Her face went stony. “Mr. Lybrand can sit on a tack.”
“Don’t let anyone hear you talking like that,” I said, worrying more about her safety than her manners.
“I heard him arguing with Miss Maeve yesterday. He told her I had no business being here, and she knew it,” Lilah said. “She told him it was her choice to make.”
“Good for her,” I said.
Lilah bit her bottom lip. “He kept saying ‘you know this is wrong.’ Like it was some awful thing for her to be my mother now. He said it wasn’t meant to be, and she shouldn’t tamper with the natural order of things.”
The music box wound down, plinking a tinny, discordant note. “You’ve got to ignore mean people, Lilah. Don’t let him make you unhappy.”
“I won’t,” she said, firmly.
I envied Lilah’s buoyant spirit. Mine seemed to sink with any change in the currents. With a final hug, I slipped out of the room.
I crept down the stairs, expecting any moment to be dragged under by a wave of loneliness.
13
“You’re awfully quiet.” Abel’s comment startled me from a brooding silence.
I half turned in the saddle, taking in the way he wore his hat shoved back with careless ease. He’d spent our ride thus far whistling in a merry, out-of-tune way. I was more than a little jealous of his good spirits. And of how easy it looked to ride astride while I wrestled skirts and petticoats to sit sidesaddle.
“I’m just tired,” I lied. But the pesky urge to tell Abel what I was really thinking buzzed in my brain like a mosquito. “Also, I should feel relieved and happy for Lilah, and I do. But it bothers me that she doesn’t need me anymore.”
“There’s nothing you should feel,” Abel said. “Your family’s been torn apart. Just because y’all survived doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt. Don’t apologize for still being sad. Or incandescently angry, even.”
I sighed. “The past few months have felt like an earthquake. It’ll be better when I get back to New York and find work. Once I turn eighteen, I can be Lilah’s legal guardian.”
Abel glanced quickly away. “Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out.” He flicked the reins, and Merlin picked up his pace as the farm came into view.
We ducked our heads and rode into the musty stable. Thoughts in a murky swirl, I barely noticed when Abel dropped to the ground and reached for me. Without stopping to think, I placed my hand in his callused palm.
I landed facing him, suddenly aware of how warm his fingers were over mine. Powdery bits of straw dust rose to swirl around our legs. From the small window, a square of light shone in, setting bright fire to the gold in Abel’s hair.
I had to fight the desire to pull him closer. He held my gaze for a long moment. My heart beat a staccato rhythm that was almost painful. The temptation to lean in, to brush my lips against his grew, but I held back. These feelings could be entirely one-sided. Abel might view me as a new friend, and nothing more. That thought was enough to make me let go of his hand. “Thank you,” I said, stepping away.
“My pleasure,” he replied. I recalled that breathing was essential and inhaled deeply.
“It’s about time y’all showed up,” Hettie said, poking her head into the stable. A basket of eggs swung from her wrist. “I had to get these myself before the hens took to breaking them.” The warmth in her voice belied the snippy words. “How was your visit? Your baby sister doing all right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “She seems well.” Maybe a little too well, if that was possible.
Hettie sidled closer, dropping her voice and looking around the stalls as if we might be overheard. “I didn’t hear no gossip at church about any strangers around. I’m guessing your daddy really did leave town.”
“Are you going to tell Mr. Lybrand and Miss Maeve he was here?” Abel asked. “Just in case he comes back to call on Lilah?”
My stomach dropped when I thought of explaining my father’s condition to Reuben Lybrand. What if he decided providing a home for Lilah, child of a madman who might show up on his doorstep at any moment, was far too much trouble? He could send her away, and she’d be shipped off on another orphan train to who knew where.
“I think we should leave it be, for now. If he’s even still here, he won’t stay long. He truly believes he has to keep running.” The burn of sudden, unshed tears stung my eyes, but my tone was brisk and sure. “Hettie, I know you’ve got chores that need doing. Let’s get started.”
