Dead Set Delphinia

by Zina Abbott

  Somehow, Delphinia knew what was coming. “Just say it, Annie. I won’t be angry.”

  “One…one of the times he was here to see you, he found me busy folding the linens, and…” Annie swallowed and stared at her feet. “He showed too much interest in me even though I begged him to leave me alone.” Annie dropped her face into her hands once more. “I…I don’t want him to show any interest in me, Miss, especially with him being your betrothed. Please, Miss, believe me. I never encouraged him.”

  Delphinia froze like a block of ice. She fought back the anger she felt, not at Annie, but at Andrew. After coming face-to-face with his mistress earlier, then enduring his declaration of how he intended to spend his free time away from their home, she had no doubt Annie did not encourage his attentions. “I know you didn’t, Annie. Evidently that is one of his…proclivities.”

  A confused expression on her face, Annie looked up at Delphinia. “I’m not sure what that word means, Miss, but I think I understand what you’re saying. I passed by the drawing room just long enough to hear you tell your mother Mr. Sopworth has a mistress and he intends to keep her. But, I don’t want to be his or any man’s mistress, Miss, nor even a flight of fancy. I…I know that takes place in many houses among the well-to-do, and that is one of the risks a girl who goes into service must face. Miss Delphinia, I don’t want to be the source of any more bad feelings you may have towards me should Mr. Sopworth try to compromise me in his home after you’re married. I’d rather leave your employ than risk that. But, Miss, I’ll never be able to get a good job again if I can’t get a good reference, and your mother has already told me she’ll not give me one.”

  Delphinia turned her back to the maid, fearful of how much the girl could read in her face depending on the answer. “Annie, has my father or any other man besides Mr. Sopworth tried to compromise you while you worked here?”

  Annie vehemently shook her head. “Oh, no. Your father has never acted too forward with me, Miss. He acts towards me and the others like a proper boss. There were rumors about your younger brother, Dion…”

  Delphinia supplied the name Annie stumbled over. “Dionysus, although we call him Dion. Has my brother ever been forward with you?”

  “Oh, no, Miss. He hasn’t been home much since I’ve been here. But a maid in service to your family before I came to work here, I guess he regularly sneaked up to her attic room and got his way by threatening to have her fired. He said he would claim she stole something, like….” Annie stopped, and hesitantly looked up.

  “Like my mother threatened you in order to get you to steal my letter for her. Go on. What happened with this maid?”

  “She was eventually sent away without references because she got in the family way. By then your brother had returned to…I can’t remember. Where ever it is they learn to be an Army officer.”

  Delphinia kept her expression blank as she stared at her informant. She had been much younger, but she recalled one of the maids she particularly liked stop working at the house while everyone from her parents on down refused to tell her why she left.

  So, dear Dionysus knocked up the maid, and then he escaped to West Point to learn how to become an officer and a gentleman. I wonder where his illegitimate child is now?

  Annie’s plea brought her back to the present. “Miss, I don’t want to create any problems in your marriage to Mr. Sopworth. Maybe once he’s a married man, he’ll be like your father and I won’t have to worry about him. But if he forces me, I don’t think I’m strong enough to fight him off. I want to leave your employ before it comes to that rather than have you think I betrayed you again.” Her pleading dropped to a whisper. “Will you please write out a good reference for me?”

  Delphinia sighed in resignation. “My marriage is going to be fraught with problems with or without you, Annie. However, I appreciate you not wishing to be a party to any improper advances from my soon-to-be husband. I’ve felt like a bird imprisoned in a gilded cage in this house. I have a feeling if…when…I marry Andrew, I will be trading one gilded cage for another.”

  Annie looked at the floor. “Many women are trapped by life, Miss. At least your cage is gilded.”

  Delphinia stared at Annie as the truth of her words slammed into her like the strike of a sledgehammer. She walked over to a window, still barred with the ornate iron. For the first time she realized this Irish maid was also trapped by her circumstances.

