Lilac Spring (11 page)

“What suitors?” she responded dreamily. “They’re all forgotten.”

Silas chuckled, hardly daring to believe in the reality of the two of them. Was this truly Cherish standing here in his arms? His lips found hers once more.

“
Cherish!
What in thunder!” Tom Winslow’s roar threw them apart.

Before Silas could draw back any farther, Winslow crossed the space between them. The next thing Silas knew, Cherish’s
father grabbed him by the shirt collar and hauled him away from his daughter.

Winslow’s fist flew into his jaw and Silas’s head snapped back.

“Papa!” Cherish shouted as she grabbed his arm with both her hands. “No, Papa!”

Her father’s fist came at him again, this time smashing against the corner of his mouth, jamming his lips against his teeth.

“Silas, do something!” screamed Cherish behind her father. “Papa, stop it!”

Finally Winslow flung Silas from him, sending him flying across the floor to land several feet away.

Cherish sobbed, not letting go of her father’s arm.

“Get away from me,” he shouted, shaking her off.

Silas stood, ready to protect Cherish, but Winslow’s attention went back to him.

“Papa, you don’t understand! What’s gotten into you?” Tears streamed down her face as her hands went out to her father.

“Don’t push me, child. Get on home, while I deal with this—this—” Not finding a word sufficiently strong to express his disgust, he gave Silas a look full of loathing. “Go home, Cherish.”

Cherish stood her ground.

“Go, Cherish,” Silas said gently, wiping the blood he felt against the side of his mouth.

Her father turned to him. “You shut up!”

Silas fell silent with a final nod to Cherish. She turned once more to her father and back to Silas. Seeing no further encouragement from either, she finally backed slowly out of the room.

When the two men were alone, Silas faced Winslow, knowing deep inside that it was over.

“I could kill you! I would run you out of Haven’s End if I could. But I can only get you off my property. I want you out of here.
Now!
” He brought his fists up in impotent rage. “Don’t ever cross my path again.”

Suddenly he turned his hate-filled eyes away from Silas and brought his hands up to his face, his voice incredulous, seeking understanding. “I
trusted
you! I trusted you with my Cher
ish…my sweet baby…” His voice broke, and Silas felt his own heart twist at the man’s anguish.

Winslow turned back to face him, his arm sweeping across the boat shop. “I trusted you with everything. Everything! Do you understand? And how do you reward me? Stab me in the back! Steal my only child! My innocent girl!” The thought rekindled his anger and he turned murderous eyes once again on Silas.

“I told you to get out!
Get out! Get out!
” Like a man possessed, he advanced toward Silas and lunged at him. Silas didn’t wait further. He knew he would get nowhere with Cherish’s father, so he turned toward the door.

He’d known it would be like this.

He walked out the door without looking back at the place that had been his home for the past fourteen years of his life.

Silas walked blindly down to the shipyard, knowing only one place to go—his boat. The only thing that belonged to him.

“Hey, Silas, thought you were up to the boathouse,” Ezra called to him from the schooner hull. “Are you all right? What happened to you?”

Silas averted his face. Suddenly he felt ashamed. He didn’t want anyone to know he’d just been thrown out on his rump like a stray dog.

He hurried past the men to his skiff. “Just going out for a sail.”

Ezra glanced at the sky. “Sky looks a mite growly. I wouldn’t take her out too far.”

Silas confirmed the man’s assessment. The clouds had thickened while he’d been inside. “No, I won’t go far.” Where indeed could he go, with no money, no gear? Too late to think about that now. He certainly wouldn’t attempt to go up to his room now.
His
room, what a delusion, he thought as he pulled the boat seaward and pushed it into the tide.

He rowed out to his yawl and climbed aboard. Once he was clear of the port and out on the ocean, his mind was free to react to the scene in the boat shop.

What had possessed him? Why couldn’t he have controlled himself? He’d known Cherish for fourteen years. Why this feeling that overwhelmed him at her mere presence? He’d been fighting it for weeks now. How had it developed? When had he first noticed every womanly curve of her? Every feminine wile?

For she
had
been flirting with him, he could be certain of that.

Perhaps she wasn’t scared of her father. She probably underestimated his disapproval toward Silas as a suitor. She was so used to having her way with Winslow that it wouldn’t occur to her that he might not condone her pursuit of Silas.

But Silas could claim no such excuse. He’d known. If Winslow hadn’t considered him to replace his nephew Henry in the shipyard, why would he ever give Silas a blessing with his only daughter? Knowing this, Silas had insisted on playing with fire. He should have put a stop to it much earlier. He’d tried, he argued with himself, remembering his “talk” with Cherish. She’d reacted like a spoiled child.