* * *
Days passed with no further word from Papa. I spent my time working side by side with the Weatheringtons and Abel. Big Tom gave me a hatchet and tasked me with turning a fallen tree into firewood for the coming winter. Despite the splinters in my palms, stacking the wood in the woodshed left me with a sense of accomplishment. In this small way, when I went back north I’d leave the Weatheringtons a bit better off than they’d been when I arrived. However, my sense of accomplishment was less significant after the days I spent hauling and spreading manure for fertilizer.
Under Hettie’s tutelage, I managed to pluck a chicken, churn butter, and wrangle the horse-drawn plow as it tilled furrows in the rich, dark soil. Any time I worked outside, Abel had a way of turning up. Together we fed and watered the horses and slopped the hogs. We worked as a team to tend the sick mama cow, and both shed tears the morning we found she hadn’t survived the night. And when it was my turn to feed Edward, Abel always seemed to wander into the barn to join me.
One afternoon, Hettie and I were in the kitchen, up to our elbows in bread dough, when Abel entered. He’d gone to Wheeler with a load of potatoes to sell to the store, and stopped by the post office to pick up a new book he’d ordered. He laid a slim envelope on the table. “This came for you today,” he said before retreating back outside. Hettie shot me a curious look, but didn’t pry.
I could just make out the return address. I tucked it nonchalantly in my pocket and continued working the dough, trying hard not to think that this note could change my future.
It was Aunt Susan’s reply to the hasty query I’d sent that first day in Wheeler. I’d asked if she had any knowledge of other relations Lilah and I might have. Blood relatives would be allowed, per the orphanage policy, to take both of us in together.
I kneaded until my knuckles were sore and my shoulders ached, thoughts straying over and over to Aunt Susan’s letter. When evening approached, I ate a hasty supper, then rushed outside, saying I needed some fresh air.
The sun melted toward the horizon. I made for the dark recesses of the barn, settled on a pile of feed sacks, and lit my lantern. With shaky fingers, I unfolded the single sheet of paper and read my aunt’s spidery script.
Dear Verity,
I hope this letter finds you well. While I understand you are troubled at being separated from Lilah, remind yourself that finding families willing to care for you both is a blessing, and keep a grateful spirit.
In answer to your question, I do not know of any Pruitt relatives who might be living in Arkansas. Our family has no connection with the state, besides your father’s brief and ill-advised stint in the summer of 1888. In answer to your curiosity regarding his time there, I suppose it does no harm to tell you of your father’s foolhardy decisions of the past, although they were a great source of distress to our dear parents.
When he finished school, Matthew defied our father’s wishes and did not begin medical training right away. He went south, with a frivolous desire to “be his own man.” He traveled about, finding work as a manual laborer, a station far beneath our family’s dignity. We had a letter saying he had settled for the harvest season on a farm in Arkansas, then heard nothing more for months, until he abruptly returned with a change of heart regarding his career.
Mother and Father were delighted Matthew suddenly wanted to begin medical school, but I noticed he was greatly changed—moody, withdrawn, sometimes sullen. I believe now this was the first sign of the madness that would befall him, although I did not re
alize it at the time.
His agitation intensified when he began receiving letters from your mother. Yet it seemed he longed for more of the very notes that caused him obvious pain. He haunted the front hall, waiting for the postman to deliver the mail each day. That winter, Elizabeth appeared on our doorstep. They were married soon after.
Perhaps, as you read this, you might wonder if you have relations on her side near your current abode. That I cannot say. Our parents, rest their souls, never spoke of your mother’s background. It was not their place, but—forgive me if this offends—I have always suspected they knew something unseemly about her past. I know very little of who Elizabeth was before she came to New York. I do remember she was from a small town called Argenta. Elizabeth said the name was taken from the Latin for silver, and I found it odd an uneducated girl from a rural community would know such a fact.
I married my dear Phillip soon after your parents wed and, in rearing my own little family, never found time to spend with Matthew and Elizabeth.
