Blessing (41 page)

After a day spent in the company of her orphans, Blessing felt more like herself. She waved good-bye to Adela and walked through the back garden to her carriage. She would never have to worry about Smith again, and her work at the docks could commence once more. She should have felt relieved, but she didn’t. Though she continually shuttered her mind against Gerard Ramsay, he still managed to remain with her always.

Judson opened the carriage door for her and helped her inside. Blessing sat back and found herself facing Ramsay. She gasped.

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” he said. “But I wanted to make sure you got home safely. Reporters are still lurking.”

“My driver would have taken care of that.” Her words came out sharply.

“He needs to be busy with the team. Don’t worry. I know you’re tired. I’m just seeing you home.”

What could she say to that? She could hardly order him from the carriage.

They rode in silence. Unfortunately he was correct. When the carriage pulled up to her gate, reporters loitered there.

“Allow me,” Ramsay said as he opened the door and stepped outside. Brandishing his cane, he shooed away the reporters, guided her through the gate, and shut it behind them.

She tried to come up with a polite way to send him home. But she could not think of anything that wasn’t rude or unappreciative.

Salina met them at the door. “I’m glad to see you brought her home safe, Mr. Ramsay. I’ll bring tea to the rear parlor for you two.”

Never had Blessing wanted to shake Salina before, but she did now. She sent her housekeeper a severe glance. Then she walked into the foyer and left her bonnet and gloves there. Ramsay did the same with his own trappings and followed her into the rear parlor. She sat down and allowed Salina to bring in the tray with the teapot, sandwiches, and small cakes. She would let the man take tea with her, then bid him good evening.

Blessing poured a cup for each of them and passed his over.

He accepted the cup but just held it in his hand, gazing at her. “Blessing, I love you.”

His words, spoken so calmly and plainly, took her unaware. She opened her lips but shut them before she could say anything that might lead him on.

In the silence she heard a frantic dog barking outside the open window. The sound echoed her own turmoil at his declaration.

“I have tried to deny this for weeks,” he continued in a voice as relaxed as if he were discussing the weather. “I have never sought to fall in love or to marry. You’re not at all the kind of woman who will make for an easy life. Your ideas are radical. You break the law. You live dangerously.” He lifted one hand in surrender. “But I’ve fallen in love with you.”

Still she kept her lips pressed together and stared out the window over his shoulder. A red squirrel alighted on a nearby branch, making it quiver. Moments passed.

“Blessing, I have just declared my love for you. You must have some reaction.”

“I cannot marry thee.”

“Why?”

“Thee is not a Quaker. I would be put out of the meeting again. I cannot face that.”

“I—”

“If I marry again, I would lose all my legal rights,” she said, forestalling his reply. “I cannot do that again either.”

“I—”

“If I married, my husband and perhaps children would become my focus, not the work I want to accomplish. I would lose everything—my independence, myself.”

He gazed at her. “I hadn’t thought of any of those matters.”
He took a sip of his hot tea as if considering her words. “I’m not going to give up.”

“I will not change my mind,” she said and paused to sip her tea as well. Her explanations bolstered her resolve. Everything she’d said was true. “If I were to marry, I would have everything to lose. I will not lose again.”

“Can you say that you have no feelings for me?”

She looked away, unwilling to answer him.
What does it matter if I have feelings for thee?

Again silence fell. She chafed in it and wished he would leave.

But he merely drank his tea and began nibbling at the refreshments. “Tell me about your afternoon. How are the children?”

His persistence exasperated her. “Does thee care? Really care?”

“Yes, I do care about the children. Please, inform me.”

He had given up the previous train of conversation, and she was relieved. Yet she wished she weren’t caught between wanting him to stay and wanting him to leave her life altogether.
Ramsay, how am I going to convince thee I cannot afford to love thee?

MAY 10, 1849

“I’m glad you came, Gerard.” His aunt greeted him at her front door.

“Your note just said, ‘Please come soon.’ What is it, Aunt Fran?”

“I need to do some shopping and wanted an escort.”

Gerard stared at her. His aunt had summoned him to take her shopping?

“Shiloh!” Aunt Fran called over her shoulder. “I’m going out with my nephew on that errand we discussed.”

“Yes, ma’am!” Shiloh’s voice came from outside, through the open rear window. “I’m weeding the garden.”

“Good girl!” Aunt Fran tied on her bonnet, pulled on her gloves, and handed Gerard an oak basket.

He put the handle over one arm and offered her the other.
Soon they were walking side by side toward the business district.

“I needed a walk, needed to do something other than visit Tippy and sit in my garden, stitching.” Her lower lip twisted down. “I had expected to be sewing many little gowns about now.” The last words were spoken stiffly, painfully.

Gerard did not want to talk about the lost grandbaby. “So what do you need at the stores?”

“Nothing. I need absolutely nothing, but Tippy heard of a new widow who has been left with five youngsters, and I want to take her a basket of food and see what else she might need. We’re not the only ones in the city who have lost loved ones this year.”

“Good grief, you’ve been influenced by—”

“By my lovely and caring daughter-in-law . . . and Blessing Brightman. Certainly. I just wish I’d left Boston immediately after my second husband died. I am free of the past at last.”

Gerard didn’t know how to respond to this.

