It was God who must fill that space, Sophronia knew. Her father, the best loved and most righteous minister in Massachusetts, had taught her as much, and Sophronia believed him. Day by day she worked to make the void inside her a home in which the Lord might dwell. But the voice of God, which she so yearned to hear speaking in her heart at last, was as silent now as ever. The only thing she heard within was the ring of scorn in Dovey’s voice—the shocking pop and shatter of a friendship breaking.
At least in the chapel, small and rustic though it was, Sophronia found the trappings of religion. True, Seattle could offer only hewn beams and primitive benches, where Lowell’s churches had boasted the gleaming warmth of carved oak, shining with the touch of generations of fellow worshipers, and pews cushioned with velvet and silk. Here there was but one small, crying fiddle, where Lowell’s chapel had rang loud and triumphant with the chorus of the organ. Sophronia drank deeply of Seattle’s cup of religion, and faintly, on the back of her tongue, she found the taste of home.
I can make this place my home, she thought. I can come to love it as much as I loved Lowell. And if I am to have no husband, I can still fill my life with good and worthy works.
Since she had decided to accept the very next proposal that fell from a man’s lips, Sophronia had received no proposals at all—nor even calls from gentlemen. In her moments of dry, sensible thought, she wondered if it were the grief that must show now on her face—the outward sign of her inner hollow, the intrinsic emptiness besetting her eyes. In her times of wild grief and bitter cynicism—which outnumbered her moments of clarity by far—she simply told herself that the Lord had sent down a penance of loneliness, that she bore a just punishment for a sin she could not name.
I must be brave, she told herself. I must accept my rebuke in humility, if I am to be found worthy of eternal life at the last judgment.
If she had earned so terrible a penance, then she was determined to serve it. She would do whatever the Lord willed. Even if her heart broke.
Harmon Grigg, the minister, ascended to his pulpit. He was approaching his middle years—well past Sophronia’s age, but still young for a man of his occupation—with neat, oiled hair of a ginger-red color, sprinkled at the temples with gray. He had a trim mustache and thick brows, and blue, kindly eyes that stared out beyond the walls of his little chapel as he preached, as if he could see, spread before him, all the vastness and bounty of God’s creation.
His text was the twenty-fifth Psalm. Sophronia opened her Bible to the correct page and began to read along as the minister spoke. But some combination of the text itself and the minister’s warm, resounding voice, so confident in the truth of God’s word, soon raised tears to her eyes. The verses lost themselves in a hot blur, and Sophronia hung her head over the Bible in her lap.
“‘Turn to me and be gracious to me,’” Harmon Grigg read.
Sophronia tried to hold back her unseemly emotion, but quite against her will, a loud sniffle escaped. It rang sharply through the congregation, and the minister paused.
Sophronia, flushing with shame, glanced from her lap to the pulpit. Mr. Grigg was staring down at her, and his eyes were wide with surprise—and something else, too. For one brief moment, one instinctive beat of her heart, Sophronia tried to understand and name the feeling she saw stirring in the minister’s countenance. Sympathy. Then her mortification overcame her once more, and she broke his gaze, turning her head to watch the wind ruffle the maples outside the tall, arched window.
Mr. Grigg went on with his reading. “‘… For I am lonely and afflicted. Relieve the troubles of my heart and free me from anguish. Look on my affliction and my distress and take away all my sins. See how numerous are my enemies and how fiercely they hate me!’”
A sob threatened deep inside her chest; Sophronia clenched her fists atop her Bible, pressing her nails hard into her palms. She would not show emotion again—would not disgrace herself, would not make of herself a fool, fodder for women’s gossip. She shut out the sound of the minister’s voice and pushed away the memory of his sympathetic gaze. She saw nothing of the world but the trees stirring gently outside, and heard nothing but the imagined sound of the wind. She did not even hear the words of God.
It took Sophronia some time to master her tranquility again. By the time she was sure of her self-control, the fiddler played the closing hymn, and the service came to its end. She was glad. The quiet of her small, spare bedroom waited at the Jameson house, the pleasant cool of its dim spaces, the solace of privacy, where she might shed her tears without fear of judgment. She shut her Bible and hurried out into the chapel’s yard.
