Into the Whirlwind (44 page)

“I’m not sorry it happened,” he said truthfully. “Nothing will ever be the same again, for either of us. And I think that’s a good thing.”

Mollie’s spine sagged, and she looked old. There were shadows beneath her eyes, and there was tension in every line of her face. Nine months of anxiety and struggle weighed down each of her words. “I don’t. I want my old world back. I don’t think I’ll ever really feel safe again.”

“Do you still have nightmares?” he asked softly.

She nodded. “Not so much about Frank anymore, but I have nightmares about the clocks I’ve built falling down. Last night, I dreamt I was climbing the clock tower to reach it, but no matter how high I climbed, it kept getting farther away. I felt like I was about to fall the whole time.” She glanced at him from the corner of her eye, her voice cautious. “Does the sound of church bells still get you rattled?”

“Yeah, it does.”

For some reason, that seemed to please her. “Well then! The fire wasn’t all sweetness and light for you.”

He bit back a grin. “I never said it was a jolly time, Mollie. But sometimes it is the hardest things that make us great.”

She looked old again. She bent her head and stared at the floor. “I’m tired of hard times. So very
tired
. I just want to feel safe again.” Her voice trembled with exhaustion, and he wished
he could do something to make life easier for her. He would give up the shirt off his back if it would just buy her a decent night of sleep.

Zack dropped his head. He couldn’t give Mollie the sense of security she needed. He didn’t even have a
job
, but Colonel Lowe could give Mollie the protection he never could. Colonel Lowe was a safe and orderly gentleman, while Zack would never be happy unless he could roll up his sleeves and tackle some new challenge. Even if it meant walking away from a perfectly good job so he could work on an unpaid crusade to clean up the insurance industry.

Mollie’s instincts were right when she chose Colonel Lowe last autumn, and Zack loved her too much to drag her down into the tumult of his life.

“Go back to Colonel Lowe,” he said softly. “Leave the scarf.”

31

I
n the elegantly appointed drawing room of Mrs. Matilda Lowe Horner, surrounded by one hundred of Chicago’s finest citizens, Mollie wanted to sink through the floor and never be seen again.

Apparently, she had misunderstood the magnitude of what went into representing a colony for Mrs. Horner’s gala celebration. Charlotte Durant, Sophie’s mother, had been the first to present her offering earlier in the evening. She represented Delaware, called “the first state” because it was the first to ratify the constitution. Mrs. Durant provided each guest with a copy of the Constitution in an embossed leather volume, beautifully illustrated with engravings of the founding fathers on handmade paper. The volume rested heavy in Mollie’s lap as she worried her lip.

It seemed that each contribution became more spectacular as the evening progressed. The woman representing Maryland brought oysters. Mollie thought it a rather charming and appropriately simple gift, until she realized that each oyster contained a genuine pearl. At the front of the room, an actress portraying Pocahontas expounded upon the settling of the nation. She was there to represent the colony of Virginia and had passed out
expensive cigars in hand-carved humidors to all the gentlemen earlier.

Mollie had brought a can of peaches.

Richard had been mortified when he arrived by carriage to escort her to the gathering, his face blanching white when he saw the two-gallon can of peaches in her hands. Mrs. Horner had been more gracious, hustling Mollie back to the kitchen and pouring the peaches out into a spectacular crystal bowl. But the glistening lumps of fruit still looked exactly like what they were: canned peaches.

After Pocahontas stepped down, the lady representing New Jersey glided to the podium, wearing a gown of glittering yellow silk. She carried a large flat rectangle covered in a matching swath of silk. Apparently, the state bird of New Jersey was the goldfinch, and the woman made a great show of unveiling an original watercolor painting by the renowned John James Audubon, depicting the goldfinch in its natural habitat.

“I present this painting to you, Mrs. Horner, to be auctioned off to benefit the poor orphans of the war, whom you have so generously helped through the years.”

The applause was hearty and well deserved, but the lump of anxiety was expanding in Mollie’s stomach. Her turn at the podium was next, and how precisely did one compete with an original Audubon?

The crystal bowl filled with glistening blobs of canned peaches rested on the sideboard. Feeling like a prisoner on the way to an execution, Mollie made herself rise and walk to the sideboard. The bowl was heavy as she carried it to the podium, and the room settled into an uncomfortable silence as a hundred faces turned to her in expectation.

How pleasant they all looked, and how foolish she felt standing in front of them with a bowl of canned peaches.

She cleared her throat. “The best peaches in the country are grown in Georgia,” she said. And what was there left to say after that? As the pause lengthened, Ulysses’s words suddenly sprang to mind, and Mollie latched on to them like a drowning victim to a lifeline. “The canned peach is very nutritious,” she asserted. “It helped prevent scurvy during the war.”

Richard sat in the front row, and his scowl could slay a man at a hundred paces. Other ladies looked embarrassed on Mollie’s behalf, and Pocahontas giggled in the back row. Mr. Horner leaned over to his wife, his whisper growing louder as he tried to smother a surge of laughter. “Who knows how many more orphans we’d have if not for the canned peach.” His whisper was loud enough to be heard by everyone. He lost control and had to cover his mouth to choke off the laughter.

Mollie pasted on her brightest smile. “Well said, sir!” This time the laughter was hearty and unrestrained. As she returned to her seat, a number of the gentlemen rose to shake her hand. One leaned over to whisper in her ear, “Thanks for lightening up the evening.”

She resumed her seat and leaned over to Richard. “That wasn’t such a disaster, was it?”

He stared stonily ahead as Miss New York made her way to the podium.

