Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [139]
“And John Haskell and his family were living where?”
“Haskell lived at the Highland Hotel. At Fortune’s Rocks. Catherine and the children were staying in York, Maine, with her parents until their cottage at Fortune’s Rocks was completed.”
“Yes, I know the Highland. And you . . .” Tucker hesitates, removing an imagined piece of lint from the sleeve of his chalk-striped frock coat. “You went with him to this hotel? Or he came to you at your house? Or did you meet elsewhere?”
“Usually, I went to him at the hotel,” she says with difficulty, thinking, There was nothing usual about it. “He came to my house on three other occasions, one of which was the last time I ever saw him.”
“And when was that?”
“August tenth.”
“What happened on that day?”
Olympia looks down at her lap. Her hands are clasped so tightly that her knuckles are white. She thinks about the last time she saw Haskell, about all the days leading up to that last time. About all of the days during which she might have stopped Haskell and Catherine from coming to her father’s house for the gala. But she did not. For she had, she knows, already entered that phase in a love affair when all meetings with the beloved are to be desired, no matter how formal or awkward, for they offer not only an opportunity to gaze upon the lover but also a chance to experience that peculiarly delicious thrill of silent communication in the midst of an unknowing audience. Olympia could tell Payson Tucker that she wished her father had not invited the Haskells or that she was anxious lest she cause Catherine Haskell, whom she truly admired, even the smallest concern, but to do so would be disingenuous, not to say altogether false.
“My father had a party, and the Haskells came to it. Catherine Haskell discovered us together that night.”
The lawyer dips his pen into the inkwell and makes a notation. “She discovered you, or someone else did and told her?”
Olympia averts her eyes.
“If this is too painful . . . ,” he says.
“Mrs. Haskell had some help,” she says. “A man by the name of Zachariah Cote.”
Payson Tucker lifts his eyes from his notebook. Olympia catches a flash of light from his lenses. “The poet?”
“Yes,” she says, mildly surprised that Tucker has heard of Cote. “I have not seen John Haskell since then,” Olympia adds.
“Where did he go?”
“He stayed in their new cottage the night of August tenth. I do not know where he went after that. I believe he left Fortune’s Rocks and Ely Falls.”
“He was living in Ely Falls as well?” the lawyer asks.
“No, he was a physician with the Ely Falls Mill infirmary.”
“Oh, I see. And when did you discover you were with child?”
Tucker asks the question as if it were one fact of thousands, a mere sentence in a paragraph. Olympia opens her mouth to speak, but cannot. She can feel the heat spreading into her face. Tucker, watching her closely, leans in her direction. A wing of hair falls forward, and he tucks it behind his ear.
“Miss Biddeford, I know these are terrible questions. And I think you have shown great courage in your answers. But I require this information if I am to take on your case. I also need to know if you have the stamina to face certain realities about your past. Believe me when I say to you that this is but the mildest foretaste of the questions that will be put to you if you decide to go any further with your suit.”
Olympia takes a breath and nods. “My family and I left Fortune’s Rocks on the morning of August eleventh,” she says. “My parents live on Beacon Hill in Boston. I discovered I was with child on the twenty-ninth of October.”
“You were examined by a physician?”
“Not immediately.”
Tucker leans back in his chair. Behind him on the desk, fitted into a silver frame, is a photograph of a handsome woman in her thirties — his mother, surely, Olympia guesses. When she was a young woman.
“Miss