Thurston House Read online

  “Would you marry her now?” He didn’t shrink from Hannah’s question, but even now, after seven years, he couldn’t imagine marrying Mary Ellen.

  “I don’t know.” He sighed as he looked at the old woman. “I really am too old to be thinking of that sort of thing, don’t you think?” It was a rhetorical question, but Hannah was quick to answer.

  “No, I don’t. And I think you should give it some thought before it is too late, Jeremiah Thurston.” But she herself didn’t think that Mary Ellen was the answer, much as she liked the girl. She had known her all her life, and had always thought her forward and at times downright foolish. She had been among the first to call her a fool for her open affair with Jeremiah. She was a good-hearted girl and it was impossible not to like her. But nonetheless she was thirty-two years old, and he needed a young wife who would give him children. Mary Ellen already had three of her own and had almost died when giving birth to the last one. She’d have been crazy to try it again and she knew it. “I’d like to see a child in this house before I die, Jeremiah.”

  He smiled sadly, thinking of the two Harte children who had just died. “So would I, my friend, but I don’t think either of us will ever see that.” It was the first time he had ever said that to her, or to anyone.

  “Don’t be so stubborn. You’ve got time. If you looked, you’d find the right girl.” Her words brought Jennie back to mind, and he shook his head, as much to push her from his mind as in answer to Hannah’s words.

  “I’m too old for a young girl. I’m almost forty-four years old.”

  “Well, you sound like you’re ninety.” She snorted in disgust, and he laughed as he ran a hand over the beard stubble on his face.

  “I feel damn close to that some days, look like it too. It’s a wonder Mary Ellen doesn’t lock the door when she sees me coming.”

  “She should have done that years ago, Jeremiah, but you know how I feel about that.” He did, but Hannah was never afraid to repeat her opinions. “You were both foolish to start that, and you’ve both paid a damn high price for it.”

  It was the first time she had voiced it quite that way and Jeremiah looked surprised. “Both of us?”

  “She damn near got run out of town on a rail, and you’ve given up the chance to marry someone who’d give you children. You might as well marry her if you’re going to do that, Jeremiah.”

  He smiled benignly at Hannah. “I’ll tell her you said so.” Hannah harrumphed and picked up her shawl from the back of a kitchen chair as Jeremiah watched her. He was going to shave and bathe before going to the mine, and he needed another cup of strong black coffee. It had been a long, long night with John Harte until his relatives arrived to console him. “By the way, John was grateful for the food you sent, Hannah. I made him eat it this morning.”

  “Did he sleep at all?” Jeremiah shook his head. How could he? “And I know you didn’t either.”

  “I’ll be all right. I’ll sleep tonight.”

  She grinned wickedly at him and turned to look at him from the doorway. “That don’t say much for Mary Ellen, does it?” He laughed and the old woman closed the door behind her.

  2

  There was an eerie silence about the mines on Saturday, which pleased him. All was stillness, there were no voices, no shrill whistles, no blasting of the furnaces. There were two watchmen drinking coffee in the March morning, as Jeremiah dismounted and tied up Big Joe in his usual place and strode into his office. The papers he had come in to look at were waiting for him, contracts for the quicksilver they produced, and plans for four more cabins to house the men who worked for him. Already the Thurston mines had the appearance of a small town, with seven houses for the men, and cabins beyond for those who had brought their families to live with them. It was a hard life for them, but Jeremiah was sympathetic to their need to be together. It was a decision he had made a long time ago, and the men were grateful to him. Now he sat looking at plans for still more accommodations for them. The complex seemed to be growing by leaps and bounds, as was the production of the mines. He was pleased by the contracts he had before him, in particular the one from Orville Beauchamp in Atlanta for nine hundred flasks of quicksilver, which amounted to some fifty thousand dollars. Beauchamp would in turn be supplying most of the South. He was a clever businessman, Jeremiah could tell from the contract. He represented a group of seven men, and apparently was their spokesman. The deal was important enough that in another week, Jeremiah would be traveling to Atlanta to meet the consortium and cement the deal with them.

  At noon, Jeremiah looked at his pocket watch, stood up, and stretched. He still had work to do, but it had been such a rough night that he was suddenly exhausted, and hungry to see Mary Ellen. He needed her warmth and her comfort. Again and again he had thought of John Harte and the family he had lost. The sympathy Jeremiah felt weighed on him like a boulder, and as the morning wore on, the thoughts of Mary Ellen pressed in on him. It was just after twelve when he left the mines and walked outside to where he had left Big Joe tethered.

  “Morning, Mr. Thurston.” One of the guards waved to him, and farther up the hillside, Jeremiah could see a group of children playing in the distance, behind the family cabins he had built for the miners. It made him think of the influenza epidemic at the Harte mines, and he prayed it wouldn’t touch them.

  “Good morning, Tom.” There were some five hundred men who worked for him in three mines now, but he still knew many of them by name. He spent most of his time at the first mine, the Thurston Mine, but toured the others regularly, and knew that they were in the hands of extremely competent foremen. And at the slightest suggestion of a problem, Jeremiah was on the spot himself, sometimes for days, if there was an accident or the mines flooded, as they did every winter.

