I pressed my forehead against the glass. If only the coolness would numb the rest of me. Even for a few minutes. To feel like my old self instead of a worn-out, dried-up spinster. I would be twenty-three on my next birthday. Most women were married with a child by this age.
“What is it, Jo? Why did you sigh?” Papa asked from behind his newspaper.
I hadn’t realized I’d sighed. Papa knew me too well. After everything we’d been through together, it was no wonder. I turned from the window and stepped nearer to the couch where he and Mama Quinn were having their tea. “It’s a letter from Walter’s friend. The one who wrote to tell me of Walter’s death.”
“Yes, we remember.” Mama’s eyes immediately softened with sympathy. “What does he want?”
“He wants to come out here for a visit and possibly to stay. My letters were a travel brochure, I guess.”
Papa lowered the paper onto his lap. “How interesting.” His English accent, according to my friends, remained as strong today as it had been when he came to America so many years ago. I, however, could not hear it. He sounded only like my beloved Papa.
“Does he have a wife and family?” Mama folded her hands together on her lap. I’d pulled her from reading. The novel, My Ántonia, was face-open on the couch next to her. Her fair hair was arranged in waves pulled back into a bun at the nape of her neck. Younger than my father by fifteen years, she was blessed with delicate, even features and a heart-shaped face.
Just over ten years had passed since she’d arrived to open the first school of Emerson Pass and my father’s heart. Almost immediately she’d become the heart of our family. All five of us thought of her as our mother. Since their marriage, two little sisters had come, bringing our total to seven. Papa called us “The Lucky Seven.”
“He has no family of any kind,” I said. “In fact, he was raised in an orphanage. I have the feeling he’s in need of a fresh start and work. He thought Papa might have ideas for him.”
“How sad. We’ll help him in any way we can.” Mama set her teacup onto its saucer and fixed her kind brown eyes upon me. “Unless there’s a reason you wouldn’t want him to come here?” The anxious way she looked at me lately filled me with guilt. Papa, Mama, and my sisters had been worried about me. I hated knowing I caused them concern. My job was to be the responsible, steady eldest, not the sad, mopey mess I’d become.
“No, not at all,” I said. “Should we invite him to stay with us? Just until he can figure out what to do next?”
“Yes, we’ve room for him if he doesn’t mind bunking with the boys.” Papa drained the last of his tea and set aside his cup. “I’m keen to help any man who fought in that terrible war.”
“He says he trained as a cabinetmaker.” I hugged my middle as I walked over to the fire that roared in the hearth, crackling and snapping. “He says Walter shared the contents of my letters with him and the rest of the boys. I find that…perplexing.”
“Which part?” Mama asked.
“That he shared them. My letters were intimate, meant for only one pair of eyes.” I looked down at my hands to keep from crying.
“Darling, it doesn’t really matter,” Papa said softly. “If your letters brought them some relief, isn’t it an honor?”
“I suppose.” I sat in one of the armchairs and watched the fire. One end of a log looked like the nose of a fox.
Mama smoothed her hands over the top of her day dress made of crimson organza. “Phillip must stay for Christmas.”
“Yes, I agree,” Papa said. “He shouldn’t be alone for the holidays. We’ll take care of him until he can get on his feet. The boys can show him around town, do a little carousing.”
“Alexander, carousing?” Mama raised her eyebrows and looked properly mortified. “Our boys do not carouse.”
Papa didn’t answer, but his eyes twinkled as he gazed at her. My chest ached with both gratitude and sorrow. Their love pleased me. Yet it also brought to light what I’d lost. I’d hoped Walter and I would share a life as they had.
Mama returned her gaze to me. “Jo, what’s troubling you?”
“We don’t know Phillip,” I said. “What if he’s awful?”
“I doubt he will be,” Mama said. “He was so kind to write to you about Walter’s death.”
“That’s true. If he’s Walter’s friend, he must be all right,” I said.
“We didn’t really know Walter,” Papa said.
