Chapter 13
By June, with the trees budding and the lake sparkling under longer, warmer days, Jewel had mastered the entire alphabet.
All twenty-six letters, in order, with their sounds.
She could identify them on sight, trace their shapes with her finger, and produce recognizable versions on her slate.
She could even sing the Alphabet Song, although not particularly on key.
These accomplishments for a Mongoloid child were staggering.
If I were a doctor, I’d publish a scientific paper refuting the current mythology about Mongolism. She wondered if Dr. Angus would be interested.
She still hadn’t met the doctor. But from all accounts, he adored Jewel just like the rest of them did.
With his brother, Dr. Fergus, staying home with his new baby daughter and a wife who was still recovering from a difficult pregnancy and birth, Dr. Angus was hard-pressed to see to the needs of his patients in Sweetwater Springs and the surrounding environs.
For a more frivolous reason, she hadn’t met Constance Taylor.
Andre Bellaire was keeping Constance and Elsie busy with clothing orders for his daughter, new wife and grandniece.
Cora certainly wasn’t protesting the acquisition of the fancy wardrobe bestowed on her by her doting great-uncle-by-marriage.
“Twenty-six!” Jewel announced one morning, having counted the letters on her shelf with the thoroughness of a shopkeeper doing inventory. “All done!”
“All learned,” Ivy corrected gently, unable to suppress a grin. “But never all done. Now we get to use them to spell words. That means we arrange them together. You’ll see.”
They started simply. Ivy had spent her evenings planning the progression—three-letter words first, chosen for their relevance to Jewel's world.
“Watch me.” Ivy placed the blue C on the kitchen table, then the red A, then the yellow T with a few inches of space between them.
She pointed to each in turn, slowly and clearly.
“These three letters spell, Cuh. Aay. Tuh.” Then she swept her finger across all three, blending the sounds together. “Cat.”
Jewel's eyes went round. She stared at the three letters lined up on the table, her lips moving silently as she processed what she'd just witnessed.
Then she looked at Brave, who was sleeping on her cushion on the chair—one paw tucked under her chin, her black fur gleaming in the morning light—and back to the letters.
“Bave?” she said, a question and a revelation.
“Brave is a cat, yes. And cat is the word we just spelled.” Ivy rearranged the letters, mixing them up with the others. “Can you put them back together? C-A-T?”
Jewel's brow furrowed. She reached for the C and placed it carefully on the left side of the table.
Good.
Then the A, with a slight hesitation before setting it beside the C. She stared at the remaining letters scattered across the surface—felt shapes in a dozen colors—and her hand hovered, uncertain.
“Which one makes the tuh sound at the end?” Ivy prompted gently.
Jewel’s tongue poked out. Her gaze swept the letters. Her hand moved to the T, hesitated, then closed around it. “Tee!” She placed it beside the A with a small, decisive thump.
The child stared at the row of three letters. Her face scrunched in fierce concentration. Then, slowly, she moved her finger across them, just as Ivy had done. “Cuh...aay...tuh.” She paused.
The longest pause Ivy had ever endured.
Jewel's eyes widened. Her whole face seemed to open—mouth, eyes, forehead—as if understanding had physically expanded her. And then, with a force that made the table rattle, and the remaining felt letters jump, “Cat!”
The word rang out with such triumph that Brave lifted her head, ears pricking, and blinked. The cat stared at Jewel with an expression of sleepy bewilderment, clearly wondering what all the fuss was about, before tucking her nose back under her paw.
“Cat!” Jewel shrieked again, bouncing so hard in her chair that it scraped backward on the floor.
Startled, Brave jumped down and ran out of the kitchen.
“I spell CAT! Pa-pa! Pa-pa, I spell a word!” Her shrill voice was almost too high-pitched to identify the words.
From the hallway came the sound of rapid footsteps—the particular urgency of a father who'd heard his daughter shriek. Torin appeared in the kitchen doorway, his face tight with alarm, one hand braced on the doorframe as if prepared to launch himself at whatever threat had made his child scream.
But when he saw Jewel's radiant face—incandescent with joy, her hands clasped together, bouncing in her seat—and the three felt letters lined up on the table in front of her, his expression shifted.
The alarm drained away, replaced by confusion, then dawning comprehension, and then into something so raw and overwhelmed that Ivy had to look away to give him a moment of privacy.
“She spelled cat.” Her voice caught on the words. “All by herself.”
Torin crossed the room in three strides and dropped to his knees beside Jewel’s chair.
His large hands—Papa Big Hands, Ivy thought, and felt her heart twist—framed his daughter's small face.
“Show me, Sweetheart.” His voice was rough as sandpaper. “Show Papa.”
Jewel pointed to each letter with a finger that trembled with excitement. “Cuh. Aay. Tuh.” She swept her finger across. “Cat!” Then she flung her arms around his neck and clung, her face buried against his shoulder. “Jewel spell word! Jewel spell cat!”
Torin gathered her in and held on. His eyes closed. The muscles of his jaw worked. He swallowed once, twice, obviously fighting for control. Opening his eyes, he kissed the top of his daughter’s head. “My clever girl.”
Over Jewel's shoulder, his eyes found Ivy’s—dangerously bright, showing gratitude, pride, and awe. And something deeper, something he couldn't disguise quickly enough before revealing his feelings and showing a tenderness directed not just at his daughter but also at Ivy.
