The Shadow Catcher

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.