Well, isn’t that what she was? And he was a fool. A stupid fool who should have known better. He certainly didn’t deserve any better than what he’d gotten.

If he’d wanted female companionship, there were certainly comely enough girls in the village. Why did it have to be the one who was off-limits that drew him?

His boat skimmed across the leaden gray water, the spray hitting him in the face, the wind whipping his hair back. He drove the boat harder, needing the action, the elements as a release to the anger, the frustration, the utter despair that rose from inside him.

Oh, God! Why now? Why this? I didn’t ask for this! Why did she have to come home now and suddenly develop some imagined fancy for me?

When he’d spent his energies, if not his anger, he pulled up his centerboard and beached his boat in a sheltered cove. The clouds, which had threatened, began to send down the first drops as he secured the boat up above the high-water mark. He realized he would probably be spending the night with it as his only shelter, a tarpaulin as his cover.

He could have bedded down with Ezra or William, but something had held him back from asking. A sense of humiliation engulfed him. He didn’t want his emotions examined by one and all. He had a horror of having his most private feelings the talk of the town.

Did you hear about that Silas van der Zee? Kissing Winslow’s daughter! Can you imagine? The apple of his eye. Who did he think he was, anyway?
The town matrons would cluck their tongues and shake their heads.
Shows what happens when you open your house to some stranger. What do you get for your effort and sacrifice? A slap in the face! Oh, for shame, Silas!
The accusing eyes would stare at him in the street, from the church pews, across the store counter.

Silas, his stomach growling from hunger, his body shivering through his thin shirt, huddled in the cuddy of his boat, wrapped himself in the tarpaulin and bedded down for the night under the steady patter of cold rain.

C
herish spent the rest of the afternoon alternately crying and marveling in wonder at Silas’s kiss. She touched her lips afresh, unable to believe what she had experienced.

She cried at the injustice of her father’s reaction, sickened by his treatment of Silas. How she longed to run to Silas, nurse his bruised jaw, but she knew her father wouldn’t let her within sight of him. She had to give her father time to cool down. Then she could talk to him reasonably and tell him of her love for Silas. She could explain that it wasn’t an overnight infatuation, but a devotion spanning years.

She’d felt each blow to Silas as if it had been directed against her own body. She cried into the pillow once again, wanting to hold Silas and tend to him.

Dear Lord, You know our hearts. I pray for Your mercy. Please soften Papa’s heart. Make him see reason. Oh, please take care of Silas until I can go to him.

She continued praying, but found it hard to concentrate as she began to relive Silas’s kisses. Was this the quiet, reserved, gently teasing Silas she knew? Was this her Silas? The man who’d held her close, as if he would crush her? The same man who’d given her a lecture about flirting just days ago?

She hugged the pillow to herself, rolling across her bed, wanting nothing more than to be in his arms again.

The only thing that marred her discovery of this new Silas was her memory of his reaction to her father. She had to stifle her sense of disappointment at Silas, who’d done nothing to defend himself against her father, but had just stood there passively receiving her father’s blows.

Was this the same man who’d displayed such emotion just moments before?

How could the two men be one and the same?

Cherish got up from her bed when she heard the front door open, knowing her father was home. She washed her face with cold water and brushed her hair. With a final smoothing down of her gown and apron, she made her way downstairs.

Her father was seated in his chair in the front parlor. Uncharacteristically he was doing nothing but staring into space. His newspaper lay ignored on the table beside his chair.

“Papa?” she began softly, entering the room.

He stared at her unsmilingly. “Close the door, Cherish.”

She complied and came into the room and stood before him.

“Sit down.”

She took the chair beside him and clasped her hands.

He rubbed his face as if finding it difficult to begin.

“Papa—” She decided to help him by explaining her feelings for Silas.

He held up a hand. “Don’t say anything, Cherish.” After a few moments of silence, he began again. “Cherish, you don’t know how disappointed I am in you today.”

Tears stung her eyes afresh. He sounded so disillusioned.

Again he rubbed his jaw, and suddenly she saw him as gray and haggard.

“Are you all right, Papa?”

He gave her a look. “No, Cherish, I’m not.” He looked away from her as if he couldn’t bear to look at her anymore. “I can’t tell you what seeing you like that has done to me.”

“But, Papa, Silas—”

At that her father showed signs of life again. “Don’t even
speak
that name in this house again!”

Cherish stood, her own frustration rising. “Papa, how can you say that? Aren’t you going to give me a chance to tell you how much I love him?”