  “Looks like spring is here.”

  “It sure does.” Jeremiah smiled. It had rained for two solid months, and the flooding in the mines had been ghastly. They had lost eleven men at one mine, seven at the other, three here. It had been a rough winter, but there was no sign of it now, as the sun shone brightly down on them, and Jeremiah could feel it warming his back as he rode old Joe along the Silverado Trail to Calistoga. Jeremiah urged him on, and the big horse picked up his feet and flew the last five miles, as Jeremiah rode with the wind in his beard and his hair, as he thought of Mary Ellen.

  As he rode down the main street of Calistoga, there were clusters of ladies strolling together, protected by lace parasols. It was easy to spot those who had come from San Francisco to visit the hot springs: their fashionable dresses were in sharp contrast to the simpler costumes of the locals, their bustles were pronounced, the plumage on their bonnets was lavish, the textures of their silks noticeable in sleepy little Calistoga. It always made Jeremiah smile to see them, and they were quick to notice him as he rode past them, astride his white stallion, with his own dark hair in sharp contrast. When he was in a particularly playful mood, he would doff his hat, and bow politely from his mount, his eyes always dancing with mischief. There was one particularly pretty woman in the cluster today, a woman with reddish hair and a forest green silk dress, the color of the trees on the mountains, but her coloring only served to remind him of why he had come to Calistoga, and he spurred his horse on a little more quickly, and it was only moments later that he reached Mary Ellen’s small, tidy house on Third Street in the less fashionable part of town.

  Here the smell of sulphur from the spa was strongest, but she had grown used to it long since, as had Jeremiah. It was not the spa, or the sulphur, or even his mines he thought of as he tied Big Joe up behind the house, and ran quickly up the back steps. He knew that she would be waiting, and he opened the door without ceremony with a faint pounding of his heart. Whatever he felt of didn’t feel for this woman, one thing was certain, when she was near him, she still had the same magical power over him she had had when they first met. There was a kind of breathlessness he felt, a surge of lust he had felt for few women before or after her. Yet when he w
as away from her, he was so easily able to do without her. It was for that reason that he never had any serious inclination to change his status. But when he was near her … when he sensed her in the next room, as he did now, all of his senses were suddenly racing with desire for her.

  “Mary Ellen?” He opened the door to the little front parlor where she sometimes waited for him on Saturday afternoons. She would drop the children off at her mother’s in the morning and then return to the house to bathe and curl her hair and put on her prettiest finery for Jeremiah. There was a kind of honeymoon aura to their meeting, because they only saw each other once a week, and if something went wrong in one of the mines, or he went away, then it was longer. She hated it when he was gone. Every night, every morning, every day, she waited for their weekends together. It was odd how, over the years, she was becoming more and more dependent on him. But she was sure that he hadn’t noticed. He was too intent on his physical attraction to her, to be aware of her decreasing independence. He liked coming to Calistoga to see her. He was comfortable in the shabby little house, and besides, he had never invited her to stay with him in St. Helena. In fact, she had only seen the house once. “You sure he’s not married?” her mother had questioned her often at first, but everyone knew that Jeremiah Thurston had never been married, “and probably never will,” her mother growled after the first few years of her daughter’s liaison. Now she no longer growled. After seven years of Saturday nights, what was there to say? She said nothing now as she took the children in, her oldest granddaughter at fourteen being almost as old as Mary Ellen had been herself when she got married. The boy was twelve, and the youngest girl was nine. It was she who particularly adored Jeremiah. But they knew enough not to say too much to Grandma.

  “Mary Ellen?” Jeremiah called upstairs again. It was unusual for her not to be waiting for him downstairs, and he made his way slowly upstairs to the three tiny bedrooms, one for herself, one for her daughters, and the third for her son, but all of them put together were smaller than any one room in Jeremiah’s house. But Jeremiah had long since ceased to feel guilty about it. Mary Ellen took a peculiar kind of pride in supporting her own, and she wasn’t unhappy in this house. She liked it. Probably better than she would have liked living in his. Hers had more warmth to it, or so he thought. His had always remained a large, uninhabited house, ever since he built it. He occupied so few of its rooms. It had been a house built for children and laughter and noise, and instead it had been silent for almost twenty years, unlike this house, which showed signs of wear and caring and small fingers dragged along once pink walls until the smudges became part of the decor and one no longer noticed.

  Jeremiah’s tread was heavy on the stairs, and he thought he smelled roses in the air as he knocked on her bedroom door. He heard the familiar voice humming in the distance. She was there, for one crazy moment he had wondered if today, for the first time in seven years, she wouldn’t be there. But she was. And he needed her so badly. He knocked softly, feeling hesitant and young. She had a way of doing that to him. He always felt a little bit breathless when he came to see her.

  “Mary Ellen?” This time his voice was gentle and soft, almost a caress, as it reached her.