Summer had arrived—or what passed for summer in this persistently cloudy place—and most of the mud had dried. The grass was thick and high and whispered against Sophronia’s skirt as she made her way toward the dirt road that would take her back into town. At first she did not hear the shout of “Miss!” over the murmur of the grasses and the sounds of the congregation heading home to their noonday meals. But the call came again, and Sophronia paused, wondering.
It was Harmon Grigg who had shouted after her. He raised a hand, beseeching her to wait, and Sophronia, stupefied and tired out by her week’s welter of emotion, stood like a deer caught in torchlight and watched him come on.
Mr. Grigg panted a little as he stopped beside her. His face was flushed with the effort of catching up to her; she could see the faint trace of freckles across his nose, a boyish accessory in contrast to the sober mien of a proper minister.
Sophronia bit her lip, certain he’d come to chastise her for her rude interruption.
“I’m sorry,” she said at once.
Mr. Grigg shook his head in confusion. “Miss?”
“I … I interrupted your service. It was wrong of me.”
He grinned, showing deep laugh lines around his eyes and a gap between his front teeth that Sophronia found quite charming. Then he swept his wide-brimmed, clerical hat from his brow. “It’s I who’ve wronged you, if I’ve made you think there’s something amiss. I only wanted to introduce myself.”
“You’re Harmon Grigg,” Sophronia said, more tersely than she’d intended.
“Yes. You’ve been attending my services for some time, and yet I haven’t taken the time to meet you properly. That’s a failing on my part.” He fell silent, and his eyes flicked down to her hand, hanging limp at her side.
Too late, Sophronia recalled her manners. “Oh,” she muttered, and offered her hand. In her flustered state, she presented it palm down, then heated with mortification when she realized she’d invited a kiss to her knuckles. But she would not turn her hand now. Harmon Grigg took her fingers gently in his own, then bowed to leave a brief, soft kiss on her hand.
Sophronia cleared her throat. “I’m Sophronia Brandt. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
“You’ve been coming to services since mid-May.”
“Yes, sir.” She found it difficult to remove her gaze from the gap in Mr. Grigg’s teeth. Or perhaps it was his lips she stared at—those lips whose touch she could still feel on the back of her hand.
“Did you come to Seattle with Asa Mercer, then?”
“I … I did.” She wondered just what opinion the minister held of the Mercer girls. Did he, like so many other residents of the city, think them a cargo of whores?
“I’ve noted, Miss Brandt, how piously you attend church. I fear piety is a rare quality in any citizen of Seattle. Modesty, too—yet you seem a very proper woman.”
“Thank you.”
Mr. Grigg shuffled his feet and glanced for a moment down into the grass, as if searching for the courage to say more. Finally he drew a deep breath and added, “I have also noticed, Miss Brandt, that you are very beautiful.”
Sophronia felt her eyes widen in a most indecorous way, but she could not seem to stop herself.
“You know, I have no wife, Miss Brandt. And today when I saw you, so moved by the Lord’s word … well, I wondered if I might call on
you.”
Now, when she needed her composure and poise more than ever before, Sophronia found she had no voice. She gaped for a moment at Harmon Grigg, and covered the right hand he had kissed with the fingers of her left. So—after resigning herself to loneliness in this mud-soaked Gomorrah, she had finally found a reason to hope, just when she thought all hope was gone. Truly, the Lord worked in mysterious ways!
But despite the anticipation welling in her breast, Sophronia hesitated. Any man of Seattle was sure to have some serious faults. They all did. There were no good men in this place—not left unmarried, at least. This city was peopled by unsavory toughs, rascals who lived for liquor and loose women.
But he is a minister, she scolded herself. A man called by God, to do good and holy work. He isn’t like the rest of them. He can’t be.
Sophronia swallowed her doubts and gave Harmon Grigg a hesitant smile. “Very well,” she said. “I shall be glad to receive you. You may call for me at the Jameson home, Mr. Grigg.”
