I wish Martin a good night, too. And then I walk to the bedroom next to Kat’s, and he to the one across from it.
He doesn’t look back at me, not once.
5
Sleep comes to me in fits and starts my first night as Mrs. Hocking. I awaken every five minutes, it seems. At some point during the night I think I hear Martin moving about and perhaps even the click of the front door latch, but I don’t rise to investigate. I don’t want him thinking I’ve already changed my mind regarding which room I want to sleep in. I haven’t. Martin is stunning and the thought of him taking me to his bed makes my insides ache, but I won’t be giving myself over to a man—body and soul—until I truly know him. I won’t be making the same mistake twice.
Dawn’s light is spilling onto the floor through a thin opening between window blind and glass when my eyes flutter open at daybreak. San Francisco is not as cold in March as other places I have lived, but there is a distinct chill in the room that reminds me of Donaghadee, and I half expect to catch a whiff of a peat fire and Mam’s hot soda bread wafting up from downstairs.
I fumble for my gram’s watch pin, which I’d placed on the nightstand next to my bed. Twenty minutes past six. I push back the covers and dress in the shirtwaist and skirt I’ve worn for the past six days, thankful the garment doesn’t smell sour. The only other dress I own is a plain wool frock suitable only for housework. I braid my hair quickly and wind it into a circle at the back of my head. When I open the door, I see that Martin is also up; his bedroom door is open and there is a peep of light downstairs spilling from the sitting room. Kat’s door is still closed.
I use the water closet and then venture down the staircase. Martin, bent over a writing tablet, sits on a sofa edge. Newspaper pages are strewn over the top of a little table between the sofa and armchair. The nib on the writing pen is making delicate scratching sounds as he works. He is wearing a dark blue suit this morning and his hair is neatly coiffed and his face shaven.
He looks up when I enter the room.
“Hello,” he says, in a quiet but congenial tone.
“Good morning. You are up early.”
“I’ve never been one to sleep past sunrise.”
I notice he already has a cup of coffee. “I’ll have to rise a little earlier, then, so I’ll have a kettle on for you.” I had seen the drip pot on the back burner of the range the evening before. My landlady at the tenement had a drip pot like that. I’ve only ever made coffee once, when she was ill and she asked if I would make a pot for her. She’d told me how to pour the hot water from her kettle onto the ground coffee beans in the top of the pot, and I watched as the filtered beverage dripped down through fine mesh into the pot below. She said I could have a sip for my trouble. I didn’t hate it, but I wondered why anyone would prefer it over tea.
I sit down in the armchair by the fireplace that Martin sat in the night before. He doesn’t ask if I slept well.
I glance down at the tablet and newspaper but can’t read either one upside down. “Are those working papers? For your job?”
“Yes. I’m heading out tomorrow.”
“And how long are you usually gone when you go, if I might ask?”
“It depends,” he says, casually, easily. “Sometimes two days, sometimes three or four. Occasionally a week.”
“I see.”
Several seconds of silence pass between us.
“You take the train when you travel?” I ask.
“I’ve purchased an automobile. I keep it garaged south of the pier when I’m not out on the road. I don’t bring it into the city.”
“An automobile?” I make no effort to cloak my surprise. I know no one who owns an automobile. Not a soul. Will he take me on a ride sometime if I ask him? Isn’t that what people with autos do on lovely Sunday afternoons? I wait for Martin to notice my amazement, but he says nothing.
A few minutes slide by with the only sounds in the room being those of the ticking of a wall clock and the faint scraping of the nib of his pen.
“May I ask you a question about Kat?” I say.
“What about her?”
“Did she stop speaking straightaway after her mother died? I’m only asking because you are leaving tomorrow and she’ll be alone with me and I want to understand better how to care for her. I don’t want to do the wrong thing while you’re away.”
Martin caps the pen and sets it down on the table. I fear I’ve said too much, and all while he’d been trying to work. But when he opens his mouth to answer, his tone is calm.
“Candace was quite ill before she died,” he says. “The more her condition declined, the quieter Kat became, and she’d been a quiet child to begin with.”
“She must have loved her mother very much.” I watch Martin carefully to see if he will react in a way that will clue me in to his own level of grief. His beautiful face is unreadable.
“Yes.”
“And Candace’s parents? Were they of help to you with Kat during this terrible time?”
“No.”
He says the word effortlessly, as though it doesn’t pain him to say it. As though he’d not been surprised his in-laws hadn’t helped him and Kat walk that hard road since surely they were traveling it as well. “Whyever not?”
“We were not on friendly terms.”
“Why is that?”
He studies me for a moment, as though he is now watching me carefully, gauging how much he will tell me about the intricacies of his first marriage. “They’d planned for Candace to marry someone of substantial means—someone like them—and instead she married me. That was a disappointment to them.”
“But . . . but even so, surely they cared about their granddaughter?”
“Kat has never been an exceptionally sociable creature. Even before she stopped talking, she was a sober child who kept to herself. Her grandparents, the few times they saw her, found that behavior bizarre.”
“Are you saying they don’t have affection for their own grandchild?”
“Didn’t.”
“Didn’t?”
“Candace’s mother died of pneumonia last year. And I hear her father is not well.”
Poor Kat. Poor Martin. Poor dead Candace. My heart strangely aches for all three of them. How wounded Martin must be inside, and how hard it must be for him to pretend he isn’t.
As if he can read my thoughts, Martin gathers up the papers and the tablet and places them in a leather satchel resting at his feet. He closes it in a gesture that seems to bring the gavel down on the conversation. “Why don’t you rouse Kat and we’ll have breakfast?” He rises from the sofa with his satchel in hand and I follow him out of the room. He heads for the library next to the room we have just left. As I pass by the open door, I see him open a drawer in the doctor’s old desk and flip through some papers. He glances up, sees me, and waits for me to continue on up the stairs.