Chapter 13 #2
“Now I know what I’ve been waiting for all my life,” Thor said to her at the end of the meal.
“I want to marry Patrick.” She laughed. He was serious and intense about work, and playful and fun away from it.
He liked to relax and enjoy the time with her.
He liked her company immeasurably and was grateful for the job.
He was doing well. The mill workers appreciated having someone in the front office who knew their problems firsthand, having lived them himself.
He had thought they would resent him for it, but they didn’t.
He was the bridge between the two camps, the administration and the workers.
It was exactly what Victoria had hoped. And he was getting used to the prosthesis.
He could manage it with a cane. It still upset him, but not as much, and there were many men like him everywhere, and some in much worse shape.
He was one of the lucky ones. There were twenty-three million men around the world who had come home physically injured in some way.
And others who hadn’t recovered mentally, and never would.
They were broken men, and had seen too much of the viciousness of war.
As Hubert Maddox had been, Thor was a strong support system for Victoria, which she hadn’t had in four years. It was a huge relief for her to have someone to share the burdens with.
They talked about everything, and he advised her where he could.
He spent a lot of time at the factories, listening to his old friends, and trying to see what he could improve.
It was a shock every day to see who hadn’t come back, to hear who had died.
The whole world was struggling to recover and put the war behind them.
And Victoria was a driving force forward, into the future and away from the past.
Thor often told her that she worked too hard and needed to relax, and she never listened.
She went a hundred miles an hour at all times, with a thousand new ideas in her mind, and she loved sharing them with him.
It had been six years since she had been able to share her thoughts with Bert the way she did with Thor.
Bert had been teaching her about his business then, and she had had so much to learn.
Now she had years of experience of her own, and Thor had a younger, more open perspective than Bert had.
His own ideas were more innovative than Bert’s had been and more like hers.
They complemented each other well, although Victoria kept things all about business.
She never thought of anything else, and Thor didn’t dare cross any lines with her.
He didn’t want to risk the relationship they had.
They were friends now, not just employer and employee.
In the spring of 1919, everyone seemed to be settling down.
The men were finally getting used to working with women in comparable jobs.
The widows were able to support their families with what they were making, and the married women liked getting out of their homes.
Victoria had maintained the nursery after the war, so the female workers had childcare for their children who were too young to go to school. And Thor was loving his job.
He joined Victoria at a number of important meetings with the other mill owners in March and early April.
The others were still interested primarily in cotton, while Victoria was trying to diversify and broaden the scope of her operation.
Thor had told her a few times that she was driving herself too hard.
She had lost weight and was looking pale, and one night, working late at the office, he took some papers in for her to sign and found her lying on the couch in her office, sound asleep.
He gently shook her to wake her, and she was blazing hot.
It was as though there were a furnace burning in her body, and when she woke up she was confused.
“Can you ask Mrs. Kelly to bring me a cup of tea? I’m freezing.
” She muttered a few words after that, and Thor realized that she thought he was Bert, and didn’t know that she was at the office.
She drifted off to sleep again. He bundled her in a blanket he had in his office and carried her downstairs.
He had grown proficient with his prosthesis and barely had a limp.
It was a little awkward carrying her, but he could manage.
He was still physically very strong. Victoria never woke up all the way to his car parked outside.
She muttered something unintelligible a few times, and was delirious by the time he got her home.
Mrs. Kelly came running when he rang the doorbell and pounded on the knocker.
“What happened? Did she have an accident?” she said when she saw Victoria in the blanket in his arms.
“I don’t know, I found her in her office asleep on the couch.
I think she has a fever, and she was delirious in the car.
” Mrs. Kelly sent Seamus to get the doctor, and asked Thor to carry Victoria upstairs.
Victoria never woke up while he did. He laid her gently on her bed, and she spoke to him again as though he were Bert, and she called Mrs. Kelly “Mrs. Babbitt,” the name of the housekeeper in London.
She looked straight at Thor with wide-open eyes and asked him where her father was.
He didn’t know what to say so he said he was sleeping, and she closed her eyes again.
“Oh good, I think he has a cough again.” Thor left the room while the housekeeper undressed Victoria and put her to bed, and when she emerged from the bedroom, he asked if he could wait to see the doctor, and she said of course.
Thor was a familiar sight at the house now.
He came frequently for meetings, and came by sometimes on Sunday afternoons, and he thoroughly enjoyed Patrick’s dinners.
They all liked Thor very much. He was a personable, respectful, modest man, and they all hoped that something would develop between him and Victoria, and were disappointed when it didn’t.
He seemed devoted to her, and looked panicked while they waited for the doctor.
He came half an hour later and examined her.
She had a fever of a hundred and four. When he came out of her bedroom, the doctor confirmed that it was Spanish flu.
It had come from Europe a year before, on the heels of the war, and had been ravaging the country and the world ever since.
There was no cure for it and it was often fatal.
The doctor said there was nothing they could do for her except put cold cloths on her head and try to bring the fever down.
They would know within a few days if she would survive it, if she lived that long.
Thor looked devastated when he went in to see her again.
She was sound asleep, with the fever raging.
He could hear a rattle in her chest when she breathed, and she was deathly pale.
He left her after a few minutes and went downstairs with Mrs. Kelly.
He gave her the phone number of his boardinghouse and asked her to call him if anything changed or if she needed anything.
“Poor man, he looks heartbroken. I think he’s in love with her,” she said to Seamus after Thor left.
“Is she in love with him?” Seamus asked her.
“I don’t think she wants to marry again.
She got on well with Mr. Banning, and they had an unusual marriage, he was so much older.
I think she’s afraid to get involved with anyone.
She’s afraid they might clip her wings, and she loves her work.
” Seamus nodded. The explanation sounded reasonable to him.
“He seems to like working as much as she does. They’re always going over papers. It seems a shame for her to be alone.” She was still young and beautiful.
“Let’s just hope she recovers from the flu,” Mrs. Kelly said sternly. She was afraid that Victoria might die, so many had in the last year. And it would be so terrible if she did. She wasn’t even thirty years old yet. But healthy young people were dying of the dreaded Spanish flu.
Thor could hardly concentrate at work the next day and called Mrs. Kelly every few hours to see if there was any change.
The fever had come down a little, and gone up again.
The doctor had been to see her, and the housekeeper said Victoria had a dreadful cough and was still confused from the high fever. She was the same the next day.
Thor took a long walk during his lunch hour, and decided to drive to Wilmslow in case he could see her.
He knew the Spanish flu was contagious and he didn’t care, all he cared about was Victoria.
He banged the knocker and Seamus let him in.
Mrs. Kelly was just coming out of Victoria’s bedroom when he got upstairs, and the housekeeper was smiling.
“The fever broke an hour ago. I was going to call you. I wanted to be sure it didn’t go up again. I’ll tell her you’re here,” and a minute later she beckoned him into Victoria’s bedroom. She was wearing a pink satin bed jacket with bows on it. Her hair was combed and she was smiling.
“I’m so sorry, I must have given you a terrible fright. I don’t know what happened. I was suddenly very tired so I lay down on the couch, and now it’s three days later. I feel like I’ve come back from the dead.”