They parted ways, Sophronia blushing, the minister grinning like a boy with a handful of peppermints. She waked in a haze of shock all the way down the hill, blind to the verdant, lush trappings of summer, hearing nothing of the birds’ sweet clamor in the trees. But by the time she reached the level streets of the city, Sophronia fairly danced back to the Jamesons’ on light feet, and even when a gust of wind swept up from the tidal flats, carrying the thick, sour odor of seaweed decaying in the sun, she breathed the air in as deeply as if it were perfumed with flowers.
The days that followed were the sweetest Sophronia had ever known. Harmon Grigg called on her Monday afternoon, and, blushing, she accepted his invitation to walk along a forest path. They shared stories of home as they strolled up the gentle rise, with the fragrant boughs of trees, clad so brightly in their gay robes of summer green, arching overhead.
Sophronia told him all about Lowell, its former glories and its slide into poverty as the great rebellion dragged on. She spoke, too, of her sisters, the golden-haired girls whom she had tended with such motherly care—and whose laughter and mischievous games she missed every day.
Harmon spoke of San Francisco. When he was only a boy, he had traveled to the city with his father, coming all the way from Ohio after his poor mother had succumbed to a fever—and shortly after their arrival, his father had perished, too, killed in the collision of two ships in the heavy harbor mist. Orphaned and too young to work, Harmon had taken the charity of a minister and learned his trade, scraping by into adulthood, watching the city grow as he did, until the seaside town had flourished into the glittering jewel it was today.
That serene walk with its intimate conversation had soothed away Sophronia’s fears as nothing had before—not even study of the Bible. Harmon’s willingness to expose his past to Sophronia—to lay bare the vulnerable places of his heart—touched her deeply, and sent a warm throb of quietude spreading through that terrible, echoing emptiness inside her. He trusted her, and even seemed to like her—though God knew they were barely more than strangers. And as she gazed into his eyes, listening to the music of his cultured speech, as she caught the flash of his gap-toothed smile, Sophronia felt for the first time in her life that she was a person worth liking.
Harmon called on her again on Tuesday, and on Wednesday—and, to her delight, on Thursday as well. Each hour they spent in one another’s company was sweeter than the last, and day by day, Sophronia’s thoughts filled with him, with the particular timbre of his voice, the rhythm of his walk, the feel of his lips against the back of her hand. It did not matter where they went—whether they strolled the city’s sidewalks, or took in the recital of the brass band outside the Occidental, or simply stood watching the low, gentle waves of Puget Sound lap the pebbly shore—Sophronia felt happy in his company, and confident in her hope.
When the sun set Friday evening and they walked back to Sophronia’s home, both of them dragging their feet to delay the inevitable parting, Harmon paused at the foot of the path that led up to the porch steps. He turned to Sophronia with silent intensity, gazing deep into her eyes, lifting her hand in his own to press it close to his heart.
“Oh—Harmon,” Sophronia murmured. An instinctive rebuke was on her lips, as she sensed that he might intend to kiss her. But a strange, wild welling in her heart wouldn’t allow her to speak.
“My darling,” he whispered, “you were sent by the Lord into my life.” His face deepened with a flush, and he seemed to wrestle with his thoughts—with his emotions. But he spoke no more, and his audible gulp sounded as loud as a thunderclap in the intimate space between them.
He is going to kiss me, Sophronia realized. And then, with a jolt of fear and frantic hope, she realized that she didn’t want to rebuke him. There was nothing in the world she desired more than to feel his lips press against her cheek—or better still, her mouth! She wanted to surrender to his embrace, allow his arms to encircle her like a shield against all the sorrows of her past.
She leaned toward him. And then abruptly pulled away, blushing, as her better sense caught up to her. “Oh! I … I ought to go inside now.”
Harmon cleared his throat. “I suppose that’s so. I had a fine time with you this evening, darling.”
Although her heart raced so frantically it made her stomach queasy, Sophronia smiled at him. “As did I.”