  Annie dropped her gaze, once again contrite. “I’m sorry, Miss. It was not my place to say that.”

  Delphinia turned back. “Stop apologizing, Annie, I’m tired of hearing it, especially when we both know what you say is true. I will give you a good reference. Now, clear a space on the edge of my bed to sit on and take one of these cakes to eat. I don’t want them both. The tea is probably lukewarm by now, but you are welcome to use the saucer to have some to wash down the cake.”

  With a little more coaxing, Annie did what Delphinia told her to do. After finishing with their refreshments the two women went through the rest of Delphinia’s clothes. Delphinia found a couple more gowns, a winter coat and two traveling outfits with fitted jackets to add to the pile. She also found some petticoats too short for her and some unmentionables she no longer wanted. The pile of clothing was soon augmented by several pairs of shoes and some older hats.

  Annie looked at the loot her young mistress had given her. “My family will think Christmas has come twice over when I take all this home to them, Miss. Thank you.”

  “You probably can’t get it all out of the house in one trip. Do you have someplace where my mother doesn’t tend to go you can store what you can’t take home tonight?” As Annie nodded, Delphinia mused. “Mother has purchased a whole new trousseau for me. I won’t need most of these old ball gowns, but I doubt you’ll have a use for them, either. I’d like maybe keep one, but sell the rest.”

  “And what might you be needing money for, Miss?” Annie bit her lip. “Sorry, Miss, it’s not my place to ask. But while I’m in your good graces, I have one more thing to confess, and one more favor to ask.”

  Delphinia looked at her warily.

  What now?

  “Miss, after they locked you up here, I was cleaning near your father’s library, and, well, I know how employers hate eavesdropping by the servants, but I couldn’t help hear him and your mother talking, not if I was to finish the task your mother set me to. They said the woman in Colorado you were writing to didn’t invest in silver mines, but ran a bridal service. They said something about how she uses writing letters to match people up. They thought it was ridiculous, and figured they had saved you from making a grave mistake. But, you see, Miss. I worry about my sister Kate. Da says it’s time Mam stops coddling her with learning reading and writing and her figures, and makes her go into service to bring more money into the family. Only, Kate is pretty, much prettier than me, and I worry if she gets in a family with a husband or older sons with a roving eye…” Annie hesitated and searched Delphinia’s face for a reaction.

  “You’re worried she’ll be subjected to unwanted attention like our former maid received from my brother or you received from my fiancée. Go on.”

  “I was thinking, Miss, my sister can write letters. If I could give her this woman’s name and address, maybe this woman could help her find the right match for a husband, one who’d be good to her and send for her to marry him. It could give her a better life than one being in service here in the city where one of the men in the family she works for might take advantage. It would get her out of the misery that is Five Corners.”

  Delphinia knew a little about Five Corners, the Irish pit of poverty, crime and despair. Any decent person living there would wish to escape to something better. She kept her voice even as she replied. “You stole one of my letters, and you saw me burn two of them the day my mother first locked me into this room. What makes you think I have a way to contact this person?”

  Annie bit her lip and blinked back tear. Once she began speak
ing, Delphinia felt her heart sinking to the floor.

  “Because I found the hiding place on the side of the mantle. I’m so sorry, Miss, I didn’t mean to. I promise you I was not looking for it. I was cleaning your room the first day your parents let you leave. The board was loose and pulled away from the wall. When I touched it, I realized it opened, like a little cupboard door. I saw there were letters in there, and some money and what looked like train tickets, like the kind my brother bought when he left to go west to work on the railroad. I think there was a scrap torn from a newspaper, too, but it was mostly covered by the other. Since I can’t read, I don’t know what any of it says, but I guessed it has something to do with what got you in trouble. I didn’t take it out, Miss. I swear I didn’t take any of the money. I didn’t tell anyone, not even my family.”

