Chapter Two
Baltimore, Maryland
“We’ve graduated, Emma. You don’t have to keep studying.”
Emma Archer’s dearest friend in all the world, Sybil Dedrick, liked to tease her about her love of books. It was a love Sybil actually shared, which made the teasing all the more entertaining.
“It’s North and South.” She held the book up for all three of her friends who had gathered for the afternoon in the drawing room of the home she shared with her grandmother.
“Oh.” Sybil feigned surprise. “Well, why didn’t you say so?”
Their friend Victoria smiled over her teacup. “Why did you assume it was a boring text best left to the schoolroom?”
“I have been left so emotionally scarred by our years of education that I cannot help but assume the worst when I see a book.” Sybil pretended it was a great tragedy in her life. “I am not certain I will ever fully recover.”
“Would a finger sandwich help?” Another of their friends, Abigail, held out the plate of sandwiches with an overly somber look.
“Immensely.” Sybil took a sandwich, giving a dramatic performance that would have put even the most celebrated New York actors to shame.
Emma adored these friends of hers. They’d embraced her quickly upon her arrival in Baltimore five years earlier, helping her find her footing.
While she had visited her grandmother many times growing up, she had been raised out West in a tiny town of farms and cattle ranches.
The glittering society of Baltimore had been entirely foreign to her.
Now, it was as familiar as the mountains on the horizon of Hope Springs had once been.
Victoria set her teacup aside. “Mrs. Gladwell called on my mother yesterday.” She gave Emma a quick, laughing look before playfully glancing at the others. “Which topic do you suspect they touched on while they were there?”
Emma closed her book, smiling even as she shook her head. “Oh, dear.”
Managing to maintain a somber expression despite the obvious laughter in her eyes, Sybil said, “The only thing I am uncertain of in imagining that conversation is whether Mrs. Gladwell used the phrase ‘my darling Robert’ or ‘my dearest Robert’ more often.”
“Or ‘what a lovely couple they would be’?” Abigail suggested with a very similar look of mischief.
“I am glad the three of you find this so entertaining,” Emma said in tones of mock disapproval, “because I suspect Mrs. Gladwell’s ‘dearest Robert’ doesn’t find it so.”
“The real question,” Sybil said, “is whether you find it entertaining.”
And with that, Emma couldn’t hide her amusement any longer. “If the poor woman weren’t so persistent, she might have realized long ago that neither her son nor I am interested in falling in line with her dreams for the two of us. I can almost feel sorry for her.”
“Almost.” Sybil smiled broadly.
Abigail selected a finger sandwich with a theatrical degree of focus. “Now, if it was Timothy Warren’s mother wandering Baltimore attempting to persuade anyone who will listen of the perfection of you joining their family, you would likely not be so dismissive.”
Emma played along with the teasing tone. “If Timothy Warren’s name was connected in any way to any of us, the amount of sighing and swooning and, I daresay, squealing that would follow would embarrass us all.”
“I draw the line at squealing,” Sybil said.
“No, you don’t,” Victoria countered.
In the midst of the laughter that followed, Grandmother glided into the room.
She didn’t move as well as she had when Emma first came to live with her in Baltimore, but her innate gracefulness couldn’t be missed.
Millicent Archer was a pillar of Baltimore society and the very picture of ladylike elegance and sophistication.
Emma had felt deeply the drastic contrast of her own mannerisms and style of speaking when she’d first arrived.
But Grandmother had been patient and kind, and Emma had eventually sorted out her place here.
Emma had arrived in Baltimore frightened and a little homesick but also in desperate need of leaving Hope Springs and the pain she’d experienced there. Now, five years later, she’d found here a tranquility she’d not felt in ten years.
“I am assuming, based on the giggling,” Grandmother said as she sat regally in the wingback chair she preferred, “that someone mentioned Timothy Warren.”
That set them all to laughing once more.
Grandmother pulled a folded piece of paper from the cuff of her sleeve. “This has arrived for you, Emma.” She handed it to her.
“Perhaps it is a love note from Timothy,” Victoria said with a mischievous smile.
“Or Robert Gladwell,” Sybil said.
Emma was so grateful to have found such delightful friends, who daily gave her reason to laugh.
