Marianne Wiggins - The Shadow Catcher

His confusion spread.

“Why state what’s obvious?” he said. “Come down from there, Scout. I have things to tell you.”

Clara gripped the reins and glanced from him to Asahel, standing only twenty feet away beside the road, his face revealing his astonishment and pain at witnessing what would have appeared to any passing stranger, not only to him, a lovers’ quarrel.

“Come down,” Edward repeated. “I’ve thought of nothing else. I’ve worked it out. I can make a go of it, I know it, Scout. With your help.”

“Please do not address me as ‘Scout,’ Edward. My name’s not ‘Scout.’ ”

Again that look of pained perplexity: “—but it’s my name for you.”

“I’m not yours to name. Like a slave or like a piece of…like your chattel.”

“—but it’s who you are to me.”

He gripped the harness and pulled the pack mule to him with his other hand, tying the mule’s lead onto the buckboard’s tackle.

“—don’t do that, Edward. Let go. I’m going to Seattle.”

“Plenty of time for that.”

He raised himself onto the boards and sat beside her. Without knowing how she had relinquished them, she saw he’d taken up the reins.

“Will you want to come to Seattle with us, Asahel?” Edward called and waved his hat. “We’ll be going there to make our fortune—!”

Asahel raised a tentative acknowledgment and started to walk toward them. In the brief time it took for him to join them on the buckboard Edward turned to Clara and stated his proposal. It was five words long. We shall have to marry .

She stared at him.

“We shall have to marry,” he repeated, “if we’re to live the way I want us to.”

She would remember flies were buzzing on the mule and mares, she would recall that flies were on their ears and asses and that the air around her smelled of mammals and that the man in whose presence she always found herself to be most helpless was paying the leathers through his fingers, his gaze focused not on her but on the road ahead when the proposition that would change her life had been put forward as if it were a point of trade at a livestock auction.

“—live the way you want us to?”

Still, he didn’t look at her.

“What way is that, Edward?”

He turned and met her gaze.

“You know…” He was having trouble speaking. “ That way.”

She felt her color rise.

“—as man and wife,” he finally said.

What did he know of men and wives, she couldn’t help but speculate, this man who’d lived outside the company of women for most his life, who’d never lived within the compass of a loving household or a loving couple, whose own parents had been apart for more than half their married lives. He was not like her, whose expectations for the marriage compact had been born of firsthand observation, whose parents had flirted and cavorted openly before their children and had lavished kisses on them and on each other.

“Do you even…have you any feelings toward me, Edward?”

“—of course.”

“I mean…have you love for me?”

She was aware that Asahel had clambered up behind them and was now within earshot of all they said.

“I have need ,” Edward whispered to her.

He took her hand and then moved to hide the gesture in the folds of her skirt. But Asahel had seen it. So he was not surprised when, early that same evening, at the family compound, Edward made an uncharacteristic appearance at the supper table and announced to everyone, “I will be taking Clara for my wife.”

“I knew it!” Hercules exclaimed and ran around the table to embrace his sister. “ I asked mother and father to get you a quick husband, ” he whispered in her ear. “I prayed to them. So you wouldn’t have to leave me.” He scurried, not to Edward, but to Asahel and embraced him, too. “Does this make us brothers?” he asked hopefully.

“I already have a brother,” Asahel remarked, his eyes riveting first Edward, and then Clara.

I don’t understand , Ellen generally lamented. “—Amelia? What about…that man you’re already married to?”

“When?” Eva icily inquired.

Clara was surprised by her displeasure.

“We’re going to Seattle in the morning to secure arrangements,” Edward announced.

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—