He stood, too. “Love him? Love him?” he roared. “Are you going to have the effrontery to stand there and tell me some story about your attachment to a good-for-nothing boy who works on my shipyard…”

Her voice rose to match her father’s. “A good-for-nothing boy! How can you say that about Silas? He’s worked—slaved—for you for years. What has he gotten in return? Has he ever had a good word from you? A promotion? A chance at learning to design ships?”

He didn’t let her go on. “What has he gotten from me?” He raked a hand through his dark hair and turned away with a bitter laugh. “You dare ask me what he’s had the gall to take from me? I could kill him, I swear I could. If I ever see him skulking around you again—If he so much as dares look at you again—”

“Papa! I love him. Can’t you see that?”

“Love!” His voice thundered at her, his brown eyes black in their fury. “Don’t you dare utter that word!

“After all I did for him,” he muttered. “All I did for
you!
I’m not going to have you waste all the education, all the manners you’ve been taught—to throw it all away on some barely literate ship’s carpenter.” He turned to her. “You must promise me you’ll have no more to do with Silas.”

When she said nothing, it seemed to infuriate him anew. “I’ll send you away, Cherish, I swear I will. I’ll send you back to your cousin Penelope. I’ll send you as far as it takes.”

“Papa. You wouldn’t! You wouldn’t do anything so cruel.”

“Don’t push me, Cherish. Now, you get your silly notions about Silas out of your head. Do you hear me?”

The two were shouting at each other by then, though neither noticed how loudly until they heard a banging on the door. Aunt Phoebe poked her head in. “If you don’t want every
one in Haven’s End to know what you’re quarreling about, you’d better keep your voices down.”

Winslow scowled at his sister and fell silent, but only for a moment.

Cherish turned to her aunt. “Aunt Phoebe, you must make Papa see reason. He can’t forbid me to see Silas.”

“I can and I will! I’ve already kicked him out of the shipyard and promised that if he so much as steps inside, he’ll be accused of breaking and entering.”

“How could you? This is his home. All his belongings are at the boat shop. Where’s he going to go?”

“He can go to perdition for all I care!” he roared.

Even Phoebe felt compelled to intervene at that. “Thomas Winslow, you get a hold of yourself. Cherish, you’d better go. I’ll talk to your father.”

Cherish left the house, running to the boat shop. She had to find Silas. No one was in the workshop. It looked exactly as they’d left it. She went up the steps to Silas’s room.

She paused on the threshold. She had never been in his room. Nothing looked moved. A narrow cot stood along one wall, neatly made up. A few garments hung on hooks. She stepped in cautiously. On the chest of drawers were a few boat models, a comb and brush. She slowly opened the top drawer. Everything neatly folded. She opened the second one and found the same.

Her father hadn’t given him a chance to take anything with him! She brought a fist to her mouth. The extent of her father’s prejudice against Silas was becoming clearer to her.

Still hoping she was wrong, she walked to the only window in the room and scanned the activity down below. The men were working as if nothing had occurred. There was no sign of Silas.

She searched for his boat, but it wasn’t there.

Perhaps he’d left it moored in the harbor. She had to know. She’d go down and ask the men below. If they knew nothing, she’d walk to the harbor and look for his boat.

Feeling better for having made a concrete decision, Cherish headed out the door. She took one last glance around the room, a part of her wishing she could linger, to breathe in the
scent of him from his pillow, his clothes, touch the things he’d touched that morning….

Tom Winslow spent an uneasy night and woke up feeling battered. The vision of that young upstart presuming—daring—to take his daughter in his calloused hands threatened to resurrect the rage all over again, a rage that overwhelmed him and made him feel physically ill.

After a meager breakfast, his stomach feeling queasy, Winslow stood on his front veranda, staring at the inlet beyond the front yard. Why couldn’t his daughter—his only child, the light of his life since his dear Isabel had passed away—have fallen for someone like that handsome Warren Townsend? Good English stock, well educated, with the kind of wealth to give Cherish the life he had raised her for.

How he needed his wife, his Isabel, now. She would understand. Why did she have to be taken away from him?

His thoughts returned to Silas. Who was he? Nothing but the son of immigrants, with not a penny to his name, no formal education, no roots in Haven’s End. Why, his own—and the Townsend—family went back to pre-Revolutionary days. They each had ancestors who had fought on the
Margaretta,
in the first naval battle of the war against the English.

Winslow shook his head. He’d never experienced the anger he’d felt yesterday. Not when a competitor outbid him on a contract. Not when he was frustrated with all the setbacks that life had to offer. The bile rose in his throat and he decided to put his ire to constructive use before it flooded him.

Such rage was having an effect on his body. He must be getting old, he thought. He felt a vague malaise and a pain in his chest, which he attributed to heartburn.

