At some point, though, Kit stirred. “I have to go, Grace,” he said. “It will be morning soon.”
Grace sat up reluctantly. “Where are you going?”
“Home. Don’t worry, they haven’t disinherited me. Uncle John would probably have liked to, but Father has decided that I just need a little more time before I’m ready to join them. He’s nothing if not patient.”
She’d already noticed that. “He wrote to me.”
“My father? I’m not surprised. What did he say?”
“He congratulated me…and said that he would be waiting for when I changed my mind.”
Kit sighed but didn’t say anything further. He kissed her gently, then rose and walked to the window. “Will you write to let me know that you’re there and all right? I doubt your family will be pleased if I write to you.”
“Yes, I will.” She fought back the strong urge to get out of bed and throw her arms around him and keep him with her.
He let the quilt slip from his shoulders and stood with his back to her. His naked back was smooth and elegantly muscled, down his buttocks and into his thighs. “I won’t say goodbye, my love, because it isn’t, is it?”
“No,” she said quietly.
He nodded and turned so that he could look at her over his shoulder. “I love you, Grace,” he said, and then the raven was back. It hopped up onto the windowsill and vanished into the night.
Grace waited a minute, then climbed stiffly off the bed. She went to the window and picked up the quilt, still warm from his body, and wrapped it around herself before lying down again. She cried a little, then fell asleep and dreamed of a night filled with swirling black feathers.
* * *
“Grace! Wake up! You’ve absolutely gotta see this!” Her sister Dorothy, hair in braids and wearing one of her hand-me-down nightgowns, was shaking her shoulder.
“What?” Grace half opened her eyes. It was light out, but by the angle of the sun she could see it was still very early.
“Outside! Come on! You won’t believe what they’re doing!” Dorothy was practically dancing.
She sat up and rubbed her eyes. “What are you talking about?”
“The crows! Come on!”
That made her move. She nearly tripped on the quilt she still clutched around her but followed Dorothy to the open window—and stood transfixed.
A soft autumn mist obscured much of the sky and the surrounding trees, but the lawn below them hummed with activity. At least a dozen crows milled about, fluttering and flying and croaking to each other. There were hundreds of small white objects on the lawn with them, and more crows were arriving with white things clutched in their beaks.
“Look!” Dorothy said. “It’s the flowers from the arbor!”
Grace stared and saw that she was right. The crows were plucking the creamy white blossoms of the autumn-blooming clematis that Mum called bridal wreath that cascaded from a pergola near the doors to Papa’s study. They were carrying them back to the grass below Grace’s window. “What are they doing?” she whispered.
“I don’t know. Ooh, look at that big one!” Dorothy pointed.
A larger crow was perched on the bench set in a flower bed at the edge of the grass. Or might it be a raven? She looked at it hard and heard a voice in her mind say, There’s a difference, though I can understand that some people don’t know it. It let out a solemn croak, and all the crows began to stalk around the lawn, each with a blossom in its beak. They scurried around for a few minutes so that Grace couldn’t see what they were doing and then, almost as one, took off into the sky.
Below her, the blossoms had been arranged to form the words I love you.
“Wow!” Dorothy gasped. “How did they do that?”
The raven—for she was sure it was a raven—croaked again as it flew to the arbor. It plucked a larger spray of flowers, then flapped up to Grace’s windowsill and dropped it there. Grace met its dark eye as it looked at her, head to one side. Then it, too, took off into the morning fog.
“That…was…incredible!” Dorothy’s eyes were wide. “Is that crow in love with you?”
“No,” Grace said. After all, it wasn’t a crow.
“Then why did it—”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you get dressed and go out and have a look? And…um, you might want to pick those up. Grand-mère wouldn’t be happy to see that the birds have been at her pergola.”
She waited till her sister had scampered off, then bent and tenderly picked up the sprig of bridal wreath. She was gazing down at it when another sudden thud made her look up. A large black bird was sitting on her window sill, looking at her interestedly. For a moment she caught her breath, but in the next realized that this was no raven, but a crow. “Oh,” she said, disappointed.
“Oh? Is that all you have to say, dryad?” it croaked.
“Crow!” She stared at it in surprise, then laughed and leaned against the side of the window. “What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for my sandwich. You left without bringing me one.”
“You came here all the way from the Adirondacks just for a sandwich?”
