CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
T he stationmaster glanced down at his pocket watch and informed those waiting on the platform the train would be on time. He no sooner turned away when the great warning shriek of the train’s whistle split the air. Even forewarned, Leona jumped in her skin, nerves like spun glass.
Anticipating and preparing for Christmas filled her days now. Invitations and cards with good wishes from friends and family overflowed the basket in the foyer. She wrapped gifts and tied them with bright red ribbons, which did not, did not remind her of streams of blood.
The train station shimmered before Leona’s eyes in a swirl of snow, steam, and cinders.
Her ears filled with the grind of steel wheels braking, the huff of the engine, the excited babble of homecoming and reunion.
A running child ran straight into her as if she weren’t there, bounced, and took off at a run again.
Leona studied the passengers disembarking and the handler piling baggage on the platform. Grandfather usually traveled light, though he’d been traveling for months in the West. She hoped he’d stay with them for a while, that Gil and Grandfather—
There he stood, a large valise in one hand and a sack over his shoulder; he searched the crowd with his penetrating brown eyes, longish gray hair and beard shifting in the breeze.
His glance moved past her, then returned.
For a moment, he appeared surprised. In her mirror at home, she was thinner than ever, and great darkish circles resided under her eyes.
But he recovered his smile. Relief swept through her, and she ran like a child toward him.
He dropped everything and opened his arms to her.
“Dear, dear Leona,” he said when he had her safely tucked into his embrace. “My girl, what’s happened?”
Almost a week had passed since her terrible discovery at the house of the spiritualists.
It took the whole carriage ride to tell the story, starting with Charlotte’s suspicions and Leona’s disastrous visit to the Van Wyns to retrieve her memoir and snoop.
No one on this earth listened like Grandfather.
Though she told him about Geneva’s request—for help, Leona told him, not the ransom she exacted for Leona’s cooperation—she couldn’t speak about the bloody scene at the spiritualist’s house.
She skipped over it, as she had the worst moments of the battlefield when she returned to Halcyon Farm after the war.
She recounted the story the newspapers were discovering instead.
Though he meant well, Gil had forbidden her newspapers.
For a nickel, the newsboys took turns bringing her the morning and evening news so she could keep up with the investigation into the murder of the Frost siblings.
“I know you, Leona, your need to satisfy your conscience and your independence. But where was your husband during this trial?” Grandfather asked.
“Trying to recover from Henry Caldwell-Jones theft of his money,” Leona reminded him.
“It takes up much of his time talking to bankers, buyers, and creditors. And I didn’t want to burden him with it until I had no choice.
He did go to the police and report the things I told him.
” Although they hadn’t come to speak to her yet, likely more satisfied with her husband telling the story than herself, a feeble-minded woman. Detective Day had been the exception.
“And why didn’t you tell me what was happening here?”
“To protect you, too, I suppose,” she admitted. “I’ve already put you through so much.”
Grandfather appeared disgruntled, and this effectively stopped the conversation, but by then, they’d arrived at Cranberry Street.
***
G RANDFATHER READ FROM the hidden cache of newspapers, unafraid of Gil’s censorship, before dinner in the downstairs parlor.
He rested on the divan, drinking cup after cup of coffee and puffing on his pipe.
Greatly comforted by his presence, she sat opposite, reading her letters.
Grandfather too appeared to suffer physically, which was not apparent the last time she’d seen him.
He rubbed his fingers as if the joints ached, and the lines about his face had deepened.
Despite Leona’s previous and constant reminders, Gil did not come home that night.
Grandfather was not pleased, and she began to despair of a holiday without drama and heartache.
She held onto the small joy of decorating the tree with Mrs. and Mr. McCarthy, her grandfather, and a few drops of laudanum in her whiskey.
It blurred the edges of the recent horror and her disappointments in herself, setting the inside of her mind aglow.
Gil returned the next morning, however. Full of apologies, he explained he’d fallen asleep at the office.
He’d decided to stay rather than disturb them by coming home in the middle of the night.
Despite his complaints of extreme exhaustion, Grandfather bundled Gil off to his study.
Leona flinched away from the loud voices emanating from there.
First a cup of laudanum tea, then she sought refuge in the kitchen with Mrs. McCarthy baking bread.