The raw emotion on his face made Ivy’s heart clench hard enough to hurt.
“Cat,” he repeated, his voice barely above a whisper.
Now that the noise died down, Brave returned, as if understanding that the commotion somehow concerned her—she leapt onto her chair and from there onto the table, sitting squarely on the felt letters, her tail curling around her paws with an air of supreme self-satisfaction.
Jewel dissolved into giggles. “Bave sit on cat!”
“Brave is a cat sitting on cat.” Ivy laughed through the tears she'd given up trying to hide. “A cat on a cat.”
“Cat on a cat!” Jewel repeated with a chortle, as if this were the funniest thing in the world.
And Torin—the solemn, guarded, fearful man who rationed his smiles as carefully as a miser counted coins—threw back his head and laughed. A real laugh, full and unreserved, the sound of joy breaking through years of carefully maintained composure.
Ivy stared at him. The laughter transformed him even more than his rare smiles did, erasing the years of worry and grief and revealing the young man he must have been before his loved ones broke his heart.
Oh, she thought, with a sudden, helpless clarity. Oh, no!
Because in that moment, watching Torin laugh while his daughter giggled and the cat sat on the word they'd built together, Ivy understood something she'd been trying very hard not to acknowledge.
I’m falling in love with him.
Not the cautious, controllable pull she'd felt from the beginning—the flutter in her chest when he entered a room, the awareness of his presence that prickled along her skin, the way she admired his wounded-hero attractiveness.
This was something deeper and more dangerous.
This was love—real, inconvenient, impossible love for a man who was her employer and a recluse and the father of the child she was coming to think of as her own.
You fool, she told herself, even as she wiped her eyes and laughed along with them. You absolute fool.
But it was too late for warnings. The word had been spelled. L-O-V-E. The cat of awareness was out of the bag.
That night, lying in her narrow Jenny Lind bed beneath the eight-point star quilt Cora made, Ivy stared at the ceiling and listened to the silence of the house.
Torin's room was down the hall. If she held her breath, she could hear the muffled creak of his bedframe as he settled in for the night.
The sound was both unremarkable and exquisitely intimate, and she pressed the covers over her mouth to muffle the small, involuntary sound that escaped her.
She took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of the rose sachet.
I’m being ridiculous.
She was a twenty-two-year-old spinster who’d never been courted, never been kissed.
She’d spent her adult life in a house where love was as bleak as warmth in winter.
She had no experience with desire and no framework for understanding the strange awareness of love that had hummed through her body all day.
But Ivy was also aware of something her other senses awakened, something she could only describe as recognition.
As if some part of her had been waiting for this particular man, this particular life, and had known it the moment she stepped through his door and dropped to her knees in front of his daughter.
Cora would laugh, she thought. She would say this is exactly what she planned.
But her best friend wasn't here to laugh or advise, and Ivy was alone with her inconvenient feelings for a man too broken by his family’s bitter abandonment to open his heart.
Her thoughts couldn’t help skipping to some of the favorite memories she hoarded. The way he braided his daughter's hair each morning. He did it badly—lopsided, too loose, with stray wisps escaping almost immediately. But every time, the tenderness of the act undid her.
Jewel would sit on her stool by the stove, patient and trusting, while Torin's large, long-fingered hands, scarred across the knuckles from years of the kind of work he'd never been raised to do, fumbled with the fine strands, his brow furrowed in concentration.
“Hold still, Cariad,” he'd murmur when Jewel wiggled. The Welsh endearment—spoken so softly she wasn't sure Torin knew he'd used it—made something warm bloom beneath her ribs.
As Jewel’s governess, Ivy should have offered to braid the child's hair. But some instinct had held her back. This ritual belonged to them—father and daughter.
She loved when Torin read aloud to Jewel in the evenings—fairy tales, mostly, from a battered volume of the Brothers Grimm—his pitch dropped into a register that was rich and low, almost musical.
He did the voices: a rumbling giant, a squeaking mouse, a wicked queen with haughty vowels that made Jewel shriek with delighted terror.
The performance was so at odds with his usual reserve—the clipped sentences, the long silences, the careful neutrality of a man who had trained himself not to feel too much—that Ivy found herself pausing in her reading or mending to listen, her finger marking her place on the page or her needle suspended in midair.
When she played the harp, he listened with his whole body, the tension in his jaw easing, his muscles relaxing. Often, his fingers would beat the rhythm on his thigh. Sometimes, Torin seemed to find a piece so striking he closed his eyes and leaned back, the better to absorb every thrumming note.
She rolled onto her side and looked at the window, where moonlight silvered the glass. Sometimes, she didn’t close the curtains, preferring to view the sliver of sky.
Although she couldn’t see many stars from her bed, Ivy now knew they existed—a vast and majestic swath across the heavens.
The stars made her feel as though she were a different person here, someone braver and more honest than the girl who'd hidden her earnings under the floorboards, avoided her father as much as possible, and swallowed her dreams like bitter medicine.
You are not that skittish girl anymore.
Ivy closed her eyes and whispered her gratitude to the Lord of the Firmament—that she was here, in this picturesque setting, where she was needed. Like St. Francis in his beautiful prayer, she asked to be made into an instrument of peace and healing for her two loves.
A sudden awareness came to her that if she asked to be an instrument, she, too, would be challenged. Would need to grow.
Will I be able to, and who, then, will I become?