“I’m afraid neither of them will have sent this.” She had received enough telegrams over the past five years to recognize what she held in her hand. “No one living in Baltimore would send me a telegram.”
“Ah.” Abigail nodded. “It will be from your father.”
He and Katie and, until the last year, Ivy sent her letters. Papa conducted most of his business through telegrams with the Baltimore company he still owned, so he often sent her one as well when at the telegraph office. She loved receiving those reminders that he loved her and thought of her.
“Perhaps he will tell you that your family is making the journey east this year after all,” Victoria said.
Emma shook her head. “Katie will be having her baby during the time they would have to be traveling. I won’t be seeing them this autumn.”
All her friends offered her looks of commiseration that she’d seen many times over the last weeks. They knew how disappointed she was. Her family only visited once per year, in the autumn after the harvest. Missing this year’s visit meant she wouldn’t see them for an additional year.
Abigail brought Grandmother a cup of tea. “I understand ‘H.M.S. Pinafore’ will be performed at the Academy of Music soon. I suspect you are planning to attend.”
“Of course, I am.”
The topic among her friends turned to the theater. Emma unfolded the paper she still held, eager to read what her Papa had sent. How well she knew the loping handwriting of the local telegraph operator who had transcribed so many messages.
Please come home. Your sister needs you.
That was the entirety of the message. Seven words. Papa wasn’t vociferous, but he was never curt. And he always ended his telegrams to her with a single letter P, his way of signing it. That was absent this time.
Had he not sent this one? If not, who else could it possibly be from?
Katie knew how to send a telegram and might have done so. But had she? Emma couldn’t at all be certain.
If not one of them, then it had to have been someone else in Hope Springs. But telegrams were far more expensive than letters. Even a short one like this would be difficult for most of the people in Hope Springs to afford. Yet only they would refer to Hope Springs as “home.”
Please come home.
Emma shuddered. Home. To Hope Springs. She couldn’t go back. She could hardly bear to even think about it.
“Whatever is in your telegram must be of some significance.” Sybil had moved to sit directly beside her, and, in her distraction, Emma hadn’t even realized. “You look concerned.”
“I am confused more than anything.” She glanced over the brief message once more. “My papa is the only one who sends me telegrams, and yet I’m not certain it’s from him.”
“What does it say?” Grandmother asked.
“‘Please come home. Your sister needs you.’” Emma looked up at them all. “That’s the entirety of it.”
“That doesn’t sound like Joseph,” Grandmother acknowledged. “I suppose, though, if he were in a hurry, sending it in the midst of the many others that he has to send, he might have opted for brevity rather than cordiality.”
That was possible.
“‘Your sister’ needs you.” Abigail held an uneaten bit of a finger sandwich in her hand, brow pulled in thought. “You have two sisters.”
“Yes, but I don’t know Eimear well; she was born just before I moved to Baltimore. And she likely has no idea who I am. I don’t imagine she needs me at all.” It was a painful admission, but an honest one.
“Surely,” Victoria said, “if your sister—either of them—were ill, the telegram would have said as much.”
“I’m not a doctor.” Emma shook her head. “I wouldn’t be particularly helpful addressing an illness.”
“Perhaps,” Abigail guessed, “your father simply thinks, since they are unable to come here, that Ivy would appreciate you traveling to Hope Springs.”
Traveling to Hope Springs.
Emma took a quick breath, trying to fill her lungs despite the sudden tension in her chest. She had never, in five years, even considered returning to Hope Springs.
She loved her family. She had many dear friends there whom she would enjoy seeing again.
But she could not go back. She couldn’t.
Doing so would flood her with more pain than she could bear.
She couldn’t go back.
“Why wouldn’t the telegram specify which sister and why she needs you?” Sybil wondered out loud.
Please come home. Emma couldn’t go home. She couldn’t.
“Perhaps the sender felt that reminding you of the connection between the two of you would help to persuade you,” Victoria suggested hesitantly.
“I hope whoever sent this is reminding Ivy of that connection. She hasn’t written to me since their visit almost a year ago.” Ivy’s silence hurt, and that pain only added to the heavy feelings Emma had toward Hope Springs.