I sucked in my bottom lip to hold back a retort. Never in my life had there been any discord between my parents and me. However, they hadn’t approved of my whirlwind courtship with Walter. Which was in no way his fault. He hadn’t had time to come home with me and meet my family. “He was here such a short time. There wasn’t an opportunity for him to court me properly. He planned to, when he returned from the war.”
“Yes, of course, darling. We understand,” Mama said in a soothing voice.
“Yes, yes, quite right.” Papa followed up too hastily. No one wanted to upset me these days. I missed when my family treated me normally. Now it felt as if I were a fragile piece of china no one wanted to break.
“May I read the letter?” Mama asked.
I nodded and handed it over the tea set. She unfolded the letter and began to read.
“Sweetheart, have a biscuit,” Papa said to me. “You’re looking much too thin.”
I obeyed, not having the energy to disagree, and put a cookie, which Papa called a biscuit, on a plate. He poured a cup of tea and set it on the table front of me. He believed most problems could be solved after a cup of tea. Given my troubled mother’s death when I was nine, I’d known differently for a long time.
Mama folded the letter and put it back in the envelope. She had a strange look on her face, somewhere between puzzled and intrigued. “I think it might be good for you to have him here.”
“You mean to tell me stories about Walter?”
“Not that exactly,” Mama said. “He’s someone of your own age group. Perhaps he will become a new friend?”
Mama and Papa exchanged a glance I couldn’t decipher.
“I don’t need friends. I have Poppy and my sisters.” Poppy and I had grown up together. Their parents had died when Poppy was young and her older brother, Harley, had raised her while acting as groundskeeper and gardener. Poppy had been away for the better part of two years, working as an apprentice to a veterinarian in cattle country. I’d missed her more than I’d thought possible. She had just always been there and now she was off to her own adventures. “Poppy will be back in a few weeks. But I shall be a good hostess, don’t worry.”
“Regardless, we can’t let a hero be alone during what’s supposed to be the merriest time of the year.” Mama had the biggest heart in the world, rivaled only by my sister Fiona, who seemed to think it was her job to look after every single person in the world.
“I’ll write him this evening and ask if he’d like to stay with us,” I said.
All four of my gaggle of sisters rushed into the room. Those who thought only boys were loud had never met my sisters. Harley had taken them into town in the sleigh to ice-skate for the afternoon. The pond in the center of town had frozen solid for the first time this season just last night.
“You won’t believe what Delphia did,” Cymbeline said, without concern over interrupting the adults.
Delphia, in preparation for the admonishment, tore a cap from her mushroom of blond curls and glared at her older sister. “I didn’t do it.”
At sixteen, Cymbeline lorded over the younger ones. Fiona, thirteen, was the protector. Adelaide, or Addie as we called her, was quiet and shy and obedient to bossy Cymbeline’s wishes. Four-year-old Delphia, bless her, had the same fire as Cymbeline. From the time she could talk, she was having none of the dictatorship.
“She challenged a boy twice her age to a race,” Cymbeline said. “And when she didn’t win, she knocked him to the ground.”
Delphia’s bottom lip trembled. “I didn’t.”
“The whole thing was an accident.” Fiona placed her hand on Delphia’s head. “She slid into him because she was going so fast. Anyway, she learned it from you, Cym. You’re always racing boys.”
“That’s different.” Cymbeline’s color heightened, making her even more beautiful than the moment before. God help us all, she was stunning and looked more like a woman than a girl. Mama always said we only had two types in this family. Fair and blond, like her, me, and the two youngest girls. Or dark hair and deep blue eyes, like Papa, the boys, Cymbeline and Fiona.
“Come here, little one,” Papa said to Delphia.
She trudged over to him. He pulled her into his lap. “Tell me what happened.”
She looked up at him with angelic eyes. “It’s what Fiona said. I was going fast, pretending that a monster was chasing me, and then I ran into him.”
“Did you say you were sorry?” Mama asked.