But despite their warm parting, Sophronia climbed the steps to the Jameson house blinded by mortification. She shut herself in her room and sagged against the door, pressing her hands against her face.
Lord! What a hussy I am. Wishing for a beau to kiss her without even a promise of marriage—it was beyond shameful!
Again and again she scolded herself as she readied for bed. But by the time she stood before her small, framed mirror, clothed in a flannel nightgown, all the scold had gone out of her. She gazed at the color high in her cheeks, at the sparkle in her eye. And she smiled. This evening with Harmon had felt so good, so right, that even Sophronia couldn’t imagine any sin into it. Perhaps the yearning she felt for Harmon’s embrace wasn’t sinful at all but a sign from God that at last, after her many long trials and disappointments, she had found true love.
“That’s it,” she whispered to her reflection. “You’ve found him—the man who will be your husband.” She smiled—and Josephine had been right, those many weeks ago aboard the Illinois; Sophronia was pretty when she smiled. She drank in the beauty of her own contentment like a parched man at a desert well.
As long as she remained true to her ideals, Sophronia knew, she would have Harmon to wed.
Let him call on me tomorrow, Lord—and the next day, too.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CONFESSIONS
Sophronia left the Occidental Hotel with a spring in her step and a buoyant song in her heart, swinging her small, beaded purse from its drawstrings as she glided across the street and up the slope of Denny’s Knoll toward her hostess’s home. The day had started gray and foggy, as so many days in Seattle did, but on that warm Saturday afternoon the clouds had burned away before the insistent cheer of the sun. The streets and sidewalks bounced their toasted warmth up toward her face, and the dusty, comfortable odor of sunbaked mud filled the avenues and alleys. She squinted against the glare as she hummed her happy tune.
She had worked diligently, ever since her arrival in Seattle, to undo the miserable first impression she’d made on Mrs. Garfield and her friends of the Women’s League. Sophronia felt instinctively that she shared the high standards of the League—indeed, there was no nook or cranny of Seattle society where she would fit so perfectly. But a simple apology, no matter how heartfelt, was never enough to recover a woman of Mrs. Garfield’s caliber from the type of vexation Sophronia had visited upon her. Sophronia had attended every meeting and function of the League, enduring the women’s stares and their suspicious whispers with good grace—after all, their judgment was her due, the harvest she’d reaped with her display of ill temper on the first night of t
heir meeting.
Now, at last, she seemed to have won Mrs. Garfield’s forgiveness and the confidence of the League. They had welcomed her to the afternoon’s meeting readily, and a few of the women had even gone out of their way to converse with her sedately about topics of great interest: a recent engagement between one of the Mercer girls and a gentleman of society; a variety of outrages committed by the city’s prostitutes; the shocking scandal of the suffrage movement that had so taken root in the eastern states.
I’m a part of their society now, Sophronia told herself joyfully as she made toward the Jameson place. I’ve Harmon’s calls to look forward to, I’ve been accepted into the Women’s League … I can finally be pleased with my life, all thanks to the Lord!
It certainly wasn’t time to start sewing a wedding gown—not yet—but Sophronia’s life had taken a turn toward rich and ample blessings. I was right to be steadfast in my morals. Finally, my righteousness will be rewarded. All she need do now was—
“Miss Priss!” A harsh, nasal voice called from behind her.
Sophronia’s jubilant steps faltered, and she turned slowly to peer over her shoulder. A perfect fright of garish colors and thickly flounced skirts followed her up the sidewalk. Sophronia recognized the prostitute—the way those mocking eyes gazed at her beneath lazy, dark-painted lids; the heavy rouge on her cheeks; most of all, the high, untidy pile of straw-yellow hair that seemed to teeter on her head like a wagon about to tip its load into the street. It was the line girl known as Haypenny—the one who had befriended Dovey.
Sophronia halted and rounded on the girl, her smile melting into a pinched frown of disgust and bewilderment. “What do you want? Are you begging for coins now? You’ll get none from me! I want nothing to do with you.” She made a shooing motion with her hands, as one might do to frighten away a pestering alley cat.
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