By the end of the evening, Mollie had quit berating herself over the peaches. The president of the State Street Bank was in attendance and had enthusiastically praised the clock that had been installed just two days earlier. “I wouldn’t trust you in my kitchen, but you can build a clock for any building I ever commission.”

Mollie chatted with the Durants and was soon the most
popular woman in attendance as one man after another stepped forward to share a joke or a war story. But it was the clock that seemed to hold everyone fascinated. The bank wasn’t even open for business yet, but plenty of people had seen that clock. “It will be so nice to get back to normal,” the kindly lady representing Maryland said. “When I rode down State Street and saw all those buildings rising higher and higher, I could finally see how it will look in a few years’ time. It brought tears to my eyes.”

Richard was not so amused. Sitting opposite her in the carriage, he waited until a servant closed the carriage door before finally meeting her eyes. “Scurvy?”

Exhausted from weeks of relentless anxiety as she struggled to get the clock completed on time, Mollie was in no mood to be repentant. “Yes, scurvy. Apparently the invention of canned fruit has made it a thing of the past. Ulysses said so himself.”

“I can just imagine,” Richard muttered. He grasped his walking stick tightly in his hand, staring moodily out the window.

The carriage rocked and bumped over the cobblestone streets, and Mollie wondered if she had been wrong to be so dismissive of his annoyance. She did her best to soften her tone. “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you in front of your sister. I should have prepared a little more carefully, and I vow I will never bring canned peaches to any event again.”

“You didn’t embarrass me, you embarrassed yourself.” He didn’t even look at her as he spoke.

The words hung in the silence of the night. While it was true she had initially been mortified when she had seen what the other ladies had brought, her embarrassment soon faded. As if she had time to waste getting embarrassed over such a silly incident! For months, she had been struggling to resurrect her company by learning how to make gigantic clocks, while
all Richard had done was send one wave of disapproval after another toward her.

She hadn’t been able to share any of her anxiety with him because the moment she tried to open her heart about her hopes for the 57th, he would relentlessly discourage her. She didn’t need more disapproval, she needed support! She’d gotten more support and camaraderie from five minutes of sitting in Zack’s dining room than she’d gotten from Richard in the months since she began making clocks.

Richard was too mannerly to continue the argument, but she could tell he was angry by the way he squeezed the top of his walking stick.

It was a hurtful sight. Her gaze drifted out the window, each of the homes lovely in the moonlight. Richard Lowe was a lion of a man. He’d come riding to her rescue at the lowest point of her life, and if she married Richard, she would never need fear financial insecurity again. She could walk away from the 57th and all the headaches associated with trying to reinvent a company.

But money could not solve all her problems. For all his sterling qualities, Richard did not understand her heart. She would never truly be at ease with him or with trying to fit into his world.

Mollie took a deep breath and looked across the seat to Richard. “I’m not sure I can marry a man who goes white at the knuckles over canned peaches.”

“What?”

At least he was looking at her now, but that made what she was about to say even harder. “I’m sorry I disappointed you tonight. You are a wonderful man, and I should have tried harder, but I am not perfect, and I don’t really want to be. You would have learned that about me pretty quickly if we had gotten married, but I don’t think we ever will. We aren’t right for each other.”

“I can’t believe you are rejecting me over a can of peaches.” He looked dumbfounded.

Her smile was sad. “I’m not.” She was rejecting him because she would never be comfortable trying to live up to the legendary glory of Colonel Richard Lowe. She just wanted to make her clocks and watches and have a man who loved her, imperfections and all. A man who clung to a stained, scorched scarf because he thought it perfect.

She had probably lost Zack Kazmarek forever, but that didn’t mean she should flee into the arms of a man she could never love. She had been trying for months to develop a deep and lasting affection for Colonel Lowe, but all she really felt was gratitude.

She would be forever grateful for what Colonel Lowe had done for the 57th Illinois Watch Company, but that was as far as her heart would be engaged.

32

M
ollie positioned the mainspring into place. Assembling this piece of the watch was always the trickiest part of the process, and she’d already botched it twice this morning. After Richard had dropped her off last night, Mollie had lain awake until almost four o’clock in the morning, and she was exhausted.

Had she just committed the biggest blunder of her life? Would she be stuck in this workshop assembling watches when she was a toothless old spinster? Marrying Richard would be the sensible thing to do, but honestly, how safe could a man make her feel if canned peaches upset his world?

The mainspring slipped from her tweezers, clinking as it bounced to the table, then onto the floor. She sighed. It would need to be steamed to be sure it was free of grit before she could try again.

She was bone-tired as she stooped over to pick it up. All around her, the technicians were moving at full speed on the Copernicus watches, while Oliver and Gunner were in the first stages of assembling their next monumental clock, this one for a hotel. It wouldn’t be right to crawl home and pull the covers over her head, but she was so exhausted. And heartsick. And
lonely. How could a person be in a roomful of people and still feel alone?

She glanced over at Alice. “I’ve got a toothache. I’m going next door.”

“Really? What’s the problem?”

Mollie shrugged a little helplessly. “Nothing. I just need to talk to Dr. Buchanan.”

She didn’t even feel guilty as she slipped out of the workshop in the middle of the morning. If she couldn’t unburden her heart to someone she was going to sink into a nervous collapse, and Dr. Buchanan was always such a good listener.

She rapped on his door and did not wait for a response before pushing inside. There was a woman at his desk, and she scrambled to hide something before turning around.

It was the blond woman Zack was so fond of. There was no sign of Dr. Buchanan, and the woman had a flushed and guilty look on her face as she slid a piece of paper beneath a book. “What are you doing?” Mollie asked, her gaze tracking across Dr. Buchanan’s desk, looking for any sign of tampering or missing items.