Chapter 1
October 1895
Through clouds of steam that swirled around smokestacks and train tracks and billowing skirts, a whistle sounded from Grand Central Depot’s farthest platform: time to face a past she thought she’d outsmarted, outrun, left safely behind. Top hats and bowlers and swooping feathers bobbed as other passengers hurried toward the platform—toward adventures and escapes and secret intrigues. But Kerry MacGregor stood still in this moment she’d dreaded.
For her, the whistle was the sound of a summons to a trip she’d give half of Manhattan not to make. Her head, her whole body throbbed with resentment.
“There you are,” said a voice from behind. The older woman came to stand at Kerry’s shoulder. “I hoped I might find you still here.”
Kerry met Miss Hopson’s gaze, her old teacher’s eyes lined at the corners these days but still full of a steady strength, like an oak you could lean into when you couldn’t walk another step. Kerry tried to muster up something to make them both laugh—her old way of handling crises. But her mind, swirling like the smoke, would not focus.
Outside, it was still the pitch black of predawn, but gas lanterns lit the depot’s platforms in a hazy gold. She looked far down the parallel lines of steel, as if she could make out the silhouette of her future—about to be crushed on the tracks. “Thank you for coming.”
“You know I understand, Kerry. Why you feel you’ve no choice but to go back. And—forgive me, but it has to be said—how much it could cost you.”
They let the words hang between them a moment along with the steam and the train station scents of hot steel and wet concrete and roasted chestnuts. Kerry’s stomach churned. She’d eaten almost nothing since the telegram came three days ago. That was part of the churning. But also, chestnuts smelled to her of troubles.
She’d gathered them in milk pails back home to help pay the bills. Even after two years away, she still felt bile rise in her throat when she caught the scent of them roasting. Taxes unpaid. Collectors at the cabin door. Her daddy cocking his Remington.
“Kerry, you’ll recall that I know as few others do how far the tentacles of poverty reach. How that world can suck you back in.”
Kerry heard the whish of releasing steam and wondered if she was also hearing her lungs giving up the last of their air.
“You’ve worked hard to get to this place. I so hate to see you . . .”
“Toss my life away?”
“You only have one, you know.”
“Once I’ve squared things away back home, I could come back.”
A pause. “We haven’t much power over Columbia’s board, not with so many other worthy young women clamoring for scholarship places at Barnard, but you know we would try. So long, that is, as you manage to keep yourself clear of . . . entanglements.”
“Entanglements.” Kerry did not need to ask for specifics. Miss Hopson had been there years ago in the one-room schoolhouse as those attachments had first taken root.
The older woman sighed. “My dear, I applaud your sense of duty. Particularly in the face of, let us say, a less than easy upbringing.”
Kerry flinched. It was true—and a gross understatement. But painful to hear it spoken out loud.
At the far end of the depot came the clanging of a streetcar’s bell and the strains of a violinist playing for passersby’s change. Closing her eyes, Kerry could hear her little sister on the cowbell, her brother with the banjo made from a gourd and squirrel hide, and their father pulling a slow, mournful ballad from his fiddle.
Their father. Who could make you weep with the raw beauty, the open-wound pain of one of his songs. When he was sober.
Their father, who, when he was not, could make you weep for any number of other reasons.
Miss Hopson sorted her words with care. “I worry for your future back”—she paused, as if the North Carolina mountains were too remote from New York to be real—“there.”
A conductor on the far platform checked his pocket watch against the depot’s clock on its elaborate iron stand near Kerry. She tried not to feel it ticking against the inside of her skull.
“I understand,” Kerry said. And she did.
Which was why she’d not already clambered onto the train and settled herself by a window so she could watch the land hurtle by in cities and flat, unremarkable farms before at last beginning to buck and plunge and turn misty blue. She understood this could be a decision that sent her life in a U-turn off the tracks. A complete derailing.
Miss Hopson cleared her throat. “In the interest of time, allow me to be blunt: How will you handle Dearg Tate?”
“With any luck, he’ll be married by now with triplets.” Kerry smiled. “Which would solve any mishandling I’d be likely to manage.”
“In other words, you’re as worried about it as you ought to be. You know, Kerry, I may look to outsiders now like a spinster Barnard professor who knows little of these things, but I can assure you, there are forces beyond the”—she rearranged her skirts—“fully rational that can knock a woman completely off course.”
A few yards away, a gentleman in a top hat halted near the depot clock. A youngish face, but with shadows of something flitting over it, like a gathering storm. Anger, perhaps. Or sadness. Kerry followed the man’s gaze toward a child limping past the clock—and crying. The gentleman in the top hat stepped forward as if he would reach for the child. But then another man was running, sliding to his knees. The kneeling man threw his arms around the boy.
“Nico!” The second man, a tweed cap flopped at an angle on his black hair, held the boy close. “Ero cosi spaventato! You cannot wander away when I turn the back for even the moment.” He held the boy’s face in his hands. “I won’t let them take you from me again.”
Kerry crossed her arms to close up the hole, the ache she felt in the absence of her own brother and sister. Which gave the telegram its pull.
“What on earth,” she murmured to her old teacher, “have those two been through?”
A movement from the gentleman near the clock made her glance back at him. He was bringing two fingers from his right hand to his left lapel—like some sort of reflex or sign. Holding them there.
Turning, he met her gaze. A shock of dark-blond hair dropped across his forehead. Stiffening, he dropped his hand from the lapel.
A contradiction, she thought: the elegance of the top hat, the arrogant set of the shoulders—against the something else in his face she couldn’t quite read.
“So, then,” Miss Hopson was saying, “I gather your father’s illness is serious.”
“The fact that they sent a telegram . . . No one has cash money for that. And Western Union tends to frown on bleached apples as payment.” Kerry held up the rectangular paper.
YOUR DADDY GONE SICK. ME & TWINS WISHING WE COULD CARRY YOU HOME.
“Gone sick means dying, since it’s a cable they can’t afford. The me & twins means my aunt Rema’s counting on my missing my brother and sister something terrible fierce—which I do. Counting on that winning out over the terrible fierce that brought me up here. The carry isn’t just slang for bring but also her saying I might need help going back to what, whether I like it or not, still is home.”