“Why not? I like sandwiches.” He looked at her with one eye. “And I wanted to see what happens. What you do next.”
“Well…not a lot, I’m afraid. I’m leaving for Europe in a few days.”
“So? Things might happen there too. Do they have sandwiches in Europe?”
Grace grinned. “I’m sure they do.”
“Hmm. Doesn’t get you out of the one you still owe me.”
“I’ll bring one out as soon as I get dressed.” Mrs. Toole might take a little convincing to produce a chicken sandwich at this hour of the morning, but Grace expected she could manage it.
“All right. I’ll be waiting, dryad.” Crow leapt from the window and coasted to the lawn.
Grace watched him for a moment, then looked at the sprig of bridal wreath still in her hand. She lifted it to her nose and breathed deeply of its sweet scent, then carried it to one of her trunks. She pulled a small, leather-bound journal from the tray on its top and tucked the spray into it, then went to get dressed.
* * *
Thank you so much for taking the time to read Evergreen. If you enjoyed it, please consider telling your friends who might also enjoy it or posting a review on the site where you purchased it or on your favorite social media site such as Goodreads or LibraryThing.
If you would like to sign up for my newsletter and get the latest info on sales, new releases, free stories, and other fun stuff, visit https://eepurl.com/bVDwlf
Author’s Note
I’ve always been fascinated by Alice Roosevelt...well, by the whole Roosevelt family, really. President Theodore Roosevelt more than earned the oceans of ink that have been expended on him and his life, and Alice’s brother Ted received the Congressional Medal of Honor for being the only general (and the oldest soldier at 56) to land in the first wave of the invasion at Normandy on D-Day in World War II. He marched up and down the beaches, walking with cane no less, meeting each incoming troop transport and putting heart into the troops as well as organizing and directing traffic after the original plans fell apart: without him, D-Day might not have been the decisive success it was.
But Alice...I have a love/hate relationship with her. Once her father became president in September of 1901 after the death of President McKinley (who really was shot at the Buffalo World’s Fair by an anarchist), she became a news item and rarely left the front page; her escapades and partying were on an epic scale. Her father once famously said, “I can do one of two things. I can be president of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.” She behaved very badly on many occasions and did some pretty unforgiveable things to a lot of people in her lifetime, but she was front and center in a time when women were supposed to be wallpaper, and you have to admire her for that.
I’ve wondered for years how Alice became Alice. For all the privilege of her upbringing
, her childhood and youth often seem rather sad to me: her mother died a few days after giving birth to her, and her father basically handed her over to his older sister to raise and went to Dakota Territory to be a rancher. Then at age three she was removed from that aunt’s care—who had been the only mother she knew—to live again with her father and his new wife, who were more or less strangers to her. That has to have left a mark on young Alice...and I couldn’t help wondering if, just maybe, some other unrecorded event might have done more damage...like, say, an unhappy first crush...?
Most of the external history in this book actually happened. Alice was a frequent visitor to her grandparents’ home in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. She and the rest of her family did indeed stay at the Tahawus Club in the Adirondacks in August and September of 1901 and climb Mount Marcy on a foggy, drizzly day...and the clouds did disappear for a little while on the mountain’s top the morning that the Roosevelts climbed it. Colonel Roosevelt got word while picnicking by Lake Tear of the Clouds that very day that President McKinley’s recovery had received a setback, and he did indeed become president that night while hurrying through a driving rain to the nearest train station. It was enormous fun to fit Grace and dryads and Kit Rookwood and his family into and around these facts; sometimes it was startling how well they fit underneath the actual history. The only historical messing about I did was Alice and Grace’s visit to Newport: Alice was not there in July of 1901, but did visit there in 1902 and many subsequent summers as the guest of Grace Vanderbilt, and got up to many shenanigans while there, of course. But as far as I know, the firm of Isham and Rookwood does not exist.
As for settings...The rickety remains of the Tahawus Club still stand (with some efforts being made in recent years to preserve the site), and Mount Marcy is still climbed by hundreds of Adirondack hikers every year—hopefully without visitations from Shadows. The “cottages” of Newport, Rhode Island—including Tess Oelrichs’ Rosecliff and Mamie Fish’s Crosswinds (I adore Mrs. Fish—she truly was a character)—still stand, and many of them belong to the Newport Historical Society which has preserved them as museums; if you ever get a chance to visit Newport, they are totally worth seeing. The Casino remains a Newport landmark, as well as the home of the International Tennis Hall of Fame.