He turned his attention to the day ahead. He would go into Hatsfield. Yes, he had people to see. If he could do anything in his power to see that Silas found no employment in any shipyard, he could force Silas to leave the area for good.

He’d thought long and hard all night over what he could tell his competitors about Silas and why he was undesirable. It had
to be convincing. They all knew Silas’s work and would hire him in a flash if they knew he was seeking employment.

A hint, a mere hint was all, something to taint his character…that was all it would take.

Tom Winslow left the house, a man with a mission.

Silas’s neck and back groaned in protest when he finally stretched himself out of his cramped sleeping quarters. His jaw hurt and his lips felt tender where they’d connected with Winslow’s fist.

Although it had stopped raining sometime in the night, the day looked as dismal as the dirty water pooling around him.

He picked up a can and began bailing it out. He had nothing better to do at the moment. He felt chilled to the bone and his hunger had turned to a dull gnaw in his stomach.

Ignoring both, he returned to bailing.

At least the action served to warm him up. After some moments of steady work he stopped to stretch the kinks out of his back. As soon as he did, he heard a raspy voice behind him.

“Ahoy there! Some rain we got last night.”

The man who spoke looked ancient. He was hunched over and wore a captain’s cap atop a scrawny head of gray hair and about three days’ growth of gray beard. He scratched this as he approached Silas’s boat.

He wore an old seaman’s jersey that was frayed at the edges and had a few holes at the elbows. His dungarees were held up by a rope belt. A pair of mud-encrusted boots crunched across the pebbles as he neared.

Silas recognized him, though he’d never addressed him personally. No one knew the origins of Tobias Tibbetts, the village drunk. No one remembered just when he’d settled in Haven’s End after a life at sea. They knew only that he was never quite sober and tended to ramble on about his days at sea if spoken to.

“Good morning,” Silas answered.

“Fine day it be.”

Silas didn’t find he could agree, so he remained silent.

The man contemplated the boat, his hand continuing to scrape at his grizzled jaw. “Fine yawl she looks.”

“Yes.” There he could agree.

The man suddenly stared up at him, his bleary blue gaze taking on a sharpness. “You slept in ’er?”

“Yes,” he answered without thinking.

The man sniffed. “Want some chow?”

Before Silas could think how to refuse, the man turned and shuffled up the pebbly cove. “Come along and have yourself a cup o’ coffee. Looks like you can use it.”

Silas slowly let the can drop. Jumping down from the boat, he followed the man up a path almost hidden by the high grasses covering the steep cliff that led up from the beach.

Tibbetts led him through the meadow to a little tar-paper shack set in a grove of evergreen trees overlooking the cove.

When Silas stepped into the one-room shanty, the odor made him stop. He wondered how such a small space set amidst the fresh-scented spruce and sea could smell so fetid.

The answer came to him as his eyes roamed the cramped quarters. The room looked as if it had never been cleaned or set in order since it had been built. Bundles lay everywhere.

Odd bits of metal, old, broken furniture, oily rags, dirty dishes, opened cans of food, heaps of clothes—there wasn’t a space not taken up with something old and dirty. To intensify the smell, the room had the hot, overstuffed atmosphere of a woodstove burning in summer. Amidst the disorder Silas spied at least three cats silently prowling through the mess.

He had to breathe through his mouth for a few moments as he followed the old man into the room. Tobias cleared off some old newspapers from a wooden chair. “Here, have a seat. I’ll get us both some coffee.” Leaving Silas to make himself comfortable, he shuffled over to the iron stove and took off the enamel coffeepot. “Just go fill this up with water,” he muttered as he exited the shack.

When the water began to boil, Tobias rummaged around the crowded countertop against one wall, shooing off a couple of cats. He examined an iron frying pan, took a dish towel from
the counter, wiped the insides of the pan and set it on the stove top. “I’ll fry ya up some bacon. Know it’s here somewheres ’cause I bought a pound yesterday, that and some eggs. Couldn’t have gone far, unless’n those cats got at it. That’s probably why I stashed it somewhere.” As he prepared breakfast, he continued talking.

“You’re the boatbuilder, ain’t ya? Seen you working down on Winslow’s yard.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You build the yawl?”

“Yes. Finished her last summer.”

The bubbling coffee and frying bacon began to overcome the other smells. When the plate was set before Silas along with the cup of steaming coffee, he temporarily forgot his surroundings and dug in hungrily.

“Here’s some toast. The bread was a mite stale, but I put it on the stove to toast and it ain’t bad this way.”

Tobias sat across from him, pushing another cat off a chair. The cat, unfazed, climbed back onto his bony legs and curled up after a few attempts to find a comfortable spot.