Prologue
JANUARY 1901
TRAIN DEPOT, LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY
Lucy Wilson shifted on the wooden bench, hardly aware of the afternoon chill as she waited for Father to return to the station. She was halfway through Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, and she sensed a niggling worry about sister Beth’s fragile health.
Whenever Lucy finished a chapter, she restrained from turning the page and made herself put down the book to check on her own sister, two-and-a-half-year-old Charlotte, who was curled up like a cat on Father’s coat, napping soundly, arms wrapped around a favorite stuffed bear she called Mr. Buttons. Lucy stroked one of her sister’s chubby little white hands and tucked a blonde ringlet away from her round cheek. At moments like this, when Charlotte was sleeping, she could see so much of Mother in her sister’s little face. She pulled the edge of Father’s coat over Charlotte’s woolen stockings and picked up her book, only to put it down again when she heard the railroad clock chime.
Two o’clock. Father had been gone for over an hour. He didn’t say when he might return from his business meeting, only that Lucy must keep close watch on her sister. Charlotte was a curious little girl and had an annoying tendency to wander off. Just yesterday, Lucy had caught Charlotte in Mother’s writing room, playing with her jewelry box. She scooped up Charlotte in one arm and gathered the jewelry with her free hand, but when she looked through the jewelry box later, one ring was missing. An anniversary gift Father had given to Mother, a ring of small ruby chips. As soon as they returned home to Lexington, Lucy would resume the hunt for the ruby ring before Father realized it was gone.
Father had forbidden Lucy and Charlotte to play in Mother’s writing room, though that didn’t stop the girls. One time when cousin Cora had come for a visit, Lucy had overheard Father say it was the one place in the house he could still sense his wife’s presence.
Lucy felt the same way about the writing room. She could almost smell her mother’s scent, a lavender perfume that she liked to dab behind her ears. The writing room had been left virtually untouched since Mother had died, right down to the quill pen left in the same inkpot, as if she were going to return soon from an errand and pick up a story where she had left off.
Lucy and Charlotte often sneaked into the writing room after Father had left for work and the housekeeper was busy with the day’s tasks. The room was actually Mother’s dressing room, but she had used it for her writing room because she liked how the corner windows let light stream in all day long. The girls would sit on the floor together, and Lucy would show Charlotte each piece of jewelry and tell stories about Mother. She wanted Charlotte to have memories of their mother, even if imagined ones.
Lucy missed her mother with all her heart, missed everything about her; her gentle ways, her sparkling laugh, her joy of life. Her mother used to tell Lucy stories, and together they would come up with plot twists or surprise endings. Someday, she told Lucy, they would write a book together. But someday never came.
Charlotte squirmed in her sleep, and Lucy wiggled her back against the cold bench. When would Father return? He felt the girls were safer waiting here at the station than at a lumberyard, with big saws and horses and wagons and hardened tree fellers.
She glanced once more at the clock and sighed. Only a few minutes past three, though it felt like hours since Father had left. As long as Charlotte napped, she didn’t mind waiting for Father because she was able to read to her heart’s content. Father didn’t approve of novels, not after Mother died. He said such twaddle softened the brain.
A train came into the station. Lucy watched dozens of people, all kinds—rich and poor and everything in between—stream out its doors. A young woman stood at a distance, looking at them with a peculiar expression on her face. Lucy realized the woman’s attention was focused on Charlotte. She glanced down at her napping sister and saw her blue eyes open briefly, blinking, before drifting shut as she fell back to sleep. Lucy turned the page to the next chapter in Little Women and was immediately transplanted into the world of Jo and Beth and Meg and Amy, upstairs in their bedrooms, Marmie downstairs in the kitchen with the cook.
She read a chapter, and then another and another, sobbing as she came to Beth’s tragic death. She knew it! She knew Beth was going to die.
“Lucy!” Her father’s fierce shout broke through her shell of absorption. “Lucille!”
She snapped the book shut and stuffed it in her bag before turning to see her father stomp toward her, all buttoned up in his dour black suit, gesturing wildly at her.
“Lucille!” he shouted again. “Where is your sister?”
Lucy jerked around to where Charlotte had been sleeping. Father’s coat remained, all bunched up, Mr. Buttons the bear tucked under a sleeve. But her sister was gone. She placed her hand on the spot to see if it was still warm. Stone cold.
A fear rose in Lucy, a greater fear than she’d ever experienced in her nine years, including that terrible day her mother lay dying.
One
MARCH 1911
LEXINGTON, KENTUCKY
The train jerked and jolted as it rumbled out of the station. Lucy Wilson stared out the window, watching her neat and tidy world fade into the distance. Watching her well-ordered life, if a bit pedantic and predictable, disappear.
She placed a hand over her heart and waited for its clamor to calm. Only six months, she reassured herself. She was expected to work for her father’s favorite cousin, Cora Wilson Stewart, for only half a year, then back home she’d go.
But back home to what?
To her father’s new wife, Hazel? A young, vivacious woman, scarcely older than Lucy. Hazel wanted to make a home that didn’t cling to the past.
Back home to Lucy’s charity work among the Lexington matrons, most of whom were twice, if not thrice, her age?
Back home to Father? Her presence only evoked his sorrow.
Lucy squeezed her eyes shut. Cora needed stenography help, Father had said, and wouldn’t listen to her objections about a move to Morehead. Cora was superintendent of education for Rowan County, an impoverished area full of—how had Father phrased it?—moonshine and dulcimer pickers. Having grown up there, he should know. But what exactly did a stenographer for a superintendent of education do? Lucy had no idea. She had many accomplished skills from her education at the Townsend School for Girls: from mastering the art of embroidery to conjugating Latin verbs. And so she had dissected the word stenography: from the seventeenth century, Greek roots. Stenos meant “narrow,” graph meant “writing.” The process of taking dictation. That, Lucy thought she could do.
Outside the window, the landscape had started to change. The train made fewer stops; its tracks wound through rolling green hills, thick with trees. Now and then she would spot a house with a sagging laundry line, but even those were becoming rare.
Think of this as an adventure, Hazel had suggested. A time to spread wings and gain confidence. Six short months, she reminded Lucy.
Hazel’s enthusiasm was contagious. Lucy had gone to bed last night with a vow to herself that she would be brave today. Strong and courageous.
Her bold resolve weakened at the station this morning, and dissolved completely with her father’s last words, said as the train to Morehead arrived: “Don’t disappoint me.” When had she not?