And now, a multitude of thank yous are in order. My gratitude to Jerold Pepper of Adirondack Experience (formerly the Adirondack Museum) for answering my queries on transportation between the Tahawus Club and North Creek, to Meredith Miller of the International Tennis Hall of Fame for notes on the Casino, and to Andrew D. Davis of Tricoastal Marine for questions about steam yachts; any errors in Evergreen on those subjects are mine alone.
Since books are not written in a vacuum, enormous thanks for your time, patience, and brains to Ena Jones, Rebecca Barnhouse, and Reka Simonsen, all of whom read this story in whole or in part and offered valuable input on making it better—I am deeply in your debt. Sherwood Smith went over it with her fine editor’s eye and made it even betterer (ahem!)...and don’t let Amy Knupp of Blue Otter Editing see me writing that way, because she did so much work toward making this manuscript sparkle. Thank you both for your help—you made this a better story and taught me to be a better writer.
And for that gorgeous, gorgeous cover, thank you to Ravenborn/Anika Willmanns.
Finally, thank you to the three safety nets I have below me, ready to catch me if I fall (redundancy is a beautiful thing): my wonderful colleagues at Book View Café, with whom it is a pleasure to work, and the equally wonderful Jen Clark Estes, Larissa C. Hardesty, Ena Jones, Katie Kennedy, Robin Lemke, Cyndi Marko, Deena Lipomi Viviani, and Holly Westlund, with whom it is a pleasure to play, giggle, comfort, advise, and be writers together...and most of all to my amazing, amazing family. I love you so much.
P.S. The further adventures of Grace in France among the dryad families of Brittany and back in New York to witness the launch of the Emperor of Germany’s new yacht—and prevent Isham and Rookwood’s most audacious “commission” yet from being carried out—is being planned. No release date yet, but if you have any comments about Evergreen or what you’d like to see in its sequel, drop me a line at [email protected] —I’d love to hear from you!
Copyright and Credits
EVERGREEN
Copyright © 2019 by Marissa Doyle
www.marissadoyle.com
ISBN: 978-1-61138-824-4
Cover design by Ravenborn
Formatting by Marissa Doyle
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are fictitious and/or are used fictitiously, and are solely the product of the author’s imagination. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, places, businesses, companies, institutions, events, or locales is completely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part or the whole of this book may be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, or utilized (other than for reading by the intended reader) in any form without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. The unauthorized reproduction of this copyrighted work is illegal, and punishable by law.
www.bookviewcafe.com
Book View Café Publishing Cooperative
P.O. Box 1624, Cedar Crest, NM 87008-1624
Connect with me
(because I love hearing from readers!)
Website: https://www.marissadoyle.com/
Blog: https://www.nineteenteen.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/marissadoyleauthor
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/marissadoyle
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/mdoyleauthor
Bookbub: www.bookbub.com/authors/marissa-doyle
Sign up for my newsletter!
https://www.eepurl.com/bVDwlf
See what else Book View Café has to offer:
www.bookviewcafe.com
About the Author
Marissa Doyle graduated from Bryn Mawr College and went on to graduate school intending to be an archaeologist, but somehow got distracted. Eventually she figured out what she was really supposed to be doing and started writing. She’s channeled her inner history geekiness into a successful young adult historical fantasy series (the Leland Sisters) and is now also happily writing fantasy of various types for both teens and adults. She lives in her native Massachusetts with her family, including a bossy but adorable pet rabbit, and loves gardening, quilting, beading, and collecting antiques and research materials for her books.Visit her at her website, www.marissadoyle.com, and at her history blog www.nineteenteen.com
About Book View Café
Book View Café Publishing Cooperative is an author-owned cooperative of over fifty professional writers, publishing in a variety of genres such as fantasy, romance, mystery, and science fiction.
BVC authors include New York Times and USA Today best-sellers; Nebula, Hugo, and Philip K. Dick Award winners; World Fantasy Award, Campbell Award, and RITA Award nominees; and winners and nominees of many other publishing awards.
Since its debut in 2008, BVC has gained a reputation for producing high-quality e-books, and is now bringing that same quality to its print editions.
Evergreen Page 28
