Always (3 page)

“You’re just tired,” Karen said.

“Embarrassed is what I am.”

Karen dropped the spoon into the soup. “At least you woke up before he had to carry you all the way to the doctor’s office.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t have fainted in the first place if I’d known Ross was still alive.”

Karen shook her head wearily. “Oh, Em.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? You sure were quick enough to write when you heard he’d been killed.”

Karen set the soup bowl on a tray on the night table, then stood and moved away. In profile, her five-month pregnancy was apparent, a slight swelling beneath the waistline of her black mourning dress. She was one of the lucky few. Her husband, Henry, had returned home from the war healthy and whole.

Bowing her head, Karen reached up to massage her temples. “I just thought it was better for everyone. What good would it have done?”

“It might have saved me from making a fool of myself in front of the whole town, for one thing.”

“I would have written to you eventually. We had no way of knowing you’d be coming home.”

“That shouldn’t have had anything to do with it. Ross and I were friends.”

Karen looked up. Her uncharacteristically blunt words caught Emily off guard. “You were more than friends, Em, and we both know it.”

Emily couldn’t quite bring herself to look away. She realized now why Karen had delayed telling her of Ross’s return. She was the only person in the world who knew the truth. She was trying to protect Emily from being hurt again. Swallowing hard, Emily started to ask, “You didn’t tell—”

“No. You made me promise, remember?”

“Yes.”

Emily was relieved when there came a knock at the door. Karen called out to grant admittance, but not before throwing Emily a look that indicated she was not through with all she had to say on the subject of Ross Gallagher.

Emily’s mother appeared in the doorway. If anything had changed since Emily’s hasty departure four years ago, it was her mother. Although she had visited Emily just five months before in Baltimore, it was only now that Emily noticed how much Marguerite Winters had aged. As always, her hair, a chestnut brown, was gathered into a loose chignon at the nape of her neck, but it had begun to surrender to the subtle gray invasion that had only sprinkled through it before. Her eyes, a sweet, soulful gray, still sparkled when she smiled, but she hadn’t smiled much since Emily had arrived. She looked tired.

“I wanted to see how you were doing, dear,” she said, pausing in the doorway. “Feeling any better?”

“I’m fine, Mama. I don’t know why you two are insisting I rest when there’s nothing wrong with me.”

Marguerite threw Karen a significant look. “Hasn’t changed much, has she? Still disagreeable as a billy goat and thorny as a rosebush.”

Karen merely rolled her eyes as she gathered up the soup tray.

From down the carpeted hall, they heard the patter of a child’s feet. Karen’s four-year-old daughter, Dorcas, appeared, hovering behind her grandmother’s crepe skirts. The child had inherited Karen’s crowning glory, her naturally curly hair. “Mammy, I thought you got lost.”

Marguerite patted her head. “It’s been years and years since Mammy’s gotten lost in this big old house, tulip.”

As Marguerite spoke, Emily didn’t miss the furtive yet curious looks she received from her little niece. She wasn’t surprised. Dorcas had accompanied Karen on her occasional visits to Baltimore only a few times, and that had been a while ago. The child had no memory of Emily, and it would take more than simply her mother’s well-meaning assurances to convince her that the irascible, dark-haired stranger who had commandeered her bedroom was indeed a blood relation.

Emily offered an encouraging smile. “Hello, Dorcas.”

“’Lo.” The child’s response muffled into her grandmother’s skirts as she hid her face.

There was an awkward silence before Karen spoke, softly admonishing, “Dorcas, remember, this is your aunt Emily.”

“That’s all right.” Emily brushed off the slight. She was determined to hold a smile. “It’ll take some time for us to get acquainted.”

From downstairs, they heard a knock at the front door. Whoever it was, the timing couldn’t have been better.

“More callers,” Marguerite said. She took Dorcas’s hand. “Come, tulip. Let’s see who’s at the door.” Before they turned to leave, Marguerite addressed Emily. “You stay put and rest. Calling hours will be over soon, then we’ll see about supper.”

“I still say there’s no reason to coddle me, Mama.”

“Fine,” her mother said, turning away. “In that case, you can wash and wipe dishes after we eat. How’s that?”