  “What if I say I don’t know what you are talking about? Maybe it is something left here by the former owners of this house.”

  Annie shook her head. “The paper’s too new. I can’t read, but I know that much.” Annie bit her lip nervously. “Maybe I shouldn’t have confessed this part until after you gave me my reference. Please, Miss, I hope you won’t change your mind. But, if after you go, please leave a paper with that woman’s name and address in there for me to take home to Kate. From what I heard your father say, if the woman with the bridal business matches a woman up with a man out west, the bride doesn’t have to pay money for train fare. The man sending for her pays. Kate would need that, for she’d have to leave without Da knowing, and I don’t know how much money Mam and I could give her. These clothes you gave me will be a boon.” Annie looked up, her eyes pleading. “If…if you still are planning to go to Colorado to meet with this woman your parents spoke of, I’ll help you get away. At the very least, I won’t tell them what I found, even after you go, in case they find you and force you to come back. But, will you help me, Miss? Will you will help me give my sister Kate a chance at a better life?”

  Delphinia looked away and ran her hands over the bed’s coverlet that now held fewer gowns. She could not fault Annie for wanting to help her sister find a good husband. After all, didn’t Delphinia herself go through Mrs. Millard in hopes the woman’s scientific graphology method would increase her chances of finding an appropriate man to marry, someone who would be a good match, instead of another money-grabbing reprobate like Andrew Sopworth?

  With a sigh of resignation, Delphinia turned to her maid who was only a year or two younger than she was. “It looks like I have little choice but to trust you, Annie. When I move, I will leave in there what you need so you can help your sister. I will also give you your letter of reference. You’ll know which one is the letter for you because I will put it in an envelope. Everything will be either for you or your sister, no one else.”

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  Jubilee springs, Colorado – late october, 1881

  CHAPTER 8

  ~o0o~

  Just before the train pulled into Jubilee Springs, Delphinia, now traveling by the name Sarah Brown, had little energy left to enjoy the wild beauty of the Rocky Mountains. She had learned that it was impossible to come into the small mountain town from the west because the rail line was still being built from east to west. She had ended up traveling into Denver after all. She had stored her luggage at the station and found a small, reasonably-priced hotel close to the station to spend the night. She hoped by sticking with this alias from the time she left Chicago, telling people she was on her way to San Francisco to visit her ailing grandmother, and by changing her hair style and dressing in a store-bought, unadorned wool dress, she had escaped the notice of anyone who might figure out her true identity.

  She realized she should have come up with a last name completely different than Brownlee, the alias she had used when she wrote to her contacts through the Colorado Bridal Agency. However, as she stood at the ticket counter, refusing to look behind her to see if she had been followed by anyone she recognized, when asked her name, without thinking she spoke “Miss Brown….” At that point she caught herself, but it was too late to be known by a different surname than Brown.

  Once she boarded the train and had more time to think about it, she decided until she make contact with Mrs. Millard of the bridal agency, she would go by Sarah Brown, a very common, undistinctive name —unlike the Greek and Roman names with which her mother burdened her and her brothers.

  As it turned out, once Delphinia got down to the business of leaving New York, she had called on Annie for help. The maid helped her sell her unwanted ball gowns, and was pleasantly surprised when Delphinia gave her a percentage of the sales as a thank you. She helped pack and haul two trunks of what Delphinia decided to take with her, and she arranged for a cousin to come on a night her parents were out having dinner at the home of one of her father’s business associates. The day Delphinia left she even helped Delphinia fake an illness by bringing up a pitcher of boiling water that morning for Delphinia to hang her head over to simulate a fever, thus avoid attending with her mother a luncheon, an orphanage charity board meeting and tea with two of her mother’s friends. The flushed and heated skin along with the perspiration had convinced her mother she needed to stay in bed for the day. Her father had left for work an hour before, and as soon as Delphinia heard the clop of horses hooves as her mother’s carriage departed, she had donned her hat, scarf and winter coat, grabbed her valise in which she emptied the contents of her hiding place all except for the letter she promised Annie including a coin in the envelope, the bridal agency ad on the scrap of newsprint, some plain paper and envelopes plus another coin for postage