  “Come in … I’m in …” She was about to say, “my bedroom,” but she didn’t need to add the words as he stepped in, his shoulders seeming to fill the room, and his very presence seeming to stop the blood in her veins as she looked up at him, her skin as creamy as the white roses next to her bed, her hair coppery in the sunlight that streamed through the windows. She had just been about to drop a lace dress over the lace corset she wore, tied with pink ribbons that ran through the lace and tied her pantaloons at the knee. She looked like a young girl as he stared at her, and suddenly she blushed crimson and turned away, struggling with the dress as it tangled at her shoulders. She was usually ready when he arrived, but she had taken longer than she’d planned cutting the roses to put in her bedroom. “I’m almost … I just … oh, for heaven’s sake … I can’t!” She was all innocence as she fought with the tangles of lace, and he walked toward her to pull the dress gently over her shoulders, but as he began, the gesture suddenly changed direction and he found himself slowly pulling the dress back in the direction from which it had come, pulling it past the silky copper hair and over her head, flinging it onto the bed, and pressing his lips down on hers as he pulled her toward him. It was remarkable to him how hungry he was for her each week when he arrived, seeming to drink in the cream of her flesh, and the rose scent of her hair. Everything about her always seemed to be scented with roses, and she had a way of making him forget that she had any life but this. The children and the jobs and the struggles were all forgotten as she lay in his arms, week after week, year after year, looking into the eyes that she loved, and that never quite understood how much she loved him. But she knew him as well as he knew himself. He wanted his solitude, his freedom, his vineyards and his mines, he didn’t want an everyday life with an everyday woman and three children he hadn’t sired. He was too busy for that, too wrapped up in the empire he had built and was still building. And she respected him for what he was, and loved him enough not to ask for what he didn’t want to give her. Instead she took only what he gave: one night a week, in a kind of abandon they would have never shared had they had a daily life, which enhanced their passion still further. She wondered sometimes if things might have been different if she could have had his baby, but there was no point thinking about that. She couldn’t have another one, the doctor said it was too dangerous to even consider, and he didn’t seem to want one, at least he’d never mentioned it to her although he was always kind to her children when he saw them. But it was not her children he thought of when he came here. It was what he saw now that filled his mind and seemed to drown his senses, that rose-scented skin, as delicate as parchment, the green eyes like emeralds burning into his as he laid her gently on the bed and began to unlace the pink corset. It fell away from her body with surprising ease beneath his expert fingers, and the pantaloons slipped away from her long, graceful limbs until she lay naked and gleaming before him. This was what he came for … to devour her with his eyes and his tongue and his hands until she lay gasping and breathless beneath him aching for him to take her. And today he wanted her even more than he had in a long time, it was as though he couldn’t get enough of her, couldn’t quite breathe deeply enough of the heady aroma of her hair and her flesh and her perfume. He wanted to push away the memories of his long dead financée, and the grief-filled night he had spent with John Harte, and he needed Mary Ellen to help him do that. She sensed that he had had a difficult week, although she didn’t know why, and as always she tried to give him something more of herself to fill the void she instinctively felt in him. She wasn’t a woman who could have easily put her impressions into words, and yet she had a deep, almost animal understanding of him.

  She lay sleepy and sated in his arms, and looked up at him as she gently touched his beard. “Are you all right, Jeremiah?”

  He smiled at how well she knew him. “I am now … thanks to you … you’re awfully good to me, Mary Ellen.…”

  She was pleased by his words, as though he understood what she tried to give him. “Was something wrong?”

  He hesitated for a long time. What he felt about the night before seemed to be strangely intertwined with feelings about Jennie, and yet that was so long ago. It seemed strange that the feelings should resurface now. But it was all so reminiscent of eighteen years ago. “I had a rough night last night. I was with John Harte.…”

  She looked instantly surprised, and propped herself up beside him on her elbow. “I didn’t think you two spoke.”

  “I went over there last night. He lost his wife, and his daughter …” He hesitated, and closed his eyes, remembering little Barnaby’s face again after he had died. “… and his boy, after I got there …” A tear slid unbidden down his face, and Mary Ellen gently touched it, and then took Jeremiah in her arms. He was so bi
g and so strong and so much a man, and yet he was so gentle and so kind. She loved him more for the tear, and for those which followed it as she held him. “He was so young.…” He began to sob for the child whose eyes he had closed, and he held Mary Ellen close to him, embarrassed at the emotions he could no longer hold back. It was like a flood coming from a place deep inside him. “The poor boy lost all three of them in one day.…” The flood began to ebb and he sat up in bed and looked at Mary Ellen.

  “It was nice of you to go to him, Jeremiah, you didn’t have to do it.”

  “I knew how he felt.” She knew about Jennie from Hannah when they talked. Hannah had known Mary Ellen since she was a child and they met frequently at the produce market in Calistoga. But Jeremiah had never mentioned Jennie to her himself. “Something like that happened to me once.”

  “I know.” Her voice was as soft as the rose petals beside her bed.

  “I thought you did.” He smiled at her and wiped his face. “I’m sorry.…” He was embarrassed now, but he felt better than he had all day. She was good for him and she had helped him. “Poor lad, it’s going to be so rough for him.”

  “He’ll be all right.”