Days of Gold (Edilean 2)

At first he didn’t know what she meant, but then he realized she was talking about her virginity.

“His wife kicked me out when she saw I was carrying her husband’s child. No references, no money. I had just the clothes on my back and the child in my belly. I stole a loaf of bread to survive and I was caught. By that time, I was too tired to run and prison looked good.”

She was taking his attention away from his own problems, and he liked hearing her Scottish accent. He glanced at her flat stomach.

“Stillborn,” she said. “Poor little fellow wanted nothing to do with this world, and I don’t blame him. The judge let me off easy with just this banishment to America. It wasn’t like I left a country that had been good to me. So why did you leave?”

“To build a new life,” he said without thinking. “My wife and I want to buy land and...” He trailed off, unable to add to the lie.

Tabitha smiled at him with a knowing little smirk. She’d seen the way he looked when he’d stepped on deck minutes before. Only a person close to you could make you that unhappy. “So what did you fight about?”

“My wife and I—” he began, but stopped. He was so sick of lying! “I want more; she wants less. What else do men and women fight about?”

She laughed so loud that everyone on deck looked at them.

“And what will you do in America?” Angus asked, changing the subject.

“I hear that a hundred people will be at the dock waiting to meet us. We’ll have to go to the courthouse to register, but after that we’re on our own. We can take job offers from those people on the dock. Or...” She gave him a suggestive look. “Or marriage proposals. I may marry one of those American men. I hear they’re a rough bunch, but maybe I can find myself a strong, sturdy man and we can make a life together.” She turned back toward him and lowered her voice. “What I want is my own home. That’s something I’ve never had. I cried for weeks after the baby was born dead. For all that it cost me everything I had, I loved the wee thing.”

“Why are you telling me all this?” Angus asked.

“No reason, but I’m good at judging character, and there’s something not right about you.” She looked him up and down. “Clothes, wife... something doesn’t match. I

saw it that first day. That you’ll talk to someone like me says a lot. I think maybe you and I are more alike than it looks from those clothes of yours.” She glanced down at him, at his big legs in the tight trousers and the shirt that clung to his chest in the wind. “I don’t think you’re like her.”

One of the sailors had come on deck with a squeeze-box and had begun playing a reel.

“Come on!” Tabitha said. “Dance with me.”

“I don’t think I—” Angus began, but then he shrugged. Why not? He walked to the middle of the deck. A sailor added a flute to the music, and the next thing he knew, he was dancing with one woman after another. All but one of the women were from Scotland and they knew all the dances that so reminded him of home.

One of the sailors joined them and soon they were whirling about the deck in a frenzy of action. Angus was so glad to have some exercise that he grabbed a woman about the waist and lifted her high in the air. There was another woman, older, and she was quite wide below the waist.

“You won’t be able to lift me,” she shouted over the music and clapping of the people watching.

Angus grabbed her and lifted her as though she were a girl. “Marry me! Marry me!” the woman shouted, making everyone laugh.

Angus’s shirt was open to his waist and he was drenched with sweat, but he kept on dancing so fast and furiously that he didn’t notice when Edilean came on deck. She stayed in the shadows, out of the limelight, watching Angus dancing with the women and enjoying himself.

But Tabitha saw her and moved past the crowd to stand near her.

Edilean looked at the woman and had to resist the urge to move her skirt aside so it wouldn’t touch her. She knew, just by looking at her, what kind of woman she was: She was the type men liked but women hated.

“If I had a man like that in my bed, I’d never leave it,” Tabitha said in a suggestive way.

“Perhaps never getting out of bed is why you don’t have a man like him,” Edilean said over her shoulder.

The woman laughed so loud that Angus turned to her, and when he saw Edilean, the smile left his face.

When Tabitha saw Angus’s expression, she laughed harder. As she left to go back to the group, she swished her long skirt and turned back to Edilean. “Be careful another woman don’t take him from you. And my name’s Tabitha,” she said, then turned and ran back to the dance. When Angus grabbed her about the waist, her eyes were on Edilean.

Edilean looked away and went back down to their cabin.

Hours later Angus returned to the cabin. Edilean was there with one of the dresses across her lap, and she was sewing. “Feel better?” she asked.

“Much,” he answered, smiling. He was sweaty and his shirt was open so his muscular chest was showing and his black hair was in slick curls about his face.

Edilean had to look away or the beauty of him would weaken her resolve. “Good,” she said as she put down her needle. “I have something to ask of you. As you’ve repeatedly told me, you owe me nothing while I owe you everything, but I ask that during this voyage you not humiliate me.”