“Yes, that’s not the problem,” Cymbeline said as she grabbed a cookie from the plate. “She said she was sorry and then she planted a kiss on him. On his cheek.”
I had to cover my mouth with my hand to hide my smile.
“His cheeks looked like an apple,” Delphia said. “I just had to kiss one.”
I caught Mama’s eye. She seemed to be trying not to laugh but kept it together enough to say, “Delphia, you mustn’t ever kiss a boy.”
“But why?” Delphia blinked her big blue eyes.
“Because it’s not proper,” Mama said.
I noticed Addie was shivering. “Come here, doll. I’ll warm you up.” I tucked her into the chair next to me and rubbed her cold hands between mine. Addie was quiet and serious like me. I adored her.
“Mama and Papa kiss all the time,” Delphia said.
“They’re married.” Cymbeline plopped into an armchair next to me. “You don’t understand anything about how the world works.”
“Cym, don’t say it like that. She’s just a little girl.” Fiona went to stand in front of the fire with her hands behind her back.
“I’m your baby,” Delphia said as she gazed up at our father. “Right, Papa?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean you’re allowed to kiss boys.” Papa put his chin on her head and looked over at me with eyes that danced with humor. Mama always says it was his dancing eyes that drew her to him. I knew exactly what she meant. “You’re my baby, which means you can’t love any boy but me.”
“I won’t do it again.” Delphia let out a long-suffering sigh, as if all the fun in the world was taken from her.
“Besides the unfortunate incident with the apple cheek,” Mama said, “what else happened?”
“That ridiculous Viktor Olofsson was skating with all the girls, one after another.” Cymbeline shook her dark curls. “He had the nerve to ask me.”
“What did you say?” I asked, knowing the answer, but teasing her anyway.
“Jo, don’t be daft,” Cymbeline said. “I would never let that big oaf touch my hand.”
He was a large man but most certainly not an oaf. Although his shoulders were thick and wide like a Colorado mountain, he was a gentle, intelligent soul who I suspected had a deep and long-lasting crush on Cymbeline. “I think he’s like a hero in a storybook. Brave and strong.” I’d once seen him pick up a wagon off a man’s leg when the horse had bucked and broken free, leaving his owner under a wheel. With almost white hair and light green eyes, he looked like the Vikings in one of the history books I had in the library.
Cymbeline’s eyes flashed as she stuck out her plump bottom lip and scowled. Strangely, her sour expression did nothing to disguise her beauty. “He’s such a show-off, doing tricks on the ice.”
“You do tricks on the ice,” Fiona said, not unkindly but more as a fact. “All the same ones Viktor does.”
Her observation was correct. If Viktor learned a trick on the ice, Cymbeline practiced until she’d conquered it.
Mama had confided in me more than once that she was afraid Cymbeline would never be satisfied living in a man’s world as we do. If she’d been old enough, I had no doubt she would have volunteered to be a nurse in the war effort overseas.
“Well, be that as it may,” Mama said, “we have exciting news. Jo’s acquaintance, Phillip Baker, is coming to stay with us for the holidays.”
“The one who wrote to you about Walter?” Fiona asked.
“The same,” I said. “How did you remember?”
Fiona shrugged. “I remember everything about my family. Anyway, it wasn’t like I could ever forget that day.” Her eyes glistened. “I shouldn’t like to ever see you that way again, Jo.”
I held out my hand to her. “Come here, sweet sister.” She sat on the arm of my chair and I patted her knee. “You don’t have to worry. I’ll never give my heart to anyone else. I’m the spinster of the family.”
Phillip
The train chugged up a slope so steep I was certain we would not stay on the tracks. Across from me, a baby in her mother’s arms cried. To distract myself from my fears of falling into the abyss below me, I pulled out the letter from Josephine. I breathed in the faint smell of her perfume that lingered on the paper. My imagination? Perhaps. Regardless, this one was to me, unlike the stack I’d read too many times to remember. Letters that were not written to me. By a girl who didn’t belong to me.
It’s a terrible thing to hate a dead man.
