The Shadow Catcher

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.