Emily gave up on arguing. Her mother had a soft-spoken manner, but when her mind was made up, there was little anyone could do to change it.

Karen was left standing in the middle of the room, resting the soup tray over the bulge of her waistline. “Give up the fight,” she advised.

Emily sank back into her pillows. “It’s so strange. Being home again, being in this room. It’s as if I never left.”

“Yes. Having you here feels like that to me, too.”

After a moment of melancholy silence, Emily scowled. “You can go now. I’ll just lie here thinking dark and stormy thoughts until someone comes to release me.”

“If you find you absolutely can’t sit still, maybe you can go through some of your old things.”

“What old things?”

Karen inclined her head toward the closet. “In there’s a whole crate of your old sketchbooks.”

“My old sketchbooks? Really?”

Karen moved toward the door. “See you at supper.

As soon as her sister was gone, Emily threw back the sheet and climbed out of bed. She hadn’t thought about those sketchbooks in years, but now that Karen had mentioned them, she couldn’t wait to get a look at them.

She pulled open the closet door. On the floor, a scarred wooden crate was crammed to overflowing with loose papers and sketchbooks. Emily felt a tiny thrill course through her. For the first time since stepping off the train, she was able to put her father’s death and the shock of returning to find Ross alive out of her mind. She carried the crate over to the bed and set it down.

Digging through to the bottom layers, she searched for one sketchbook in particular. Then she saw its raw, dog-eared edge and pulled it out, baring it to the light of day for the first time in years.

Settling back onto the bed, she pulled her legs up to sit cross-legged as she laid the sketchbook flat before her. It suddenly struck her that she hadn’t sat in such an unladylike position in years, not since those days when she had worn her hair in braids. Since about the time she had made the drawings on these very pages.

*

April 1855

“Papa, that boy is back again.”

Emily stood in the open doorway to her father’s office.

“What’s that, Emily Elizabeth? What boy?” With his pen poised over a sheet of paper on his desk, Nathaniel Winters looked up with a frown. He still retained a full head of hair, but its color, once black as starless midnight, was now speckled with gray. Even his chin whiskers were giving in to these distinguished signs of age.

Accustomed to her father’s crusty temperament, Emily tossed her head, flipping a braid over her shoulder. “It’s that boy, Ross Gallagher. He was here yesterday and the day before that and the day before that and— ”

“Oh.” Nathaniel raised his pen hand to nip his daughter’s recital in the bud. “I suppose he’ll just keep coming back, won’t he? Like some blasted housefly? Is that about the size of it?”

“Sure does seem like it.”

“Well, go fetch him, then. Might as well get this over with.”

Emily couldn’t help a little scowl as she headed back toward the front of the shop. Along the way, she effortlessly skirted a pair of job presses and two tall composing desks where young men in aprons and rolled-up shirtsleeves stood setting type on composing sticks.

Emily knew the layout of her father’s place of business so well she could have negotiated safely past desks, cabinets, worktables, and printing presses with her eyes shut. She even loved the smells. Ink, turpentine, new paper, and pipe tobacco.

This, the first floor, comprised the job printing department and front business office as well as her father’s private office near the back. Adjoining his office was a small, windowless room with a washstand and a cot that was always kept stocked with fresh linens and clean towels. That was where Nathaniel stayed when he had to work into the wee hours of the morning. Since the
Penn Gazette
had become a morning daily, night work was common. The newspaper itself was printed on a new double-cylinder power press up on the second floor.

The boy who waited by the front door was familiar to Emily. Since he had moved in with a neighboring farm family in February, they took the same road into town for school. Rumor had it that he was from New York City and that his mother had died, leaving him orphaned. The Brenner family had taken him in after he was bounced back and forth among other relatives.

Aside from these rumors, Emily knew firsthand that Ross Gallagher had his share of problems with bullies in the schoolyard. His chief adversary was a boy named John Butler, whose family owned one of the biggest mills in town. John and his friends’ name-calling—much of which Emily didn’t understand—was nevertheless awful, and Ross often sported a black eye or a split lip after tangling with his tormenters. From what Emily could tell, the source of Ross’s troubles with John seemed to be his half-Irish background and his Catholic religion. Emily had recently begun to notice that this second word,
Catholic,
was often pronounced in a derogatory whisper even by adults.

