded, "Who'd be
daft enough to wager a ship in a card game? That's like wagering
your own mother!"

"Yes, it is. But the master who bet her said
she'd lost her luck."

The air filled with a confusion of voices,
all speaking at once.

"Lost her luck! Jake, dear, have you lost
your mind?"

"Aye, that master wasn't daft, but you must
be. I'm surprised you made it all the way to Astoria on that doomed
ship."

"Sell her—you must sell her. There's terrible
danger—"

China said nothing, thinking that this was so
typical of Jake. Bold and audacious, he thought he could lead
anyone, conquer anything. But this was serious. Loss of luck was
the worst thing that could happen to a vessel, even worse than
sinking. A drowning, the voice of a ghost, any odd occurrence could
jinx a ship. Once it occurred, ill fate would hound her to the day
she sailed to the scrap yard, and until then she would lose lives,
money, and time. No captain or buyer would knowingly enter into an
alliance with a jinxed ship. This was just another example of
Jake's recklessness.

Jake glanced down the table at China. She
remained silent, offering no advice, not looking at him. She jabbed
idly at her eggs. Judging by her expression, he wasn't even sure
she was listening.

Jake shook his head and put a spoonful of
sugar in his coffee. "I've navigated the
Katherine
for four
years. She was stubborn and slow and plagued with all kinds of
accidents. But she hasn't lost her luck. It was that captain who
was unlucky. He was a foolhardy tyrant who was too fond of Russian
vodka, and he sacrificed crewmen's lives and his ship's grace
because of it. He stayed in Charleston after the card game, and
once he was ashore, she never gave me another moment's worry. I
sailed her around the Horn to get here. She has the manners of a
lady, and she responds like a new bride."

China's head came up at this remark.

Captain Meredith nodded approvingly, then
posed in a hopeful tone, "Will you at least rename her? To trick
the bad spirits who've taken note of her?"

"No. It's said she was named for a woman with
rare beauty and a very kind heart." He looked at China again, then
added, "No man could ask for more."

China focused her attention on her plate, her
mouth tight at his allusion. Jake Chastaine was in no position to
discuss kindness. If he'd had a kind heart, he would have left
Quinn in Astoria. Ignore him, she told herself. Just eat your toast
and ignore him.

"I was hoping to see Ryan. He must be nearly
grown by now," Jake went on, gesturing at an empty chair. "Has he
already left for school?"

A vast, yawning silence fell around the
table, and no one rushed to fill it. The hiss of the gas chandelier
overhead suddenly seemed very loud. Only two people looked at him:
Susan Price, with her vague, troubled gaze, and China, her face
paled to snow and her eyes glinting back at him with blue frost.
Aunt Gert studiously folded her napkin, and Captain Meredith
continued spooning up his mush, apparently deaf to Jake's inquiry.
No one spoke, and Jake began to wonder why asking such a simple
question made him feel as though he were sitting there in his
drawers.

China swallowed convulsively, and the toast
went down her throat in a dry, choking lump. Reaching for her tepid
coffee, she took a drink. She struggled to keep her voice steady.
"The sea got both of my brothers Quinn and Ryan."

The feeble remainder of her appetite gone,
she stood and began clearing the table, avoiding Jake's dumbfounded
gaze. She hadn't considered that he might ask about Ryan. Her
younger brother's absence was such a painful subject, it was never
discussed in the house.

Gert and Susan also stood, and Captain
Meredith started as China lifted his nearly finished breakfast away
from him. "Say, missy, I'm not done with that," he complained.

"It's time for your medicine, Cap," China
replied distractedly, leaving with the plate. She reached for the
tureen with the mush in it. "Come out to the kitchen and get
it."

"Fussing females," Captain Meredith groused,
yanking off his napkin and flinging it on the table. "Never let a
man have a moment's peace—"

China stepped into the hall, the other two
women close behind her.

"China, wait a minute," she heard Jake call.
"I'd like to talk to you."

She turned reluctantly and let him catch up
with her. A slight frown formed between his gold-laced brows, and
China detected his salt-air scent again. Its effect alarmed her;
how strongly it drew her, how it made her notice the curve of his
mouth. She retreated a pace.

Jake began, "The room in the attic—"

China braced herself, waiting for him to ask
for his money back.

At the end of the hall, Susan Price stared at
Jake one last time before sliding into the kitchen.

He waited until she was gone, then observed
in a lowered voice, "That Mrs. Price, I get the feeling her hatch
isn't battened."

"She's a good example of what happens to a
woman who spends her life waiting for a man who'll never return
from a voyage," China responded tartly, then turned and strode away
before he could say anything more.

Captain Meredith hobbled past him, grumbling
under his breath about bossy women, and Jake was left standing
there, dispensed with, having never gotten the chance to talk about
moving out of the attic.

Jake looked up and down the empty hall as he
pushed up his sleeves. After a moment he muttered a curse himself
and went to get his coat.

There was a far less complicated lady waiting
for him at the repair yard. A lady with better manners and a very
kind heart.

CHAPTER THREE

She looks sound enough, Jake, but for that
bottom," Monroe Tewey observed. He shifted the toothpick in the
corner of his mouth while his experienced eyes ran the length of
the
Katherine Kirkland
's starboard hull.