Yet I knew him for who he truly was. When I’d known him as a child in the orphanage, I’d recognized immediately how he used his charm to get what he wanted. Even the nuns fell for his act. When he ran away at age twelve, I genuinely think their hearts were broken. Women, even ones sworn to love Jesus, couldn’t help but fall for Walter Green.
Hope lurked inside me, goading me into this fool’s errand. After cheating death a second time by recovering from the Spanish flu, I would not rest easy until I came west and told Josephine the truth about the man to whom she’d pledged her eternal love. If not for me, I knew she would love a ghost, possibly forever. Josephine Barnes was a loyal woman. Nothing would deter her unless she understood what kind of man he really was under all that golden-haired, blue-eyed charm. I couldn’t bear the thought of a woman like her spending the rest of her life remembering a man who never really existed. Walter Green was not the man she thought he was. I was the only one left alive to tell her the truth.
He hadn’t loved her. There were other women who wrote to him. All who believed he would marry them when he returned from the war. All targeted for their wealth. Playing the odds, he’d said to me one time. The more he had waiting, the more likely he would marry into money. Those were to secure his future. Countless dalliances with nurses were just for fun.
Yes, I wanted her to know the truth. But it wasn’t for purely altruistic reasons. I wanted her for myself. As I’d convalesced after the flu, I’d read the letters she’d sent to Walter hundreds of times. I’d stared at her photograph until I memorized every detail of her pretty face. The stories of her close family and the beautiful mountains where she lived had moved me more than they should have. In truth, I’d fallen in love with her. Was I lonely? Yes. I’d been lonely all my life. This was something else entirely. In addition to my yearning for a family and my romantic nature, I had this odd sensation of a deep connection between the two of us. The idea of fate, even soul mates, had crossed my mind. Was there a reason beyond mortal comprehension that I’d been the one who ended up with the box of her correspondence?
Could I pinpoint the exact moment I decided to write to her and ask if I might come to visit? Not really. It was more of a gradual thing, an expansion in my mind of what might be possible. Even though I knew her affection toward me was unlikely, I had to try. A man like me didn’t win a rich, beautiful girl like her. I was poor and uneducated. My only skills were those of a cabinetmaker. Yet I had hope. I’d escaped the war and then the flu. I had to take a chance.
I glanced down at the letter, reading it one more time.
Dear Phillip,
I hope you won’t find my large and somewhat obnoxious family too overwhelming. I’ve asked them all to be on their best behavior, but that’s not a guarantee. You’ll bunk with my twin brothers. They also served in the war. I’m sure you’ll all become fast friends.
Papa and my brothers will be happy to help you find employment if you decide to stay.
I shall look forward to meeting you soon.
Sincerely,
Josephine Barnes
I folded the letter and put it back in the envelope, then traced the letters of my name, written by her hand.
Walter, I thought, you lucky, conniving bastard. He’d held that hand in his own.
The train had made it to the top of the peak. I looked out the window to snow that sparkled under the sun. Josephine hadn’t exaggerated about the piercing blue hue of the sky.
The baby stopped crying. Her mother, a pretty blonde woman wearing a gray traveling suit and matching hat, apologized to me for the noise. “The altitude hurts her ears.”
“No need to apologize, ma’am. We were all babies once.”
She peered back at me with obvious curiosity. “Do you know someone in Emerson Pass? Most people who head our way either live there or are visiting family or friends.”
“I’m visiting the Barnes family.”
Her face lit up with a bright smile. “The Barneses. They’re very close friends of mine. I’m Martha Neal. I was the second schoolteacher in Emerson Pass, but now I’m married to the town doctor. He was an outsider who moved to town to take over the practice of our last doctor and somehow managed to make me his wife.” She indicated the baby with a dip of her chin. “This one is named Quinn, after our first teacher in Emerson Pass, who is now married to Alexander Barnes. But you know all that, I suppose?”
The Spinster (Emerson Pass Historicals Book 2) Page 2
