We are? Clara thought
“Who’d have thought you’d find a husband before I did?” Eva mused, not charitably. Only Asahel, among the Curtises, was kind enough to raise a toast. To Clara and Edward, he announced: God help you.
Edward left the kitchen as abruptly as he had appeared and Clara followed him across the porch into the yard as he continued walking, unaware that she was shadowing him. She called his name and he stopped and turned and she came up very close to him.
“Edward, what is this about—?”
He looked at her intently and for one careless instant she believed he was about to kiss her but instead he touched a stray lock of her hair and smoothed it back along her head. He kept his hand beside her face and traced the delicate bone of her ear. “You must let me call you what I want to call you,” he said, and she nodded, once, as if entranced, and, once again, he almost smiled.
“Read this,” he said and handed her a folded piece of newsprint from his shirt pocket. It was a small notice, torn from a page of a Seattle newspaper, seeking capital investment in a local business.
“A photographic studio,” he pointed out. “A going concern. Already established. I wrote to him. The owner, Mr. Rothi. I told him not to take a partner on until I came to see him.”
“How much does he want?”
“—what does it matter? If he’s got a full setup I can start to print my photographs. We can make a business of it — you and me…”
He looked so hopeful she leaned to kiss him as an affirmation but he turned his head aside, so her lips touched his bearded cheek and when she threw her arms around his shoulders she could sense that something wasn’t natural in the way he stood, in his resistance, a specter of reluctance in his flesh.
He didn’t come to her that night, although she only half expected that he would, now that his mother and his sister were returned. Edward was not a man to compromise her virtue in their eyes, she knew — but she also knew that he was not a man to let anything come between himself and what he wanted, once he wanted it. She hoped, against her rational judgment, that he would wait until the household was asleep and come to her again to lie beside her. She thought she had been cured of this longing that arose unbidden every time she thought of him, but his reappearance, the physical effect he had on her, had proved her wrong. She placed her palm flat on the pillow where he had slept and tried to ease her disappointment in the present with thoughts of their future life together, not a single night but a succession of nights and days, with Edward. Happiness should have been her natural state — she knew she should be happy — but some occluding doubt, or lack of faith, diffused that vision. They were to be married. If there was some less-than-gratifying aspect of their present contract, she believed, they would find the means to make it better in their future years together, as a couple. She loved him and he needed her. And that was all that mattered.
They left as dawn broke the next morning, Clara wearing for the second day in a row the only traveling clothes she owned and Edward dressed in a worsted three-piece suit she’d never seen, cut high beneath the arms as had been the fashion several years before. His shirt was starched but on close inspection she could see the collar had been turned. He wore a silk cravat tied at a rakish angle and carried a moroccan leather portfolio of deep burnished cordovan stamped in gold, in an exquisite flourish underneath the handle, with the letters E.S.C. They took the buckboard and the two dray mares Hercules had at the ready for them and reached the boat landing in less than half an hour. In another hour they were on the water, plowing through the coastal fog as if sleepwalking in a dream, the points of reference otherworldly, passing them as phantoms. Clara stood with Edward by the rail, their faces and their clothing growing damp with moisture from the air that formed a blanket visibility, a surround, a seeing-but-not-seeing, which intensified the mystery of things one heard. A loon. Two loons. A distant bell. Sound, she thought — no wonder this body of water was called Puget Sound—sound defined the world out here, not vision. It reminded her of snow, of the way snow falling in the evening in St. Paul had baffled sound around their house, of the way her mother had led them out onto the porch to listen to sound’s heightened intensity under the influence of falling snow. Her mother would have loved the echo chamber that this fog created, Clara thought — it was like a tunnel, snug — and as she bent across the rail she had the feeling that if she leaned out far enough it could nullify her being and subsume her, render her invisible and swallow her as snow had devoured both her parents—
Edward! she breathed, reaching for him as a safety. She had never told him how her parents died, only how she and Hercules had been forced to carry on without them. She had never told him of her mother’s sensitivity for sound, only of her father’s artfulness, and now she felt she had to tell him all about Amelia, how the music lived inside her, how she played, how she transformed into another being, an instrument of sound, when she sat down and started touching the piano.
“—Edward, I so want to tell you how my mother…”
“—yes, I know you’re fairly bursting with excitement, aren’t you, Scout? You are so good for me! You’ve changed my life! Those books — you must go on giving me more books to read! You must teach me everything you know—!”
He kissed her fingers through her glove.
“I’ve brought along this gold nugget,” he said, showing it to her. She had seen it — or one like it — on his writing desk, when she had visited his spartan room: it was small and brown, the shape and color of a relic tooth.
“For our wedding bands,” he said.
From the size of it she could see how thin the bands would have to be, but she was touched.
“A fellow gave it to my father, for saving his wife’s life through prayer. The woman had a fever and my father sat with her three nights and prayed. While we waited, this fellow told me how he’d gone out west to California when the gold was struck, one of the first, in ’49. He told me how he’d found a strike and mined it — not a panning site, a placer find. From that moment I was gold struck — so many things to do in one life, Scout! That fellow ran out of strength before the gold ran out and he showed me on a map where it was and he asked me if I would go with him. Would I! I’d have gone in a heartbeat but for father weighing in against it.”
He rolled the nugget in his hand.
“This nugget was all that he had left and when his wife was cured he pressed it into Father’s hand and said, ‘She’s worth it.’ Father didn’t know what it was worth. If I hadn’t taken it from him he would have squandered it.”
“—you took it?”
“I conserved it.”
His look declared his self-acquittal. Some people, it seemed to say, cannot be trusted to appreciate the value of the things they own, cannot be trusted to safeguard their heritage. It was not so different, she supposed, than her own conservation of her father’s paintings from the debt collectors. And she was even further moved to understand that Edward was now willing to convert this talisman to rings to pledge their troth.
It had already slipped her mind that she had started to tell him something dear to her, about herself. When he had interrupted.
They had not known each other long enough for her to see a pattern, yet — everything they did together was still new, a singular event, so when they docked, and disembarked, into the bruit and push of the rough and tumble ferry slip and Edward strode ahead of her, leaving her to struggle through the crowd alone to catch him, she thought the pace he set was from their shared excitement, not his single-mindedness.