Dear niece, I do pity you and Lilah. We can only hope your father’s condition was not passed down to either of you. It is a shame I was unable to let you stay here and attend school as he wished. You and Lilah would have been most welcome, but Phillip and I have suffered financial reversals that made it impossible to add two more to our household.
I keep you both in my thoughts and prayers.
Your loving Aunt Susan
I bit my lower lip and tasted blood. I was sure Aunt Susan’s “financial reversals” were nonexistent. More likely, she didn’t want her reputation sullied by taking in the children of her lunatic brother.
But Aunt Susan had proved more help than she imagined. My mother came from Argenta. How strange, to realize I’d wandered the county fair in her hometown, unaware of the connection.
Argenta, a little farming town, was the perfect place for a young man to find work. Papa had done just that, ceasing his travels to try his hand working on a farm. And, according to Aunt Susan, when he returned to New York, he’d gotten letters of an upsetting—and apparently very personal—nature from my mother. It was obvious that they’d had a relationship during his summer in the South.
I wandered from the barn into the dusky evening, lantern dangling in my hand. Papa’s disjointed words came back to me. “We were so young then … so very young when we fell in love … child of my indiscretion.”
I strung the pieces together: Papa and Mama met in Argenta while he worked the harvest. Then he returned to New York, she followed several months later, and they were married. I’d never known anything of their earliest history, only that I’d come along about a year into their marriage. Mama had kept a photograph of the three of us on her bedside table my entire life: Papa, young and clean-shaven, with his hand on Mama’s shoulder as she cradled a lace-draped infant me in her arms. They’d hired a man with a Kodak box camera to take the shot, an extravagance to celebrate the arrival of their first child.
But what if I hadn’t been their first child? I stopped in my tracks, thinking. “My daughter.” I’d assumed he meant me, but recalling his next words chilled me. “I knew from the start I’d lose her.”
Aunt Susan talked of his growing distress after returning from Arkansas, and upsetting letters from my mother. Something deep in my gut twisted. A new narrative played out in my head, and when combined with Aunt Susan’s information and Papa’s own words, it made sense: My mother became pregnant during the time Papa had been in Arkansas. Then he’d gone back home and the messages he received from her, the ones that troubled him, broke the news and kept him informed as the weeks went by. The pregnancy must have been a difficult one. “I knew from the start I’d lose her” replayed, over and over.
At last, Mama had journeyed to New York that winter, but without the baby. Their first little girl didn’t survive.
An empty ache hit my chest as I thought of my mother, close to my age, having a baby in a bleak midwinter. Losing that baby girl, then leaving her home, and—
Familiarity crashed down.
I’d heard this story before, only with more detail, and different names.
Images danced behind my eyes, flickered and froze, then came into stark focus: A snowcapped church with a parsonage next door. A young girl kneeling in an icy garden; then rising and fleeing, disappearing without a trace into a blizzard, leaving behind a tiny grave. I sank to the ground remembering Jasper, Katherine, and Della telling a sad story as we sat under the shade trees at the fair. They’d talked about the preacher’s daughter who’d gotten pregnant, lost her baby, and fled into a snowstorm. Mary Mayhew vanished nineteen years ago. That would be around 1888, when Aunt Susan said Papa returned to New York. The same time my mother had arrived from Arkansas, after months of corresponding with my father, who’d been distraught and anxious over what her letters contained.
The similarities were too stark. There was no way two young women could’ve had the same tragic loss in the same little town, and both fled during the same harsh winter.
I’d listened to the story of a troubled young woman and her lost baby, not knowing I was hearing my mother’s own history.
I placed a hand on the dusty ground, trying to quell the sudden vertigo that overcame me. Could I tell the Reverend and Mrs. Mayhew their disgraced daughter hadn’t died in that long-ago snowstorm? That she’d let them think her lost for years, when she’d actually gone to be with her beau?
The next realization stole my breath. Here was the solution I’d sought from the beginning: blood relatives who could take Lilah and me together.
