Memory's Embrace Read Free Page B

corresponding gesture. “Now, tell me why your aunt would ‘murder’ you, as you put it?”
    “Derora Beauchamp is a very difficult woman,” Tess answered, with miserable dignity, “and she doesn’t like me very much as it is. Her opinion is bound to plummet when I appear in the company of a bedraggled peddler, wearing these clothes!”
    Joel Shiloh smiled and shook his head at the prospect. “Bedraggled, is it?”
    “You do need a shave,” Tess allowed, defensively. “Perhaps a haircut and a bath—”
    He pretended to wield a pencil, making a note in the palm of his hand, the coffee mug wriggling as he “wrote.” “Shave. Haircut. Bath,” he listed aloud.
    Tess laughed in spite of all her contradictory feelings.
    “You really are strange. You argue with God. You have one name on your wagon and another on your—”
    The taut alertness in his face was alarming. Gone was the look of humorous indulgence that had curved his lips, the mirth that had danced in his blue eyes. “Another on my what?” he prompted, in a frightening rasp.
    Tess retreated a step, wishing that she hadn’t stopped at this peddler’s camp at all. How much safer it would have been to push her bicycle the rest of the way to town, even in the rain! “I just meant—well—”
    “You meant what?”
    Tess swallowed the aching lump that had gathered in her throat. “I—I saw the Bible,” she confessed. “I didn’t mean to pry—”
    “Oh,” he said, and he turned away quickly, ran one hand through his hair. Now that it was drying, Tess could see that it was a color somewhere between honey and ripe wheat. “That belonged to a friend of mine.”
    “Y-You don’t need to explain.”
    “I know,” he answered. And then he turned back to face her again and the smile was in his eyes. “Where is this bicycle of yours? I’ll put it in the wagon while you’re finishing your coffee.”
    “I really—”
    He waved away her protest and started off toward the road. Moments later he returned, wheeling the bicycle along.
    “Really, Mr. Shiloh—”
    He opened the wagon’s rear door and lifted the bicycle inside. Tess wondered if he ever listened when people tried to dissuade him.
    With deft, practiced motions, Mr. Shiloh went on toharness the beleaguered mule. Coming back to the fire, he kicked dirt over the flames, took up the coffeepot and the mug he had used, and gestured grandly, like a footman about to help a queen into her carriage.
    Exasperated, Tess flung what remained of her own coffee out of the cup and proceeded, scrambling up into the high seat of the wagon before he could contrive to help her.
    “If you would like,” Joel offered, settling into the seat beside her, putting the coffeepot and mugs beneath it, taking up the reins, and releasing the brake lever with one foot, “I’ll explain to your aunt.”
    “That would only make matters worse!” pouted Tess.
    “I’m sorry,” he replied, and he seemed to be sincere. “I’ve made a hell of a first impression on you, haven’t I?”
    He had. And Tess hoped that it would be the last impression he made, as well. “No matter,” she said coldly. “You’ll be moving on, as peddlers do.”
    “Perhaps I’ll stay,” he said.
    Tess looked at him in horror and then decided that she didn’t care whether he stayed or not. Her chores at the boardinghouse would keep her so busy that she wouldn’t encounter him again, anyway. “As you wish,” she said.
    They drove in silence for a long time, the mule laboring diligently along the muddy logging road that led to the small Oregon town where Tess had spent the last five years of her life. The beast’s breath made a misty fog around its muzzle, and at least one of its burdens pitied it.
    When the Columbia River, with its log booms and itssteamboats, came into sight, Tess forgot the mule and its master and dreamed. She would leave Simpkinsville one of these days, just up and leave. She would go to Astoria or to Portland or even