The Widow Of Pale Harbour. Hester Fox

from his lungs. He put down his fork, hoping to appear composed in his answer. “My wife passed away. Childbirth,” he added, knowing that if he didn’t provide the cause now he would only be asked later anyway. “The baby died, as well.”

      Mrs. Marshall’s face creased and fell. “Oh, dear, I am sorry to hear that.”

      Gabriel waved off her concern, but it took a considerable amount of effort to keep himself in the present. It seemed that no matter how far he ran from Concord, Anna would haunt him, never mind that he had hungered for her ghost to follow him here.

      “Well, I don’t like to impose where it isn’t my business, but Pale Harbor has any number of good, capable young women who would make good wives to a minister.”

      “Clara!” Mr. Marshall exclaimed.

      “Well, it’s true,” she said in an injured tone. “I don’t pretend to be a matchmaker, but there’s no hurt in him considering his options.”

      Mr. Marshall gave Gabriel an apologetic look as if to say they both knew how women could be. Gabriel dropped his gaze to his plate, his appetite gone.

      They finished dinner in silence, even the twins apparently content to be quiet. Afterward, the girls were sent up to bed while the adults retired to the parlor for dessert. Gabriel drank the coffee that was offered to him and ate the fruitcake, nodding politely along at the depthless conversation about the weather and the new portrait studio in Rockport.

      Coming here had been a mistake. Why did he think he could converse with prominent, wealthy families? Social graces and etiquette had never been his strong point. What need had a man like him, from his background, for social graces? He’d had to learn everything painstakingly from Anna, and even now he was more suited to enjoying a good story in a tavern than polite small talk over delicate china cups of coffee.

      “I should be going,” Gabriel said, standing abruptly.

      Mrs. Marshall’s brows drew quizzically together, but she pasted on a bright smile. “Of course, I hadn’t realized how late it was getting. Horace?”

      “Mmm? Oh, right, right,” said Mr. Marshall, standing with a grunt.

      “Thank you,” Gabriel said, giving Mrs. Marshall a stiff bow of his head. “Dinner was delicious.”

      Gabriel’s coat had almost completely dried after the benefit of being on a stove, and the men went out to the porch, where Mr. Marshall lit another cigar. The storm of the previous night had rolled off, leaving in its wake a steady drizzle and crisp breeze.

      “You’ll think all it does is rain here,” Mr. Marshall said with a hint of chagrin. “We seem to be stuck in some sort of weather pattern, with storms from the sea rolling into the harbor every few days.”

      Gabriel welcomed the rain. Every drop that chilled him to the bone was a penance, a reminder. He deserved to be wet and cold for the role he had played in Anna’s death. If he hadn’t gotten her with child, she would still be here. She had been too delicate, too fragile, for childbearing, and he hadn’t protected her. God, he was doing it again. Stop thinking about her, you dolt.

      Mr. Marshall reached for something in his waistcoat pocket, pulling Gabriel from his thoughts. “I hope you won’t mind the presumption, but I’ve taken the liberty of drawing up a list of all the families in town for you.” He handed Gabriel a folded sheet of paper. “Thought you might want to make the rounds and introduce yourself.”

      Gabriel took the list and scanned the jumble of names, unable to fathom actually having to put faces to them. “Thank you. I’m sure this will be very useful.”

      But Mr. Marshall wasn’t listening. He was worrying at his mustache, staring out into the gray dusk. “There is one name I omitted from that list.” He paused. “You would do well to steer far and clear of Sophronia Carver.”

      “The widow?”

      Nodding, Mr. Marshall took a slow puff from his cigar. “My wife has a flair for the dramatic, but there’s no getting around the fact that something’s not quite right about what goes on in that house.”

      Gabriel followed Mr. Marshall’s gaze to the tip of a white cupola that just showed above the treetops in the distance. His heart grew heavy and his gut churned at the thought of meeting with anyone on the list, least of all the odd widow who had so captured their imaginations.

       4

      Sophronia looked down at the deluge of ink slowly spreading across her desk and bit back a curse; nothing had gone right that morning. First, she had taken out her favorite wool shawl for the winter, only to find that moths had eaten the fringe clean off. Then the magazine’s board had delivered a stern missive, warning that subscriptions were down from last year and that if she couldn’t bring in a higher caliber of submissions, then the magazine’s future would be in grave jeopardy. It was all bluster on their part, but it still was never a good sign when the board was unhappy. The last straw had been when Duchess had knocked a bottle of ink over a stack of unread submissions. Now half of them were stained and stuck together, and would be unreadable. If the next brilliant submission to save the magazine had been in that pile, she would never know.

      But even on the hard days like this, she relished her role as owner and editor of the magazine, and wouldn’t give it up for anything. All the work could be done from her desk in the parlor, and then Garrett would take her packets of papers and notes and mail them to the office in Portland. It gave her a sense of fulfillment, like maybe her solitary life on the hill wasn’t completely fruitless and without merit.

      She had worked hard to achieve success as the magazine’s owner. There were half a dozen editors and businessmen who would have been only too happy to see her stripped of her position. So what if her ownership was the result of a technicality? Nathaniel had thought that, should anything happen to him, the magazine would be safest in her name, somewhere competitors couldn’t get at it. She suppressed a grim laugh. If he’d had any idea when he would die, and in the manner he had, no less, he never would have taken the liberty.

      “Duchess, you may have cost us the next Shelley or Byron,” Sophronia muttered as she tried to peel the inky pages apart in vain. Duchess gave her an unapologetic glare from the windowsill.

      Crouching down, she set all the salvageable pages in front of the grate to dry, and rocked back on her heels. Her vision began to swim as she stared down at her hands, and for a moment they were not stained in black ink, but crimson blood. So much blood...beneath her nails, crusted into her cuticles, smeared across her face. Just like on that fateful night.

      The smell of damp earth filled her nostrils, and she could feel the unforgiving wind biting at her cheeks, though the fire was licking away in the grate. Clean, clean... She had to wash her hands, scrub them until they were pink and innocent again before anyone saw and realized what she had done. Heart racing, she rushed to the kitchen sink, pouring scalding water out from the kettle and mercilessly scouring the offending flesh.

      The waking nightmare didn’t break until her hands were raw and burned, the skin singing with pain. She jumped back from the sink, trembling with how quickly the chimera had come on. A nervous laugh threatened to erupt, but she held it in. God, what a foolish creature she could be.

      A breath of fresh air would revive her and clear away the bad memories. She gave her hands one last harsh wipe on a towel, and then went and fetched her cloak and bonnet and steeled herself to face the outside world.

      She pushed the door open. The first few steps outside the house were always the hardest, but if she could just get a little momentum, then by the time she was out the door she could keep going, at least a little ways.

      If it wasn’t for the quiver of movement from the breeze, she would have completely missed the sliver of black marking the door. Slowly, she took a step back into the foyer, her gaze trained on the door and the alien object attached to it.

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