I thought of Reverend Mayhew’s hard eyes and judgmental air. He was surely the reason Mama felt she could never return to Argenta. But why had she let her own mother suffer for years, believing her daughter had frozen to death?
I pressed my fingers to my temples, thinking of Lilah. The Mayhews were her grandparents, too. But even if they welcomed us, would it be right to take her from Miss Maeve’s home? They both seemed so content. So happy.
I rose in a daze and walked out of the barn, heading down the lane that divided the farm from the woods. Gravel crunched under my boots. In the gloaming, a barn owl’s shriek rang out from the woods. I stared into the trees, my thoughts in a spiral.
For several seconds, the shape lurking there did not register. Then the figure moved stealthily between the trees, shoulders hunched forward, head bowed low. I squinted into the shadows, not trusting my own eyes.
Dimming my light, I moved toward the woods, eyes fixed on the body weaving between the trunks. As I walked, a sense of recognition grew. The gait was familiar, along with the shape of the man’s shoulders. I caught a glimpse of the profile.
The trespasser stopped, turning to face me.
I took a deep breath. “Papa, I need to talk to you.”
14
My father blinked slowly once. Twice. He tilted his head at an angle, a terrible smile stretching his lips. I took a step back, then forced myself forward. “Come back to the farmhouse—”
Still grinning, he put a finger to his lips. The lantern light flashed off his teeth. His eyes were huge, unblinking. I held out a shaking hand. “Come with me. Please.”
Papa dropped into a silent crouch. Hunkered down, staring up at me, he looked like a wild animal.
With startling speed, he leapt to his feet. In one swift motion, he was up and running, sprinting away into the forest. I hiked my skirts in one hand and gave chase. Branches crackled like fire under my feet as I ran. He would not leave me again.
I ducked and wove through the underbrush. Limbs and briars snagged in my hair and tore at my clothes. I fell farther and farther behind. When Papa slipped out of sight, I kept going. And going.
Panting, I burst into a clearing and stumbled to a halt. The gray stone well waited before me.
I sat down among sodden leaves and doused my lantern light. It was already dark as night under the thick canopy. Perhaps if Papa thought I’d left, he’d give his position away. It
was another sign of his disordered mind that he had ventured into the woods without a light of his own.
I shivered in the blackness, sudden goose bumps dotting my arms. Willing my breath to slow, I drew in the scent of earth and trees. A damp chill circled me. The fog had returned. I hugged my knees to my chest, listening hard.
A branch snapped. I tensed, rising slowly, preparing to make a grab for my father.
It was only when the dim light of a lantern shimmered into view that I realized it wasn’t Papa returning.
Hide. The voice of instinct was loud in my brain. I crept back from the well into the shadows, pressing my spine against a tree. A figure drew closer, and I recognized the silvery hair and slight build. I nearly laughed aloud. I’d been scared into hiding by Miss Maeve Donovan. But curiosity closed my lips before I could announce my presence. What was the schoolteacher doing in the woods?
She walked slowly, her head bent over a lantern. In its soft light, her cobweb-gray dress looked almost white as she stepped gracefully through the trees. The fog swirled and dove, rose and shifted. It seemed to move with her, as though it were a part of her somehow. The temperature continued to fall, until my lungs ached with each breath. Miss Maeve paced slowly toward the well, her expression unreadable.
She placed the lantern on the well’s edge, pressed both hands on the stones, and raised her face to the sky. When she exhaled, her breath hovered like a vapor. Then the tide of fog swelled, so thick it smothered the lantern light.
In that featureless gray, I felt completely alone. Abandoned, even. The expanse of empty woods at my back loomed over me until I could stand it no longer. I sprang up, gathering my unlit lantern. “Miss Maeve? It’s me, Verity.”
A sudden gust of wind, bone-breaking cold and sharp as a blade, swept by. I gasped at the wintry onslaught. The fog parted, and for one instant, the view ahead was unobscured.
Eventide Page 11
