Marianne Wiggins - The Shadow Catcher

Clara smiled again at Edward’s language.

“Are you a mountaineer, Mr. Curtis?” the jeweler asked.

“I have ascended to Pinnacle Peak. Twice ,” he answered. “Carrying my dry-plate camera. Fourteen thousand feet.”

The jeweler stopped and looked at him.

“You have photographs taken from the peak?”

Edward nodded.

“Then perhaps I can interest you in showing them to our Mazamas Club. Have you heard of us?”

Edward shook his head.

“We are the premier mountaineering group of the Pacific Northwest. Do you mountaineer, as well?” he asked of Clara.

“No, I’m sorry. My pursuits are more interior…”

The jeweler turned his attention back to Edward: “I’ll put you in touch with the Club leader, we make several expeditions a year into the Cascades and Olympics…”

As the men talked Clara began to see into a world of symbiotically connected links, a society like the one she had known her parents to have had in the art world when she was growing up in St. Paul, formed of men and women whose interests overlapped. But then the jeweler said, “It will help your business,” and Clara realized there was another aspect to the world of mutual pursuit that she had yet to learn.

The bell on the door chimed and what appeared to Clara to be a beggar woman entered with a damp smell accompanying her, rising from the crude reed basket that she carried covered with a cloth. She was all of four feet tall, almost equally as wide around her hips, with a faded blue bandanna tied around her weathered face from which tiny crescent eyes peered at Clara without expression over thin down-turning lips.

“Good morning, Princess,” the jeweler greeted her with what Clara thought sounded like mockery. “What have you got for me today?”

The woman opened her fist, palm up, in front of Clara in a gesture Clara assumed was meant to ask for money until she noticed tiny ivory pearls the size of apple seeds scattered on the incised map across her palm.

“Pearls,” the woman said.

“Let’s have a look,” the jeweler told her.

She crossed to him and showed him what she had while Edward watched her closely. The jeweler counted out the tiny pearls across the counter, then handed her some coins.

“Clams?” she asked, exposing the fresh shellfish in her basket. “Mussels?”

“Not today, Princess,” the jeweler said.

She looked at Edward, and Clara could see that he was studying her every feature.

Then, without a word, she left.

“That was Princess Angeline,” the jeweler told them. “Quite the fixture around here.”

“That’s somewhat cruel, don’t you think?” Clara braved. “To call someone like her a ‘princess’?”

“—but she is a princess. The daughter of Chief Sealth. The Suquamish head man from whom Seattle takes its name. She and her ilk dig clams and mussels on the reed flats down by Eliot Bay…”

He showed the finished rings to them for their approval and asked, “Anything else I can help you with this morning?”

“Yes,” Edward said. “Tell us where we need to go to find a judge so we can marry.”

It was the courthouse and within two hours, and without ceremony, they were man and wife. They had stood next to each other without touching but when the moment came they had turned to face each other, and had smiled.

When it was over Edward led Clara to a nearby restaurant and held her hand across the table as the waiter brought them glasses of ice water in leaded tumblers with real ice. It was thrilling, Clara thought.

“To ‘Rothi and Curtis,’” Edward toasted.

“Yes,” Clara concurred. She raised her glass. “And to us .”

She looked around the room and began to anticipate the excitement of their life together in this invigorating place. She squeezed his hand. “I have a single favor I must beg.”

He waited.

“Hercules,” Clara said. “I trust you will allow—”

“—of course,” Edward affirmed. “I already think of him as my own brother.” He pressed her fingers. “—even as my son.”

Thank you , she breathed.

She could not imagine greater happiness. At a nearby table a woman laughed and Clara turned in time to see the woman’s escort bring her fingers to his lips and kiss them and then press her hand against his heart. She felt Edward lift his hand from hers and by the time she turned back to him he had tucked a napkin in his collar and was lost behind the menu.

Through the meal he sought her advice on designing stationery and his business card and asked her help composing the notice he would place about his partnership with Rothi in the newspapers. He had determined he would stay on a few days and begin to work, begin to look for rooms for them to rent and when they reached the top of the entrance to the dock he asked if she needed him to walk her all the way down to the ferry.

“I can make it on my own,” she said.

“That’s my Scout .”

He took her by the shoulders then and kissed her on the check and when she turned to wave to him after several steps he was already gone.

The sun had still to set on her wedding day when she brought the mares to a halt before the house and Hercules came running from the barn.

“I shod my first horse—!” he cried. “All by myself! The farrier let me shoe her!”

Clara waved her finger with the wedding band in front of him. “I guess we both got shod today,” she joked.

He embraced her and she walked beside him as he led the horses.

“Edward bought a business.”

“—what kinda business?”

“Pictures.”

“—oh that’s nice. Like father’s?”

“Photographs.”

“—oh I’ve seen him do that in the barn.”

“Yes but now he’s going to do it in Seattle.”

Hercules stood still.

“No,” he said.

“Hercules, it’s a wonderful city — like St. Paul. You’ll meet lots of boys your age—”

“You were supposed to marry him so we could stay ,” he said. “—so you would stay.”

“I’m not saying we will be apart…”

“ I am.”

She blinked.

“I’m not going to Seattle,” Hercules said with grave finality. “You can’t make me.”

“Why are you behaving like this, Hercules?”

“I’m happy here—”

“—we will still be happy in…”

“I’m happy here where I can be with horses.”

“There are horses in Seattle,” she began to argue.

“— these horses.”

Clara took a moment to assess her brother’s mood.

“I talk to them,” he said.

She watched him smooth the fine soft hairs along the gray mare’s cheek.

“We can always visit—”

“—no I talk to them, ” he told her.

She stared at him.

“—inside the horses,” he tried to explain to her.

“You talk to…?”

“—mother and father.”

“— inside the horses,” she finally repeated.

“—don’t ask me to explain it. I didn’t want you to find out.”

He began to cry.

“—no, no…” she comforted him. “It’s a good thing that you’ve told me, Hercules.”

“I can feel them. In the ponies. When I pet them. And I know they can feel me…”

She watched him lean his head against the horse’s flank and close his eyes and she laid her hand against his back and patted him.

“Tell me something,” she said after a while. “Which horse is it?”

“All of them.”

“—every horse?”

“Every one I’ve ever met,” he said. “They just know me. We just fall in love. There has to be a reason why …”