Emily had asked her father about it. He told her that Catholics differed from Episcopalians no more than one nest of skunks differed from another and that it was indeed an unfortunate thing that so many people were cursed with brains no bigger than a peanut. Then he had shooed her off.

While it was true that Ross Gallagher’s life story had an undeniable heartrending quality, Emily was having a very hard time feeling sorry for him today, and it had nothing to do with him being Irish or Catholic. He was here to get a job, and Emily didn’t care for that idea at all. Whatever job a thirteen-year-old boy could do, she could do just as well. But she hadn’t convinced her father of that fact yet. And now, along came this boy, this
upstart,
ready to snatch opportunity right out from under her nose. No, she didn’t like that idea one bit.

Ross’s lanky adolescent frame snapped to attention as Emily approached. “So, uh, what did he say, Emily?”

Emily wrinkled her nose, annoyed that he was suddenly acting like they were friends.
Jiminy pats!
They weren’t even in the same room at school. He was in the upper grade classroom with that snooty Johanna Davenport, whose father was an alderman at church and owned the competing daily newspaper in town. Ross had never even bothered to say hello to Emily until he came poking around her father’s shop looking for a job.

“He said you can come on back, but...” Emily trailed off ominously.

Ross looked alarmed. “But what?”

“He’s not in a very good mood.”

Emily knew that her father’s surly reputation preceded him and was gratified to see it was true in this case. Ross’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed hard. “He isn’t?”

Emily inclined her head toward the back of the print shop. “Come on.”

“Uh, maybe it’s not such a good time to bother him, Emily. Maybe I should come back later when he’s not so busy.”

Emily smirked as she led Ross past the compositors, both of whom looked up sympathetically as the nervous lad passed.

“He’s here, Papa!” Emily announced when they reached their destination.

She noted with satisfaction that her father appeared annoyed as he looked up, interrupted yet again in the middle of a heated sentence. His deep voice boomed so loudly, Emily imagined it shook the rafters overhead. “
Dad blast it
! What’s he waiting for? Send him in!”

Emily stepped aside. “You heard him.”

Ross’s healthy, suntanned complexion had gone cotton white. The expression on his face told Emily that if he had a choice between entering the den of a disturbed grizzly and entering Nathaniel Winters’s sanctified cubicle, he would choose the grizzly.

Nathaniel’s voice cracked the air like a bullwhip. “What’s the matter, boy? Your shoes get stuck to the floor?”

Emily almost giggled as Ross actually looked down at his scuffed brown boots, but her glee fizzled when he looked up again. His expression had changed. Some color had returned to his cheeks. She saw something in those dark brown eyes that made her frown. It was the same look he wore when faced with John Butler’s insults. Something in those eyes told Emily that it would take a lot more than a grouchy newspaper editor to make young Ross Gallagher turn tail and run.

He took a deep breath and stepped into the room. “Sorry to disturb you, sir. If this is a bad time, I—”

“Hold that thought!”

Emily stuck her head around the corner of the doorway to see her father scribbling furiously, ignoring the youth who stood before him. After a few moments, he tossed down his pen. “Well, what is it, young man? I haven’t got all day.”

“I heard you were looking for an errand boy.”

Nathaniel’s impatient gaze shifted to Emily, who still gaped around the corner of the doorway. “You need something, Emily Elizabeth?”

“No.”

“Then, why don’t you go put your head someplace where it’ll do some good?”

Miffed, Emily pulled back out of sight and waited. There was a moment of silence inside the room.

“You still there, Emily Elizabeth?”

“Yes.”

“Go on, now. Mind your own business.”

Emily slinked past the archway, throwing a rebellious scowl at her father for good measure. What use was a newspaper reporter who minded her own business?

She passed by a towering black walnut cabinet, intending to head straight for the rear exit, but just as she glanced over her shoulder to see if anyone was watching, Billy O’Leary came thundering down the back staircase.