Night Winds (40 page)
“Through you I drain the pent-up rivers of myself;
In you I wrap a thousand onward years.”
Walt Whitman
From “A Woman Waits for Me”
* Friday, September 23, 1875 *
Shae stood on the gulf beach and stared off after the departing schooner. Its outline soon dissolved into a heavy morning fog. Phillip had insisted on driving Delilah from the bayside dock so Shae could reassure herself her aunt was truly leaving.
No trace of the ship’s outline remained, yet Shae maintained her vigil
. She barely noticed the misty drizzle that dampened clothes and skin. After a long, long span, she spoke. “It feels so strange to think I’ll never see her, never see any of my relatives again.”
Phillip squeezed her hand, then helped her down from the carriage and onto the deserted beach
. A pair of sandpipers strutted close and then reversed their course.
“Since when aren’t husbands counted among family?” Phillip asked
. He stooped to lift a flawless angel wing shell from the moist sand. The fragile halves of the ivory bivalve joined at the center, its raised ribs forming a pair of delicate, striped wings. “And if that’s not enough, there’ll be the childre
n
our children, Shae. Think of it.”
She accepted the shell as well as the greater gift of his earnest words, his reassuring presence
. She marveled at the joy his promise brought her, at the quickening of her heart as he put his arm around her shoulder. For so many years, she had allowed the past to darken her colors, to nearly obliterate all but the faintest trace of light. Now despite the rain’s increase, she stood blinking in the brilliance, the warm glow of the future, not the past.
Still, she remained unsure about Alberta
. “Do you think I was right to send her back to Philadelphia?”
“There’s nothing to be gained by bringing her to trial,” Phillip told her
. “Losing your father was already the greatest punishment for her.”
“And now she’s lost her home as well.”
“And you.”
“She hated me,” Shae said
. “You heard her.”
He shook his head
. “She hated your mother for taking King from her. Her guilt prevented her from seeing who you are.”
She turned and peered into his hazel eyes
. “And who is that, Dr. Payton?”
His wicked smile sent chills sparking through her body in the most delightful places
. “Someone I feel tempted to examine, right here on the beach.”
Shae grinned at him in shameless invitation
.
She should not have been surprised when his reaction spooked Delilah and sent her squealing at a gallop down the beach.
“I told you earlier she couldn’t be reformed,” Shae said.
Over an hour passed before they bothered to retrieve the mare
. During the drive home, neither one complained about the damp sand sticking to the skin inside their clothes.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Port Providence is a fictional city located on a peninsula along the Gulf Coast of Texas. The community is based largely on Galveston, which was the grandest city of the southwest during the latter part of the 19
th
century.
Two prosperous coastal settlements in the region, Indianola and St. Mary’s, were devastated by hurricanes in 1875 and 1886
. Hundreds of lives were lost, and both young cities were abandoned.
Galveston survived these storms and stands today, despite the catastrophic 1900 hurricane, now known as the Great Storm
. Between five and six thousand people died in that hurricane, more than in any other natural disaster in United States history. Because of the terrible damage, the city soon lost its preeminence to Houston.
The storm recounted in
Night Winds
is a composite of both fictional elements and actual events from each of these storms.
Copyright ©
2014 Gwyneth Atlee
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