  Once Delphinia reached Denver, she decided to avoid making her presence known to Mrs. Millard. The woman knew her by her first alias, Delia Brownlee, a name her father also knew. Not sure if her father’s men had contacted the woman, or, if they had, whether or not she would keep knowledge of Delphinia’s location confidential, she decided to wait until she reached Jubilee Springs. Perhaps she would go directly to the owners of the mine to inquire about their employees interested in getting married. Perhaps she would visit some respectable businesses around town and inquire regarding the best way to obtain proper introductions.

  Delphinia knew even if she met some likely marriage prospects her first week in Jubilee Springs, the courtship would need to be short and the marriage quick. She was dead set on marrying within a week, two at the most. No matter the lengths she had gone to in order to cover her tracks, she suspected her father would hire detectives, if necessary, to find her. Why he was so determined she marry Andrew, Delphinia did not know, but she intended to prove she could be just as stubborn as him.

  Delphinia sat on the north side of the car as the conductor announced they were approaching Jubilee Springs. She surveyed the landscape, beautiful in its wildness, but even with the evergreens, so much dryer with less grass and more dirt and rocks than what she was used to back east. She guessed the trees with the tall, slender trunks that grew so close together in clusters possessing only a few yellow leaves still dancing in the breeze must be the aspen trees she had heard so much about. The ground beneath them was blanketed with a yellow carpet of leaves. So pleasing to the eye, and similar, but not the same as seeing the colors of turning leaves up in the mountains of New York. Delphinia fought down a pang of longing for her beloved Catskills. She had left New York, along with its beauty, behind in order to escape.

  Delphinia studied the road that must cross the bridge the train was quickly approaching. Off to her right, she saw a two-story building that resembled a hotel. She noticed several men milling about outside. Further on, another two-story building had a wide porch out front with a veranda on the second floor. She noticed several women on the second story veranda with a few men standing on the ground talking to them. Although one did not discuss bordellos in polite company, by eavesdropping on conversations her brothers had held with their friends, she had heard of them, and the purpose they ser
ved.

  “You new to Jubilee Springs?”

  Startled at being addressed by a stranger, Delphinia turned to study the neatly dressed man in the checked suit for several seconds before she answered. “Yes, I am. It’s my first trip to the region.”

  “You don’t want to go there. It’s for the single miners. And that place with the women—it’s for their entertainment. No place a decent lady wants to find herself.”

  Delphinia offered the man a weak smile. “Thank you for the warning.”

  She turned away to look out the window again. As the train crossed the bridge, she caught sight of more buildings, and piles of dirt. What appeared to be a hole in the side of the mountain left Delphinia wondering if that could be the mine that employed the men looking for wives. She turned to look out the windows across the aisle from her seat. Some sort of mill dominated the scene, but beyond it she could see what looked like the buildings of a small town. Most were made of wood, but some were constructed of brick. She considered it a good sign regarding the permanence of the town.

  Once again her unsolicited tour guide spoke. “Almost here. Depot’s right ahead. Is someone meeting you?”

  “Not today, but shortly. I’m sure there will be someone at the station who can help me make arrangements to have my things taken to a hotel or boarding house.”

  “Well, there’s the River Valley Inn. It’s nice and has good food. If you plan to stay a week or more, there’s Howard Boarding House a block down and over. Mrs. Howard serves breakfast and supper as board, and she’s a good cook.”

  “Thank you. I may look into that.”

  “If you don’t mind me asking, are you one of those brides that’s coming in this weekend for the miners? You’re a couple of days early, and they usually come in with that lady from the bridal agency, but I guess there’s no law saying you have to come with her.”