Mrs. McCarthy put Leona to work stirring the rum cake Grandfather requested.
Mrs. McCarthy appeared happy to oblige him, as she did for most things, and she still had to cook for her own family.
But she seemed content where she stood with flour to her elbows as she kneaded the dough into loaves.
Leona wondered if she could ever achieve this level of peace.
Worry for Millie lurked beneath the surface of Leona’s thoughts.
She’d left her reticule in the spiritualists’ house the day before the murder, though without anything identifying inside it.
She’d dreamed the police came knocking on the door anyway, calling out her name as they pointed bloody, accusing fingers.
“Mr. Earl seems a kind man.” Mrs. McCarthy’s voice broke the skin of Leona’s worry. “I expected him to be taller.” She blushed. “Someone told me he is very eccentric.”
Leona gave the batter another stirring, mesmerized by the spirals the spoon made. “And breathing abolitionist fire?” she teased. “Spouting poetry and quoting Moby Dick for our edification?”
“Hrmph,” Mrs. McCarthy said, which Leona knew meant yes. “That man is the salt of the earth.”
A high compliment indeed.
“And informed about—” She stopped kneading and crossed herself. “The An Gorta Mor .”
It did sound properly monstrous when she used the Gaelic for the hard times, the hunger that began in the ‘40s in Ireland. He’d spoken for Irish Independence at Parliament in London, where they’d shouted him down.
They accused him of Fenian ties, and the Fenians accused him of spying.
Threats of violence were the real reason he’d had to escape out West.
Mrs. McCarthy’s deep sighs as she went back to kneading pulled at Leona’s heart. She cast about, searching for something happy to distract her.
“And how is the new granddaughter, Roseann, isn’t it?”
She gave Leona a grateful smile. “There’s nothing sweeter than a babe. And nothing so horrifying! The screams coming out of that rosebud of a mouth—”
Loud voices erupted from the parlor, and Leona froze. More of my money won’t solve your problems! Mrs. McCarthy fell silent as she patted the loaves into shape and placed a towel over them.
“He’s changed,” she said so softly Leona had to strain to hear.
“He’s not the cheerful man he was when I first started working here.
I know that Caldwell-Jones fellow is to blame.
” Her glance was sorrowful as she took the overly beaten rum cake batter from Leona.
She poured it into a well-greased pan and slid it onto a shelf in the hot stove.
“And you haven’t seemed yourself, either.
I thought, perhaps, those wild moods of yours might also have meant you’re to have a little visitor of your own, m’um? ” Her eyes grew bright and warm.
“What? I—?” Thunderstruck, Leona put her hand to her belly. She’d lost track. She tried to laugh, but a sob edged with thorns rose in her throat. The damned laudanum made it hard to tell if her situation had become worse or better.
Mrs. McCarthy’s arms came around Leona, hugging her tight to her round, grandmotherly body. She murmured lovely sounding Irish words in Leona’s ear, soothing. At first, she resisted, but the woman held her hard until she gave in, relaxing into her embrace so she didn’t fly to pieces.
“I wish you peace,” Mrs. McCarthy said. “Only peace.”
Grandfather stepped into the kitchen with a small stack of mail in his arms.
“Are you well?” he asked her, looking hard between Mrs. McCarthy and Leona.
“Commiserating,” Leona told him with a glance at Mrs. McCarthy, who nodded and turned back to her work.
He handed her a package of familiar weight and dimensions.
“And a Happy Christmas to me,” Leona murmured after glancing at the return address.
Hope flared bright and hot as she snipped the strings and tore away the brown paper wrapping.
She held the memoir pages like a lost child returned, before opening the card with elegant handwriting wishing Gil, herself, and her grandfather a Happy Christmas.
She’d written to Geneva to tell her about the spiritualists; how she suspected they were blackmailing her husband.
But she’d heard nothing after that. Perhaps they had indeed mended the tears in the fabric of their marriage.
Mrs. McCarthy followed them into the parlor with a tray holding hot tea and warm scones and where the fire was merry. Light snow fell outside the big bay window looking out onto the street. Leona and Grandfather devoured the scones as they went through the mail.
“There’s this.” She passed the expensive card stock to her grandfather.