“How old is your sister now?” Abigail asked.
“Fifteen.”
“The same age you were when you moved here.” Sybil likely didn’t realize how much pause that gave Emma.
“Yes, the same age.” She looked down at the telegram. Your sister needs you.
At fifteen, Emma had felt desperately alone. Grandmother’s visit to Hope Springs had proven a godsend. What if Ivy needed a providential visitor of her own?
“Girls, I hate to ask, but—” Grandmother looked at Emma’s friends apologetically.
They all rose and offered farewells, understanding the unspoken request.
“Let’s all go see ‘H.M.S. Pinafore’ together,” Abigail requested as she made her way toward the drawing room door.
“That would be delightful,” Emma said.
A moment later, only Grandmother remained in the room with her.
“Why did you leave Hope Springs, Emma?” Grandmother didn’t generally beat around the bush, but this was very direct talk even for her.
“You know why. We have discussed it ad nauseam.”
“As proud as I am of your mastery of Latin during your education here, I will not be distracted by it. Humor me, and answer the question.”
Emma rose, unable to prevent herself from pacing. The mere thought of Hope Springs set her on edge. “I left . . . I left because I couldn’t bear to be there any longer. The memories and the grief and the loneliness was too much. It crushed me more every day.”
She had been drowning by the time she left, gasping for air in a whirlpool of anguish.
“Correct me if I’m wrong—and I know I’m not—but Ivy also lived through the horrific fire that lay at the heart of those memories and that grief and your overwhelming loneliness.”
Emma folded the telegram again, but it did little to push the words away. “She did.”
“And she is now the very age you were when the devastation of that experience proved too much for you to continue enduring without some kind of escape, without some help.”
Emma walked faster, her steps struggling to keep pace with her frantic pulse. Grandmother was inching toward a declaration that Emma should go back. It was too much to ask. Far too much.
“I don’t know who sent this.” She held up the telegram. “But they cannot possibly believe they have the right to demand that I—”
“There was no demand in that message, Emma. Read it again.”
She shook her head.
“Read it again. Please.”
She didn’t have to. She knew it word for word already. And she knew which word her grandmother was emphasizing at that moment.
“Please,” Grandmother repeated. “That isn’t a demand. It is a plea. It is a plea for Ivy.”
Emma deeply loved her sister. She truly, truly did. And Ivy, it seemed, needed her. But she couldn’t go back to Hope Springs. She couldn’t. The mere thought of it had her physically shaking.
“I can’t make that journey alone,” she said, suddenly realizing a complication. “And I suspect you are not equal to a journey like that.”
Grandmother shook her head without offense or embarrassment. “I barely managed it five years ago. I couldn’t do it now.”
Absolute relief washed over her. She breathed at last. “Then, that answers the request. I can’t make the journey alone, and you can’t make it with me.”
“But I could.” Sybil was standing in the doorway. “I would love to go out west and have an adventure.”
“Excellent,” Grandmother said. “That removes the obstacle.”
“No.” Emma shook her head. “That removes an obstacle, and not even the most significant one.”
“What is the most significant one?” Grandmother asked.
Emma closed her eyes, bracing herself against the surge of painful memories. Flames and ashes. Death. Katie’s injuries. Finbarr’s lost vision. His hurtful words. The inescapable grief and fear that had plagued her every moment from the time of the fire until she’d finally been able to flee it all.
It was too much. Five years away had granted her a desperately needed reprieve. If she went back, she would break all over again.
“I can’t go back,” she whispered. “This is my home now.”
“No, it’s not,” Grandmother said. “You have enjoyed being here, but you have never seemed truly at home.”
Emma turned to look at her, panic and worry and sorrow warring inside. “Please don’t make me do this. I can’t bear it.”
“I don’t intend to make you do anything.” Grandmother rose with care and moved slowly but gracefully to where Emma stood. “I have loved having you here. I will miss you while you are gone. When you return after your visit to Hope Springs, I will be overjoyed.”
“I’m not going back.” But her insistence felt empty. Your sister needs you.
“You came here to heal, Emma,” Grandmother said. “But now you are hiding. Until you make peace with your past, you will never be done running from it.”