Jake stood on the busy dock, bareheaded under
a soaking rain. The river was slate gray, mirroring the color of
the sky. It had always bothered him to see a ship out of the water
once it had been launched. He knew it was necessary, but a vessel
on groundways, exposed and somehow vulnerable, felt unnatural to
him, like a dog with wings or a sunrise in the west. Still, he was
glad to have Monroe doing the work—he ran one of the best repair
yards on the West Coast.

Monroe gestured at the tenacious forest of
goose barnacles clinging to the ship's hull. Tangled in them were
snarls of seaweed and other ocean flotsam. "When was she scraped
last?"

Jake hated to admit it, but the evidence of
her neglect was there for all to see. "It's been way too long. I
was the mate, but her last captain wouldn't spend the money to take
her in." He stressed the point. The mate was responsible for seeing
to a ship's maintenance, along with countless other duties, and he
didn't want anyone to think that he had personally allowed the
Katherine
to deteriorate. "He didn't care that it slowed her
down."

Monroe's toothpick darted back and forth with
a sucking noise as he shook his head disapprovingly. "You should
think about coppering her hull. It would help keep the worms off
her. It'd cut down on leaks, too. A wooden ship begins sinking the
day she's launched, you know."

Yes, he knew. But copper was expensive and
Jake wasn't ready to make that investment without committed cargo.
"Not this time, but if I make a decent run during the next year,
I'll bring her back to have it done," he said, swiping at a
raindrop on his forehead. "For now, we'll just tar and caulk her.
And I need to replace a few blocks, check her lines, varnish her.
Take a look at her rudder, too."

Monroe nodded and walked away to schedule the
work.

Jake crossed under the bowsprit and glanced
up at the figurehead. It was a beautifully carved woman with wheat
gold hair, blushing cheeks, and huge blue eyes. Her arms were
outstretched, as if to embrace the sea ahead of her and guide the
ship through the waves. Her white robes draped as though windblown,
but, in keeping with nautical custom, she was bare-breasted due to
the belief that such display had the power to quiet storms.

His gaze climbed, following the rigging to
the mastheads. They rose to such a dizzying height, they seemed to
scrape the bellies of the heavy gray clouds overhead. The ship was
a beauty, all right, with flowing lines and graceful curves, and
after sailing her for four years, he knew every inch of her.

Since that sultry night in Charleston, he had
marveled again and again at his incredible good luck—and profound
idiocy—to have wagered everything he owned on a pair of threes and
won. He'd wanted this ship. His hands had itched to take her wheel
without the bloodshot, beady-eyed stare of Captain Josiah Marshall
on the back of his neck. The only thing Jake had had going for him
in that card game, besides rock-steady nerves, was a clear head.
Captain Marshall had possessed neither. Marshall had bid "good
riddance to the bitch" as he signed his ownership over to Jake with
a vodka-palsied signature, vowing that Jake would never know a
moment's peace as her captain.

Jake had left Charleston the very next
morning with only one thought on his mind: he would set sail back
to Astoria, triumphant. He'd stopped for nothing, knowing there
would be plenty of time to see to the ship's repair after he got
there.

Marshall had been wrong. Jake knew as much
contentment as any man could who wandered the world. The
Katherine Kirkland
had asked nothing of him but reasonable
care and a sure hand on the wheel. In return, she lulled him to
sleep in his bunk on calm seas and offered cover during storms. If
she hadn't satisfied his every desire, she came close, and that was
about all a person could expect in life.

He started to walk back down the dock and
caught the pungent odor of the salmon cannery up ahead on his
right. A young man stood at the edge of the dock, wearily dumping
barrels of chum into the river while gulls hovered overhead and
dove into the water in pursuit of the fish remains. A half-dozen
skinny wharf cats twined around his legs seductively, meowing and
spitting at each other in competition for the scraps.

That easily could have been him mucking out a
cannery in rubber boots and a butcher's apron, Jake thought. It
probably would have been, too, considering the sparks that flew
between Pop and him. He would have had to find other work away from
the fishing boat, and for someone like him there weren't many
options. Fishing and the ocean were the only two things he'd known,
so he probably would have taken a job at one of the salmon packers.
And once the smell of fish got on a person, nothing could budge it.
It clung to hands, clothes, and dreams. Jake had grown up with
enough people who labored in the canneries to know that. The work
he'd done over the past several years had been just as hard, at
times more dangerous by a hundredfold. But he knew he'd had the
better life.

He turned to look at the
Katherine
one
more time. Pride rose in him. He was certain he'd made the right
decision in leaving Astoria all those years ago, although he hadn't
expected to be gone so long. This ship epitomized recognition,
success, respect—the attainment of everything he'd only dreamed of
so long ago. Well, almost everything.

*~*~*

China stood on the back porch and peeked
through the window in the kitchen door, hoping to sneak in
unnoticed. It would be impossible to explain to anyone what she was
doing outside in the rain with a cold, untouched meal in her hands.
Seeing no one, she balanced the tray against her hip and turned the
knob to let herself back in. She set the tray on the table and
considered the soup and sandwich on the plate in front of her.
Leaning forward a bit, she looked through the window toward the
carriage house to see if—