“I have more in common with Blessing than you know. Your mother was the dutiful daughter and married the man her parents chose for her. I, on the other hand, fell in love with a fine but penniless man, a poet. We eloped.”

Gerard stopped midstep. “Eloped?”

“Yes. Shocking, isn’t it? It was all hushed up, of course. A Ramsay eloping? And my parents and older brother—your father—were so relieved that Stoddard wasn’t born until we’d been married over a year. They never managed to drag my first husband into the family business, but he got a respectable teaching job and was able to support me and our son. I always felt a bit guilty over your mother, though. If I’d
married a wealthy man, maybe your father wouldn’t have been forced to marry Regina merely for what she brought with her.”

Gerard’s head swam. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because you have been at loggerheads with your father since you were a child. Which I quite understand. Saul and I have also never seen eye to eye, but in his own way he has done his duty to me. To remove my young son from my second husband’s house where he was not welcome, Saul sent Stoddard off to school and enrolled you at the same time so he wouldn’t be alone.”

“That’s why he sent me away to school!” Shock quivered through him.

“Yes. I never asked him to, Gerard. But frankly it was the right decision at the time, and not only for Stoddard’s sake. We almost lost your mother that year—she could hardly rise from her bed. She couldn’t have been a mother to you for several years after that severe bout of her ailment.”

The thought that his father had not sent him to school out of selfishness or spite—but rather for nobler reasons—astounded Gerard. He still couldn’t move.

“Let me explain how it was.” His aunt tugged at his arm and they began walking again.

He obeyed but could barely feel his boots touching the ground.

“My dear love, Stoddard’s father, had died of cholera, and when I could no longer stand living with my parents, I allowed them to finesse me into marrying a much older and reasonably wealthy man I didn’t love. Eventually, I discovered that my second husband married me only to gain an heir. But
I never gave him a child, and in the end, ironically he made a will leaving all his wealth to Stoddard, the stepchild he’d avoided for over a decade.”

Gerard chewed on this new perspective of the past.

As they arrived at the grocer’s, Aunt Fran’s confidences ended. She walked to the counter, and presently the basket on Gerard’s arm was filled with staples such as eggs, cornmeal, salt, pepper, sugar, and flour.

Gerard wanted to ask many questions but couldn’t find his tongue. For the first time he began to view his father as a person like him who’d made choices—some good, some bad—and then lived with them.

Outside again, Aunt Fran pulled out a slip of paper and read the address. Moments later they were entering the neighborhood of Little Africa.

“I presume the new widow is a woman of color,” Gerard commented, noticing the aftermath of the riot still plainly visible in the rubble littering the streets and the handful of burned-out dwellings.

“Yes, though I’m sure if I looked, I could find a needy widow in most any part of this city. Maybe that will be my work.” Aunt Fran glanced around and approached an older man sitting on a bench at the front of his modest home. She inquired about the widow’s address, and he rose, directing them to the right house, a one-room cabin that looked like it had been built by an original Ohio pioneer fifty years ago.

A young woman opened the door and stared at Gerard and Aunt Fran.

“Blessing Brightman gave me your name and said you needed help,” Aunt Fran said by way of introduction.

“Miz Brightman sent you?” the woman replied.

“Yes. I brought some items that any housewife can use, but what else do you need?”

Gerard entered the cabin and joined the widow and Aunt Fran, seated on kitchen chairs.

Just like Scotty at the orphanage, the woman’s children gathered around Gerard’s knees, staring up at him. One of the little girls climbed onto his lap. When her mother protested, Gerard smiled and raised a hand. He began talking to the children about whatever they brought up.

“What I really need is work,” the widow said finally. “I can sew real good and I bake a good cake.”

“I will spread the word,” Aunt Fran said.

“Thank you, ma’am. That’s kind of you.”

A few more minutes of conversation, and Gerard and Aunt Fran bid her good day.

When they were a couple of blocks along, Gerard finally found the words he wanted to say. “Why didn’t you tell me all that about your past earlier?”

She paused and eyed him with a mix of amusement and exasperation. “You don’t know?”

He shook his head no.

“My dear nephew, I’m sure that you want to marry Blessing Brightman. And it is by far the most intelligent thought you’ve ever had. Now, my advice: you need to figure out what is stopping you. Is it your past? Is it something else? Whatever it is, fix it.”

No,
he
wasn’t the one stopping matters, but he didn’t say that. “Fix it?” Fix Blessing Brightman?

“Yes, exactly.” She began walking briskly toward home.

He grumbled silently but hurried to keep up with her, the now-empty oak basket banging against his side. The discomfort mimicked his frustration over Blessing’s refusal to entertain his proposal.

Then, as he kept pace with his aunt, who appeared to be in a great hurry to get back to her home, he thought about her advice—
“Fix it.”

How was that possible in such a situation? Could he fix all the obstacles between himself and Blessing on his own?

MAY 16, 1849

Bouncing the eight-month-old, squirming-to-get-down Daniel Lucas in her arms, Blessing watched as the judge signed the papers making the baby her legal son, her legal heir.

In the judge’s chamber, Tippy and Stoddard stood to one side of her. Tippy was pale and thin but smiling at this occasion, her first time in public since her convalescence. Ducky Hughes, wearing an obviously new dress, stood on Blessing’s other side.